The Good Terrorist Page 10

  Alice, a sleepy creature in the big chair, was humble, even apologetic, as she struggled up to greet them. She felt she had no right to it when food and drink were spread about the floor and she was invited to join.

  Then she remembered. She pulled out her thick roll of notes and, laughing, gave £150 to Philip. “On account,” she said.

  A silence. They stared. Then they laughed, and began hugging her and one another. Even Jasper put his arm around her briefly as he laughed, and seemed to show her off to the others.

  “Better not ask where,” said Roberta, “but congratulations.”

  “Honestly gained, I hope,” said Faye primly, and they started again, embracing and laughing, but this was as much, Alice knew, out of the exuberant excesses of emotion from the day’s energetic confrontations with Authority as because they were pleased with her.

  “All the same,” said Faye, “we have to come to a group decision,” and Roberta said, “Oh, balls, Faye, come off it. It’s all right.…”

  The two women exchanged a look; and Alice knew: they had been discussing it down there, and had disagreed. Bert said briefly, as though it really didn’t matter, and had not mattered: “Yes, as far as I am concerned it is all right.” Jasper echoed, “Yes, I agree.”

  Pat said, “Of course it is all right.”

  Philip could not speak, for he would have wept; he was shining with relief, with happiness. And Jim: well, he was taking it, Alice could see, as a reprieve; she knew that nothing could ever seem, to Jim, more than a temporary good. But he was pleased enough. There was a warm, good feeling in the room. A family …

  The good feeling lasted through the meal, and while Alice took them to the kitchen to show them its cleanliness.

  “A wonder, she is,” sang Faye. “Alice the Wonder, the wondrous Alice …” She was tipsy and exhilarated, and everyone enjoyed looking at her.

  Without Alice’s asking, Bert and Jasper lifted the cooker upright to stand in its place against the wall.

  “I’ll get it properly fixed tomorrow,” said Philip, contentedly.

  They went together up the stairs, reluctant to separate for the night, so much of a group did they feel.

  Lying along the wall, in the dark, her feet a yard from Jasper’s feet, Alice remarked dreamily, “What have you and Bert decided, then?”

  A quick movement from Jasper, which she noted, thinking, I didn’t know I was going to say that.

  He was lying stiffly, found out; that was how he had experienced what she had said.

  “Oh, I don’t mind, Jasper,” she said, impatient but conciliatory. “But you did discuss it, didn’t you?”

  After a pause, “Yes, we did.”

  “Well, it does affect us all.”

  A pause. Grudgingly, “We thought it mightn’t be a bad thing, having other people here. But they have to be CCU. Jim will have to join.”

  “You mean, Philip and Jim will be a cover.”

  He said nothing. Silence means consent. She said, “Yes, and of course there’ll be more people coming in, and …”

  He said fussily, “You aren’t to let just anyone come, we can’t have just anybody.”

  “I didn’t say, just anybody. But the others needn’t ever know we are IRA.”

  “Precisely,” said Jasper.

  And then she remarked, in her dreamy voice and to her own surprise, “With the comrades in the other house, I wonder …” She stopped. Interested in what she had said. Respectful of it.

  But he had shot up on his elbow and was staring at her in the half-dark, where headlamps from the road moved light across the ceiling, the walls, the floor, so they were both irregularly illuminated. He was silent. He did not ask, “How do you know about the other house?,” or say, “How dare you spy on me?”—things that had been said often enough in the past, until he had learned that she could do this: know, without being told.

  She was thinking fast, listening to what she had said. So, Bert and Jasper had been next door, had they? There are comrades there? Yes, that’s it!

  She said, “Did you just go there, on the off-chance, or—what happened?”

  He replied stiffly, after a pause, “We were contacted. They sent a message.”

  “To you? To you and Bert?”

  From his hesitation she knew that she had been included, but she did not intend to make an issue of it.

  “A message came,” he said, and lay down.

  “And you and Bert and—the comrades there decided we should have more people in, as a cover.”

  Silence. But she knew he was not asleep. She let a few minutes go by, while she thought. Then she changed the subject, saying, “Quite soon people are going to have to start making a contribution. So far I’ve paid for everything.”

  “Where did you get that money?” he asked at once, reminded about it, as she had intended.

  She had it ready for him; she leaned over in the dark and handed him some notes.

  “How much?” he demanded.

  “Fifty.”

  “How much did you get?”

  “Ask no questions,” she said, though she would have told him had he asked; but he only said, “That’s right, squeeze the last blood out of them.”

  She said, “Tomorrow I’ve got to tackle the Council. Will you get my Social Security?”

  “Right.”

  They were both waiting for the sounds of lovemaking from next door, but Bert and Pat must have dropped off. Jasper and Alice had been lying tense; now they relaxed and lay companionably silent, and Alice was thinking: We are together.… This is like a marriage: talking together before going to sleep. I hope he starts telling me what happened today.

  She did not want to ask, but she knew that he knew she craved to hear it all. And soon he was kind; he began to talk. She loved him like this. He told her everything, right from the beginning: how the seven of them had been on the train, how they had bought sandwiches and coffee at the station, and had all crowded on the two seats facing each other and shared breakfast. Then how they went by taxi to the printworks. The taxi driver had been on their side: he had said “Good luck” as he drove off.

  “That was nice,” said Alice softly, smiling in the dark.

  And so they talked, quietly, Jasper telling everything, for he was good at this, building up word pictures of an event, an occasion. He ought to be a journalist, thought Alice, he is so clever.

  She could have talked all night, because of course she had slept a long time. But he fell asleep quite soon; and she was content to lie there, in the quiet, arranging her plans for the next day, which, she knew, would not be easy.

  When she woke, Jasper was not there. She ran to the top of the house, and looked into the four rooms where she had left all the windows open. The two rooms where the horrible pails had been were already only rooms in which people would soon be living. But she had not come for that. On two of the ceilings were sodden brown patches, and, having located on the landing the trap door to the attic, she stood on a window sill to reach. She could, just, and felt the trap door lift under her fingers. No problem there!

  Down she ran to the kitchen, where there were voices. What she saw made her eyes fill with tears. They were sitting round the table: Bert and Pat, these two close together; Jasper; Jim smiling and happy; and Philip, already working on the cooker, bending over behind it, a cup of coffee on its top. Bert had gone to his friend Philip’s girlfriend, Felicity, the Thermos had been filled, he had bought croissants and butter and jam. It was a real meal. She slid into her place at the head of the table, opposite Bert, and said, “If this room had some curtains …” They all laughed.

  “Before talking about curtains, you had better get things fixed with the Council,” said Jasper, rather hectoring, but only because he was jealous of Pat, who said, “Oh, I’d back Alice. I’d back her in anything.”

  Coffee and croissants appeared before her, and Alice said, “Has anybody noticed the ceilings upstairs?”

  “I have,” said Pat.
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  Philip said, “I can’t do everything at once.” He sounded aggrieved, and Pat said, “Don’t worry. It’s not difficult to fix slates. I did it once in another squat.”

  “I’ll do it with you when I’ve finished this,” said Philip.

  Pat said to Bert, “If someone could get the slipped-down tiles out of that guttering …?”

  “No head for heights,” said Bert comfortably.

  “I can do that,” said Alice. Then she said to Jasper, not Bert, “If you could borrow the car from next door, you could go looking in the skips for some furniture? I saw four skips in my father’s street with all sorts of good stuff.” She added fiercely, “Waste. All this waste.” She knew her look was about to overcome her, as she said, “This house, all these rooms … people throwing things out everywhere, when there’s nothing wrong with them.” She sat fighting with herself, knowing that Pat was examining her, diagnostic. Pat said to Bert, “There you are, Bert, job for the day. You and Jasper.” As he sat laughing from some old joke about his laziness, she said, irritated, “Oh, for shit’s sake, Alice has done all the work.”

  “And found all the money,” said Philip, from the cooker.

  “Put like that,” said Bert.

  “Put like that,” agreed Jasper, pleased, already restlessly moving about because of wanting to be off with Bert, looting and finding, street-combing.…

  Those two went off as Roberta and Faye came in, saw the remains of the croissants, and sat down to consume them.

  Alice dragged Philip’s heavy ladder to the front of the house, and went up it. Luckily the house was built squat, heavy on the earth, not tall and frightening. By the time she reached the top, Pat was already on the roof, sitting near the chimney with one arm round it: she had come up through the attic and a skylight. Around the chimney’s base the roof looked eroded, pocked. A great many tiles had slipped and were now propped along the gutter. All that water pouring in, and going where? They had not properly examined the attics yet.

  Alice was reaching out for the fallen tiles, and laying them on the roof in front of her. Pat seemed in no hurry to start; she was enjoying sitting there, looking at roofs and upper windows. And at neighbours, of course, watching them, two women at work on a roof. And where were the men? these people could positively be heard thinking—Joan Robbins, the old woman sitting there under her tree, the man staring grumpily out of a top window.

  “Catch,” called Alice, ready to throw, but Pat said, “Wait.” She wriggled onto her stomach and squinted in through the roof.

  “There’s a nest on the rafter here,” she said in a hushed voice, as though afraid of disturbing the birds.

  “Oh no,” said Alice, “oh, how awful!” She sounded suddenly hysterical, and Pat glanced at her, coldly, over her arm, which was stretched in under the roof. “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Alice, and began to cry.

  “A bird,” said Pat. “A bird, not a person.” She pulled out handfuls of straw and stuff, and flung them out into the air, where they floated down. Then something crashed onto the tiles of the roof: an egg. The tiny embryo of a bird sprawled there. Moving.

  Alice went on crying, little gusts of breathless sobs, her eyes fixed on the roof in front of her.

  Another egg crashed on the roof.

  Childlike frantic eyes implored Pat, who still was rooting about with her arm through the hole beneath her. But Pat was deliberately not looking at Alice snuffling and gulping below her.

  A third egg flew in an arc and crashed splodgily in the garden.

  “Now that’s done,” said Pat, and she looked at Alice. “Stop it!” Alice sniffed herself to silence and, at a nod from Pat, began to throw up the tiles. Pat caught them, carefully, one after another.

  Roberta and Faye appeared below, and went off, waving to them.

  “Have a good day,” said Pat, brief, ironical, but with a smile saying that she, like Alice, did not expect anything else.

  Soon Philip came up to join Pat, and Alice, having cleared all the gutters as far as she could reach, went down to move the heavy ladder along a few paces. She worked, in this way, all round the house, removing wads of sodden leaves, and fallen tiles. Above her, Philip and Pat replaced the tiles.

  Alice felt low and betrayed. By somebody. The two minute half-born birds were lying there, their necks stretched out, filmy eyes closed, and no one looked at them. The parent birds fluttered about on the high branches nearby, complaining.

  Alice tried to keep her mind on what had to be done next. The cleaning. The cleaning! Windows and floors and walls and ceilings, and then paint, so much paint, it would cost.…

  In mid-afternoon she went off to ring the Council, as if this were not an important thing, as if things were settled.

  She heard that Mary Williams was not there and her heart went dark.

  Bob Hood, an official disturbed in his important work, said curtly that the matter of 43 and 45 had been put off till tomorrow.

  Said Alice, “It’s all right, then, is it?”

  “No, it certainly is not,” said Bob Hood. “It has not been agreed that you or anyone else can occupy those premises.”

  Alice said in a voice as peremptory, as dismissive as his, “You ought to come and see this place. It is a disgrace that it could ever be considered as suitable for demolition. Somebody’s head should roll for it. I am sure heads will roll. These are two perfectly sound houses, in good condition.”

  A pause. Huffily he said—but he was retreating—“And there have been more complaints. Things cannot be allowed to continue.”

  “But we have cleaned up forty-three—the one we took over. The police would confirm that it has been cleaned up.”

  Alice waited, confident. Oh, she knew this type, knew how their cowardly little minds worked, knew she had him. She could hear him breathing, could positively note how mental machineries clicked into place.

  “Very well,” he said. “I will come round. I’ve been meaning to take a look at those two properties.”

  “Can you give me some indication as to time?” said Alice.

  “There’s no need for that, we have keys.”

  “Yes, but we can’t have people just wandering around, can we? I’d like you to give us some approximate time.”

  This was such cheek that she wondered at herself. Yet she knew it was not over the top, because of her manner: every bit as authoritative as his. She was not surprised when he said, “I’ll come round now.”

  “Right,” said Alice. “We’ll expect you.” And put down the receiver on him.

  She raced back. She called up to Philip and Pat that the Council was coming, and on no account should they stop, because it would be a good thing for them to be seen at work up there. She ran indoors to check on sitting room, kitchen. She went upstairs to the rooms where they slept, and marvelled that Roberta and Faye’s room was a veritable bower of femininity, with dressing table, cushions, duvet on the double sleeping bag, photographs—all of it grubby, but it would make a good impression. She whisked on a skirt. Her hair, her nails. She heard a knock before she expected it and tripped down the stairs with a cool smile already adjusted on her face to open the door correctly on, “Bob Hood? I am Alice Mellings.”

  “I hope those two on the roof know what they are doing?”

  “I expect so. He is a builder. She is assisting him. As an amateur, but she has done it before.”

  She had silenced him. Oh, you nasty little man, she was thinking behind her good-girl’s smile. You nasty little bureaucrat.

  “Shall I show you downstairs first? Of course, this will give you no idea of what it was like only three days ago. For one thing, the Council workmen had filled in the lavatory bowls with concrete and ripped the electric cables out—they left them anyhow, a fire hazard.”

  He said, “I have no doubt they were fulfilling their instructions.”

  “You mean, they were instructed to leave the cables dangerous, and to concrete over the main water tap? I wonder if the Water Board
knows about that?”

  He was red, and furious. Not looking at him, she flung open one door after another downstairs, lingering over the kitchen. “The electrician had made it safe in here, but you were lucky the place didn’t go up in flames. Mary Williams said you had been over this house. How was it you didn’t notice the cables?”

  Upstairs, she said, knowing that to this man anything incorrect, even so much as a mattress on a floor rather than on a bed, must forever be an affront, “Of course, you will have to take my word for it—the state of these rooms was unspeakably awful when we came, but we have only just started.”

  “Unspeakably awful now,” he said huffily, looking in at the room she and Jasper slept in, the two sleeping bags like the shed skins of snakes loose against the wall.

  “It’s relative. I think you will be surprised when you see it in a month’s time.”

  He said, quick to take his advantage, “I told you, don’t expect anything.”

  “If this house is left empty again, it will be filled to the brim with vandals and derelicts inside a week, you know that. You’re lucky to have us. It’s being put back into order, with no expense to the taxpayer.”

  He did not reply to that. In silence they went through the rooms on the top floor, now sweet-smelling, the air blowing through them. He instinctively closed the windows one after another, performing the task with a fussy, virtuous, irritated little air. Like a fucking housewife, thought the smiling Alice.

  They went downstairs. “Well,” he said, “I have to agree with you—there’s no reason why these houses should come down, that I can see. I’ll have to look into it.”

  “Unless,” said Alice, sweet and cold, “someone was going to make a profit out of it. Did you see the article in the Guardian? ‘The Scandal of Council Housing’?”

  “As it happens, I did. But it is not relevant to this case.”

  “I see.”

  They were at the door.

  She was waiting. She deserved a capitulation; and it came. The official said, unsmiling but with his whole body expressing unwilling complicity, “I’ll put the case for you tomorrow. But I am not promising. And it is not just this house, it’s the one next door. I’m going there now.”