(Spr sm chn?)
Think of him, Telephone Man, standing like something over-evolved out of Darwin, post-Neanderthal in his overalls with his wires in coils on his arms and his van full of great rolls of wire behind him and there he is scratching his head like a monkey because there’s no metal grate in the ground he can lift to do the job, and a lady in a wimple peeking out at him through the slit like he’s a martian come in a spaceship because it’s the fifteenth century and there’s no such things as vans. Think of their faces. Laughing makes her cough. Coughing sends – Christ, yes, she thinks as she coughs – a sheaf of fifteenth-century arrows through her chest with all their little flinty hooks and notchy metal edges, and that’s just a small cough, a choked-back cough, because a real cough, she thinks daring herself, taking inch-large breaths, recovering, would shake the foundations and send a whole slab of fortress wall into the moat. A real cough, she resets the muscles in her arms and shoulders, shakes her head, is like the whole fucking National Trust ancient fucking property breaking up into nothing but rubble.
Else is going to have to stop thinking. She’s going to have to stop using her
(Spr sm. Chn.)
imagination. She daren’t laugh again; she daren’t cough again. Who knows what she’ll cough up? Something the size of a baby fucking pig, by the feel of it, covered in fucking pigbristle. Fuck. Cunting fucking. It coughs out of her, satisfying and sore. Laughing makes her cough. Breathing makes her cough. So presumably actual fucking would make her actually haemorrhage. Moving makes her cough; just her shoulders, her head. Else daren’t move, not just yet.
When she does decide to get up, this is what she’ll do. She will go across the road to that girl, like she’s done the last twice, and pick up the money they’ve been dropping at her feet. That’s how they’ve decided to play it, her and the girl, and that’s how they will play it. First Else gets to her feet. Then she crosses the road. Then the girl sees her coming and runs away. Then Else picks up the money. It’s fair. It’s her right. Everyone knows the hotel is Else’s. But she has to be careful how she plays it. She has to judge it right. If she gets up too soon she could chase the girl away too soon and miss out on potential money. If she doesn’t get up the girl might up and go herself, and what if she took it all with her for once? what if she decided for once that she wanted it? Else steadies her breath. It’ll be fine. In a while the home rush will start, a short while after that the home rush will be over; that girl could make who knows how much more in that time. Else will wait. She’ll sit quietly and wait, because there could be ten or fifteen quid extra in it, say,
(Spr sm chn?)
and that’s fifteen quid more than Else can make, since she’s making next to nothing today. You never make anything if you’ve got a fucking cough. They walk round you in a wide berth. Three pounds and forty-two pence she’s made since night fell. So she could get quite fond of that girl. They’ve got quite a partnership going. Else could eat well tonight and maybe even buy some sleep too.
If the girl doesn’t go first and take the money.
If Else can last out past rush hour and the girl is still there.
If nobody comes and moves them on.
Move along
People don’t want to see it.
And I don’t want to see it.
Okay?
That’s the girl.
Thank you.
Some of the other things policemen and policewomen have said to Else over time:
Is that your stuff? Move it. Or we’ll bin it. Move it. Move. (a man)
How old are you? You won’t see another year at this rate. You know that, don’t you? It’s not just me saying that. It’s statistics. They die every day, people like you. I’m not making it up. We see it, every day. You just keel over in the street. Don’t you want to see thirty? (a woman)
You’ve got a home. Everybody’s got somewhere. Go home now, there’s a good girl. (a man)
Move along now, Else, we can’t have this; you know we can’t. (a woman)
Ever thought of working for a living? The rest of us have to. We can’t all just loaf around like you. (a woman)
(whispered) Now I’m telling you straight and I’ll only tell you once. You want a good raping, and you’re for it. You let me see you in here again and you’ll get it. I mean it. That’s a promise, not a threat. You hear me? Hear me? Eh? (a man, at the station)
Can’t you get it through your thick skull that decent people hate scum like you? You’re scum of the earth. You spoil it for the rest of us. The scum of the fucking earth. (a woman, at the station)
Here you go, darling. Milk? Sugar? Give it a good stir, it’s all powdered stuff at the bottom. (a man, at the station)
Did you have a look at the noticeboard up there, Elspeth? No? You’re eligible for police counselling. It’s on Thursdays, here, on the third floor. You’re eligible. That means it’s free, you don’t have to pay if you’re too poor. That’s what we’re here for, to help people. You only have to register. You only have to ask. (a woman, at the station)
Else remembers that word, from school. Poor. Then it was a word from history, from the times when there were such things as philanthropists (another word from history), which is what Robert Owen was, who built the workers in his factory a church and a school and a hospital, and didn’t employ the very youngest of their children until they were a bit older than the age that other men who weren’t philanthropists employed children at. New Lanark was the name of his mills, like his philanthropy made a new place in the world. The poor. What history worked to improve, to make things better for. But that was then. This is now. In one of the newspaper pages wrapped round one of her feet (her boots are too big) there is an article written by somebody suggesting that boxes for contributions of money, from people who have it for people who have to ask for it, could be set up in shops like Sainsbury’s, so that money could still be given out by those who want to, but those who have it won’t actually be
(Spr sm chn?)
asked for it by anybody. A deal like that (she dares a laugh to herself and something in her chest ricochets, then settles down) could put Else out of a job.
The penny by Else’s foot, the one she will reach for in a minute, is head-up, she can see, and it is quite a recent coin, it has the paunchy head of the queen in her later years. Else watches it. It’s not going anywhere. She’ll get it in a minute.
She likes to wrap relevant things round her feet.
BRITAIN MASSIVELY MORE UNEQUAL THAN 20 YEARS AGO. ONE IN FIVE PEOPLE LIVES BELOW BREADLINE. These subheadings are cushioning her heel. Ha. She tore them out of the paper in the library. This historic city she’s sitting on the pavement of, full of its medieval buildings and its modern developments teetering on top of medieval sewers, is all that’s left of history now; somewhere for tourists to bring their traveller’s cheques to in the summer. Actual history is gone. Else knows; she’s clever, she always was. Today she can remember how to spell philanthropist. But all the same, today she can’t remember which hand means which on a clock, whether it’s the short one that means the minutes or the long one that does.
(Spr sm chn? Thnk y.)
Chn. Spr sm.
F y cn rd ths msg y cd bcm a scrtry n gt a gd jb.
First it’s the thought of herself gttng a gd jb, with done hair and skimpy smart clothes from the shops, legs the fashionable colour of nylon and the right kind of shoe strapped on, coming out of an office building like that one over there above World Of Carpets. Then it’s the thought of the way she imagined it when she was a small girl with her father on the Tube reading those gt a gd jb adverts when they visited London, sharp-eyed girl with her hair tied back and the neat clothes on that her mother had made, way back then when reading the advert, knowing what it meant, was one more proof of her cleverness in getting it right, the shorthand for what was possible. It makes her laugh. The laugh blurts out; she can’t stop it. The coughing does too, loud and sudden enough to spook a passing dog who jerk
s on his lead and starts to bark, and as the coughing and the barking racket out and an arm drags the dog away, the coughing hurts, the stuck splinter of herself as a girl hurts, the combination of the coughing and the past gets her in its mouth like a dog gets a rag, and shakes her.
To stop herself shaking, to stop herself thinking of it, she thinks of them instead, all the gd jb secretaries over time, row after row of
(Spr sm
(pause to cough
too long, person’s gone)
ch?)
shorthanders, 100-word-per-minuters. Think of them neatly filleting the words, and their wastepaper baskets overflowing with the thrown-away i’s and o’s and u’s and e’s and a’s. But they’re all redundant now, she thinks, all those scrtries. They’re history. Ha. They’ve all been made redundant by crisp shiny new girls with dictaphone machines and computers which print up what you say at the same time as you’re saying it. They’re probably all on the street now, the scs, doing the same day’s work Else does. She doesn’t need vowels either. She knows all kinds of shorthand. She imagines the pavement littered with the letters that fall out of the half-words she uses (she doesn’t need the whole words). She imagines explaining to the police, or to council road-sweepers, or to angry passers-by. I’ll clear up after me, she tells them in her head. It’s just letters. Anyway they’re biodegradable. They rot like leaves do. They make good compost. Birds use them for lining nests, for keeping their eggs warm.
Starlings’ eggs: pale blue. Robins’ eggs: white marked with red. Thrushes’ eggs: brown flecks or spots. Sparrows’ eggs: grey and brown covered in splotches. Chaffinches’ eggs: pink with brown tinges. Blackbirds’ eggs: greeny kind of blue specked with brown. She knows the eggs of city birds; she has done since she was a child out in the back garden and looking in the hedge at the blackbird’s nest, the three small green-blue eggs in the bed of grass and hedge-twigs. Don’t touch them, her mother said. If you touch them the mother bird will know and she won’t come back for them and they’ll die. How will she know? Else asked. She just will, her mother said, I’m telling you, don’t. Else was wearing yellow crimplene, it had a pink band at the neck, at the sleeve cuffs and at the hem. It was the month of May, nineteen seventy-nine, a very long time ago. The eggs were beautiful. She took out one of them and held it in her hand. It was light, it could easily break there in her hand. She could easily crack it; just moving a little would crack it. She put it back in the nest beside the other two. Nobody had seen.
The next day the mother bird still hadn’t come back. Three days later the eggs were cold. The birds inside them would be mucus, their bones wouldn’t have formed properly, would just be elbows of wing.
Stop crying, her mother said. It doesn’t do any good for those poor baby birds. She handed Else a book, it had birds on the cover. The book made Else feel sore inside. She made herself learn facts out of it. By the summer of the following year, when rare heat shimmered at either end of the road and the nests hidden in all the trees and hedges were full of new fledglings and last year’s eggs were nothing but a bad dream, Else (in a new blue cotton pinafore scooped at the neck, a daisy design sewn on to the pocket) knew these things off by heart: swifts’ eggs were white and long, magpies’ eggs were blue-ish speckled brown.
Nowadays this is Else’s recurring dream: she enters a room whose walls are lined with wardrobes. She opens the door of the first one and inside on a shelf is her mother’s sewing machine with the thick transparent Cellophane draped over it to keep the dust off. Round it, under it, above it, are drawers. Inside each of them is a complex filing system of folders. Inside each of these folders is a too-small garment. A dress, a cardigan, a waistcoat, slacks, a pinafore. Each piece of clothing has been made for Else. The folders fill the drawers and the drawers fill each of the wardrobes and the wardrobes crowd the room so that there is almost no space in it, and each piece of clothing is pressed flat in its folder, shrunk and airless as if vacuum-packed. Else is dizzy with them. She unpacks the first, and then the next, then one after another after another they pile up round and over her feet and even though she has opened hundreds of them there are still thousands more to unfold, all different, all handmade, all stitched with care and thousands more drawers of them waiting for her to open them. Puffed-sleeves. Tapers and waists. Pinking-shear edges. Zigzagged black braiding. Crimplene and cotton, nylon and wool, polyester and terylene and suede, and each of them is useless; too small, too fragile, too clean, too much; the wardrobes go on forever packed with unwearable love, and in her dream Else knows with a sheering hopelessness that she is asleep and that, untakeable as it all is, it will rip her apart at her seams one more time to have to wake up and leave any of it, one single piece of it with its empty arms, behind.
It is a nightmare.
It has got so that Else is afraid to sleep in case it comes, and afraid to sleep in case it doesn’t come.
(Spr sm chn?)
She tries laughing. She coughs again. Nothing loosens. Her insides are blistered; she knows they are; they look like paint does when it’s been too near heat. Her insides are burnt-out like waste ground round a condemned building whose windows have been broken and their glass left lying about inside on the floors of its empty rooms. If someone went in there to try and get some sleep, say, she’d cut herself open on the glass. If she sat down to rest she’d sit on broken glass. When Else breathes, when she moves, it feels like broken glass.
She has shattered her insides, living the way she is. She knows she has. It isn’t funny. It comes over her like misery. She has broken her insides, burnt them out, then heaped them over with ground as if to stop the burning. Beautie, Truth and Raritie. Grace in all simplicitie. Here enclosde in cinders lie. Enclosde, spelt backwards at the end. Nclsd. Shakespearian. Shksprn. The library here in this town is good. She thinks of the library instead. It is better than the one in Bristol. It stays open longer, generally, and the librarians rarely throw anybody out, even somebody getting some sleep. She has been reading metaphysical poets. Truth and Beautie buried be. Or: I am rebegot. Of Absence, Darknesse, Death; things which are not. Poetic darkness, Else thinks breathing carefully, has an extra e, as if a longer kind of darkness than the ordinary kind, and a capital D. Darknesse. Essence of dark. She has read a poem about a boy who acted plays in front of Queen Elizabeth the First, was good at playing very old men and died aged just thirteen. Else also likes William Butler Yeats. I went into the hazel wood. Because a fire was in my head. Go your ways, o go your ways. I choose another mark. Girls down on the seashore. Who understand the dark. She can’t be bothered with novels any more. She has read enough novels to last her a lifetime. They take too long. They say too much. Not that much needs to be said. They trail stories after them, like if you tied old tin cans to your ankles and then tried to walk about.
Else panics. She has been dreaming and now the girl is gone. She can’t see the girl. Is the girl still there? There are people on the opposite side of the road, she can’t see past them. She can’t see her.
It’s all right. It’s all right. The people go past and the girl is still there. She still hasn’t moved. Her hood is still up.
She holds herself, that girl, as if she is all bruises. She’s young enough for anything to have happened to her, and the way she stares at nothing it’s pretty clear that something has. But on the whole she looks hardly tarnished; she looks shiny, out of place, like if someone left a spoon in the garden by mistake for a couple of nights, and there it is still lying in the grass exactly where they left it when they come to find it. She looks like she comes from somewhere with a garden, with garden furniture in it.
Else imagines the girl a garden and sits her on a sun-lounger. Tall flowers wave their heads. She is drinking a can of Coke. She looks disgruntled. Someone shouts something from a kitchen window. What? the girl shouts back, her head turned, her mouth open. What did you say?
No she doesn’t. She doesn’t shout anything. It’s winter, there’s no garden, and she just s
its there like that, a grey girl on the grey steps of the World Of Carpets showroom opposite in the darkness, watching the hotel.
She has the stupefied look of the lovelorn. That’s what it
(Spr sm chn?)
is; yes. She is watching the hotel for someone going in, or someone coming out of it. Some man from up the road, some friend of her parents who’s been having her regularly since she turned fourteen, on her jacket, spread under them on her mother’s good corduroy front-room suite after school, or in the lunch hour, or while her mother is in the shower or out at the shops, and now his wife, or her mother, has found him out, or her father maybe, he’s found him out, he’s out to get him, he’s going to punch his face in, they’re searching for him, and she’s come here to the hotel to warn him, she’s sneaked out of her bedroom, out of the window and down the side of the house because the door was locked, they’d locked her in, she knows he said he’d stay in this hotel if he was ever
Or. She’s waiting for someone to look out of one of the hotel windows and see her. Maybe some salesman who passes through town twice a month, who’s just loosened his tie and opened the crotch buttons on his work-suit trousers, who’s standing with his shirt-tail out, glancing at the night over the town, and – there, look – he sees her waiting so patiently for him, the, um, the (how would they have met?) the sly shy girl who was doing the teas and coffees at the sales conference two months ago, who teased him and whom he teased over the sugar packets, whose virginity he thinks he pocketed between 10:45 a.m. and 10:50 a.m. in the deserted Conference Room behind the high stacks of seats, quick, because she had to be back serving again on the hour and he had a demonstration to give straight after the coffee break.
Ah, love. Else, laughing her guts out now, knows it well. Members of the public, for instance, are always asking her for it, as if it’s part of her job to give it out to them for their small change.