The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [2]
Without referring to him, she ran up the stairs, and he followed slowly, listening to how she banged on doors, and then, hearing nothing, flung them open. On the first-floor landing they stood looking into order, not chaos. Here every room had sleeping bags, one or two, or three. Candles or hurricane lamps. Even chairs with little tables beside them. Books. Newspapers. But no one was in.
The smell on this floor was strong. It came from upstairs. More slowly they went up generously wide stairs, and confronted a stench that made Jasper briefly retch. Alice’s face was stern and proud. She flung open a door onto a scene of plastic buckets, topped with shit. But this room had been deemed sufficiently filled, and the one next to it had been started. Ten or so red, yellow, and orange buckets stood in a group, waiting.
There were other rooms on this floor, but none were used. None could be used, the smell was so strong.
They went down the stairs, silent, watching their feet, for there was rubbish everywhere, and the light came dimly through dirty windows.
“We are not here,” said he, anticipating her, “to make ourselves comfortable. We aren’t here for that.”
She said, “I don’t understand anyone choosing to live like this. Not when it’s so easy.”
Now she sounded listless, flat, all the incandescence of fury gone.
He was about to start a speech about her bourgeois inclinations, as she could see; but the front door opened, and against the sunlight was outlined a military-looking figure.
“Bert!” he shouted, and jumped down the stairs three at a time. “Bert. It’s Jasper.…”
Alice thought maternally, hearing that glad voice ring out, It’s because of his shitty father. But this was part of her private stream, since of course Jasper did not allow her the right to such ideas.
“Jasper,” acknowledged Bert, and then peered through the gloom up at herself.
“Alice—I told you,” said Jasper.
“Comrade Alice,” said Bert. His voice was curt, stern, and pure, insisting on standards, and Jasper’s voice fell into step. “We have just come,” he said. “There was no one to report to.”
“We spoke to him, in there,” remarked Alice, arriving beside them, indicating the room from which came the soft drumming.
“Oh, Jim,” dismissed Bert. He strode to a door they had not opened, kicked it open since it had lost its knob, and went in without looking to see if they followed.
This room was as near to normal as they had seen. With the door shut, you could believe this was a sitting room in an ordinary house, although everything—chairs, a sofa, the carpet—was dingy. The smell was almost shut out, but to Alice it seemed that an invisible film of stench clung to everything, and she would feel it slippery on her fingers if she touched.
Bert stood upright, slightly bent forward, arms at ease, looking at her. But he did not see her, she knew that. He was a dark, thin young man, probably twenty-eight or thirty. His face was full of black shining hairs, and his dark eyes and a red mouth and white teeth gleamed from among them. He wore new stiff dark-blue jeans and a close-fitting dark-blue jacket, buttoned up and tidy. Jasper wore light-blue linen trousers and a striped tee shirt like a sailor’s; but Alice knew he would soon be in clothes like Bert’s, which were in fact his normal gear. He had had a brief escapade into frivolity due to some influence or other.
Alice knew that the two men would now talk, without concerning themselves with her, and set herself to guard her interests, while she looked out of the bow window into the garden, where rubbish of all kinds reached to the sills. Sparrows were at work on the piles, scratching and digging. A blackbird sat on a milk carton and looked straight at her. Beyond the birds, she saw a thin cat crouched under a hydrangea in young green leaf and slim coronets of pink and blue that would be flowers. The cat was watching