Various Pets Alive and Dead (11 page)

‘Hey! He’s well fit!’

Oolie waves both hands at a traffic warden busily ticketing a row of cars by the shopping parade. Although she didn’t mention this to the social worker, Oolie’s uninhibited sexuality is also a worry. Would Oolie remember to take the pill every evening if there was no one to remind her?

‘Come on, Oolie. We’re there.’

Clinging on to the handrails they stagger down the stairs and out on to the pavement of Hardwick Avenue, where Oolie makes a beeline for a puddle left by the recent rain and stamps in it with both feet.

Their inter-war semi is set back behind holly bushes in a quiet tree-lined street where their neighbours are dentists and accountants; it has three generous bedrooms and a small sunny garden – it’s the sort of house they could never afford if they moved back to London now, they’d be lucky to get a one-bedroomed flat for the same price. It’s because of the deindustrialisation of the North, Marcus explained. All the time they thought they were experimenting with revolutionary ways of living, the real revolution was slowly taking shape under their noses: the demise of manufacture, the triumph of finance.

Since he’s retired from the Institute, Marcus has ensconced himself in Serge’s old room, which he uses as a study. If Serge wanted to come home to finish writing up his PhD, they’d have to come to some arrangement. Goodness knows what Marcus gets up to in there. He says he’s writing a history of the non-Communist non-Trotskyist left – the Fifth International, he calls it. It can’t be good for him to spend so much time picking over the past, which only makes people unhappy. Yes, he’s become much more withdrawn and grumpy recently.

She puts the kettle on and opens the fridge for milk.

‘Be the change you want to see
.’ Mahatma Gandhi’s words are fixed to the fridge door with a green frog magnet; they’ve taken the place of ‘
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need
’, which hung on the fridge door at Solidarity Hall, held in place by a red flag magnet.

She takes a cup of tea upstairs and sets it down on Marcus’s desk.

‘How’s it going, love?’ She ruffles his hair with her fingers.

He starts and looks up at her, smiling, blinking owlishly behind round glasses, as though he’s just woken up from a deep sleep.

‘That Italian comrade who came over in 1984 – can you remember his name?’

‘Bruno. Bruno Salpetti.’

Doro shuts her eyes for a moment, and finds she can remember not only his name but the rough-smooth texture of his cheeks where the stubbly bit ended and the baby-soft bit began, the clean smell of his soap, the fine black hairs on his forearms and belly, and the thicker mass of black curls below.

‘That’s it!’ He scribbles it down. ‘Was he in Potere Operaio?’

‘Lotta Continua.’

Does Marcus know about her and Bruno? And, after all these years, would he mind?

‘That was my first encounter with the politics of autonomy. Listen to this.’ He leans forward and reads from the screen of his computer. ‘ “Although the workers have to sell their time to the capitalist who owns the workplace, their human needs and desires are opposed to those of the capitalist.” ’

‘My most beautiful
compagna
,’ Bruno had called her. It’s a long time since Marcus said something like that. Yes, in those days she could still give Moira Lafferty a run for her money, despite her long auburn hair and DD boobs. The new men, it seemed, weren’t that different from the old men.

‘ “Autonomy is the workers’ struggle to assert their own personal and economic goals …” ’

Even Fred the Red, who spent his days wandering in the wordy thickets of Marxist theory and his nights with a succession of tearful girlfriends from London, found time for Moira. In fact, he was probably the father of Star.

‘ “… in the face of the employer’s relentless pursuit of profit …” ’

The dictates of sisterhood meant you weren’t supposed to feel angry or jealous towards other women, because we were all victims of sexism, and we had to solidarise. Beautiful women were oppressed because they were only sought after as sex objects, and plain women were oppressed because they weren’t sought after at all.

We
were
sisters, Moira and I, she reflects. We stuck together like sisters, but we also squabbled and fought like sisters, especially over Bruno Salpetti.

Bruno arrived in Solidarity Hall from Modena in 1984, at the start of the miners’ strike, declaring he wanted to share the straaggling of the proletaariat. He slept on a mattress on the floor of the Marxism Study Centre, which had long since been transformed into a playroom for the kids. His only luggage was a little backpack which contained a selection of readings from Gramsci’s
Prison Notebooks
, a razor, and a pair of very small black underpants. (Moira, needless to say, found some pretext to investigate and whispered her findings to Doro.) The razor went unused – he grew a beard, which usually Doro didn’t fancy on men, but on him it looked excitingly leonine. The underpants appeared on the washing line with pleasing regularity. He broke the monotony of their bean-grain diet with wonderful spaghetti dishes made with fresh tomatoes and olive oil; he maintained that Gramsci had more to offer to the revolution than Trotsky; and he believed in, and practised, free love. He was only twenty-five, but what’s a decade or so between friends?

Moira, as you would expect, was the first to get in there.

‘He’s got a dick like a gorilla!’ she reported with characteristic refinement.

Doro felt a flush of annoyance. What does
she
know about bloody gorillas?

‘Oh, really,’ she said.

It was bad enough that Moira was bedding Bruno at any time of day or night, but she had to advertise what a good time she was having with little crescendos of shrieks and sighs that could be heard in every corner of the house. Although it was solidly built, there was something about the layout of Solidarity Hall which meant that sound percolated through stairwells and corridors. And whatever you were doing you had to stop and listen – there was no escape. Once it was the curly-haired milkman collecting his money; Doro was on the doorstep in her dressing gown, fumbling in her purse for some change, and suddenly his ears pricked up. Their eyes met. A little smile spread across his face and he looked at her enquiringly.

‘She’s got TB,’ said Doro. ‘She often coughs like that. I expect she’ll die soon. It’s quite tragic.’ She slammed the door.

The kids naturally were curious, and Nick explained that it was a sign that Moira was very happy. This was confirmed for them one day when two women from Women Against Pit Closures came collecting for the soup kitchen which had just been set up in the village hall. Doro invited them in and offered them tea. They entered gingerly, stepping over the debris in the hall, looking curiously at the posters on the walls (‘
THE TEARS OF PHILISTINES ARE THE NECTAR OF THE GODS
’ was still there), sniffing the lentil-flavoured air. Sticking close together, they followed her down the long gloomy passage into the kitchen, where Clara and Serge were having an after-school snack of peanut butter and cornflakes at a table which hadn’t been cleared since last night. As they sat down and Doro put the kettle on, the ceiling above started to creak, and the sounds of Moira’s bliss were suddenly very audible.

‘By ’eck, she sounds ’appy. Must’ve seen t’ fairies at bottom o’ t’ garden,’ said the younger one, who was called Janey.

‘D’you rent ’im out?’ asked the older one, called June, who had a smoker’s voice and a sagging crinkled face.

‘Yes,’ said Doro, ‘but there’s a queue.’

They exchanged quick looks.

Janey said, ‘D’you want to ’elp us in’t kitchens?’

‘Sure,’ said Doro.

‘Bring ’
im
too,’ said June, flashing two rows of incongruously pearly teeth.

Another time, it was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

‘It’s a bad case of devil-possession, we’re trying to exorcise …’ Doro began, but they didn’t hang around for an explanation.

Maybe it was the milkman, or June and Janey, or even the Witnesses, but somehow word got around the village, and they started to get a steady trickle of visitors, male and female, who would call on some pretext and stand on the doorstep trying to peer through the open door into the house. In those weeks of the miners’ strike, there was always someone coming to their commune collecting for petrol-money for the pickets or donations for the soup kitchen where miners and their families could get at least one meal a day, and they were pleased and excited that they seemed at last to be making links with the local community, who had previously shown little interest in the Marxism Study Centre or the Anti-Colonialism Discussion Group.

Bruno was delighted when Doro conveyed the news that the women in the village had invited him to volunteer in the kitchen.

‘They like to experience the Italian cuisine?’

‘Er … I think so,’ said Doro.

Moira was less pleased. She’d cut quite a figure on the picket line at Askern, with her flaming hair and interesting slogans (‘Miners are the midwives of socialism!’) which drew puzzled but admiring glances from the ranks of the pickets.

‘I’ve been called all sorts,’ declared Jimmy Darkins, Chairman of the National Union of Mineworkers’ local branch, ‘but never a midwife. I shall ’ave to give it a gooa.’

Moira obviously revelled in all that male attention. She and Bruno would regularly rush home exhilarated after picketing duty, fling themselves down on the mattress and make noisy love. It was awful.

Now she’d just have to choose between spending her time with a load of women doing boring domestic chores on an epic scale, or letting her lover loose in that hormone-heavy environment.

‘The role of the women is absolutely crucial in this struggle, Bruno,’ Doro said.

‘But the picket line is where it’s at, comrade,’ urged Moira.

‘Hm. However, as Gramsci says, is important to build the counter-hegemonic positions in all social institutions.’ Bruno twirled his fork through the pasta.

‘Exactly!’ cried Doro.

Moira shrugged defeat, slurping in a mouthful of spaghetti alla Napoletana, letting the sauce dribble down her chin.

‘Oh my!’ said June, when Doro led Bruno into the Askern miners’ welfare hall next day.

The room fell silent as twenty women stopped what they were doing and stared at the newcomer.

‘Come on in, duck! Don’t be shy! We’re not gonner rip yer keks off. Not till after dinner, any rood.’

Bruno smiled innocently.

Janey whispered to Doro, ‘Does ’e talk English, love?’

June whispered, ‘Does ’e talk the language of love?’

Unfortunately Doro had a class that afternoon, so she had to leave. Bruno came home several hours later, hitching up his jeans as he lurched through the door, his face covered with reddish blotches.

‘How was the cooking?’ asked Moira sulkily.

‘The ingredients were poor.’ His voice sounded faint. ‘It is a disaster the British masses have a diet of such impoverishment.’

‘How did you get on with the miners’ wives?’ asked Doro.

‘The proletarian women displayed extreme … how I should say …?’ He fumbled for words, ‘… class consciousness.’

The problem of class consciousness dogged Doro for days. If that’s the secret, there could be no hope for her, she fretted, drowning her disappointment in soapy water as she rinsed the breakfast clutter in the sink. For she couldn’t help being thoroughly and undeniably middle class. But then so was Moira. So were all of them, in their thoughts, their habits, their tastes and preferences. The fact that they’d all just gone off picketing didn’t alter that one iota. Did any of the women in the soup kitchen wear dungarees or read George Eliot or eat vegetarian mush? Although they’d lived up here on the fringes of this working-class community for fifteen years, they’d barely touched its inner life. Having finished the washing-up, she smoked a joint and brooded on the inherent unfairness of the class system, which suddenly seemed to cut her off from all possibility of happiness.

‘Why are you sad, my most beautiful
compagna
?’

His arm was around her shoulder.

‘Oh! I’m …’ her eyes filled with tears, ‘… I’m just thinking of the unfairness …’ a sob rose in her throat, ‘… of the class system.’

‘Do not weep, my noble spirit. It is of course unjust. But this is why we are in straaggle, yes?’

His fuzzy cheek pressed against hers, his warm hands searching the opening of her blouse.

‘Yes!’

‘Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will?’

‘Yes!’

Doro learned a great deal about class consciousness and struggle that day. And her pleasure was enhanced when she later bumped into Moira coming out of the bathroom with a mardy look on her face.

Sometimes Bruno slept with Doro (who also slept with Marcus, who didn’t know), and sometimes he slept with Moira (who also slept with Nick Holliday and Fred the Red, who did know) and sometimes he got back from the soup kitchen too exhausted to do anything but sleep. Then one evening when he arrived back from the soup kitchen, there was a young woman with him.

‘This is Megan.’

He introduced her to the group, repeating their names for her.

‘Hi.’

She looked up from lowered eyes, not smiling, and stuck to Bruno like a shadow.

Doro didn’t feel particularly threatened by Megan at first. She wasn’t pretty – at least, not in a conventional way – she had a thin angular body with heavy breasts, a long curtain of dark hair, and grey-green watchful eyes. She moved silently, like a cat, and hardly spoke. In fact, she’s not sure, even after so many years, who Megan really was, except that she’d been married to a strike-breaking miner, and was brought into the commune by Bruno. Doro can still remember that night. She shivers.

It was the dead of winter, the long bitter winter of 1984–5, and it was strange, Doro recalls, that Megan had no possessions with her, not even a coat. Bruno explained that she was running away from an abusive relationship. They welcomed her unquestioningly, made up a bed for her in the annexe in Moira’s studio, and the women lent her the clothes she needed.