Vacant Possession Read online

  It was an awful photograph, why had she ever kept it? Quickly she detached it from the page and put it down on the bedside cabinet. There was a blank space now in the album, a testament to her vanity. There she was again, arms folded outside number 2. The garden had been dug over, and the house behind her had all its woodwork painted a gleaming white. It had been a gruelling year-long slog, up and down ladders with buckets of paste, back-breaking work; but it was a big house, and there was land at the side to accommodate the extension they had eventually built, giving them a fourth bedroom and a much bigger kitchen. That was the whole point about Buckingham Avenue, it offered such scope for improvement. How much easier it would have been if their removal had not coincided with the crisis in Colin’s life. There had been a girlfriend, of course; he supposed she didn’t know. His behaviour was odd and abstracted, even by his own standards. He had drunk too much, whenever he could get his hands on some alcohol; they could not afford, in those days, to keep a stock in the house. Their petrol bills had soared; where did he go? Finally, of course, he’d been breathalysed and banned from driving. His little affair had come to nothing. That was obvious, wasn’t it? He was still here, she was still here; here they were.

  Sylvia looked at her watch. Ten past one. She let the albums slip onto the bed, yawned, stretched, and peeled off her tracksuit, dropping it into the laundry basket. She went into the bathroom, washed, and cleaned her teeth vigorously. Back in the bedroom, she averted her face to avoid the sight of herself half-naked in the dressing table mirror. Her thighs were going, her tummy had gone; after four pregnancies, what could you expect? If she had known then what she knew now…She pulled on her baggy cotton trousers, and took out of the drawer a tee shirt which said in big black letters NURSERY SCHOOLS ARE OUR RIGHT. Running a hand through her hair, she mooched off downstairs.

  Lizzie Blank, the daily (a German name, Sylvia supposed), was standing at the sink wringing dirty water from a cloth. “All right, Lizzie?” Sylvia said.

  “All right, Mrs. S.?”

  Sylvia crossed to the fridge. She opened it, picked out a lettuce leaf, and stood nibbling it while she surveyed her domestic. She supposed that a survey of Lizzie Blank would be a comfort to any normal woman who was afraid of losing her looks. Weird was the only word for her.

  Lizzie Blank was a woman of no age that could easily be determined. Her dumpling body, entirely without a waistline, was supported on peg-shaped legs. Her hair, platinum blond and matted, had a height and stiffness that Sylvia’s in its heyday had never approached; two little squiggles, shaped like meat hooks, stood stiffly out by each ear. Her large face—rather blank in truth—was so caked with make-up that it was impossible to decide what it might look like naked, and her eyelids, outlined in thick black pencil, were painted a vivid teal blue. How many pairs of false eyelashes she wore, Sylvia could not take it upon herself to say. Her magenta lips bore no relation to her real mouth, but were over-painted greasily onto the skin, so that the merest twitch of her cheek muscles brought about a smile or a pout. The lips worked unceasingly; the eyes remained quite dead.

  “How was your trip?” Sylvia asked.

  “Okay. One of us thought there would be donkeys. We had them before, when we went on a day trip.”

  “I think you only get them at the seaside.”

  “I don’t see why. Not as if they swim.”

  Sylvia was taken aback. “Tell me, Lizzie,” she said, “do you wear a wig?”

  Lizzie only smiled. Sylvia realised that her question was perhaps an intrusion. After all, she thought, if it is a wig, it’s bound to slip about on her head from time to time. I could find out by observation alone.

  Sylvia swung open the fridge door again, took out half a cucumber, and cut an inch off it. She raised it to her lips. “By the way, you didn’t try to clean Alistair’s room, did you? I meant to tell you. I expect he’s got the door locked.”

  “The spare room?” Lizzie looked at her; it might have been astonishment, but her face was so far from the human norm that it was always difficult to be sure what her expressions meant.

  “Well, it’s not really the spare room. Alistair’s always had it, since we came.”

  “I call it the spare room.”

  “I daresay it was, before we moved here. Anyway, what I’m saying is—don’t bother with it. His father will make him clean it up, when the school holidays start.”

  “Some rooms have no talent for cleaning. Some rooms will never be clean.” Her tone was perhaps unnecessarily doom-laden, but Sylvia supposed she was devoted to her art. It was a good sign really.

  “I was wondering, would you take on another lady?”

  Lizzie was washing down the sink with bleach. She shook her head, without pausing in her work.

  “Only, our vicar’s wife is looking for somebody to do a few hours for her.”

  “Did you say you could recommend me?” Lizzie turned her full flat face towards her employer; her rouged cheeks glowed, ripely pink, in a waste of chalk-white powder.

  “I mentioned your name. I didn’t commit you.”

  “Not interested, Mrs. S.”

  “I did tell her, I didn’t know how many other people you did for.” Biting her cucumber: “You’re a bit of an enigma, Lizzie.”

  “I can’t take anything else on.” Lizzie screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle. “I work at night.”

  She bent down to put the bleach away under the sink, presenting to Sylvia her large rear end. “Yes, well, I thought I’d ask. I’d better get off to my committee meeting. Can I give you a lift?”

  Lizzie took off her large plastic apron and hung it behind the kitchen door. “Thank you kindly, Mrs. S. You’re a good woman. An angel, I might add.”

  With a baffled smile, Sylvia went off to get her purse. Weird was the word. As it happened, though, Lizzie Blank was the only person who had answered her ad in the Reporter. The purplish, pinpoint, foreign-looking hand had prepared her for—well, a foreigner; a person of strange diction and eccentric ways of cleaning lavatories. Lizzie did not seem exactly foreign; but perhaps her parents were, perhaps she came from a funny background. She seemed a good-hearted soul, Sylvia thought, and willing enough; even if she was rather lavish with the cleaning materials.

  She went back into the kitchen. Lizzie Blank was now in her outdoor garb; a dirndl skirt of red and blue, and a leopard-skin jacket. “I’m surprised you don’t feel the heat,” Sylvia said, counting out her money. “There you are, love.” Lizzie’s false nails flashed, and the notes vanished into one of her pockets.

  “It’s my pride and joy, this jacket,” she said. “As my mother used to say, Pride must Abide.”

  Lizzie took out a chiffon scarf, pink shot through with gold, and went out into the hall. In front of the mirror, she adjusted it carefully over her coiffure. “Ready?” Sylvia said, swinging her car keys. “You’ll have to give me directions.”

  Damn, she thought, I’ve been stuffing myself again; and I meant not to have any lunch.

  They drove downhill towards the town centre. Right here, left here, said the charwoman, leading them into the maze of streets that still stood on the southern side of the motorway link. “All this will be coming down soon,” Sylvia said. “You’ll all be dumped over Hadleigh way in a high-rise. How do you feel about that?”

  “All right.”

  “But it’ll break up your community.”

  “Not my community. I wasn’t born here.”

  “Oh, I see. But still, you won’t like life in a towerblock.”

  “I shan’t mind. You can throw things off the balconies.”

  Sylvia gave her a sideways look, then switched her attention back to the road. She slowed down. Small brown children played by the kerb, barelegged in the July heat, crouching in the gutter and darting out into the road. There was not a blade of grass for miles. Midsummer brought out the worst in it, baking the cracks in the pavements, raising a stench from the dustbins. The long ginnels that ran between the hous
es discharged a dim effulgence of stale sweat and stale spices; a thin ginger cat slept on a coal-shed roof, its scarred limbs splayed, its eyes screwed tight against the glare. Not a tree, not a patch of shade. “Displacing people from their environment,” Sylvia said. “You’d think the lesson would be learned by now.”

  “Here it is. Eugene Terrace.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “This will do.” Lizzie opened the car door and began to lever her bloated body out of the seat, swivelling sideways and kicking her feet over the kerb. Her ankle chain flashed in the sunlight. Out at last, she leaned down and stuck her face in at the passenger door. “Thanks a million, Mrs. S.” Inside the leopard-skin jacket she was perspiring heavily, and patches of grease were breaking through her face powder; she gave a terrifying impression of imminent dissolution, as if fire had broken out at Madame Tussaud’s.

  Sylvia drew back from her grinning mouth and heavy scent. “Is this where you live, at this shop?”

  “Over the top. It’s temporary. I’m stopping with a friend, he’s got lodgings here.”

  “See you Thursday then.” She watched Lizzie, waddling towards the side door of the fly-blown corner grocery. I wonder what she means about working at night? Can she possibly be a prostitute? Surely not; she was too grotesque for anyone’s taste. Lizzie stopped, ferreting in her bag for her door key. There was something unreal about her, as if she were a puppet, or an illustration loosed from the pages of a book. Suddenly, and with awful clarity, Sylvia understood her mingled repulsion and fascination, the prickling of kinship which had made her take the creature on. It was herself she was seeing, Sylvia Sidney of ten years back, the masklike maquillage, the jelly-flesh wobbling like a sow’s; the great big beautiful baby doll. She felt suddenly sick. She groped for the gear lever.

  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

  The Mukerjees’ stock in trade blocked most of the narrow passage: tinned cream of tomato soup in cartons of three dozen, boxes of pre-cooked 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 sh
e’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.