‘Looking for a kip, dear?’ Felicia is addressed by a limping woman who is pushing a pram full of rags, with plastic bags tied around the belt of her coat. The woman’s face is crimson and gnarled, her eyes bloodshot. Wisps of white hair escape from beneath a woollen muffler that’s tied under her chin. Scabs have formed around her mouth.
‘Nowhere to settle, dear?’
‘The hostel’s full.’
‘Happen it would be.’
‘I had my money stolen.’
‘Am I right you’re an Irish girl?’
‘I am.’
‘I’m from the County Clare myself. A while back.’
‘I’m looking for someone.’
The lame woman isn’t interested in that. She has been going about the streets for forty-one years, she says; forty-one years, two months and a day. ‘I keep the count. Sharpens you to keep the count.’
Feeling safer in company than alone, Felicia walks with the woman through a neighbourhood that becomes quieter and darker as they advance. Their progress is slow, each litter-bin investigated, the remains of food rescued and gnawed, bottles drained of their dregs. ‘What age would you call me?’ Felicia is asked during such a pause, and she says she doesn’t know.
‘Eighty-two years of age, still going strong. I’ve been all over. Liverpool, Plymouth, all the sailor towns. I was in Glasgow one time. I knew all sorts in Glasgow. I knew the cousin of the Queen. Lovely, considerate man. Lovely in his uniform.’
Skirting an area of waste ground, they have left the streets and are approaching the tow-path of a canal. The water lies below them, at the bottom of an incline, reached by a path through scrub and weeds. Good shelter down on the cut, the lame woman promises, and delves among the rags in her pram. She holds a few up to demonstrate their usefulness as blankets, and Felicia shudders, affected by the fetid odour this rummaging has brought with it.
‘Lena’s out!’ a voice cries, near them somewhere, and then two figures emerge from the mist, one of them waving and exclaiming again that Lena is out. From time to time weak moonlight filters through the clouds, and as the figures come closer Felicia distinguishes a skinny young man with a boyish face and clipped fair hair, and a scrawny middle-aged woman with matchstick legs. The man is attired in flannel trousers and a knitted jersey under a tweed overcoat torn at one pocket, a tie knotted into the collar of a grubby shirt. Orange dye is growing out of the woman’s grey hair; in a skeletal face her lips are sensual, pouted into a tulip shape, shiny now with lipstick. Stubble sprouts on her companion’s chin and upper lip and in a soft growth on the sides of his face. In the misty twilight the woman’s clothes seem shabby.
‘How are you, George?’ the lame woman inquires after she has welcomed Lena back. Lena was released that morning at eight, subsequent exchanges reveal, and got a lift on a narrow boat to the Flowers and Castle, where George was waiting. They’ve been drinking barley wine. ‘I’m off if you’re not coming,’ the lame woman abruptly threatens and, not waiting for Felicia’s reply, she disappears into the scrub of the slope, the wheels of her pram rattling and juddering over the uneven surface.
‘Haven’t you a place for the night?’ the skinny young man asks Felicia. ‘Are you stuck?’
‘I’ve nowhere tonight.’
Still preferring to be in company than on her own, Felicia remains with the two, returning with them the way she has come with the limping woman. They are curious at first: she tells them that she has been looking for a lawn-mower factory because a friend works there. She gives a description: dark hair kept short, medium height, greenish eyes, grey you’d probably call them. Johnny Lysaght, she says, and tells about the money that has disappeared from the sleeves of her jersey.
‘Typical, that,’ is Lena’s response, the description Felicia has given eliciting no interest. ‘Turn your head and you’re robbed while you’d blink.’
As they walk, Lena talks a lot. Stale as old cabbage, a prison social worker is; another one’s called Miss Rubbish. She was lucky, this time, with her cell-mate. ‘Wants me to go in with her when she gets out, Phyllsie does. Some type of dodge she has with the benefit. I wouldn’t go in with no one, Felicia, I give it to her honest. Now I’ve found the boy I ain’t looking for nothing else. Me and George stick together, Felicia, know what I mean? I wouldn’t want nothing dodgy there, not with young George. Don’t know the meaning of it, the boy don’t.’
‘You’re hungry, Felicia?’ George interrupts.
His voice is the most beautiful Felicia has ever heard. Each word he utters is perfectly enunciated, undistorted by accent or slurred delivery. Lena speaks roughly.
‘Yes, I’m hungry.’
Felicia adds that she hasn’t any money to spare for food, but George says that doesn’t matter and Lena agrees. In the streetlight Lena’s threadbare coat has acquired colour: a faded yellow, with ersatz gold buttons.
They buy portions of chips in a fish-and-chip shop and eat them on the street. She’s London herself, Lena says, bred and born. She and George met up there and decided on a change of scenery a while back on account of a problem they had, a woman who gave a description. They were sleeping under cardboard in London, and previous to that she was on the game, playing the motors. She never took to it. Before that, a man she met in Westbourne Grove persuaded her to have snow-capped mountains tattooed on her back. They’re there for ever now; act on an impulse and you have a landscape all over you for the rest of your days.
George is silent while Lena talks, content to nod sympathetically when the tattooing episode is recounted. His eyes screw up when he’s sympathetic, spreading geniality into his soft, boy’s features.
‘Wet as draining-boards some of them magistrates is,’ Lena comments, but adds that the judge who sent her down this time was a different kettle of fish, loving every minute of his sentencing. She describes the hot, red face, excitedly stern. ‘Example-to-others stuff. Know what I mean, Felicia?’
‘Yes.’
‘You pregnant then, Felicia? Bun in your tin, have you?’
‘That’s why I’m looking for Johnny.’
‘Johnny-come-lately, eh? Johnny-I-hardly-knew-you?’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘Course it ain’t. Course not.’ Lena pauses, then adds: ‘I’m not the boy’s mother, Felicia. Did you think I was his mother? He’s sixteen, you know, mother of his own down London way.’
‘Drives a Daimler,’ George says.
‘Don’t stand for a word against her, Georgie don’t. I hear that boy called a saint, Felicia, many’s the time. Bring him into a Pricerite or a Victor Value or a Lo-Cost, he don’t lift nothing, never has in his life, not so much as a tube of pastilles.’ All the time she was inside, George was out begging, sleeping rough, making do on cups of tea, never touched a thing. ‘Sends a card to the bishops on their birthdays, never forgets one of them. Education done that to him, Felicia, know what I mean?’
They arrive at a house with scaffolding around it and a temporary front door, made of unpainted blockboard. ‘No charge here for a doss,’ George reassures Felicia, pressing a bell that hangs on its wires, no longer attached to the door frame. From somewhere within the house comes the thump of music, and occasional hammering.
‘You’re welcome.’ A man in a bomber jacket, with a mug in his hand, greets them when the door is opened. ‘Come on in.’
He leads the way through an uncarpeted hall, towards uncarpeted stairs. Wallpaper has been partially removed from the walls, torn strips of it still hanging. Pieces of plaster, bricks, wood shavings and lengths of electrical wire are strewn about in the hall and on the stairs. Bags of cement, shovels, buckets and a stack of concrete blocks almost fill the first-floor landing. Coming from behind a closed door from which the paint has been burnt off, the music is louder at the top of the house. In another room the intermittent hammering is louder also.
‘So they’ve turned you loose again, Lena.’ Opening the third door on the landing, the man in the bomber jacke
t has to shout to make himself heard. ‘Remit, eh?’
‘That’s it, Mr Caunce.’
An unshaded bulb dimly lights a small room, empty of furniture. Several rust-marked mattresses, two of them occupied, lie close together on the floor.
‘There you go.’ The man in the bomber jacket smiles another welcome at the three newcomers. ‘OK then?’
Lena says the accommodation is fine. ‘Good-night, Mr Caunce.’
The occupants of the mattresses are a young man and a girl, fully dressed, without further covering. Both are lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling. Neither addresses the newcomers, nor ceases to gaze upwards.
‘The toilet’s across the way.’ Lena directs Felicia before she makes the journey herself.
When she returns, George and Felicia go in turn. Felicia doesn’t like the lavatory. There is no bolt on the door and it isn’t clean. The floorboards are sodden because the bowl is cracked and oozes water. A piece of rope has replaced the chain. A single tap protrudes from the wall, but the basin that was once beneath it has been removed. There is no lavatory paper.
She doesn’t like the room when she returns to it. She doesn’t like the house. Lena has taken her coat off, revealing a tight black imitation-leather skirt and a black jumper, which she now removes also. George has taken off his overcoat and his shoes.
‘All right for you?’ Lena asks, not pausing for a response. ‘Looks like our friends is on the needle.’ Lena and George share one of the mattresses, with George’s overcoat spread over them. Felicia lies down on the remaining one. Lena asks her to turn the light off. Mr Caunce doesn’t charge, George assures her again.
Felicia lies listening to the noisy breathing of the drugged couple, and the music and the hammering. These sounds and the rank smell in the room pass into Felicia’s sleep, until another sound wakes her. A woman is shouting. From somewhere lower down in the house come desperate, hysterical cries of distress.
The breathing of the couple does not alter. Neither Lena nor George wakes up. Then the music ceases, and with it the hammering, leaving behind only the woman’s shrill cries, words occasionally articulated. ‘Bestial! Bestial animals!’ Sobbing begins when the woman becomes exhausted, then silence until the music starts again, and the hammering.
Felicia does not sleep after that, even though both sounds cease when the darkness lightens. She sobs herself, wishing she could have stayed asleep, not knowing what to do when the day begins.
‘Fancy a tea?’ Lena’s voice interrupts. ‘Tea, Georgie?’
The two they have shared the room with are disturbed by their going, their eyes dilated and unfocused. Not speaking, they inject themselves, one passing the syringe to the other.
‘Who was that screaming?’ Felicia asks on the street. ‘That woman?’
‘A Spanish lady.’ George looks sorrowful, his high spirits of the night before gone.
‘Singer from way back,’ Lena adds. ‘Nightclub stuff. She objects to the noise, see. Plus there’s that toilet dripping down through her ceiling, plus she has a tale about her telephone breaking down. Caunce has the music and the hammering going, plus every kind of derelict up and down the stairs, so’s he can get her out.’
‘Mr Caunce is not a very nice man.’ George offers the opinion with reluctance. ‘I’m afraid we have to say that.’
‘I often think of her crooning in the nightclub,’ Lena says, ‘back in her heyday. Sixty or so she is now.’
‘That screaming was terrible.’
‘Shocking,’ Lena agrees, and the subject is left.
They queue for tea outside a church hall, its doors not open yet. You don’t get much, Lena warns: tea, and bread with something on it, more if you queue a second time and they don’t notice. ‘Good morning!’ a woman greets them, propping open the doors after twenty minutes have passed. Beryl it says on a badge she is wearing.
Inside, trestle-tables and benches are set out in rows. In a corner there’s a sink, beside a refrigerator and a gas stove. Three other women are spreading sliced bread with margarine; a fifth is pouring tea from a large metal teapot into rows of mugs with milk already in them. There’s a smell of gas and washing-up.
The morning visitors shuffle in, mostly men, all of them unkempt. They are silent except for two who mutter quarrelsomely. Lena has begun again about her colleague in gaol and the scheme she has devised for extracting extra benefits from the social-security system. ‘That’ll do there,’ the woman pouring tea sharply calls out, a reprimand to the men who are quarrelling. They’re not running a beer garden, the woman adds jollily, doing her best to cheer the men out of their disagreement. But the men remain morose.
‘Phyllsie’ll never get away with it, know what I mean, Felicia? Poor Phyllsie hasn’t the way with her for stuff like that.’
Two more women, clearly not intent on sustenance, and younger than the women supplying it, enter the hall. Swiftly they survey those gathered there, and choose Felicia and her companions to approach first. ‘The Aids brigade,’ Lena remarks.
‘Ever prick yourselves with a needle you pick up,’ one of the women begins in a hectoring manner, ‘you squeeze the blood out of the prick hard as you can. Really hard, much as’ll come out. D’you understand?’
‘We’re not on the needle,’ Lena says.
‘No one’s saying you are.’ The second young woman picks up her companion’s petulant tone. ‘All that’s being said to you is you might handle something by chance.’
‘Hold the finger under a hot tap for a good ten minutes. Then dip it into household bleach.’
When the Aids women have passed on, and in a tone that suggests he has been giving the matter thought during their harangue, George says:
‘We wouldn’t know about lawn-mowers.’
He nods repeatedly to emphasize this conclusion, and Lena says she agrees. Not in their line, she adds, but there you are. They finish the breakfast they’ve been provided with and Lena says:
‘Coming over to the park, Felicia?’
It isn’t far away; they sit there watching people going to work. On soil as black as coal, roses have not yet begun to sprout their new season’s leaves. The grass, cropped close months ago, still shows no sign of growth; flowerbeds are free of weeds. The wooden seat they occupy is dedicated to Jacob and Mir Abrahams. Died with others, 1938. Remembered here.
‘What I’d have is one of them big brown dogs that has their mouths open,’ Lena remarks. ‘First thing if I came into money I’d get one of them dogs. Nice friendly fellow you could take on to the streets. Know what I mean, Felicia?’
A sedate couple pass by, arm in arm. Retired, Lena speculates; taking it easy now. Funny to be out so early, funny they don’t have a dog. ‘Anyone today, George?’ she inquires, and George says yes, today is the birthday of the Bishop of Bath and Wells.
‘I’m sorry we don’t know about the lawn-mower thing,’ he says.
He stands up, and so does Lena. Felicia realizes her encounter with them is over. He didn’t forget, George says: yesterday he sent the Bishop of Bath and Wells a card with a squirrel on it. He smiles, nodding again when he adds that the Bishop of Bath and Wells is probably opening it at this very moment. There was a sermon once, he says, when he was at school. In which it was stated that bishops were lonely.
‘Good luck, Felicia,’ Lena says. ‘Good luck with your fella.’
‘I put a little rhyme I know on it,’ George says, and pauses to recite with his clear enunciation:
‘Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.’
They go, and Felicia watches them sauntering through the flowerbeds, while George’s voice continues, before it fades away to nothing.
13
Mr Hilditch is in his big front room. ‘Blue Hawaii’ is playing. The Daily Telegraph is limp on his knees.
When the doorbell sounds he doesn’t move. He know
s she won’t go away, she’ll ring again. When she does he rises slowly and crosses the hall at the same leisurely pace, all the nagging doubts he has experienced dissipating so swiftly that they have gone completely by the time he reaches the door. ‘Blue Hawaii’ has come to an end, but he continues the tune with his breath, passing it softly over his lower teeth. He raises a hand to the mourning tie he’s wearing, straightening it before he opens the door.
‘We meet again,’ he says, his smile agreeable.
Mr Hilditch doesn’t press his visitor to enter his house. He stands on the doorstep with her, having to peer at her because it is dark. He recalls as a child trying to entice a mouse into a trap that was made like a cage. You put the cheese down and then go away. Every day you put the cheese down a little closer to the metal wire and in the end the mouse goes in of its own accord, confident that it knows what’s what.
‘You’ve had no luck in your searchings?’
Mr Hilditch speaks coolly, not wishing to give the impression of any satisfaction on his part. He listens while he’s told that the Irish girl has been all over the place. He leaves it to her to tell her story.
‘I’ve had my money stolen.’
‘Stolen?’
‘Well, it disappeared. It was hidden away in one of my carriers and when I looked it wasn’t there.’
‘You’ve been in doubtful company, have you?’
He listens while he’s told about the religious house, and then contributes the view that any kind of fanatic isn’t to be trusted. The Irish girl says she doesn’t know what to do. She has been in other bed-and-breakfast places, she says.