Felicia's Journey (15 page)

‘I don’t know what to do.’

Miss Calligary waits for Felicia’s distress to subside, then reminds her that soon the inmates of the house will arrive with news of the day’s gathering. When the folk are fully congregated she will inform them of what has occurred, and make inquiries about the possibility of the money having been found lying around and put away for safety.

There is a wait, and there is silence between them. Then, when everyone has returned, when Felicia has been greeted – though without the warmth she previously experienced – Miss Calligary puts it to the assembled Gatherers. Their response is to stare at Felicia with disappointment that is not disguised. All trace of friendliness has drained from the bloodshot eyes of the old
Ethiopian and from Mr Hikuku’s, peering out of their narrowness. The hurt in the other faces distorts them; loathing sours Agnes’s prettiness. No one speaks. Miss Calligary has become so still her features might be cut in ebony.

With nothing left to say, Felicia goes away.

12

Mr Hilditch draws up the figures for the January expenditure and canteen takings, spreading the monthly subsidy lightly in the hope of holding on to a bit extra for February. At four o’clock a vending-machine representative begins his sales pitch: install a bank of food machines in the canteen and you dispense with all canteen staff. The machines would back directly on to the kitchens, the prepared portions loaded straight into them: at the drop of a coin the dishes would emerge when and how they’re required, piping hot or chilled. Drinks likewise: load the machines with the necessary ingredients – tea, coffee, chocolate, softs, no more than ten minutes’ labour a day. ‘You can’t lose, Mr Hilditch,’ the vending man assures him, but Mr Hilditch has no intention of making a change. He likes the old ways. He likes to see his canteen staff, the women’s hair tied up under their caps, the chatter and bustle of the queues, steam rising from the pans, mashed potato scooped up, an extra spoonful of sprouts jollied out of the server. Yet in spite of this preference he is always prepared to see a catering representative in the lull of the afternoon. He enjoys the interruption, a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits shared. He feels it gives a shape to the day. Tomorrow the Colman’s mustard man is due.

These passing days are shaped in another way also: with speculation, with reassurance following doubt, with the steadying of his thoughts. The unknown factor is how much money she retained in her handbag, how long she can manage to keep going. The nag is that while she’s hanging about on the streets there’s the danger of her running into the boyfriend. Added to which it could dawn on her at any moment that there might be something, after all, in her father’s astute suspicions: anyone she cares to ask would direct her to the barracks. Driving home on the evening of the vending
salesman’s visit, Mr Hilditch shakes his head with renewed finality: all that is a chance that has to be taken. What matters more is that she’s still around, and is likely to be.

But that night, having deadlocked his front door and shot the bolts at the back, Mr Hilditch mounts his stairs feeling nervous in case he has let everything slip away from him. In the days that have passed since his sighting of the girl she could have stumbled on her quarry. At this very moment he could be making a clean breast of his deception, buttering her up with devious excuses. At this very moment she could be getting herself up the pole all over again.

Savagely Mr Hilditch brushes his teeth, painfully attacking his lower gum as he reflects on the way the world is these days: crazy God-botherers enticing young girls, lying thugs taking advantage, you name it and it’s there.
GP Ruined my Sex Life! says Boob-Op Fourteen-Year-Old Mum. Dog-Collar Dougie Had Sofa Sex with my Pal for Revenge! Kids in Black Mass Sacrifices!
The headlines race through Mr Hilditch’s memory, culled from the newspapers he sometimes carries away from the canteen because he likes to see it tidy. Every day of the week, seemingly, cigarettes are stubbed out on the flesh of infants. Every day of the week women in their nineties suffer rape and violence. Flaming petrol is poured through letter-boxes for the fun of it. Cars are stolen, televisions are stolen. Company directors spend their employees’ pensions on motor yachts. Drug addicts get their fixes over the counter in Boot’s. Teenage girls are set alight on city wastelands.

Mr Hilditch cools his face with water. Calm again, in bed, he recalls an evening with Bobbi in the Welcome Spoon at Legge’s Corner near Junction 18. They sat for hours, maybe even three, while she poured out her troubles, in much the same way as the Irish one has. ‘You wouldn’t credit half of it,’ Bobbi said: the abuse she received at the hands of the man her mother took in after her father went off; the home she spent six months at, where men in belted overcoats arrived at weekends intent on the same. With Bobbi’s almost pretty face for company, Mr Hilditch drops off.

The following evening, distancing himself equally from his place of work and Number 3 Duke of Wellington Road, Mr Hilditch
drives to a supermarket where he is not known. He purchases hairnets and tights and women’s underclothes, talcum powder and skin cream. Already, at a Saturday jumble sale, he has selected outer garments and two hats. After he has eaten, he arranges these articles about the house, filling a wardrobe with coats and skirts and dresses, and drawers with underclothes which he takes the trouble to crumple up, even to tear a little. He half empties bottles of lotions and squeezes cream from tubes. He packs the talcum powder, with lipstick and eye make-up, into the bathroom cabinet. He drapes the tights over the rails of the ceiling-drier in the kitchen. He locks away his spike of receipts, and any envelopes and papers that bear his name, old cheque-books and bank statements.

When Mr Hilditch’s mother died he sold her belongings to a clothes dealer who sent in a card, but he later discovered that the cardboard box he’d filled with her shoes had been overlooked. Planning to dispose of these on some future occasion, he stored them in an outside shed. On the kitchen table he wipes off the mildew and later arranges them in a row by the side of the wardrobe.

‘I require your national insurance number.’ The clerk speaks through glass, making it difficult to hear him. He repeats what he has said.

‘I haven’t one over here.’

The clerk directs her to where the forms are, pointing behind her. He mentions a permanent address, stating that that will be necessary.

‘I haven’t anywhere permanent. I’ve had my money stolen.’

‘An address is required on a benefit application.’

Overhearing this conversation, a middle-aged man with waist-length hair and torn clothes says Felicia is wasting her time, an opinion confirmed by a girl trailing a dog on a string. The girl has a safety-pin hanging from a nostril. Her hair is pink and blue, tomahawk style.

Felicia says she has been staying at the Salvation Army hostel, but they tell her that won’t do for an address. The man says the benefit’s no loss: if he was beginning again himself he would keep
well clear of the System and its computers. Once you fill in a form you’re harassed for ever. Earn a wage for a day and half of it’s taken off you to buy false teeth for old-age pensioners.

‘Play music, do you? Pity,’ the girl adds when Felicia shakes her head.

That evening the hostel is full when she arrives. In a Spud-U-Like she spends some of her money on a cup of tea and asks the people whose table she shares if the bus station remains open all night. It’s not something they’d know, they say. On the street again, she is accosted by two men loitering outside a pool-hall. They want to know her name and when she tells them they want to know where she’s from. They say they can fix her up, but she doesn’t understand. She feels frightened and hurries on.

‘Get off out of this street,’ a woman whose face is green in the night-light orders when she sets her bags down for a moment in a shop doorway. ‘Move yourself.’

The woman is big, with artificial fur on the coat, and earrings shaped like hearts. Felicia says she is only having a rest.

‘Rest yourself somewhere else then.’

‘D’you know is the bus station open all night?’

‘What d’you want the bus place for?’

‘I need somewhere for the night.’

A car draws up beside them. ‘Business, love?’ The woman simpers as the driver winds down the window. ‘She ain’t on the game,’ she adds, jerking her head towards Felicia. The man opens the car door and the woman gets in beside him.

‘How’re you doing?’ another voice asks when another car draws up.

‘No,’ Felicia says.

She walks on, reaching streets that are familiar to her, where the night-time traffic is busy. Clothes are displayed in the fashion windows, their bald-headed models prancing in affected motion, pouting at nothing. Building societies offer mortgage rates. A cardboard man and woman stride forward, holding a roof above their heads: 8.25% the enticement is. Sports equipment and ski clothing vie for attention with furniture and shoes. Washing machines and microwave ovens are in a sale.
Every Camera Slashed!
another message is.
Olympus! Minolta! Praktica!
A Pizzaland is brightly lit, people occupying all the tables along the windows, a girl in a red beret talking urgently to her companion, a man with a ponytail who keeps nodding. A crowd of eight share a single table. A couple with a child gesture at the child, cross because she won’t eat the food. A man wearing a cap is on his own. ‘I’ll go for a Kentucky,’ someone passing by on the pavement says. ‘I’d rather a Kentucky.’

Cartons are thrown down outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Colonel Sanders is reassuring in the window, his honest gaze, his white goatee, Finger Lickin’ Good. The voice of Sheena Easton on a ghetto-blaster is drowned by Michael Jackson’s. Bright neon sparkles:
Coca-Cola is a Way of Life
, it says in the sky.

Two women rattle charity boxes. A West Indian is talking to himself, gesturing with his hands. A gang of hooligans push through the pedestrians, pretending to elbow them aside. In a gambling arcade men and youths, grim-faced, play the machines.

Felicia’s eyes dart about as she continues on her way, still searching in the crowd. When she arrives at the bus station she settles herself on a seat, but an hour later she is told that no further buses are due either to arrive or depart, and is asked to go. She finds the railway station, and lies on a wooden seat in the waiting-room, but from there, too, she is eventually moved on.

She rests in the entrance to a shop that is more than just a doorway: a wide secluded area hidden from the street by a central pillar with windows in it, displaying watches. She sits there, crouched on the tiled ground. One of her shoes has come through in the sole. She roots in her bags and when she has changed her shoes she remains where she is because it is quiet.

She wanders on eventually, resting sometimes on a pavement seat, moving again when it becomes too cold. At a stall beneath a bridge where taxi drivers stand about she buys a sausage roll that is reduced to fourpence because it’s stale. The air is dank with mist.

Already, hours ago, the homeless of this town have found their night-time resting places – in doorways, and underground passages left open in error, in abandoned vehicles, in the derelict gardens of
demolished houses. As maggots make their way into cracks in masonry, so the people of the streets have crept into one-night homes in graveyards and on building sites, in alleyways and courtyards, making walls of dustbins pulled close together, and roofs of whatever lies near by. Some have crawled up scaffolding to find a corner beneath the tarpaulin that protects an untiled expanse. Others have settled down in cardboard cartons that once contained dishwashers or refrigerators.

Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs. They lie with their begging notices still beside them, with enough left of a bottle to ease the waking moment, with pavement cigarette butts to hand.
Homeless and hungry
is their pasteboard plea, scrawled without thought, one copying another: only money matters. All ages lie out in the places that have been found, men and women, children. The family rejects have ceased to weep into their make-do pillows; those brought low by their foolishness or by untimely greed plead silently for sleep. A one-time clergyman no longer dwells on his disgrace, but dreams instead that it never happened. Rejected husbands, abandoned wives, victims of chance, have passed beyond bitterness, and devote their energies to keeping warm. The deranged are lulled by voices that often in the night persuade them to rise and walk on, which obediently they do, knowing they must. Men who have failed lie on their own and dream of a reality they dare not contemplate by day: great hotels and deferential waiters, the power they once possessed, the limbs of secretaries. Women who were beautiful in their day are beautiful again. There is no arrogance among the people of the streets, no insistent pride in their sleeping features, no lingering telltale of a past’s corruption. They have passed the stage of desperation, and on their downward path some among the women have sold themselves: faces chapped, fingernails ingrained, they are beyond that now. Men, in threes and fours, have offered the three-card trick on these same streets. Beards unkempt, hair matted, skin darkened with filth, they would not now attract the wagers of their passing trade. In their dreams there is occasionally the fantasy that they may be cured, that they
may be loved, that all voices and visions will cease, that tomorrow they will discover the strength to resist oblivion. Others remain homeless by choice and for their own particular reasons would not return to a more settled life. The streets, they feel, are where they now belong.