Vacant Possession. Hilary Mantel
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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 houses 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.
The Mukerjees’ stock in trade blocked most of the narrow passage: tinned cream of tomato soup in cartons of three dozen, boxes of precooked 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