Vacant Possession (8 page)

Where the Travellers’ Call had been there was a field of rosebay willowherb and scrap metal. There were a few aimless piles of red brick, two feet high, and in places the earth was turned up, as if someone had begun to dig foundations here and then thought better of it. Only the Rifle Volunteer was still standing, at the corner of where Sicily Street used to be. It was eleven-thirty, and while he watched, the landlord put on the lights and came out to open the doors. He stooped ponderously to draw out the bolt, and stood gazing for a minute at the sky; then he looked across the wasteland, shading his eyes as if he were scanning the prairie. Sholto was the only human figure within his view. There was a rusting refrigerator lying on its back, a swastika spray-gunned on a wall; human faeces. Sholto felt the straps of his holdall cutting into his wrists. Picking his feet out of the mud, scraping his shoe on a handy brick, he began to make his way towards the Rifle Volunteer. I thought the war was over, Sholto said.

Miss Tidmarsh was nearly fifty now, and still going strong. Her shiny new car waited outside on the gravel. Muriel followed her; withered flanks inside a scarlet bib-and-brace. “Guess what!” Miss Tidmarsh said. “We think we’ve found you a job. Who’s a lucky girl?”

She reached a hand across Muriel, pulled her seat belt, and snapped it fastened. They crunched off over the gravel. Even Miss Tidmarsh’s style of driving seemed less mature than it had been. Muriel said, “Whatever happened to Miss Field?”

Miss Tidmarsh glanced at her sideways. “Fancy you remembering Miss Field! Was she your social worker?”

“Such a lovely person,” Muriel said dotingly. It was an expression the nurses used, about lady doctors who did not snub them and relatives who did not pester.

“Did you think so? She left. Went to work in a bank, if I remember. I think she got married or something.”

They shot out of the main gate and onto the road to town. Muriel didn’t look back.

She started off as a cleaner, pulling a little trolley with her brush and her mop and her scouring powder and her special bucket. She had her name written on the trolley:
MURIEL
. She slopped her water about the corridors and under the tables in the canteen; she tipped her powder down the lavatories, and sang while she plied her mop. She learned to sing with a cigarette in her mouth, because cigarettes were what the factory made, and any worker was at liberty to pluck the finished article from the machines and puff away during the tea break and the half-hour for lunch.

At the end of the first week Maureen said to her: “Muriel, love, I don’t know what to say. Look at your brush, it’s all worn down to stumps. Have you been chewing it?” Maureen sighed heavily. “There’s a wheel coming off
MURIEL
. You’ve got through as much powder as I use in three months. And look at your Eeziwipes; they’re all over the place.”

Muriel stood looking down at her feet.

“No point putting your bottom lip out,” Maureen said. “I don’t know, where’ve you been all your life? I suppose some can clean and some can’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Am I discharged then?”

“That’s not up to me, duck. There’s enough on the dole as it is. On your own at home, are you?”

“I am at the moment. But I’m expecting my mother.”

“Ah, that’s nice. Well, look, lovey, buck up now. Perhaps we can get you on Ripping.”

That first weekend of freedom, Muriel paid a visit to her old home. It was quite a distance from the room that Miss Tidmarsh had found for her. She saw buses going about the streets, but she didn’t know how to get one to go in the right direction. So she walked; she had nothing else to do.

Considering how many years had passed, the district hadn’t changed much. She turned off Lauderdale Road, where she used to wait for the minibus. She paused for a few moments before the house where the fox terrier used to live, and took a good look. The stained glass and the net curtains had gone. The woodwork was painted white, and there was a panelled front door of polished wood, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head; and a carriage lamp on the wall. It looked very smart. If the dog came out, I could kick it, she thought. She turned the corner. Buckingham Avenue had hardly altered at all. Each house stood set back from the road behind its neat privet hedge. Peering down between the houses, she saw the thick clumps of rhododendrons, the striped lawns, the trellised archways for climbing roses. At number 2, her home, there were big stone urns on either side of the door; flowering plants spilled out of them, and a hanging basket swung from the porch. The shrubs had been cleared from the side of the house, and they had put up a flat-roofed extension, bright red brick against the pebble-dash. The windows gleamed. She walked to the gate and traced the number with her finger. She would never have believed that her mother’s house could look like this. She felt lonely.

She hung about for a while on the other side of the road, waiting to see if anyone would come out. Other people lived in the house, and she knew who; that monster of lust called Colin Sidney, who had seized his chance to buy it up cheap and move in next door to his scheming sister. What about the spare room, she wondered. Had there been an eviction, or were they still forced to keep the door locked?

Muriel waited for an hour. No one came in or out of number 2. Her feet hurt and she was thirsty. Presently she set off to walk back to her lodgings and sleep until it was time to go to the factory again. I can come again next week, she thought.

The Ripping Room had sixteen occupants, ranged at two long tables. Kieran came from the lift, pulling his trolley. “I’m a YOP,” he told Muriel. “They get me cheap.”

“What’s a Yop?” Muriel asked.

“Don’t you know? It’s a Youth Opportunity.” He added, “We get a lot of those.”

“Kieran brings the boxes,” Edna said. “Right? These are old cigarettes, right, off shop shelves what have gone out of date. On that trolley he’s got two hundred thousand rotten old fags. You get your box, right? Take out the packets. Open the packets, right?” She looked around her. “Kieran, where’s our boxes, where’s our bloody stacking boxes, where’s our Universal Containers?”

Kieran came sloping up. “I was putting me lipstick on,” he said. “I’m entitled.”

“Get on with it!” Edna said. “Empty the fags out, right? Fags to the left, foil to the right. Fags to the left, foil to the right. Got it?”

“Got it,” Muriel said. Edna was an angry-looking woman, with varicose veins and black corkscrew curls. She wore an overall and white cap. “Away you go then,” she said, and went off grumbling back to her own table.

“What happens to them all?” Muriel asked.

“Oh, they scrunch ’em all up and make ’em into new ones,” Kieran said.

There were two tables, and Edna’s got preferential treatment. When the Navy Issue came back in their tins, with the mould growing under the lids, it was never Edna’s table that got them. They were Permanent Rippers. On the other table, the girls could be moved, as the work required, to the Making Room, to the Blender, or the Hogshead. Before the week was out, Muriel had learned to rip very nicely. She was never moved; nor was the elderly lady who worked opposite her.

This was a humble little woman, with a worn bony face, and eyes and nose and mouth so insignificant that to call them features was an inflation of the truth. A scant amount of iron-grey hair was pinned fiercely to her little skull. The skin of her neck was yellow, her shoulders were bowed, and her hands shook a little as she reached for her cigarette boxes. She hardly seemed to have the strength for ripping. Every morning, before Kieran brought his first trolleyload, she would take out her teeth and wrap them in tissue paper, and slide them into her handbag. She would snap the clasp and hold the bag to her for a moment, looking around her with an anxious little smile; then she would put on her overall, over her pinny, over her old polyester dress. She seldom spoke. Her eyes watered continuously. She walked with her knees bent, her head down; a soft silent creature of depressive aspect. From time to time—once a week perhaps—some word from one of the other girls would catch her fancy, some gossip or quip, and she would tip her head back, open her toothless mouth, and roar with silent laughter, wiping her eyes the while and trembling at her own temerity.

She’d had a hard life, Edna said. Her name was Sarah; but everybody called her Poor Mrs. Wilmot.

Muriel’s second trip to Buckingham Avenue was more enlightening than the first. She had only been hanging around for five minutes when who should she see, coming up the road with her Saturday shopping, but Miss Florence Sidney?

Miss Sidney had put on weight, and her frizz of hair was now grey. She wore stout shoes, a check skirt, and a woollen scarf with bobbles on it, and she advanced along the street looking neither left nor right. As she passed number 2, going around the corner to her own gate, the front door flew open and a gang of screaming teenage children swarmed down the path and fanned out across the road. Miss Sidney was almost knocked into the hedge. Steadying herself against the gatepost, her face flushed, she called out after the children, “Alistair! For heaven’s sake!”

“Eff off, you old cow,” the boy called Alistair shouted back; wailing and yodelling, the gang careered around the corner into Lauderdale Road.

Miss Sidney put down her basket to recover herself. She steadied her breathing, allowed her flush to subside, and picked a few bits of privet from her cardigan. Looking up, she saw Muriel watching her from the other side of the road. Muriel smiled; there was no one she would rather see pushed into a hedge. Miss Sidney’s eyes passed over her, as if she thought it was rude to stare; it was plain that she had no idea who Muriel was. She gave a half-smile, picked up her shopping, and trotted round the corner.

She doesn’t expect me, Muriel thought. But she ought to expect me.

Muriel fished in her coat pocket, and brought out a piece of newspaper. She unwrapped it as she crossed the road, took out Mrs. Wilmot’s teeth, and tossed them over the hedge into the Sidneys’ front garden.

Just as she was rounding the corner, the front door of number 2 opened again. Colin Sidney came out and loped down the path towards his car; a big fair man, balding, lean and fit. She watched him jump into his car and shoot away from the kerb. He did not even notice her. She raised a hand after him; like someone giving a signal to a hangman.

Mrs. Wilmot was being retired. She had been at the factory for thirty years; today was her last day.

“Course,” she said, in her usual dead little whisper, “I’ll not get my pension, I’m not sixty. Course, I’ll get my benefit. Course, I’ll have to put in for it. Course, I don’t really know.” She picked up a corner of her overall and wiped her left eye.

“It’s a bloody shame,” Edna said. “Ripping’s all she’s got. Here, love, we’ll give you a send-off.”

“Course, they gave me a Teasmaid,” Poor Mrs. Wilmot said. She wiped her other eye and sniffed.

“Bugger the Teasmaid, we’ve got a lovely presentation to give you. We’ll give it you down the pub, it’s Friday night, isn’t it?”

“Course, the pot was broken,” Mrs. Wilmot whimpered. “Course, I didn’t complain.”

“I wish you’d told me,” Edna said, “I’d have complained all right. I don’t know, this place is going down the drain, you can’t leave anything about, people’s teeth being nicked out of their own handbags, they want bloody hanging. You could do with a new set, you should have asked for one, you should get compensation.”

“No point really,” Mrs. Wilmot said dejectedly. “I have to get my cards. I have to go to the office. I don’t like.”

“What do you mean, you don’t like?”

“Going to the office. I don’t like.”

“I’ll get your stuff for you,” Muriel offered.

“Oh, would you?” A tiny hope shone out of Poor Mrs. Wilmot. “Muriel, ask them for my wages as well, lovey.” The next moment her situation overwhelmed her again; she looked away and sniffed, and soon the tears were coursing down her cheeks.

“Off again,” Edna said. “Come on, duck, pull yourself together.”

“Course, you can understand it,” Poor Mrs. Wilmot said. “Course they don’t like me coughing on the tobacco. I appreciate that. Course I do.”

They arrived at the Swan of Avon just after opening time. Edna organised the moving of tables, commandeered extra chairs, and herded them into the Snug. “Let’s have a kitty, girls,” she called. The girls fumbled in their bags and tossed five-pound notes into the centre of the table. “No, not you, love,” Edna said to Poor Mrs. Wilmot. “This is your day, duck. Come on now, wipe your eyes. That’s it, give us a smile. Have a go on the Space Invaders.” She bustled her way to the bar, shouting through an open doorway to some male cronies from the Hogshead who were ordering up their first weekend pints in the public bar.

“Eh up, Edna!” the men shouted; and other badinage. “All girls together, is it, all girls together? Room for one more, is there, room for one more?”

A warm beery miasma drifted over towards the noisy party in the Snug. The weekend free-issue was opened, and soon the air turned blue with smoke. “Give over, you cheeky monkeys,” Edna yelled across the landlord’s head. The men roared back at her. Edna trilled with laughter, waved her arms. Her eyebrows shot up, her face reddened. Muriel watched her from the pub door. Her every gesture was florid, packed with life; her voice was as commanding as the factory hooter.

Muriel came up behind her. “I’ve been to the office for Mrs. Wilmot’s forms.”

“Good lass!” Edna cried. “Have you got them?”

“Yes, and I gave her the wages.”

“Righto then, you can help me carry.” She thrust a tin tray crammed with dazzling drinks into Muriel’s hands. “Here you go.”

“Oh ho, Passion Cocktail,” yelled the men from the Public, crowing in their mirth, and swaying backwards and forwards on the bar rail.

“Don’t buckle my rail, lads,” the landlord beseeched. Sweat started out of his forehead at the strain of keeping up with Edna’s drinks order. “Can you make a Harvey Wallbanger?” Edna asked him.