Vacant Possession (27 page)

“And so? What did she do?” Mr. K. asked fearfully. So early in the morning, alarms before his oat flakes.

“So she caught hold of me and pinched my arm. She says, where’s the baby? I say, what baby? I said, I wish I had one, I could get rehoused. She says, don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes, Suzanne. Suzanne? Who’s she?”

“Related to this Blank, no doubt,” Mr. Kowalski said with a sneer. “Related to Snoopers, related to the giant who brought the bread that day. A woman phones up constantly, asking for Blank. I try everything, sing down the receiver, rude noises.”

“Have you tried leaving it off the hook?”

“But my precious, how shall I follow their tricks? No, we must face it, Anaemia, our number is up. This woman who accosts you, she is the one who looks—so—with the staring eyes, the ghoul?”

“That’s her. The pale one.”

Mr. K. shuddered. “Have you seen Wilmot?” he asked.

“Not come out this morning.”

“She must be given her orders. It is a siege. Please to stay on the upper storey till further notice.”

“You won’t catch me going out there again. That woman’s bonkers. They can insult you, but they’re not allowed to pinch your arm. It’s mistaken identity. I’ll sue them.” She hurried off, rubbing her sore arm. “There’s tribunals.”

Left to himself, Mr. Kowalski lumbered into the hall and drew the big bolts on the front door. He went back to the kitchen and locked himself in. Five minutes later Lizzie Blank came downstairs, carrying her boots. For once, she wasn’t bothered about giving him any frights. He was getting a bit unpredictable, she sensed. By leaning hard on the inside of the door, you could get sufficient play to draw back the bolts without making a noise. This she did; and, in her finery, stepped into the street.

Mr. K. tipped half a scuttle of coal into the range. He might as well be comfortable now. I could have a hearty breakfast, he reflected; except that he had neglected to procure the essentials for one. But truly, he had no stomach for it. He was sick when he thought of dying; sick and cold. But I will defend it to the last, he thought: hearth and home.

From between the worn cushions of his fireside chair he extracted his book of idioms. He picked up his pen, and was overwhelmed by a rush of feeling so violent that his hand shook and he was forced to put it down again and recover himself. All the horrors of the last months flooded back; the voices of strange women, the heavy footsteps overhead. The beating in the street, the blonde impostor on his own stairs; the giant, limping off round the corner. Presently he calmed himself; but his hand still shook when he picked up his pen and wrote: Curtains, Swansong, Terminus:
THE FINAL CHAPTER
.

It was a wild blustery day; tossing grey clouds, rain on the wind, outbreaks of sunshine. Muriel would have put her umbrella up, but she couldn’t juggle both together; the umbrella and the cardboard box.

The baby, Gemma, had been sleeping when she arrived at Edwina’s flat. She had left the empty box at the bottom of the stairs, gone up and rang the doorbell. There was no sign of the flat’s owner, but Suzanne was waiting for her, in her boots and big sweater, ready to go.

“There you are, Lizzie, hello. She’s asleep.”

“That’s good. And how are you, ducks?”

“Oh, I’m all right,” Suzanne said, with a little laugh. She had been heavily pregnant when they had last seen each other; now she looked paler, hollow-eyed, inwardly collapsed. The flat—two rooms really—was dirty and neglected, a near-slum. There was a scrap of fraying carpet, then bare boards; windows were cracked and crisscrossed with tape. There were mattresses strewn over the floor. Somewhere a tap was dripping, tip-tap, tip-tap. Suzanne’s possessions were in a heap inside the front door; a backpack, a sleeping bag, and a box of baby things. Her face had a bruised look, as if she hadn’t slept.

“Heard from Jim?”

Suzanne shook her head. She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Here are her things,” she said, handing over a plastic carrier bag. “Her bottle and everything, disposable nappies, put cream on her when you change her, she’s getting a rash. She can have a feed when she wakes up.”

“How do you know?” Muriel said suddenly. “How do you know how to look after them?”

“It’s only common sense. It’s not the mystery that people make of it.”

“It’s cold here.”

“The squat should be warmer. I hope it’s all right. I’m taking most of my stuff over on the off chance. I’ll pick her up about six o’clock, will that be okay?”

“I’ll fetch her back.”

“Oh, would you? Course, you could stay here with her”—she looked around doubtfully—“but it’s a bit depressing.”

“Better off at my place,” Muriel said. “Be an outing for her, won’t it?”

“I don’t think she’s old enough to appreciate an outing.”

“She’ll get the air, though. Where is she?”

Suzanne went into the other room and came back with a quilted bundle. She kissed the baby’s fluffy head, and pulled up her hood around her face. “There, she’ll be nice and warm,” she said. “Can you manage? She’s heavier than you think. Hold on, and I’ll put her cot blanket round her. There. Okay?”

“Okay. Good luck then.”

“Thanks, Lizzie. I’ll pay you tonight. See you.”

She followed them out onto the stairs. A keen draught whistled under the closed doors of the landing. Suzanne crossed her arms over her chest. She looked anxious.

“Sure you’ll manage?”

“No problem.” Muriel thought she was going to follow, hovering over them, until they were down in the street; but she paused at the top of the uncarpeted stairs and let them go down alone. Manoeuvring with her foot, Muriel pulled the front door behind her, and it closed with a clatter. There was a tiny porch, long unglazed, the wood rotting. Her box was where she had left it, on the composition floor running with damp. She stooped and put the baby in. Gemma was a bigger bundle than she had expected, encased in her snug quilting. She was asleep, and dreaming; Muriel saw the movement of her eyes under the tender skin of the lids.

She took up the box in her arms. At some point before she reached home, Gemma was sure to wake up, and then she would cry and attract attention. For this reason, it would be better not to fold over the flaps of the box; it would look odd. It was true that Mother had done it, but her own infant had been past crying, and moving only faintly, moving only feebly, like something burrowing underground. If anyone stops us, she thought, I’ll say I’m her godmother. She stepped into the street.

No one stopped them. No one noticed them hurrying by; the big fleshy woman plastered with make-up, strutting along in her high-heeled boots; and her box from the Pick ’N’ Save. The bottom edge of the box dug into her chest. She had no gloves, and her nails were drops of blood against the cardboard. The towns-people passed them, bending in the wind, their faces screwed up and their collars pulled about their ears. In their concrete bunkers in the shopping centre, the saplings lashed in the gust, whipping the moist air with their half-fledged green. There was mud and broken glass on the pavements, the polystyrene cartons from the hamburger shop bowled down the street. Birds fled shrieking from wire to wire.

At ten o’clock the woman rang up again; the woman with the harsh, strange, threatening voice. She said, was Lizzie Blank there? This was the third time she’d rung, she said.

“No Blank is here,” Mr. K. said. “You are under a mistake.”

“Look,” Sylvia said, “will you tell her, please, that I have this box for her?”

“Specify contents,” said Mr. K. gruffly. High explosive, he thought.

“How would I know what’s in it? All I know is that it’s been cluttering up my hall for weeks past. Tell her: if she doesn’t collect it right now, I don’t know how she’ll get it, because I’m moving today. The house will be all locked up.”

She was a persistent, headstrong woman, this; he would not like to meet her in the dark. It seemed a bad mistake to inform her quarry over the telephone about what was in store; but no doubt, like him, she was a veteran of intrigue and destruction, and like him had long forgotten whose side she was on. Someone, somewhere, would be taping the call. It was all over the papers, about telephone tappers. Sooner or later the box would turn up; the parcel, the mystery, the infernal machine. He would be ready for it.

“Right,” said Florence, straightening up. “Anything else I can do for you?” She sneezed twice, and blew her nose in a businesslike fashion.

Her face, when she took the handkerchief away, was sulky and woebegone. She had taken exception to their moving; was thinking about selling up herself and getting a flat. Colin could not imagine her leaving the district, but she said that people were talking about her. She said they had got wind of it, about Mother, and that when she walked along Lauderdale Road, people exchanged glances, and talked out of the side of their mouths, and hurried in, slamming their front doors.

“No, I think that’s about it,” Colin said to her. “Thanks, Florence, it was good of you to take time off. I think they’re just about finished on the van.” He went to the front door and looked out into the road. The removal men were just securing the tailgate. “That’s it,” he said.

The house was empty; even the carpets were taken up. They had come down far enough on the purchase price, Sylvia said, without throwing in soft furnishings. There were pale marks on the walls where the pictures had been; buttons and small coins, shaken out of the furniture, lay on the floorboards for the new owner to sweep up. At the top of the stairs, all the doors were wedged open, and an unaccustomed white light lay across the banisters and the bare landing. There was something about the house in its present state that discomfited him extremely; like an old woman stripped naked. He couldn’t wait to leave.

Florence pulled on her gloves. “Better get back to the office. I’ve got to go out and see a claimant.”

“Don’t be too hard on him.”

“Her. It’s a woman. I don’t know why you think I’m such a tyrant. It’s the taxpayer’s money, you know. Well, Colin…so this is it.”

“Yes. I hope the children won’t be a nuisance when they come home from school. I’ll be over for them mid-evening.”

“They will be a nuisance, but by now I’m reconciled. Where’s Alistair today?”

“God knows. I expect he’ll turn up; like a homing rat or something.”

For a moment he thought she was going to offer him her hand. “We’ve been neighbours ten years, Colin. I shall miss you.”

“We’ll miss you, too.”

“I hope you will be very happy,” she said formally, as she set off down the path.

Anyone would think I were getting married, Colin thought, as he watched her go. It still gave him a pang to think of Isabel; but now that he had become such a decision-maker, he was discovering an ability, a happy knack, of not thinking about her at all. The obsessions that had once alarmed him were attenuated now, washed-up little ghosts, trailing their spectral images through his brain when he was on the verge of sleep. He was not so vulnerable now, in waking hours. It was a man’s life; an open countenance, a shuttered heart. It was just as the Prime Minister always said: There Is No Alternative. And that was a comfort too.

Sylvia came down the stairs, her feet clattering on the bare treads.

“What a day!” she said. “We could have picked a finer day for it.”

“Looks as if it might clear, to me.”

“Let’s hope. Ready?”

“Yes.”

Sylvia came to a halt, stubbing her toe on the cardboard box that still lay in the hall. “Oh, this blasted box,” she said. “What am I to do with it?”

“Leave it.”

“I rang up again. That bloke’s foreign, who always answers. I can’t get any sense out of him.”

“You’ve got the right number?”

“She gave it me herself. Anyway, the address must be right, because that’s where I sent her wages, and if she hadn’t got them she’d have been round like a shot.”

“I could take it,” Colin offered. “I could drop it off.”

“No, I’ll do it. You follow the removers. Here you are.” She took out of her shoulder bag the keys to the new house, with the estate agent’s tag still on them. She dropped them into his hand. “You go and open up, and I’ll drop the box off at Napier Street and follow you in the Mini.”

“But I don’t know where you want the furniture.”

“Never mind.” She smiled. “Whatever I decide now, I’ll want it changed next week, I know I will. Off you go, then, I’ll be right with you.” She kissed him on the cheek.

Colin went down the path, swinging the keys. “My old man said follow the van,” he sang. “And don’t dilly dally on the way.” He jumped into the Toyota and revved up the engine, ready for a sporty start. “Off went the van with me home packed in it—” He sped away from the kerb, waving gaily as he approached the corner, though his wife was no longer in sight.

Leaving the front door ajar, so that the squally rain blew in through the crack, Sylvia turned and clip-clopped down the hall. Just a final check, she thought. In the kitchen the smell of pine disinfectant rose to meet her. She had given the worktops a good going-over that morning, and washed the floor. There had to be some mess, when carpets were taken up, but she wanted the purchasers to know that she was clean.

She opened the cupboards one by one. All empty; the groceries were in the back of the car. Inside the last cupboard, by the hinge, there was a smear of something red. Tomato sauce, she thought. Those kids again, eating, eating, always eating. Pulling her abdomen in, she looked around. There was nothing to wipe it up with, no cloth or anything. Not even a tissue in her pocket. With an expression of distaste, she clicked the door shut and left the kitchen behind.

Strange how the living room looked smaller with all the furniture gone. You’d think it would be the other way round. On the mantel-piece sat Colin’s head. Much to his disgust, and to Alistair’s, she had insisted it should be left behind. A horrible thing, she thought it, with its blind white eyes. She walked over to it, touched the tip of the nose, then the cold lips. The porcelain was yellowish and crazed at the base. Faculty of Benevolence. Faculty of Hope.

She climbed the stairs and checked the bedrooms, opening the doors of the built-in wardrobes and easing out the drawers. In Alistair’s room she stood by the window for a moment, looking out over the dank garden, into the tangle of grey branches that fenced it off. In summer it would be an impenetrable wall of green, but of course she would not be here to see it. She laid the palm of her hand flat against the wall. It felt damp, but there was no trace of the fungus now. Colin had done a good job on it. Perhaps there was hope for him yet. The growths would be back, naturally; but that was the next tenant’s problem.

The sun was struggling out as she left Alistair’s room, and shining through the narrow window onto the landing. It seemed to make everything look worse; illuminating the stains on the wallpaper, the cracks in the floorboards, even the brushmarks in the paintwork; a scouring, bleaching April sun. She hesitated, then turned back and drew closed the door of Alistair’s room. Softly, in turn, she closed the other doors. Her face half in shadow, she went downstairs. She picked up the box, surprised again by how light it was. “Lost me way and don’t know where to roam,” she hummed. The front door clicked shut after her. She took the keys out of her pocket and posted them back through the letter box.

As soon as Muriel turned the corner—she felt the baby stirring within the box—she saw the car parked by the kerb; hello, she thought, Miss Isabel Field. She was parked a few houses along, on the other side of the road, and she was watching Mr. K.’s gate. Muriel saw the upturned white oval of her face; then sunlight struck across the windscreen, and wiped it from her view.

Miss Field was not somebody who understood life. She had not grasped how things work. She had not grasped it ten years ago; almost under her nose, she and Mother had toddled off to the canal. Muriel had an impulse to cross the road, the box in her arms, and pass the time of day.

But there was a need to hurry. It was necessary to get herself back upstairs and change into her own clothes. She couldn’t take the baby to the canal wearing Lizzie’s white boots, it would be unsuitable. Besides, why should the changeling emerge, unless it recognised its mother?

She turned in at the gate. She saw it, in her own mind, the murky waters parting as the human baby sank. She looked down at Gemma; pity, she thought, you could get fond of it. Slowly, trailing green weed, her own skeletal child swam to the bank. “Resurrection is a fact,” she whispered. She drew the child from the water; rigid, but not with cold. With damp and bony fingers, the changeling reached for her face.

She was putting the key in the lock when she heard hurried footsteps behind her. She turned, holding the box between herself and her pursuer.