Vacant Possession (22 page)

Isabel smiled into his face, madly and slyly. “You never know,” she said, “who’ll be damaged most in the end.”

Muriel met Sholto. He looked haggard; his feet were damp, and his clothes were wearing out. “Still holding down your job?” he asked. She nodded. “You’re doing all right, Muriel. Still going in disguise?”

“Yes. But not for long now.”

“You don’t still hold this changeling crap?”

She said, “I’m lonely, Sholto, out here in the town. Sometimes I’d like to climb back into my head. I’d like to sit on my bed and double up, and slide right down my own throat. Do you understand?”

“I’m finished with Crisp,” Sholto said, not listening. “He’s turned criminal. And you—I don’t want to know. You’ll be taking babies out of prams at the supermarket.”

“They don’t have prams,” Muriel said. “They strap them into those buggy things, or carry them on their backs. When I look at Miss Suzanne, all the words get tangled up inside my head, all those words you showed me on that pot head. In my mother’s day, Sholto, we had a special room in our house. In that room my mother said there were things would pick the flesh off your bones. Where did it go to, that flesh? It isn’t dead. It must be somewhere.”

“You murdered that poor old bugger at the hospital.”

“It wasn’t murder. It was an execution. He didn’t do well by me, Sholto. I could have been a married wife by now. He did it all without a by-your-leave. He never gave me a bouquet. Single red roses, that’s what you give a girl.”

“Now you’re driving that Polack mad; or whatever he is.”

“I don’t drive. They go by themselves. He says there are men on the streets with poisoned umbrellas. He says there are countries where women walk round with black curtains over their heads. And that there’s a man called Castro, and they sent him exploding cigars. He says they have factories where they make diseases.” She blinked. “I never told him any of that.”

Sholto glowered at her, out of his little rat’s face. “When I met you, Muriel, I asked you if you was mad, or stupid. You said you was both. It took us in.”

“I’m all gone to nothing.” She hit her fist against her ribs, bending over as if to muffle the hollow sound. “Those ghosties have sucked the life out of me. Mother set them on. I’ve stopped expecting her. I think they’ve sucked her up too. Now there’s only the changeling left.”

“What you are is wicked,” Sholto said.

Behind her thick glasses, Muriel blinked again.

“Do you know,” said Sylvia, as she poured her muesli, “that in the past two years, according to a recent opinion poll, one in four of the population visited a canal?”

“Really?” Colin yawned. “Any particular population? It can’t be Venice, I suppose.”

“You know what I mean. In England and Wales. In fact, twenty-seven per cent. That’s more than one in four.”

“Stranger than fiction,” Colin said.

“Now of these people, seventy-one per cent went for a walk. Eight per cent went fishing. Seven per cent hired a boat.”

“That still leaves a number unaccounted for. What were they doing?”

“One per cent went swimming,” Sylvia offered.

“I wouldn’t fancy that in our canal.”

“Exactly the point,” Sylvia said. “We’re going to have a community canal clean-up.”

Colin looked at her warily over the top of the newspaper, and sank down a little in his chair. He thought that his mother had tired her out, but she seemed to be getting a second wind. He heard her speak of sponsorship and job creation and government schemes, and how the probation service would bring along strong young recidivists, and the Sea Scouts and the Brownies would pick up the litter from the banks. He ducked his head well below the holidays page. Exclusive villa parties, he read, wind-surfing, houseparties on the water’s edge. Barbados, Crete, the Algarve. Love Nest for Two by Sardinia’s Sandy Beaches. Cheap flights. Cheap flights, free escapes. Cheap flights without leaving Coketown.
“Hard Times,”
he said to himself.

“Of course they are,” Sylvia agreed. “But this stretch should have been done two years ago. It was scheduled. I’ve got to get on to the Inland Waterways Board. Of course, it’s Francis’s idea really, but he’s got a lot on at the moment. There’s this man picketing the church.”

“Good God,” Colin said. “Is he violent?”

“No, not so far, he’s just a nuisance, but he does make threatening motions with his banner. He tries to stop people going in to Francis’s services. You know when we had that Christians Against Rate-Capping meeting? He stood outside howling abuse. If it goes on Francis will have to get the police in, and that’s against his principles.”

“Yes, I see the problem.” A November morning pressed its cold grey face against the kitchen window. No wonder he often felt that someone was looking over his shoulder. “Oh, well. It’s not as bad as any of ours.”

But Sylvia did not want to talk about the family. She did not mean to be deflected. Sylvia made progress; it was only his mind that went round and round endlessly, revolving the same problems. Isabel: my God, how miserable she must be. How frustrated, how agonised inside. Had he not some responsibility there? Supposing he had left his family all those years ago, would Isabel be different now? What if? And what if?

I could do with being two people really, he thought; people who could live quite alternative lives, and meet up from time to time to compare notes. I am incapable of a decision, and always have been; I wait for circumstances to make my decisions for me, and just as I pray for resolution, so I dread it. Act, and you might as well be dead. Action is the great abortionist. It wipes out freedom. It terminates desire.

“And then there was the chromium-plating plant,” Sylvia was saying, “pumping out acids year after year. And the dye works. I can remember a time when there were weeds on the canal, but now there’s just an inch of scum on the surface and that awful smell of rotten eggs. Francis says that there’s no oxygen in it at all. The water doesn’t move, and there’s a couple of feet of poisonous mud at the bottom. The walls are collapsing in. It could be damaging our health. He says there could be literally anything at the bottom of that canal.”

Since Dr. Rudge’s visit, Mrs. Sidney had sunk into a twilit world, sleeping for twenty hours of the twenty-four, surfacing only occasionally to ask for the Lord Chamberlain. It was much more peaceful, but unfortunately—and perhaps because of her new sedatives—she had become doubly incontinent. Florence had rung the hospital, but they said that, with Christmas coming up, and the long-range weather forecast being what it was, they could hardly think of taking her in before next May. Since then, disaster had struck.

It had made the national news:
FIRE HAS BROKEN OUT AT A GERI ATRIC HOSPITAL IN THE MIDLANDS
,
TRAPPING STAFF AND PATIENTS IN A FIRST-FLOOR WARD. FIREMEN WHO EVACUATED VICTIMS FROM THE FORMER WORKHOUSE SAID THAT ESCAPE ROUTES WERE GROSSLY INADEQUATE
.
A PUBLIC INQUIRY HAS BEEN CALLED FOR
.

When Florence heard, she went upstairs to her mother’s room. She stood by the bed with her arms folded, watching the withered eyelids flutter in drugged sleep. “That could have been you,” she whispered.

Dr. Rudge came by. “Lucky escape,” he said.

“If you say so, Doctor.”

“Oh, come come, Miss Sidney. You want your mother with you for some years yet.” As he coiled his stethoscope into his bag, Dr. Rudge looked sharply at her expression. He was a bald, tubby man, who prided himself on being humane; but really, there were no geriatric beds, and that was that.

Florence had run downstairs after him and followed him into the street. “I can’t go on,” she wailed. “Dr. Rudge, listen to me.”

Dr. Rudge stopped in surprise, bouncing his car keys on his palm. “But you’ve got the district nurse, Miss Sidney. Be thankful for small mercies.”

“But I can’t manage! The smell! And the way she wakes up and thinks she’s at Marlborough House! It frightens me!”

“You have domestic help, I understand.”

“She keeps abusing her! She says she’s the daughter of the woman who used to live next door. She accuses her of holding seances. It’s horrible. It’s worse than May of Teck. She’s totally and completely mad.”

“Really, pull yourself together,” said Dr. Rudge. “You know we’re promised a geriatric unit for 1990. Go in, Miss Sidney, it’s starting to rain. And I do have other calls to make.”

“But I can’t go on.” Florence’s voice rose into the damp afternoon. “Don’t you understand? We can’t take any more, any of us.” Two women, coming back from the Parade, rested their shopping baskets on a low wall and watched attentively. The Deakins, elderly people from down the road, were peeping out from their porch. Dr. Rudge cursed under his breath, and felt in his overcoat pockets for his prescription pad. He scribbled on it and ripped the page off.

“Try this to calm you down, Miss Sidney.” He thrust the prescription at her. Florence crumpled it in her fist and threw it after him. It struck him smartly on the neck as he jumped into his Volvo. He slammed the door and drove away.

“Old Aunt Flo,” said Suzanne now, coming into the kitchen. “Making a scene like that in the street. All the neighbours will be talking about it.”

“We’re beyond caring what the neighbours say,” Sylvia said. “We have to be.”

Suzanne manoeuvred herself into a chair. “I’ve come to tell you. I’m moving out when the baby’s born.”

Sylvia regarded her sadly. “I can’t stop you. Where are you planning to go?”

“I’ve got this friend, Edwina. She’s got this flat.”

“Unusual name,” Colin said.

“She’ll let me stay with her till Jim sorts himself out.”

“Jim will never be sorted out. You know that, Suzanne.”

“Don’t tell me what I know. Who are you to advise anybody?”

“How will Edwina like having a baby around?” Sylvia said. “She’ll soon get tired of it.”

“I’ve got other friends. I can move on.”

“You’re not a bloody gypsy. Babies can’t do with that sort of life. They have to be settled. They need a routine. They need to be kept warm.”

“Don’t think I’m staying here.” Suzanne’s voice quivered, on the edge of hysteria. “You’ve all let me down. This house is horrible. Nothing works. There’s no hot water. The lightbulb’s gone in my room and I daren’t stand on a chair. It’s like the Black Hole of Calcutta. If I stand on a chair I’ll go dizzy and I’ll fall off and have a miscarriage and then Jim will never marry me.”

“I think you’re getting things out of proportion,” Sylvia said, with a restraint that Colin could only commend. “You ought to calm down. Ask Aunt Florence to give you one of your grandmother’s pills.”

“I can’t have pills,” Suzanne said, blubbering. Colin handed her his handkerchief. “I’ll give birth to a monster. I suppose I will anyway. What can you expect, coming from a family like this?”

Colin and Sylvia exchanged a glance, each beaten and weary face eyeing the other. Colin understood that cleaning up the canal was a diversion for his wife, just as pining for the lost girl who was now Isabel Ryan was a diversion for him. They were like a pair of felons roped together, singing to pass the time on their trip to Tyburn. Suzanne blew her nose into his handkerchief and gave it back to him. Her chin drooped. She looked eleven months gone.

Christmas was celebrated quietly at Buckingham Avenue. In the morning, Francis and Hermione called round between services to have a glass of sherry. Their general air was far from festive. Austin had turned down a place on the Youth Training Scheme, saying that he was self-employed as a satanist, and had failed that week to keep an appointment with his probation officer.

“Of course, young people must rebel,” Francis said. “But why Satanism? Why has this spirit of vicious irrationality got abroad? Tell me that, Colin.”

Sylvia went to and fro, carrying a wine box. She seemed dazed. A smell of burning carrots came from the kitchen. She had aged, Colin thought: deep lines from nose to chin.

“I asked you much the same,” he said to Francis. “I asked you why I found teeth in my front garden. Something’s happening round here. Did you see that advert in
The Times
for the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology?”

“I don’t read
The Times
, I’m afraid.”

“I read it in the staff room. It said you have to have an interest in the way some individuals interacted with the environment other than by normal channels. I’m sure somebody’s interacting in this house.”

“It’s true,” Sylvia said. “We keep getting these electrical faults, but we’ve had the wiring checked. The milk keeps turning sour. Things go missing.”

“I’m disappointed in you,” the vicar said.

“Have you thought of trying Unigate?” Hermione put in. “You can get low-fat yoghurt as well.”

“We read a book about it,” Sylvia said. “We thought it might be Suzanne. Her amassed discontent finding expression.”

“I’m surprised you don’t want an exorcism.”

“That might not be a bad idea.”

“What about this woman Blank? If objects are missing, you probably need look no further. Have you checked her credentials?”

“She doesn’t have credentials,” Sylvia said sulkily. “She’s a cleaning woman.”

“I think it’s our unhappiness that does it,” Colin said. “It’s the accumulated misery, bouncing off the walls.”

“Are you unhappy, Colin?” the vicar asked. “I didn’t know.”

Florence arrived just as Francis and his wife were leaving; reporting in as usual for Christmas dinner. “I’ve given her double pills,” she said. “It should keep her quiet for an hour or two.”

“You have to watch dosages, with the elderly,” Francis warned. Florence scowled at him.

“I didn’t like your sermon. People want the ox and the ass, not the National Coal Board. I agree with that man who stands outside with the placard.”

Suzanne, swaying around in the kitchen, upset a pan of sprouts and scalded her feet. Alistair lay on his bed, the door locked and his eyes closed, breathing raggedly with the breathing of the room. Karen locked herself into the bathroom and squeezed her spots till her face flared with scarlet patches. Claire put on her Brownie uniform. “Enjoy your day,” Sylvia said at the door. “Christmas is no holiday for me,” the vicar replied.

The Ryans had begun the day late. Jim had long ago given up taking Isabel to see his family, and this year there was no need to go to the hospital. Christmas dinner was a silent affair. Jim watched Isabel’s face, waiting for the wine to enter her bloodstream and make her voluble. First, she would fling accusations at him; second, she would cry into the bread sauce. After a while she would talk about concentration camps. Later still she would collapse. He would drag her onto the sofa and throw a rug over her, and go for a walk round the park.

At Mr. K.’s house, Mrs. Wilmot and Miss Anaemia sat with their landlord at the kitchen table. Although it was now some time since Mr. K. had been beaten up by the woman in the street, he still bore traces of his injuries; patches of greenish discoloration showed on his face where his bruises were fading. As for the dismay, fright, and humiliation, it might be years before he recovered from those.

“That was no woman,” he said, for the third time that morning. Gloomily he adjusted the yellow paper hat that Miss Anaemia had insisted that he wear. “That was a man in disguise.”

“A Transylvanian,” said Miss Anaemia. “Leave it out, Mr. K. Your dinner’s getting cold.”

They had decided to incorporate the traditional Christmas trimmings—crackers, a game of pass the parcel—with the kind of food each of them liked best. “After all,” Miss Anaemia said, “we’re three loners, we’ve only ourselves to please.” Pickled cucumbers were put on the table, and dumplings with caraway seeds, and All-Bran; tinned ravioli, and chocolate digestive biscuits. Wheezing as he moved across the room, Mr. Kowalski produced from the cool pantry some bottled beer. He squeezed out a few tears, thinking of carp on Christmas Eve, of his little sister with new hair ribbons, of candles burning in the windows to light them home from midnight Mass. He did not know whether it was his own past he was grieving for, or other people’s; the images flickered and ticked behind his retina like shots from silent films. Miss Anaemia thought of growing up in Burton-on-Trent. Poor Mrs. Wilmot thought of nothing at all, for she had no past to remember; but she shook with silent mirth when she read the mottoes in the crackers. After dinner had been cleared away, the presents were exchanged. Mrs. Wilmot and Mr. K. each gave the other mufflers and miniature bottles of whisky; they both gave bath salts to Miss Anaemia. They knew that she would never take a bath, because the rusty trickle of warm water that ran from the antiquated pipes would not bathe a flea; but she agreed with them about the air of ease and luxury the bottles would lend to her dressing table. Then the cards were taken out, and they played Happy Families, and ate chocolates. Mr. Kowalski grew excitable, and insisted on getting them to their feet for a lively traditional dance that involved clapping rhythmically and standing on one leg. Mrs. Wilmot fell over a good deal. Mr. K. threw an extra scuttle of coal on the kitchen range, and soon they were enveloped in a pleasant warm fug, doors tightly shut against the elements, the windows sealed. Mr. K. seized his young lodger’s hand. The bottled beer had gone to his head. He put his hands around her waist and whirled her off her feet, rumbling out the refrain in his rib-heaving bass and stamping his left foot. “My dear young thing,” he said, breaking off his chorus, “won’t you join me in holy matrimony?”

“Then I’d never get my giro back,” Miss Anaemia said. “You’d have to keep me. ‘He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune,’ or words to that effect.”

“No need for children,” Mr. K. said. “Rubber goods can be obtained.”

But Miss Anaemia shook her head. Two spots of scarlet flamed on her cheeks. The kettle sang merrily on the range. Mr. K. roared and stomped, and held his arms in a tree shape above his head. Poor Mrs. Wilmot staggered exhausted to the kitchen table. She hugged her belly, and swayed, and gave a mute bellow of laughter; she licked her pale lips, and the steam from the kettle misted up her glasses.

The smell of the roasting turkey woke Alistair from his lassitude. He got up, groaning, and ventured out onto the landing. “There’s sumfin growing on my wall,” he said. “Fungus or sumfin.” Next door Mrs. Sidney stirred in her sleep, and mumbled; she had caught the note of the festivities, and thought she was at Balmoral.

Evening came. Lizzie Blank had arranged to take Sholto and Emmanuel to Gino’s Club for the Christmas Nite Special. I want to be a special fantasia, she thought, with gold paint on my nails and a tinsel crown; she was buggered if she was going to do that in a WC. Miss Anaemia and Mr. K. were sleeping off the afternoon’s excitement; what did it matter if the click-click of her stilettos on the stairs entered their dreams? It was 8:30
P.M
.; she gave her lipstick a final coat of gloss, patted her curls, and departed.

But as she reached the foot of the stairs, the kitchen door opened; there stood Mr. K. in his vest and braces. He rubbed his eyes, itching from the smoke of the kitchen; there was a poker in his fist. His jaw dropped. “In my own house,” he cried. She sprang for the door.

At the Ryans’ house, Isabel was asleep on the sofa. Her book lay face-down on the carpet; not the book she was reading, but the book she was writing, her loose-leaf collection of scruffy typed sheets. Jim didn’t believe in her book. He didn’t believe that she would ever finish it, or that anyone would care to publish it if she did. But she was determined, in her drunken way. She was guilty, and she must have something to be guilty of; she must be properly accused. Her body heaved in sleep, her skin grew damp, her face emptied of pleasure or hope. Her many pulses beat.

Mr. Kowalski fell back against the door frame, gagging in panic. The fire iron trembled, clutched against his chest. Ole King Cole, Muriel sang on the street. She could feel the faculties clattering inside her skull, the lines clashing and meshing like railway sidings; she could feel the words twisting together, the separate letters intertwining, the bs with the ps with the ks, all lashing and plaiting their tails.
CALCULATION
was twisting in her cranium,
HUMAN NATURE
battered at the bone, at the fissures and the sagittal suture, at the tentorium, at the parietal arch. Ole King Cole, with his frantic black soul; and he called for his fiddlers,
ME
.

New Year.

Miss Anaemia went down to see the DHSS. “I’m pregnant,” she said. “Rehouse me.”

“We would require confirmation of that.”

“I’ll confirm it. I’m telling you, aren’t I?”

“Medical confirmation.”

“Oh, I see. What if I had an elderly dependant?”

“Are you saying you have an elderly dependant?”

“What if, I’m saying.”

“And you are pregnant as well?”

“Look, you had a tip-off, didn’t you? You came and looked at my sheets. You said I was going with a giant. If I’ve got a man I could be pregnant. What do you have a man for?”

The woman put her pencil down. “According to our Rotherham office, you turned up there to claim benefit, giving a false address and stating that your name was Lady Margaret Hall. You do realise that we could prosecute you for attempted fraud?”

“Supposing I brought you a baby?” Miss Anaemia said. “Would you pay out then?”

Muriel leaned over Mrs. Sidney. “Yellow ones?” she enquired. She shook the bottle and held it tantalisingly out of reach. Mrs. Sidney croaked faintly. Her features were drawn already, corpse-like. Muriel unscrewed the bottle and dropped the pills into her palm. “Open wide,” she said. Mrs. Sidney’s jaw quivered, and she parted her lips. Muriel fed her the pills one by one, slipping some in from the other bottles when she felt like it. It took a long time. She held Mrs. Sidney’s jaw shut to make sure she swallowed. She had seen it done at Fulmers Moor.

Sylvia was out at a meeting of the Canal Clean-up Cooperative. Florence was out at work. Lizzie Blank was in sole charge; that was how they trusted her. She left the old lady to it and went next door to clean the bathroom. She put her feet up for an hour in Sylvia’s living room and read magazines, and ate the caramel toffees she had brought with her. When she went next door to check on Mrs. Sidney the old lady was still breathing, so she pulled a pillow from beneath her head and held it over her face until she was confident that she had expired.

It did not escape her, going downstairs, that by disposing of Mrs. Sidney she might be helping the family rather than hindering them. The break-up of their family life, the increasing dereliction of the family home, was happening around her, but perhaps not at her behest; it was not she who had arranged for Jim Ryan to impregnate Suzanne. Life just arranges itself, usually for the worst, and chance is not blind at all; it has as many eyes as a fly on the wall.

Even if the death did not incommode them in the long term, she could not resist it. She wanted to see their faces. She needed to see how they displayed strong emotion, so that she could copy them, and have something to feed on.

She had reset her features, and was making herself a cup of coffee, when Suzanne came to join her. “Want one?” Lizzie said. “How are things?”

“I’m staying till it’s born,” Suzanne said. “When it’s born I’m getting out.”

“And will you be coming to my place?” Her tone was bright; but it worried her. She could see snags. If Suzanne came to stay at Mr. K.’s house, Poor Mrs. Wilmot would have to move out. She could not trust Crisp with her personal effects; he might sell them, and give the money to the poor. “Why not stay at home?” she said coaxingly. “Just for the first week or two. Give us all a chance to get to know the baby.”

“No, I’m going to Edwina’s. Or I might go to Sean’s. Or I might go back to Manchester to that squat I told you about, only they’ve had a lot of trouble with the police coming round and they might have to move out. I don’t know where I’ll be. Can I use your address?”

“All right.”

“Then if I’m moving around, I can use it for getting my giro. And I can give it to Jim, because there isn’t a phone at the squat, and when he wants to get in touch he can write to me there and you’ll save it for me, okay?” Her eyes flickered away. “He will want to get in touch, won’t he? Don’t you think so? He’ll want to see the baby, won’t he?”