The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing
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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