The Good Terrorist

There was a silence. Alice knew that, paying a very low rent, there would be plenty of money. If people had any sense of how to use it, that is. She and Jasper, living with her mother and paying nothing, had about eighty pounds a week between them, on Social Security. But none of it was saved, because Jasper spent all his, and most of hers too, always coming to demand it. ‘For the Party,’ he said – or whatever Cause they were currently aligned with. But she knew that a lot of it went on what she described to herself, primly, as ‘his emotional life’.

She knew, too, that in communities like this, there were payers and the other kind, and there was nothing to be done about it. She knew that Pat would pay; that Pat would make Bert pay – as long as she was here. The two girls would not part with a penny. As for Jim – well, let’s wait and see.

She said, ‘There’s something we can do now, and that is, get the lavatories unblocked.’

Roberta laughed. Her laugh was orchestrated; meant to be noticed.

Faye said, ‘They are filled with concrete.’

‘So they were in one of the other houses I knew. It isn’t difficult. But we need tools.’

‘You mean tonight?’ asked Pat. She sounded interested, reluctantly admiring.

‘Why not? We’ve got to start,’ said Alice, fierce. In her voice sounded all the intensity of her need. They heard it, recognized it, gave way. ‘It’s not going to be nearly as difficult as you think now. I’ve looked at the lavatories. If the cisterns had been filled with concrete, it would be different, they’d have cracked, probably, but it isn’t difficult to get it out of the bowls.’

‘The workmen concreted over the tap from the main,’ said Bert.

‘Illegal,’ said Alice bitterly. ‘If the Water Board knew. Are there any tools?’

‘No,’ said Bert.

‘You said you have a friend near here? Has he got tools?’

‘She. Felicity. Her boyfriend has. Power tools. Everything. It’s his job.’

‘Then we could pay him. He could get the electricity right, too.’

‘With what do you pay ‘im,’ said Faye, singing it. ‘With what do we pay ‘im, dear Alice, with what?’

‘I’ll go and get the fifty pounds,’ said Alice. ‘You go and see your friend.’ She was at the door. ‘Tell him, plumbing and electricity. Plumbing first. If he’s got a big chisel and a heavy hammer we can start on this lavatory here in the hall. We really need a kango hammer. I’ll be back,’ she cried, and heard Jasper’s ‘Bring in something to eat, I’m starving.’

On the wings of accomplishment Alice flew to the Underground, and on the train she thought of the house, imagining it clean and ordered. She ran up the avenue to Theresa. Only when she heard Anthony’s voice did she remember Theresa would be late.

‘Alice,’ she said into the machine. ‘It’s Alice.’

‘Come in, Alice.’

Anthony’s full, measured, sexy voice reminded her of the enemies that she confronted, and she arrived outside their door wearing, as she knew, her look.

‘Well, Alice, come in,’ said Anthony, heartily but falsely, for it was Theresa who was her friend.

She went in, knowing she was unwelcome. Anthony had on a dressing-gown, and there was a book in his hand. An evening off was what he was looking forward to, she thought. Well, he can spare me ten minutes of it.

‘Sit down, do. A drink?’

‘No, Anthony, I never drink,’ she said, and went straight on, ‘Theresa said this morning I could have fifty pounds.’

‘She’s not here. She’s got one of her conferences.’

‘I thought, you could give it to me. I need it.’ This was fierce and deadly, an accusation, and the man looked carefully at the young woman, who stood there in the middle of his sitting-room, dressed in the clothes he thought of as military, swollen with tears and with hostility.

‘I haven’t got fifty pounds,’ he said.

A lie, Alice recognized, and she was staring at him with such hate that he murmured, ‘My dear Alice, do sit down, do. I’m going to have a drink if you won’t.’ He was trying to make it humorous, but she saw through it. She watched, standing, while the big dark bulky man turned from her, and poured himself whisky from a decanter. All her life, it seemed to her, she had had moments when she thought that he, and her friend, Theresa, were naked at nights in bed together, and she felt sick.

She knew from her mother that the sex life of these two was vivid, varied and tempestuous, in spite of Anthony’s heavy humorous urbanities, Theresa’s murmuring, smiling endearments. Dear Alice, darling Alice, but at night…She felt sick.

And she thought, as she had done when she was little, And they are so old! Watching the man’s broad back, grey thick silk, his smooth head, dark as oil, small for that body, she thought, they have been sexing all night and every night for all those years.

He turned to her in a swift movement, glass in his hand, having thought what he should do, and said, ‘I’ll ring Theresa. If she’s not actually in conference…’ And he went swift and deadly to the telephone.

Alice looked around the big expensive room. She thought: I’ll take one of those little netsukes, and run out, they’ll think it was the Spanish woman. But just then he came back and said, ‘They say they’ve called it a day. She’s on her way home. Well, I’ll get some supper on then. Theresa’s too tired to cook at conference times. Excuse me.’ Glad to be able to turn his back, she thought, and as he disappeared into the kitchen, the door opened. It was Theresa. For a moment Alice did not recognize her, thought it was some tired middle-aged woman, and then thought, But she looks so worn out.

Theresa stood heavily, her face in dragging lines, and she wore dark glasses, which left her eyes blinking and anxious when she took them off.

‘Oh Alice,’ she said, and walked fast to the chair near the drinks and collapsed. She fumbled as she poured herself a drink, and sat nursing the glass on her bosom, breathing slowly. Eyes shut. ‘Just a minute, Alice, just a minute, Alice dear,’ and as Anthony came in, moving his large bulk quickly to kiss her, she lifted her cheek to his lips, eyes shut, and said, ‘Thank God we closed early. Thank God, one more evening till eleven, and I’d be done for.’

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and pressed down. She smiled, with small pouting kissing movements, eyes tightclosed, and he went back to the kitchen, saying: ‘I’ve done some soup and a salad.’

‘Oh darling Anthony,’ said Theresa, ‘thank you – soup – it’s just what I need.’

What Alice felt then was a slicing cold pain – jealousy; but she did not know it was that, and she said, to be rid of the scene, rid of them, ‘You said I could have fifty pounds. Can I have it, Theresa?’

‘I expect so, darling,’ said Theresa vaguely. And in a moment she had sat up, had opened her smart bag, and was peering inside it. ‘Fifty,’ she said, ‘fifty, well, have I got it? Yes, just…’ And she fished out five ten-pound notes and handed them to Alice.

‘Thanks.’ Alice wanted to fly off with them, but felt graceless; she was full of affection for Theresa, who looked so tired and done, who had always been so good to her. ‘You are my favourite and my best, and my very best auntie,’ she said, with an awkward smile, as she had, when she was little, and they played this game.

Theresa’s eyes were open and she looked straight into Alice’s. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘Alice, my dear…’ She sighed. Sat up. Stroked her deep-red skirt. Put up a white little hand to smooth her soft dark hair. Dyed, of course. ‘Your poor mother,’ said Theresa. ‘She rang me this morning. She was so upset, Alice.’

‘She was upset,’ said Alice at once. ‘She was.’

Theresa sighed. ‘Alice, why do you stick with him, with Jasper, why – no, wait, don’t run off. You’re so pretty and nice, my love – ‘ here she seemed to offer that kind face of hers to Alice, as if in a kiss. ‘You are such a good girl, Alice, why can’t you choose yourself someone – you should have a real relationship with someone,’ she ended awkwardly, because of Alice’s coldly contemptuous face.

‘I love Jasper,’ she said. ‘I love him. Why don’t you understand? I don’t care – about what you care about. Love isn’t just sex. That’s what you think, I know…’

But the years of affection, of love, dragged at her tongue, and she felt tears rushing down her face. ‘Oh Theresa,’ she cried, ‘thank you. Thank you. I’ll come in to see you soon. I’ll come. I must go, they are waiting…’ And she ran to the door, sobbing violently, and out of the door, letting it crash. Down the stairs she pounded, tears flying off her face, into the street, and there she remembered the notes in her hand, in danger of being blown away or snatched. She put them carefully into the pocket of her jacket, and walked fast and safely to the Underground.

Meanwhile, back in the beautiful flat, they were discussing Alice. Anthony kept up a humorous quizzical look, until Theresa responded with, ‘What is it, my love?’

‘Some girl,’ he said, the dislike he felt for Alice sounding in his voice.

‘Yes, yes, I know…’ she said irritably – her exhaustion was beginning to tell.

‘A girl – how old is she now?’

She shrugged, not wanting to be bothered with it, but interested, all the same. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘One keeps forgetting.’

‘Nearly forty?’ insisted Anthony.

‘Oh no, she can’t be!’

A pause, while the steam from the plate of soup he had brought her, and had set on the little table beside her, ascended between them. Through the steam, they looked at each other.

‘Thirty-five, no thirty-six,’ she said flatly at last.

‘Arrested development,’ said Anthony firmly, insisting on his right to dislike Alice.

‘Oh yes, I expect so, but darling Alice, well, she’s a sweet girl – a sweet thing, really.’

Chapter 3

In Alice’s little street the houses were full of lights and people, the kerbs crammed with cars of the returned from work; and her house loomed at the end, dark, powerful, silent, mysterious, defined by the lights and the din of the main road beyond. As she arrived at the gate, she saw three figures about to go into the dark entrance. Jasper, Bert. And the third? – Alice ran up, and Jasper and Bert turned sharply to face possible danger, saw her, and said to the boy they had with them, ‘Philip, it is all right, this is Alice. Comrade Alice, you know.’ They were in the hall, and Alice saw this was not a boy, but a slight, pale young man, with great blue eyes between sheaves of glistening pale hair that seemed to reflect all the dim light from the hurricane lamp. Her first reaction was, But he’s ill, he’s not strong enough! For she had understood this was her saviour, the restorer of the house.

Philip said, facing her, with a stubbornness she recognized as the result of effort, a push against odds, ‘But I’ve got to charge for it. I can’t do it for nothing.’

‘Fifty pounds,’ said Alice, and saw a slight involuntary movement towards her from Jasper, which told her that he would have it off her, if she wasn’t careful.

Philip said, in the same soft, stubborn voice, ‘I want to see the job first. I have to cost it.’

She knew that this one had often been cheated out of what was due to him. Looking as he did, a brave little orphan, he invited it! She said, maternally and proudly, ‘We’re not asking for favours. This is a job.’

‘For fifty pounds,’ said Bert, with jocular brutality, ‘you can just about expect to get a mousehole blocked up. These days.’ And she saw his red lips gleam in the black thickets of his face. Jasper sniggered.

This line-up of the two men against her – for it was momentarily that – pleased her. She had even been thinking as she raced home that if Bert turned out to be one of the men that Jasper attached himself to, as had happened before, like a younger brother, showing a hungry need that made her heart ache for him, then he wouldn’t be off on his adventures. These always dismayed her, not out of jealousy – she insisted fiercely to herself, and sometimes to others – but because she was afraid that one day there might be a bad end to them. Once or twice men encountered by Jasper during these excursions into a world that he might tell her about, his grip tightening around her wrist as he bent to stare into her face looking for signs of weakness, had arrived at this squat or that, to be met by her friendly, sisterly helpfulness.

‘Jasper? He’ll be back this evening. Do you want to wait for him?’ But they went off again. But when there was a man around, like Bert, to whom he could attach himself, then he did not go off cruising. A word she herself used casually. ‘Were you cruising last night, Jasper? Do be careful, you know it’s bad enough with Old Bill on our backs for political reasons.’ This was the hold she had over him; the check she could use. He would reply in a proud, comradely voice, ‘You are quite right, Alice. But I know my way around.’ And he might give her one of his sudden, real smiles, rare enough, that acknowledged they were allies in a desperate war.

Now she smiled briefly at Jasper and Bert, and turned her attention to Philip. ‘The most important thing,’ she said, ‘is the lavatories. I’ll show you.’

She took him to the downstairs lavatory, holding the lamp high as they stood in the doorway. Since the day the Council workmen had poured concrete into the lavatory bowl, the little room had been deserted. It was dusty, but normal.

‘Bastards,’ she burst out, tears in her voice.

He stood there, undecided; and she saw it was up to her.

‘We need a kango hammer,’ she said. ‘Have you got one?’ She realized he hardly knew what it was. ‘You know, like the workmen use to break up concrete on the roads, but smaller.’

He said, ‘I think I know someone who’d have one.’

‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘Can you get it tonight?’

This was the moment, she knew, when he might simply go off, desert her, feeling – as she was doing – the weight of that vandalized house; but she knew, too, that as soon as he got started…She said quickly, ‘I’ve done this before. I know. It’s not as bad as it looks.’ And, as he stood there, his resentful, reluctant pose telling her that he again felt put upon, she pressed, ‘I’ll see you won’t lose by it. I know you are afraid of that. I promise.’ They were close together in the doorway of the tiny room. He stared at her from the few inches’ distance of their sudden intimacy, saw this peremptory but reassuring face as that of a bossy but kindly elder sister, and suddenly smiled, a sweet candid smile, and said, ‘I’ve got to go home, ring up my friend, see if he’s at home, see if he’s got a – a kango, borrow Felicity’s car…’ He was teasing her with the enormity of it all.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Please.’

He nodded, and in a moment had slipped out of the front door, and was gone. When she went into the sitting-room where Jasper and Bert were, waiting – as they showed by how they sat, passive and trusting – for her to accomplish miracles, she said with confidence, ‘He’s gone to get some tools. He’ll be back.’

She knew he would; and within the hour he was, with a bag of tools, the kango, battery, lights, everything.

The concrete in the bowl, years old, was shrinking from the sides and was soon broken up. Soon, scratched and discoloured, the lavatory stood usable. Usable if the water still ran. But a lump of concrete entombed the main water tap. Gently, tenderly, Philip cracked off this shell with his jumping, jittering, noisy drill, and the tap appeared, glistening with newness. Philip and Alice, laughing and triumphant, stood close together over the newly-born tap.

‘I’ll see that all the taps are off, but leave one on,’ she said softly; for she wanted to make sure of it all before announcing victory to those two who waited, talking politics, in the sitting-room. She ran over the house, checking taps, came running down. ‘After four years, if there’s not an airlock…’ She appealed to Philip. He turned the main tap. Immediately a juddering and thudding began in the pipes, and she said, ‘Good. They’re alive.’ And he went off to check the tanks, while she stood in the hall, thankful tears running off her cheeks.

In a couple of hours, the water was restored, the three lavatories cleared, and in the hall was a group of disbelieving and jubilant communards who, returning from various parts of London, had been told what was going on, and on the whole, disbelieved. Out of – Alice hoped – shame.

Jim said, ‘But we could have done it before, we could have done it.’ Rueful, incredulous, delighted, he said, ‘I’ll bring down the pails, we can get rid of…’

‘Wait,’ screamed Alice. ‘No, one at a time, not all at once, we’ll block the whole system, after years, who knows how long? We did that once in Birmingham, put too much all at once in – there was a cracked pipe underneath somewhere, and we had to leave that squat next day. We had only just come.’ In command of them, and of herself, Alice stood on the bottom step of the stairs, exhausted, dirty, covered with grime and grey from the disintegrating concrete, even to her hair which was grey. They cheered her, meaning it, but there was mockery too. And there was a warning, which she did not hear, or care about.

‘Philip,’ she was saying, ‘Philip, we’ve got the water, now the electricity.’ And in silence, Philip looked gently, stubbornly at her, this frail boy – no, man, for he was twenty-five, so she had learned among all the other things about him she needed to know – and suddenly they were all silent, because they had been discussing, while she and Philip worked, how much this was going to cost and how much they would contribute.

Philip said, ‘If you had called in a plumber, do you know what you would have had to pay?’

‘A couple of hundred,’ supplied Pat, tentatively, who, without interfering in this delicate operation – Alice, and Philip and the house – had been more involved than the others, following the stages of the work as they were accomplished, and commenting, telling how thus she, too, had done in this place and that.

Alice took the fifty pounds from her pocket and gave them to Philip.

‘I’ll get my Social day after tomorrow,’ she said. He stood, turning over the notes, five of them, thinking, she knew, that this was a familiar position for him to be in. Then he looked up, smiled at her, and said briefly, ‘I’ll come in tomorrow morning. I need to do the electrics in daylight.’

And he left, accompanied not by his mate, Bert, who had brought him here, but by Alice, and she went with him to the gate, the rubbish malodorous around them.

He said, with his sweet, painful smile, that already tore her heart, ‘Well, at least it’s for comrades.’ And walked off along the street where the houses stood darker now, since people had gone to bed. It was after one.

She went into the deserted hall, and heard the lavatory flushing. Held her breath, standing there, thinking, The pipes…but they seemed to be all right. Jasper came out, and said to her, ‘I’m going to sleep.’

‘Where?’

This was a delicate moment. In her mother’s house, Jasper had had his own place, appropriating her brother’s room, in which he curled himself up, a hedgehog, guarding his right to be alone at nights. She, daughter of the house, had slept in the room she had had all her life. She did not mind, she said; she knew what she felt; but what she did mind, badly, was the thoughts of others, not about her, but about Jasper. But they were alone in the hall, could face this decision together. He was gazing at her with the quelling look she knew meant he felt threatened.

Pat came out to them, saying, ‘The room next to ours is empty. It probably needs a bit of a clean, the two who were in it weren’t…’

In the great dark hall, where the hurricane lamp made its uncertain pool, the three stood, and the women looked at Jasper, Alice knowing why, but Pat, not yet. Alice knew that Pat, quick and acute, would understand it all in a flash…and suddenly Pat remarked, ‘Well, at any rate, it’s the best empty room there is…’ She had taken it all in, in a moment, Alice knew, but it seemed Jasper did not, for he said heartily, ‘Right, Alice, let’s go.’

Pat said to them, as they silently went up, ‘Alice, don’t think we don’t think you aren’t a bloody marvel!’ And laughed. Alice, not giving a damn, went into the big empty room behind Jasper. His backpack had been undone, his sleeping-bag lay neatly against the right wall at the end, as far away as it could get. Alice said, ‘I’ll fetch my things,’ waited for him to repudiate her, but he stood, back turned, saying nothing. She ran down to the hall, hoping Pat would not be there, but she was, standing quietly by herself, as though she had expected Alice to come down, wanting to do what she then did, which was to advance, take Alice in her arms, and lay her smooth cherry cheek against Alice’s. Comfort. Comradely reassurance. And a compassion, too, Alice felt, wishing she could say out loud, ‘But I don’t mind, you don’t understand.’

‘Thanks,’ she said to Pat, brief and awkward; and Pat gave a grunt of laughter, and waved as she went back into the sitting-room where – of course – the comrades were discussing Alice, Jasper and this explosion of order into their lives.

Up in their room, it was dark. But some light came in from the sky and from the traffic. Alice spread her sleeping-bag on its thin foam rubber base, and was soon lying flat on her back, on her pallet, on the wall opposite to Jasper who lay curled as he always did, in fierce aloneness. He was not asleep, but soon he slept, as she could see from a loosening of his body, as if he had been washed up on a shore, and lay abandoned.

Too tired to sleep, she lay listening to how people were going to bed. Good-night, good-night, on the landing, and the corridor along from it. Roberta and Faye in one room, of course. Jim in another. And, in the room next to this one, Pat and Bert. Oh no, she did not want that, she did not want what she knew would happen. And it did, the grunting and whispering and shifting and moaning – right on the other side of the wall, close against her ear. It was too much. Love, that was; which everyone said she was a fool to do without; they were sorry for her. Theresa and Anthony, at it all night and every night, so said her mother, after years of marriage, grunting and panting, moaning and wanting. Alice lay as stiff as a rod, staring at the shadowed ceiling where lights from the cars in the road fled and chased, her ears assaulted, her mind appalled. She made herself think: Tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll get the electricity done…Money. She needed money. Where? She’d get it. She wasn’t going to cheat Philip…

Philip, given the sack six months ago from the building firm – the first to be sacked, and Alice knew why, because of his build: of course any employer would think, this weakling – had set himself up. He was now a decorator, hopefully, a builder. He had: two long ladders, a short ladder, a trestle (but needed, badly, another), paintbrushes, some tools; and could borrow from his friend, in Chalk Farm. He had got the job of decorating a house, in spite of his frail appearance; perhaps because of it; had been paid only half, was told he was not up to it. He knew he would not be paid the rest; it would mean going to law and he could not do that. He was on the dole. He thought he would get a job doing up a pub in Neasden. He said he thought he would get this job, but Alice knew he didn’t much believe it. He lived with Felicity (his girlfriend?) in her flat a couple of streets away. He had to be paid.

The noises through the wall, having died down, were starting off again. Alice dragged her pallet and bag over to the other wall as quietly as she could, afraid of alerting Jasper, who would feel her being there so close to him as an encroachment. And sure enough, just as she was settling down, he started up and she could see him glaring at her, teeth gritting. ‘You are in my space,’ he said. ‘You know we don’t get into each other’s space.’

She said, ‘I don’t like that wall.’ This situation having occurred before, repeatedly, she did not have to explain. Leaning up on his elbow, his face clenched with fury and disgust, he listened to what could be plainly heard even from his wall; then lay tense, breathing fast.

She said, ‘I’m getting up early, to see if I can get hold of some money.’

He did not say anything. Soon, the house became still. He slept.