The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [32]
“Old Bill’ll be around,” said Jim, bitter, experienced.
“Oh, God, these bottles,” swore Pat, and Alice said, “The bottle bank. If we had a car … Who has a car?”
“They have one next door.”
“Forty-five? Would they lend it? We have to get rid of these bottles.”
“Oh, God, Alice,” said Pat, but she stood her spade against the house wall—beyond which was the sitting room where they knew Jasper and Bert were, talking—and went out into the side street and then the main street. She was back in a minute, in an old Toyota. They spread empty black plastic sacks on the seats, filled the car with bottles: to the roof at the back, the boot, the pit in front near the driver, leaving only that seat, into which Alice squatted, while Pat drove the car down to the big cement containers, where they worked for three-quarters of an hour, smashing in the bottles.
“That’s it for today,” said Pat, meaning it, as she parked the car outside 45, and they got out. Alice looked into its garden, appalled.
“You aren’t going to take that one on, too!” said Pat in another statement.
She went into their house, not looking, and up to the first floor, to the bathroom.
She did not comment on the new electric bulb, shedding a little light in the hall.
Alice thought: How many rooms in the house? Let’s see, an electric light bulb for each one? But that will be pounds and pounds, at least ten. I have to have money.…
It was dark outside. A damp, blowy night.
She went into the sitting room. Bert and Jasper were not there. She thought: Then I and Jim …
Jim was again with his drums. She went to him and said, “I will carry down the pails. You stand by the pit and fill in the earth. Quickly. Before the whole street comes to complain.”
Jim hesitated, seemed about to protest, but came.
She had never had to do anything as loathsome, not in all her history of squats, communes, derelict houses. The room that had only the few pails in it was bad enough, but the big room, crammed with bubbling pails, made her want to be sick before she even opened the door. She worked steadily, carrying down two pails at a time, controlling her heaving stomach, in a miasma that did not seem to lessen but, rather, spread from the house and the garden to the street. She emptied in the buckets, while Jim quickly spaded earth in. His face was set in misery. From the garden opposite came shouts of “Pigs!” Alice went out into the little street and stood against the hedge, which was a tall one, and said through it to someone who stood there watching, a man, “We’re clearing it all up. There won’t be any smell after tonight.”
“You ought to be reported to the Council.”
“The Council knows,” said Alice. “They know all about it.” Her voice was serene, confident; she spoke as one householder to another. She walked back under the street lights into her own dark garden in a calm, almost careless way. And went back to the work of carrying down buckets.
By eleven the pit was filled and covered, and the smell was already going.
Alice and Jim stood together in the dark, surrounded by consoling shrubs. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, and though she never smoked she took one from him, and they stood smoking together, drawing in the sweet clouds and puffing them out deliberately, trying to fill the garden air with it.
Jim said, with a scared laugh, “That was all my shit. Well, most. Some was Faye’s and Roberta’s.”
“Yes, I know. Well, never mind.”
“Have you thought, Alice—have you ever thought?—how much shit we all make in our lives? I mean, I’ve only been here eight months, well, more or less. I mean, if the shit we made in our lives was put in a drum, or let’s say a big tank, you’d need a tank like the Battersea power station for everyone.” He was laughing, but he sounded frightened. “It all goes into the sewers, underneath here, but suppose the sewers just packed up?”
“They won’t,” said Alice, peering through the darkness at his dark face to find out what was really frightening him.
“Why shouldn’t they? I mean, they say our sewers are all old and rotten. Suppose they