Vacant Possession

‘He hanged himself.’

Sholto was a man of very good sense; wise and lucid, and ready for anything, except for the days when he sat on the floor, holding his head. ‘What they claim,’ he said, ‘is an ongoing beanfeast, flats, nurses, jobs, day centres. But if you want to avoid all that you’ll have no trouble at all. There aren’t enough to go around.’

‘They’re going to close this place,’ Effie said. ‘What will happen to me? Where will I go? What will happen to my bedside mat? It’s all I’ve got.’

‘You get money given you,’ Muriel said.

‘Of course, I shall have the Civil List.’ Effie cheered up. ‘I’ll see you right, everybody.’

Hunniford Ward was closed. Effie got desperate, crying frenziedly and pulling at her hair. ‘Look, we’ll all keep in touch,’ Sholto said. He wrung her hand. ‘Me and you, Muriel, the Reverend Crisp. We’ll go on trips together. We’ll have donkey rides and such. We’ll hire a little bus and go to places of interest.’

Effie blew her nose, consoled a little. The next day she came running up, her face alight; the greatest animation seen on her features since 1977, when she set fire to a cleaning lady. ‘Giuseppe is back,’ she said, ‘that was thrown off Hunniford. If you don’t like it they take you back. Giuseppe didn’t like it.’

They went to see Giuseppe after he was dried out. ‘I went down London,’ he said. His podgy face was lemon-yellow; his fingers played tunes on the bedcovers. ‘I went in a hotel. There was women in that hotel,’ he crossed himself, ‘they was tarts. I never paid those women. A man come threatened me get out of that hotel. I went down the coach station. I went down the café. I went down the Sally Army.’

‘Five more minutes,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s been poorly.’

They smiled at her. The nurses liked it when you were poorly. They were kind to you. If you were sick in bed, they knew what you were up to and what they ought to be doing.

‘I went up Camden Town,’ Giuseppe said. ‘I went down Bayswater. I went up Tottenham Court Road to see my grandmother, but she was dead. I went in the bed and breakfast. I went in the night shelter. I ask for an extra blanket but they say, no no, fat man.’ Giuseppe rubbed his side. ‘My chest hurts. I’m a tramp. I go to Clacton. It’s winter. I get a lodging and I walk by the sea.’ He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. ‘Mother of God, it’s so lonely in Clacton.’

‘Just remember your medication,’ they said to Sholto. ‘A community nurse will call and see you.’

‘Not if I see her first,’ Sholto said.

Sholto got out on a Thursday. He was all set for his sister Myra’s house. He made his way along the street, carrying his navy-blue holdall, the yellow nylon straps wound around his wrist. When Myra saw him coming she locked the door.

Sholto walked on to the corner. When he turned off Adelaide Street, a terrible sight met his eyes. The whole district had been razed. Osborne Street was down, Spring Gardens had been flattened. The Primitive Methodist Chapel was boarded up and all the gravestones had been taken away. He tramped through the meadow of blight where the bones of Primitive Methodists had once rested; the ground was strewn with glass and broken pots. He squatted down, turning over the shards. The weather was damp; his holdall was smeared with yellow clay. From where he knelt he looked up and read a sign: MOTORWAY LINK BEGINS MAY 1983.

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 200,000 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.