The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [148]
There was nowhere in the room to sit, only the trestle and behind it the stool on which Jocelin sat. Windows showed a greying sky. The birds would start soon. Alice stood in front of Jocelin like a schoolgirl in front of a teacher, and said, “Have you thought yet what we should do?”
“Yes, of course. What we blow up depends on our means, doesn’t it. I’ve got a pretty good idea of what the capacity of these things is. But we have to discuss it.”
“Have you … I mean … you’ve …”
“No, I haven’t done this before. But it’s a question of using your common sense,” said Jocelin briskly. She set aside one copper tube, which was about ten inches long and presumably had reached some stage of readiness, and took up another. She nodded sideways at the “recipe book,” which lay open. This production shared the same qualities as the devices made according to its recipes. It was not printed, but photographed, which gave it a technical, ugly look. It was on bad paper. It had a yellowish plastic cover, like a cheap cookery book. Everything on that trestle looked cheap, makeshift, sharp-edged, and for some reason unfinished. Everything, that is, except the clever packets of chemicals, which seemed glossy with the amount of thought and expertise that had gone into them.
“And it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we had a practice run,” said Jocelin, smiling. It was, as might be expected, a cold, off-putting smile.
“Right on,” said Alice. “Of course.”
“We could choose something that deserves to be blown up.”
Alice came to life with, “Yes. Something absolutely shitty … something revolting, yes.”
Jocelin looked at her curiously, because of this sudden animation. “Have you anything in mind? I want something defined, if you know what I mean. Something definite, not too big; and solid. So that I can check quantities.”
Alice was reviewing in her mind’s eye things she would enjoy seeing blown up. She had to discard the high corrugated iron fences around the former market where everyone had had such a good time; which, all through the week, and particularly on Saturdays and Sundays, had been like a festival. A fence was not “defined.” It went on and on.
“Not a telephone box,” said Jocelin. “It says here exactly how much one needs to do one of those in.”
“A car?”
“Yes, we might have to use a car, because of the difficulty of access. Of being seen. But I know what a car would need. Something else.”
Alice smiled. “I know what.” A passion of loathing had taken her over, so that she felt quite shaky with it. “Oh God, yes,” she breathed. “I’ll show you. It’s not far.”
“Right.” Jocelin left her post and was beside Alice as they went silently down the stairs. The hall was not dark, but grey. Daylight. There would soon be people in the streets, the early workers.
They had only to walk half a mile, to an area of small streets that had been built before the invention of the motorcar. Now lorries trundled there all day, crunching backwards around corners, passing one another with inches to spare. The pavements, built so that two people could pass each other, were narrow, and in two of these little streets, at right angles to each other, the pavement had been widened on one side, thus further narrowing the streets by about a yard. This piece of official brilliance was dazzling enough, but in addition, to make it all totally incomprehensible to the ordinary mind, having gained this extra yard or so of pavement for the comfort and satisfaction of the citizens, the Council had then stuck all along the reclaimed edge of pavement cement stanchions or bollards of a peculiarly ugly grey-brown, about a yard tall, and round, like teeth. These hideous and pointless and obstructive objects, twenty or so around each corner at either end of the afflicted street, which Alice passed whenever she went to the Underground, provoked in her the all-too-familiar helpless rage, useless, violent, and unappeasable. She would stand there, examining this scene as she had done when seeing how the Council workmen had filled in lavatories with cement, smashed pipes, vandalised