Homeland (33 page)

‘An’ tell me this, Johnnie,’ Billy was rambling on. ‘How it is that the man who goes and fights for his country comes back ’n finds he counts for less than the
bastard who stayed behind? How’s that, eh? I’ll tell you how – ’cos the bastard that stayed behind got himself all set up and made plenty of money, that’s
how.’

Another possibility, it seemed to Wladyslaw, was that the boyfriend was a touchy subject for Stella, that she was tired of the criticism and disapproval he attracted, and found it easier not to
mention him at all. This thought cheered him up enormously, and he listened to the rest of Billy’s ramblings with as much sympathy as he could muster.

After less than an hour the net was almost full. They transferred its writhing contents into a sack. Back at the farm, Billy hung the sack from a hook under the eaves of the withy shed. As they
parted for the night Wladyslaw thought Billy said, ‘We’ll take ’em up to the smokery first thing.’

But in the morning there was no sign of Billy. Stan said he’d left at five on the milk train.

B
ILLY WAS
woken by the sting of the cold. At some point in the night his scarf had slipped off his head and like a waiting parasite the cold had bitten
into the unguarded flesh of his cheek. The hard wooden floor felt almost gentle by comparison, while the touch of the girl at his back, though diluted by thick layers of clothing, gave off a feeble
but companionable warmth.

It was dark, but the luminosity of the snow two storeys below gave definition to the window and suffused the frosted panes with white glimmering light. Hearing no sounds from outside, he thought
it must be early, perhaps five or six, but as first one vehicle and then another laboured along the street he decided it was probably later. Both vehicles seemed to stop outside the block, but he
put this down to a trick of the snow.

In the next flat someone clumped rapidly across the bare boards, there was the protesting whine of a sash being thrown up, and a woman yelled something. Billy recognised the nasal tones of
Carol, a leading member of the action committee. She shouted what sounded like a series of questions – he caught only fragments – and then the window was closed with a bang that sent
the counterweights rattling in their shafts.

A door slammed in the corridor, footsteps sounded, and he caught a muffled crescendo of voices. Pushing off his blanket, rearranging it around the sleeping girl, he clambered to his feet and
went to the window. At first the ice on the glass stubbornly re-formed whenever he tried to rub it away, but by scratching hard with his nails he was finally able to make out the shapes of two vans
parked in the road outside, and, bunched around the entrance gates to the block, five figures, at least three of them with the domed helmets of policemen.

He made his way into the bathroom by touch, only to find that the lavatory would not flush and the taps were dry. At first he supposed that the water, like the other services, had been cut off,
but going into the kitchen and finding the kettle full of ice, he realised that the big freeze had saved the landlords the trouble.

Treading softly so as not to wake the girl, he let himself out into the corridor. A vehement discussion was issuing from the open door of the next flat. He could hear the shrill relentless voice
of Carol and the deep tones of a man arguing against her.

Turning away, Billy made for a candlelit doorway at the end of the corridor. He found Betty Price in the kitchen, heating some water over a portable paraffin stove which had decorated the
immaculate white kitchen tiles with long tongues of soot. Betty was a scrawny woman with gap teeth and prematurely lined skin. She had been in residence with her four children since the start of
the squat some ten days before.

‘Any chance of a cuppa?’ Billy asked.

Usually Betty greeted this request with a suggestive reply, played for all it was worth, ‘For you, darlin’? Anything.’ But today she said baldly, ‘No can do, sweetheart.
Barely enough water for the kids.’

‘You know we’ve got company?’ Billy asked, jerking his head towards the street.

She rolled her eyes scornfully. ‘You’d think they’d have better things to do.’

‘They won’t arrest anyone.’

‘Just let ’em bloody try.’ She snorted. ‘But then they’ve no need to bother, have they, now the water’s off. No, we’re all packed. Can’t be
hangin’ about in this bloomin’ climate.’

‘Where’ll you go?’

‘Me sister’s till she chucks us out. Then . . .’ She blew out her cheeks at the prospect of searching for the kind of cramped overpriced accommodation she’d been trying
to escape in the first place. ‘Gawd only knows.’

The paraffin stove popped and spluttered, and she fiddled with the knob.

‘No more squats?’ Billy asked.

‘No point, is there? Not when the council don’t take a blind bit of notice. Still, we got six days with the heat and the light, didn’t we? Could’ve been worse.’

‘What would happen if you went and camped on the council’s doorstep?’

She gave a cackling laugh. ‘Then I’d get myself arrested no trouble at all.’

‘Good luck,’ Billy said.

‘And you.’ With a mischievous gap-toothed grin, she grabbed his face in both hands and gave him a smacking great kiss on the lips.

On his way out, Billy looked into the living room and saw her kids sitting around a candle, chewing on slices of bread and jam. Suitcases and bundles of bedding stood ready to go. The younger
children stared blankly at him when he waved, but the two older boys made cheeky faces.

‘Seen the coppers?’

They nodded happily. At their age it was all a bit of a lark.

When he got back to the flat to fetch his things the girl called out, ‘That you, Billy?’

‘Sure is.’

She cried with relief. ‘I thought you’d gone.’

He struck a match and put it to a candle stump. She was sitting huddled in the blankets. ‘Everyone’s getting out,’ he told her. ‘There’s no water, and the police
are camped outside.’

‘You going too?’

‘No point in staying.’ He began to pack his knapsack.

‘Can I come with you?’

‘I’m going to work.’

‘But after?’

‘Don’t know, do I?’

‘Please let me come with you.’

He shook his head. ‘Might go travelling. Haven’t decided yet.’

Her name was Rosie. She had attached herself to him shortly after he had moved in and been trailing after him ever since. She was from Dorset, or it might have been Devon, and was alone in
London. He would have shaken her off before now but she was thin and sickly-looking and made few demands. When she nestled close to his back at night he was glad of the warmth. He wasn’t so
much of a fool as to try for more, even supposing he’d fancied her, which he didn’t.

‘I’ve nowhere to go,’ she said.

‘What about that hostel where you were before?’ He pulled a ten-bob note from his pocket and thrust it towards her. ‘Here.’

‘I couldn’t.’ She was close to tears.

‘Course you can.’ He plucked her hand free of the blankets and pressed the note into her palm.

‘Carol says there’s another place we can go.’

He fastened the last buckle on his knapsack. ‘I thought Carol was for no surrender.’

‘She says it’s a nice house with a full coal store. She says it’d be weeks before anyone knew we were there.’

‘Go with Carol, then.’

‘But I want to stay with you, Billy.’

‘No one gets to stay with me.’

Taking the candle, he looked into the other rooms to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind. He wouldn’t be sorry to leave the place. Even without furniture the flat managed to
feel oppressive with its striped wallpaper and ornate radiator housings and ceiling lights made of beaded crystal. The only room he coveted was the bathroom, which had a majestic white basin and
lavatory, full-length bath, and heavy chrome fittings. It wasn’t just the luxury of the hot and cold running water, nor even the depth of the bath, which let you lie with water up to your
chin, it was the brazen extravagance that he loved, the idea of splurging so much money on a room where you bathed and shat and shaved. It had tickled him to sit on a throne surrounded by walls of
black and white polished marble, to look in a mirror with bevelled borders that reflected light in all directions, and to operate taps so huge and shiny that you could see your own distorted image
in them.

When he went to collect his knapsack, Rosie cried plaintively, ‘Please let me come with you, Billy. I wouldn’t be any trouble, promise. I’d help out. I’d do whatever you
wanted.’

He stood over her. ‘I need my blanket.’

As soon as she had clambered to her feet he folded the blanket and, averting his eyes from her mournful face, picked up his things and left.

He glanced through the open door of the adjacent flat as he passed, but everyone seemed to have gone.

On the stairs he followed a bunch of people laden with baggage and screaming children who were fumbling their way down from the upper floors in the darkness. Nearing the last turn the bumping
and confusion eased as muted light filtered up from below.

The scene in the entrance hall might have come from a film which had employed the wrong cast. The hall, with its tall ceiling, gleaming mirrors and black-and-white patterned floor, could have
come from a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers film, while the homeless families who were waiting disconsolately in their heavy layers of clothing worn one on top of another, with their boots and
tightly wrapped scarves, their rolled-up bedding and bursting suitcases, belonged to a wartime newsreel, a bunch of refugees trekking across alien lands.

Carol was stationed by the grandiose marble fireplace talking fervently to some of the adults. She was an unlikely figure for an activist. No more than twenty-one or two, slight, with bleached
hair and a jutting jaw, you would have taken her for a shop girl dreaming of the next night out or the next man, or both. Billy had met her one Saturday afternoon on his way back to Ernie’s
house. She had been standing outside Hackney Town Hall with five or six other women, handing out leaflets for the Workers’ Housing Committee, pleading her case with anyone who’d stop to
listen. Spotting Billy, she came marching over and delivered a quickfire speech on the scandal of the housing crisis. He replied, what housing crisis? which got her well and truly going until she
realised it was a joke. After that there was quite a bit of mutual sizing up, ostensibly political but also sexual, before they agreed to meet for a drink later that evening. She turned up half an
hour late, fuming over some fresh incidence of official callousness, and it took two gin and limes in quick succession to loosen her up enough to laugh, even to flirt, but not enough, it seemed, to
sleep with him. She’d thought about it though, he knew she had, although it was probably just as well things hadn’t got that far. She was the type to talk politics in bed, not something
that would have stirred his passions.

The Workers’ Housing Committee had been formed by a group of housewives who’d led one of the first squats, the now legendary occupation of an empty block of flats in Regent’s
Park which had culminated in a police siege and a crowd of two thousand homeless people staging a sit-down protest in the road outside. Since then, so far as Billy could make out, the founding
housewives had abandoned control of the committee to a number of veteran activists who slipped in and out of the block at odd times, trade unionists and communists who whispered advice into
Carol’s ear and made the occasional round of the flats, stiffening the communal resolve.

They weren’t much in evidence now, however, as Carol faced the families alone and urged them to hold tight till word could be sent to the homeless community, who’d come and lob food
up to them through the windows.

‘They goin’ to lob water up an’ all, are they?’ said one of the women. ‘Come on.’

‘Have you looked out the door recently?’ added a gravel-voiced man. ‘No one’s goin’ to come out in this lot, are they? Not if they was Scott of the bleedin’
Antarctic himself.’

‘But if they know we’re under siege—’