The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [155]
Then Jocelin came in, hardly glanced at her—so she couldn’t be so obviously in a ruinous state—and said that she must have strong coffee: not sleeping did not suit her. If she started now, she was sure she could get ready the appropriate explosive device for their work tonight. She spoke in an abstracted way, but with the cold relish that was her way of showing the excitement that, Alice knew, would shortly again be restoring herself. To hasten the healing process, she went up with Jocelin to her workroom, taking a chair with her this time, and watched those careful, intelligent hands at work. And soon she did feel so much better she had almost forgotten Comrade Gordon O’Leary. She thought vaguely: We’ll have to decide about whether to take those packages to the rubbish tip or not. As things are, he’ll believe they have already been found and taken off somewhere. So far behind her now did her real terror seem that she actually thought: Well, that’ll give him a bad moment or two. Serve him right. She told Jocelin about him as if he had been some sort of importunate salesman she had sent packing.
“Who the hell do they think they are?” Jocelin agreed.
Their elation began to fill the whole house, like the aromas of one of Alice’s soups, and for a while they were all up there, watching Jocelin at work, joking about how they would like to use this bomb or that. Tower blocks of flats. Police-computer information storage. Any information storage systems, for that matter. Certain housing estates. Any nuclear shelters that had been built anywhere, for it was only the rich who would benefit from them. Nuclear power stations.
This game got wilder and noisier, until Caroline pointed out that Reggie and Mary would be in soon. Jocelin was left to her work, and the others dispersed about the house, but kept meeting on landings, or in the kitchen, for today it was hard not to be in one another’s company, to share this tide of excitement, of power.
Everything went well that night, which was a Thursday. Reggie and Mary came in long enough to collect a few things; they were off for the weekend. A stroke of luck: it meant they could all spend that evening together. They gathered in the kitchen, laughing, joking, as if they were drunk. But no one drank. And Jocelin was quiet, self-absorbed, set apart from them by the necessities of her task.
She decided that it would be better if there were three in all, not two, because of lifting that heavy cement post. They competed for the honour, and Jocelin chose Bert. Faye was disappointed, and a little bitchy. Roberta said, “Never mind, there’ll be other times.”
At a quarter to four, Jocelin, Bert, and Alice quietly left the house. All the windows in the little street were dark. In the main road the lamps seemed to be withdrawing light back into themselves; their yellow was thickening as a cool abstract grey stole into the sky. Along the pavements between the lamps it was dark. Low down in front of them this darkness agitated itself, and became a small black-and-white dog, trotting with a modest and thoughtful air from somewhere to somewhere. There were no people in this street, and no one in the little street where they had to do their work. The whole business took a minute, with Alice and Bert heaving up the bollard, and Jocelin placing the bomb under it. The bollard stayed upright. They did not run off, but walked slowly to a corner, then walked fast. Some minutes after they reached home, and were in the kitchen drinking chocolate, they heard the thud of the bomb. It was louder than they expected.
They sat around, not joking now, but tense, even irritable, longing to go and see, but Bert said that criminals always tried to visit the scene of the crime and the police counted on that.
Jocelin actually went off to bed. Then so did Faye and Roberta. The others could not. At about nine Caroline strolled down, through busy streets, found the