The Good Terrorist

‘Very well,’ said Mrs Whitfield at last, and sat for a moment, not so much in doubt now that she had made a decision, but worried. For Alice. ‘Those are big houses,’ she remarked, meaning: they use a lot of electricity.

‘It’ll be all right,’ said Alice, sure that it would be. ‘Can you switch it on this afternoon? We have got an electrician at work. It would be a help…’

Mrs Whitfield nodded. Alice went out, knowing that the official was watching her go, disturbed, probably already wondering why she had given in.

Instead of going straight home, Alice went to the telephone box at the corner and dialled her mother. A voice she did not at first recognize; but it was her mother. That awful flat voice…Alice nearly said, ‘Hello, this is Alice,’ but could not. She gently replaced the receiver and dialled her father. But it was his partner who answered.

She bought a large thermos, which would always be useful, for example on demos or at pickets; asked Fred’s wife to fill it with strong tea, and went home.

The white dusty cloud in the kitchen had subsided. She said to Philip, now crouched on the floor with half the floorboards up, ‘Be careful they might switch it on at any moment.’

‘It is on, I’ve just tested,’ said Philip, and gave her a smile that made it all worth while.

They sat on the great table, drank strong tea and were companionable and happy. It was a large room. Once a family had had its centre here, warm and safe and unfailing. They had sat together around this table. But Alice knew that before all that could begin again, there must be money.

She left Philip, and went to the sitting-room where Pat was awake and no longer lying abandoned and open to Alice’s anxious curiosities. She was reading. It was a novel. By some Russian. Alice knew the author’s name as she did know the names of authors, that is, as if they were objects on a shelf, round, hard and glittering, with a life and a light of their own. Like marbles, that you could turn between your fingers for as long as you liked, but they would not yield, give up their secrets, submit.

Alice never read anything but newspapers.

As a child they had teased her: Alice has a block against books. She was a late reader, not something to be overlooked in that bookish house. Her parents, particularly her mother, all the visitors, everyone she ever met, had read everything. They never stopped reading. Books flowed in and out of the house in tides. ‘They breed on the shelves,’ her parents, and then her brother, happily joked. But Alice was cherishing her block. It was a world she could choose not to enter. One might politely refuse. She persisted, polite but firm, secretly tasting the power she possessed to disquiet her parents. ‘I do not see the point of all that reading,’ she had said; and continued to say, even at university, doing Politics and Economics, mainly because the books she would be expected to read did not have the inaccessible mocking quality of those others. ‘I am only interested in facts,’ she would say during this period when there was no escaping it: a minimum number of books had to be read.

But later she had learned she could not say this. There had always been books of all kinds in the squats and communes. She used to wonder how it was that a comrade with a good, clear and correct view of life could be prepared to endanger it by reading all that risky equivocal stuff that she might dip into, hastily, retreating as if scalded. She had even secretly read almost to the end of one novel recommended as a useful tool in the struggle, but felt as she had as a child: if she persevered, allowing one book to lead her on to another, she might find herself lost without maps.

But she knew the right things to say. Now she remarked about the book Pat was reading: ‘He’s a very fine humanist writer.’

Pat let Laughter in the Dark close and sat thoughtfully regarding Alice.

‘Nabokov, a humanist?’ she asked, and Alice saw that there was serious danger of what she dreaded more than anything, literary conversation.

‘Well, I think so,’ Alice insisted, with a modest smile and the air of one who was prepared to defend an unpopular position reached after long thought. ‘He really cares about people.’

Somebody – some comrade, at some time, in some squat or other, had said as a joke, ‘When in doubt classify them as humanists.’

Pat’s steady, interested, thoughtful look was reminding Alice of something. Of someone. Yes, Zoë Devlin. Thus she would regard Alice when the subject of literature came up and Alice had had no alternative but to make a contribution.

Suddenly, Alice remembered something. Zoë Devlin. Yes.

A quarrel, or at least an argument between Dorothy Mellings and Zoë Devlin. Recently. Not long before Alice left.

Alice was concentrating so hard on what she remembered that she slowly sat down, hardly noticing what she did, and forgetting about Pat.

Her mother had wanted Zoë to read some book or other and Zoë had said no, she thought its view of politics was reactionary.

‘How do you know when you haven’t read it?’ Dorothy had asked, laughing.

‘There are lots of books like that, aren’t there,’ Zoë had said. ‘Probably written by the CIA.’

‘Zoë,’ Dorothy had said, no longer laughing, ‘is that you? Is that Zoë Devlin speaking? My good friend, the fearless, the open-minded, the incorruptible Zoë Devlin?’

‘I hope it is,’ said Zoë, laughing.

‘I hope it is, too,’ said Dorothy, not laughing. ‘Do we still have anything in common, do you think?’

‘Oh go on, Dorothy, let up, do. I don’t want to quarrel even if you do.’

‘You are not prepared to quarrel about anything so unimportant as a book? As a view of life?’

Zoë had made a joke of it all. Had soon left. Had she been back to the house again? Of course, she must have, she had been in and out of that house for – since before Alice was born.

Zoë was one of Alice’s ‘aunties’, like Theresa.

Why had Alice not thought of going to her for money? Wait, there was something there, at the back of her mind – what? Yes, there had been this flaming row, terrible, between Dorothy and Zoë. Yes, recently, good Christ, not more than a week or so ago. Only one row? No, more. A lot.

Dorothy had said Zoë was soft-centred, like a cream chocolate.

They had screamed at each other. Zoë had gone running out. She – Alice – had screamed at her mother, ‘You aren’t going to have any friends, if you go on like this.’

Alice was feeling sick. Very. She was going to vomit if she wasn’t careful. She sat, very still, eyes squeezed tight, concentrating on not being sick.

She heard Pat’s voice. ‘Alice. Alice. What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, in a hurried, low voice, still concentrating, ‘it’s all right.’ In a minute or two she opened her eyes and said, normally, and as though nothing at all had happened, ‘I am afraid of the police crashing in suddenly.’ This was what she had come to say.

‘The police? Why, what do you mean?’

‘We’ve got to decide. We have to make a decision. Suppose they come crashing in.’

‘We’ve survived it before.’

‘No, I mean, those pails, all those pails. We daren’t empty them into the system. Not all at once. We daren’t. God knows what the pipes are like down there where we can’t see them. If we empty them one at a time, one a day let’s say, it’ll take for ever. But if we dug a pit…’

‘The neighbours,’ said Pat at once.

‘I’ll talk to the woman next door.’

‘I can’t see Joan Robbins being mad with joy.’

‘But it will be the end of it, won’t it? And they would all be pleased about that.’

‘It would mean you, me and Jim.’

‘Yes, I know. I’ll go across to the Robbins woman. You ask Jim.’

A pause, Pat yawned, wriggled around in her chair, lifted her book, let it drop again, and then said, ‘I suppose so.’

In the next garden, which was wide, divided by a crunching gravel path, Joan Robbins worked on a border with a fork. Under a tree on the other side sat a very old woman, staring at the sky.

Joan Robbins stood up when Alice appeared, looking defensive and got at. But Alice did not give her time for grievance. She said, ‘Mrs Robbins, can we keep the tools for a bit? We want to dig a pit. A big one. For rubbish.’

Joan Robbins, who had withstood the annoyances of this dreadful No. 43 for so long, looked as if she would say no, say she had had enough of it all. Her pleasant face was irritable, and flushed.

But now the old woman under the tree sat up in the chair, leaned forward, staring. Her face was gaunt and purplish, with white woolly hair sticking out around it. She said in a thick, old, unsteady voice, ‘You dirty people.’

‘No,’ said Alice steadily. ‘No, we’re not. We’re cleaning it all up.’

‘Nasty dirty people,’ said the old woman, less certain of herself, having taken in Alice, such a nice girl, standing on the green lawn with daffodils behind her.

Alice said, ‘Your mother?’

‘Sitting tenant. Upstairs flat,’ said Mrs Robbins, not moderating her voice, and Alice understood the situation in a flash. She went over to the old woman, and said, ‘How do you do? I’m Alice Mellings. I’ve just moved in to 43 and we’re fixing the place up, and getting the rubbish out.’

The old woman sank back, her eyes seeming to glaze with the effort of it all.

‘Goodbye,’ said Alice. ‘See you again soon,’ and went back to Mrs Robbins, who asked sullenly, ‘What are you going to bury?’ indicating the ranks and ranks of filled shiny black sacks.

She knew!

Alice said, ‘It’ll get rid of all the smell all at once. We thought, get the pit dug this afternoon, and get rid of everything tonight…Once and for all.’

‘It’s terrible,’ said Mrs Robbins, tearful. ‘This is such a nice street.’

‘By this time tomorrow the rubbish will be all gone. The smell will be gone.’

‘And what about the other house. What about 45? In summer, the flies! It shouldn’t be allowed. The police got them out once but…they are back again.’

She could have said you; and Alice persisted, ‘If we start digging now…’

Joan Robbins said, ‘Well, I suppose if you dig deep enough…’

Alice flew back home. In the room where she had first seen him, Jim was tapping his drums. He at first did not smile, then did, because it was his nature, but said, ‘Yes, and the next thing, they’ll say, Jim, you must leave,’ he accused.

‘No, they won’t,’ said Alice, making another promise.

He got up, followed her; they found Pat in the hall. In the part of the garden away from the main road, concealed from it by the house, was a place under a tree that had once been a compost heap. There they began digging, while over the hedge Mrs Robbins was steadily working at her border, not looking at them. But she was their barrier against the rest of the busybody street, which of course was looking through its windows at them, gossiping, even thinking it was time to ring the police again.

The earth was soft. They came on the skeleton of a large dog; two old pennies; a broken knife, a rusting garden fork, which would be quite useful when cleaned up; and then a bottle…another bottle. Soon they were hauling out bottles, bottles, bottles. Whisky and brandy and gin, bottles of all sizes, hundreds, and they were standing to waist level in an earthy sweet-smelling pit with bottles rolling and standing around the rim for yards, years of hangovers, oblivion, for someone.

People were coming home from work, were standing and looking, were making comments. One man said unpleasantly: ‘Burying a corpse?’

‘Old Bill’ll be around,’ said Jim, bitter, experienced.

‘Oh God, these bottles,’ swore Pat, and Alice said, ‘The bottle bank. If we had a car…who has a car?’

‘They have one next door.’

‘45? Would they lend it? We have to get rid of these bottles.’

‘Oh, God, Alice,’ said Pat, but she stood her spade against the house wall – beyond which was the sitting-room where they knew Jasper and Bert were, talking; and went out into the side street and then the main street. She was back in a minute, in an old Toyota. They spread empty black plastic sacks on the seats, filled the car with bottles; to the roof at the back, the boot, the pit in front near the driver, leaving only that seat, on which Alice squatted, while Pat drove the car down to the big cement containers where they worked for three-quarters of an hour, smashing in the bottles.

‘That’s it for today,’ said Pat, meaning it, as she parked the car outside 45, and they got out. Alice looked into its garden, appalled.

‘You aren’t going to take that one on too!’ said Pat in another statement.

She went into their house, not looking, and up to the first-floor bathroom.

She did not comment on the new electric bulb, shedding a little light in the hall.

Alice thought: How many rooms in the house? Let’s see, an electric lightbulb for each one? But that will be pounds and pounds, at least ten. I have to have money…

It was dark outside. A damp, blowy night.

She went into the sitting-room. Bert and Jasper were not there. She thought: Then Jim and I…

Jim was again with his drums. She went to him and said, ‘I will carry down the pails. You stand by the pit and fill in the earth. Quickly. Before the whole street comes to complain.’

Jim hesitated, seemed about to protest, but came.

She had never had to do anything as loathsome, not in all her history of squats, communes, derelict houses. The room that had only the few pails in it was bad enough, but the big room, crammed with bubbling pails, made her want to be sick before she even opened the door. She worked steadily, carrying down two pails at a time, controlling her heaving stomach, in a miasma that did not seem to lessen, but rather spread from the house and the garden to the street. She emptied in the buckets, while Jim quickly spaded earth in. His face was set in misery. From the garden opposite came shouts of ‘Pigs!’ Alice went on into the little street and stood against the hedge, which was a tall one, and said through it to someone who stood there watching, a man, ‘We’re clearing it all up. There won’t be any smell after tonight.’

‘You ought to be reported to the Council.’

‘The Council knows,’ said Alice. ‘They know all about it.’ Her voice was serene, confident; she spoke as one householder to another. She walked back under the streetlights into her own dark garden in a calm, almost careless way. And went back to the work of carrying down buckets.

By eleven the pit was filled and covered, and the smell was already going.

Alice and Jim stood together in the dark, surrounded by consoling shrubs. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, and though she never smoked, she took one from him, and they stood smoking together, drawing in the sweet clouds and puffing them out deliberately, trying to fill the garden air with it.

Jim said, with a scared laugh, ‘That was all my shit. Well, most. Some was Faye’s and Roberta’s.’

‘Yes, I know. Well, never mind.’

‘Have you thought, Alice – have you ever thought? – how much shit we all make in our lives? I mean, if the shit we made in our lives was put in a drum, or let’s say a big tank, you’d need a tank like the Battersea power station for everyone.’ He was laughing, but he sounded frightened. ‘It all goes into the sewers, underneath here, but suppose the sewers just packed up?’

‘They won’t,’ said Alice, peering through the darkness at his dark face to find out what was really frightening him.

‘Why shouldn’t they? I mean, they say our sewers are all old and rotten. Suppose they just explode? With sewer-gas?’ He laughed again.

She did not know what to say.

‘I mean, we just go on living in this city,’ he said, full of despair. ‘We just go on living…’

Very far from his usual self was Jim now. Gone was that friendly sweet-cheeked face. It was bitter, and angry, and fearful.

She said, ‘Come in, Jim, let’s have a cup of tea and forget it, it’s done.’

‘That’s just what I mean,’ he said, sullen. ‘You say, come and have a cup of tea. And that’s the end of it. But it isn’t the end of it, not on your life it isn’t.’

And he flung down the spade and went in to shut himself in his room.

Alice followed. For the third time that day she stood in the grimy bath labouring with cold water to get herself clean.

Then she went upstairs. On the top floor all the windows were open, admitting a fresh smell. It was raining steadily. The sacks of refuse would have a lot of water in them, and the dustmen might be bad-tempered about it.

Midnight. Alice slumped down the stairs, yawning, holding the sense of the house in her mind, the pattern of the rooms, everything that needed to be done. Where was Jasper? She wanted Jasper. The need for Jasper overtook her sometimes, like this. Just to know he was there somewhere, or if not, soon would be. Her heart was pounding in distress, missing Jasper. But as she reached the bottom step, there was a pounding on the door as if there was a battering-ram at work. The police. Her mind raced: Jasper? If he was in the house, would he keep out of sight? Old Bill had only to take one look at Jasper and they were at him. He and she had joked often enough that if the police saw Jasper a hundred yards off and in the dark, they would close in on the kill; they felt something about him they could not bear. And Roberta and Faye? Please God they were still at the picket. The police would have only to take one look at them, too, to be set off. Philip? The wrong sort of policeman would find that childish appeal irresistible. But Pat would be all right, and Bert…Jim where was he?

As Alice thought this, Pat appeared at the sitting-room door, closing it behind her in a way that told Alice that the two men were in there; and Philip stood at the kitchen door, holding a large torch, switched on, and a pair of pliers.

Alice ran to the front door, and opened it quickly, so that the men who had been battering at it crashed in, almost on top of her.

‘Come in,’ she said equably, having sized up their condition in a glance. They had their hunting look, which she knew so well, but it wasn’t too bad, their blood wasn’t really up, except perhaps for that one, whose face she knew. Not as an individual but as a type. It was a neat, cold, tidy face, with a little moustache: a baby face with hard cold grey eyes. He enjoys it, she thought; and seeing his quick look around, straining to go, as if on the end of a leash, she felt sharp little thrills down her thighs. She was careful that he did not catch her glance, but went forward to stand in front of a big broad man, who must weigh fifteen stone. A sergeant. She knew his type too. Not too bad. She had to look right up to him, and he looked down at her, in judgment.

‘We told you lot to clear out,’ said this man, with the edge on his voice that the dustmen had, a hard contempt, but he was making a gesture to a couple of the men who were about to pull Pat aside and go into the sitting-room. They desisted.

Alice held out the yellow paper, and said, ‘We are an agreed squat.’

‘Not yet you aren’t,’ said the sergeant, taking in the main point at once.

‘No, but it’s only two days. I’ve done this before, you see,’ she said reasonably. ‘It’s all right if you pay the bills and keep the place clean.’

‘Clean,’ said the sergeant, bending down over her, hands on hips like a stage sergeant, Mr Plod the Policeman. ‘It’s disgusting.’

‘You saw that rubbish outside,’ said Alice. ‘The Council are taking that tomorrow. I organized it with them.’

‘You did, did you? Then why were we having phone calls about you digging some pit in the garden and filling it with muck?’

‘Muck is the word,’ said Alice. ‘The Council workmen filled the lavatories with cement, so there were buckets upstairs. We had to get rid of them. We dug a pit.’

A pause. The big man still stood there, leaning a little forward, allowing his broad face to express measured incredulity.

‘You dug a pit,’ he said.

‘Yes, we did.’

‘In the middle of London. You dig a pit.’

‘That’s right,’ said Alice, polite.

‘And having dug a pit, you fill it with – ‘ He hesitated.

‘Shit,’ said Alice, calm.

The five other policemen laughed, sniggered, drew in their breaths, according to their natures, but the young brute on whom Alice had been keeping half an eye suddenly kicked out at the door of the cupboard under the stairs, smashing it.

Philip let out an exclamation, and he was by him in a flash. ‘You said something?’ he said, looming over Philip, standing there in his little white overalls. A kick would smash him to pieces.

‘Never mind,’ said the sergeant authoritatively. He wanted to pursue the main crime. The vicious one fell back a step and stood with clenched hands, his eyes at work now on Pat, who stood relaxed, watching Alice. Alice, seeing his look, knew that if Pat were to meet that one in a demo, she could expect the worst. Again the little cold thrill of sensation.

‘You – stand – there – and tell – me – that you dig a pit in a garden, and just make a cesspit, without a by-your-leave, without any authority!’

‘But what else could we do,’ said Alice in clear reasonable tones. ‘We couldn’t put dozens of buckets of shit into the sewage system all at once. Not in a house that’s been empty. You’d really have cause to complain then, wouldn’t you?’

A pause. ‘You can’t do that kind of thing,’ said the sergeant, after a pause. In retreat. Please God, thought Alice, Pat or Philip won’t say: But we’ve done it!

‘It was a very large pit,’ she said. ‘We came by chance on some lush’s bottle-bin. It was a good five feet deep. We’d show you, but it’s raining. If you come round tomorrow we could show you then?’

A silence. It hung in the balance. Please, please, God, thought Alice, nothing will happen, the two girls won’t walk in; that really would finish it, or Jasper doesn’t suddenly take it into his head…For Jasper, in a certain mood, might easily come out and enjoy provoking a confrontation.

But the thing held. The five policemen who had been scattered around the space of the hall came in closer to their leader, like a posse, and Alice said, ‘Excuse me, but could I have that?’ For the sergeant still held the yellow paper. He read it through again, solemnly, and then gave it back.

‘I’ll have to report that pit to the Water Board,’ he said.

‘There were no pipes where we dug,’ said Alice, ‘not one.’

‘Only a skeleton,’ said Pat, negligently. As one the six men turned, glaring. ‘A dog,’ said Pat. ‘It was a dog’s grave.’

The men relaxed. But they kept their eyes on Pat. She had got a rise out of them, but so smoothly. In the dim light from the single bulb, she lounged there, a dark handsome girl, politely smiling.

‘We’ll be back,’ said the sergeant, and hitched his head at the door. They all went out, the killer last, with a cold frustrated look at little Philip, at Pat, but not much at the ordinary, unchallenging Alice.

The door shut. No one moved. They all stood staring at that door; they could come crashing back again. A trap? But the seconds went past. They heard a car start up. Alice shook her head at Philip, who seemed about to break into some effusion of feeling. And the door did open. It was the sergeant.

‘I’ve been taking a look at those sacks,’ he said. ‘You said they were being taken tomorrow?’ But his eyes were at work all around the hall, lingering with a slight frown on the smashed-in cupboard door under the stairs.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Alice. Then, in a disappointed voice, ‘Not very nice, was it, smashing in that little door, for nothing.’

‘Put in a complaint,’ he said, briefly, almost good-naturedly, and disappeared.

‘Fascist shits,’ said Pat, like an explosion, and did not move. They remained where they were. They might have been playing ‘statues’.

They let a couple of minutes go past, then, as one, came to life as Jim emerged from the shadows of his room, grinning, and the four went into the sitting-room where Jasper and Bert lounged, drinking beer. Alice knew from how they looked at her that Jasper had been telling Bert, again, how good she was at this – reflecting credit on himself; and that Pat had been impressed, and Jim was incredulous at the apparent ease of it all. She knew that this was a moment when she could get her own way about anything, and in her mind, at the head of her long agenda of difficulties to be overcome, stood the item: Philip and Jim.