Vacant Possession

Lizzie Blank, known otherwise as Muriel Axon, turned her key in the lock; and entered the dismal passageway of Mukerjee’s All-Asia Emporium.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_6a2a4859-b232-5749-abbf-0913fa2de101)

The Mukerjees’ stock in trade blocked most of the narrow passage: tinned cream of tomato soup in cartons of three dozen, boxes of precooked rice and deodorant sprays, toothpicks, lavender furniture polish, and fancy bun cases. Muriel walked sideways between the boxes, holding her shopping bag across her chest, and went upstairs in the dark. She found she had forgotten the password again, so she booted the door until the sentiment ‘Christ is risen’ came feebly from within.

The room was full of shadows and swirling dust, the sun kept out by a yellowing paper blind. Muriel walked to the window and released it; it shot up and out of her hand with a soft flurry like the exit of a family of rats. She looked out over the roofs of the outdoor privies and the coal sheds.

‘Stir your stumps,’ she advised the man on the bed.

It was Emmanuel Crisp, her friend, her mentor, her old mucker from the long-stay hospital; it was Emmanuel Crisp, who liked to pretend he was a vicar, and who got put away for it. He’d been a troublesome sort of lunatic, always needing big injections; whereas she, whose antecedents were much worse, had given no bother at all; always neat, clean and biddable, at least after the first few years.

Crisp flapped a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. ‘Hello there, Muriel. I thought it was you, kicking.’

‘I’m not Muriel. I’m Lizzie Blank.’

‘But you are Muriel really, aren’t you?’

‘Sometimes. But today I’m Lizzie Blank, because I’ve got my wig on, haven’t I, and my make-up?’

Crisp studied her. ‘It’s wonderful how you get transmogrified.’

‘I’ve got my job to do,’ she said grimly.

Emmanuel lay back on the bed. He was an exhausted man, with his greenish pallor and his high-pitched giggle. It was the day trip to York that had tired him. It had been their best get-together with old friends since they’d all been turfed out of Fulmers Moor Hospital, and left to fend for themselves.

‘Sholto enjoyed it,’ Muriel said. ‘He didn’t have a fit. It was only the excitement that made him sick.’

Crisp’s jaws worked around a yawn. He slid his long frame into a sitting position. ‘Do you have my press cuttings?’

Muriel took the newspapers out of her bag and tossed them onto the table. ‘It’s hot in here.’ She pulled off her wig and dropped it by the Daily Telegraph; then, on second thoughts, arranged it on its stand, on the blank-faced head of white polystyrene that she kept on top of Crisp’s chest of drawers. She didn’t live here; she had a room of her own. But everything was arranged for her convenience.

‘Well?’ she asked Crisp.

Emmanuel looked up, gratified, ‘AN ACT OF GOD,’ he read. Muriel said, ‘Do you want me to go for some fish and chips?’

‘I couldn’t eat. I’m too excited.’

‘Suit yourself. I’ve had my lunch with my employers. They’re not too pleased about the practice I had in their kitchen.’

‘They’ll get it on their insurance,’ Crisp said, absorbed. ‘Heretics have no insurance.’ He smiled as he read. Muriel yawned, and scratched her itching scalp.

‘I’m going to change,’ she said. ‘Don’t watch me, Crisp.’

She took off her leopard-skin jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes with a groan, and delved about under the bed for the flat open sandals that Muriel wore. She hauled up her skirt and released her black stockings from their suspenders. From under his eyelids Crisp watched her, rubbing with her fingertips at the indentations the suspenders had left in her blue-white flesh. Her blouse went over her head and onto the floor, and with a grunt she undid the fastening of her painful padded brassiere. Her own body, free from Lizzie’s underpinnings, seemed flat and meagre. ‘Give me a towel,’ she said to Crisp. He watched her as she scrubbed off Lizzie’s mouth, erased her lurid eyelids. After five minutes Muriel was back; her almost colourless eyes, her bland inexpressive features, her short dark hair now beginning to grey.

‘Are you getting a multiple personality?’ Crisp asked her.

She gave him a look. ‘I know who I am,’ she said.

She put on Muriel’s skirt, and a limp cheesecloth blouse, embroidered on the bodice with blue flowers. She had a faraway look, Crisp thought; she was planning what she would do on the street. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘We could pass the afternoon in a study of the Psalms.’

‘Stuff that,’ Muriel said. ‘Where’s my collecting box?’

‘Bodily resurrection is a fact.’

‘I never said different. Don’t go picking quarrels.’

‘Do you know, it’s not the first fire at York Minster. Jonathan Martin, 1829, described as a lunatic. Emmanuel Crisp, 1984, right hand of the Lord.’

‘I hear you, talking like a nutter. Trying to get yourself readmitted.’

‘What if I am? We all pretend to be something we’re not. Especially you, Muriel.’ She was heading for the door. ‘Don’t leave me on my own. I feel jittery.’

‘Well, what is it you want to do then?’

‘Stay with me a bit. You can talk to me if you like.’

‘What about?’

‘About your life. I could give you absolution, Muriel.’

She hesitated, came back into the room. ‘What’s that?’

‘Forgiveness for your sins.’

‘What’s forgiving? It doesn’t change anything. Anyway, I don’t do sins.’

‘Your crimes, then. It’s a nice point.’

‘But I don’t like remembering, Crisp. It upsets me, thinking about my mother and all that. I’d like to oblige you. But it gives me a pain behind my eyes.’

‘Do you good to have a pain. You’re a malicious old bat.’

‘What about you? Burning down churches?’

‘I do it for God.’

‘I do it for me. I do it for fun. I do what I like.’

But already the unwelcome process had begun. Her recall had nothing dim about it. Ten years ago, she had been a woman with a mother and a child. She’d had a lifetime of Mother, but the baby she’d only had for a few days. She had disposed of both of them: 1975. Only hours after the disposal, her life had changed completely; chance had shackled her in the long chain of events that brought her to where she was now. And they say crime doesn’t pay! She was better off now than she’d ever been; it was only one of the things people said to comfort themselves. Before that dark February afternoon, with the social worker screaming in an upstairs room, she’d been nothing but a girl at home; a girl at home with her mother at 2, Buckingham Avenue, for thirty-four years.

Mother was not an easy woman. She was a landlord, a gaoler. She did a manoeuvre she called ‘keeping ourselves to ourselves’. It involved close planning, bad manners; cowering in the back room if anyone came knocking at the door. It was not age that did this to Mother; it had always been her policy. When Muriel went to school, Mother waited for her by the gate. She took her by the neck and by the arm and hauled her home.

This was Muriel’s life: days, whole weeks together, when Mother didn’t let her out of the house in the mornings. She locked her in the bedroom, or hid her shoes. At St David’s School on Arlington Road, she was nothing but an object of remark. None of the remarks were flattering. She rocked on her chair, played with her fingers. She would not write, could not, had never learned, forgotten how. At the sound of a bell the children rushed out of the room and fought each other in an asphalt circus behind bars. She stood and watched the others, rubbing her arm above the elbow where Mother’s fingers left her permanently bruised. She licked some rust from the railings; there was iron on her tongue, salt, ice. She laid about her with her fists. Soon this part of life was over; Mother kept her at home.

The streets, Mother said, were dangerous for a growing girl. There were attacks, impregnations, thefts. She could make your flesh crawl with her tales. By and by a man came to the house, making enquiries. His name was Mr Hutchinson, and he was called an attendance officer. Mother dodged him for a month; finally she let him in. ‘Are you Mrs Evelyn Axon?’ he asked. He saw Muriel, sitting on a stool in the kitchen. He called her my dear. Mother sneered. Oh dear, my dear, she said, isn’t it a gorgeous little cretin, a muttonhead, an oaf, and is it precisely what you want, sir, for your select conservatoire? Mr Hutchinson had a cardboard file which he stored under his arm. He took a step backwards, away from Mother, holding the file across the breast of his fawn overcoat. It brought him up against the door of the lean-to; confused, he turned and fumbled for the handle, and found himself treading in the mulch of old cardboard and newspaper that was always underfoot in winter, breathing in the dank lean-to air. Cobwebs trailed across his glasses. From her stool, Muriel laughed out loud.

After Mr Hutchinson had been retrieved from the lean-to and set on his way out of the front door, Mother had taken her aside and said: stupidity is the better part of valour. Doltishness is the best defence. After that, there had been similar visitors; meeting similar fates, if they got in at all. The Welfare, Mother called them. There had been a time when, just to keep them happy, Mother had let her go in a bus once a week to the handicapped class. She sat with other people in a room, four of them round each table. She cut out shapes in felt and sewed them with great tough stitches onto other felt. She got thin strips of cane and bent them up into baskets; and while she did this she spoke to no one, keeping her lips closed and preserving her eyes behind the thick glasses that the Welfare had got for her. Presently the materials were taken away, and they were given tea and biscuits.