• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1526 0

from Mary. She would sit here, by herself, doing nothing. Funny, she was described as unemployed, she had never had a job, and she was always busy. To sit quietly, just thinking, a treat, that. To be by oneself—nice. Guilt threatened to invade with this thought: it was disloyalty to her friends. She didn’t want to be like her mother—selfish. She used to nag and bitch to have an afternoon to herself: the children had to lump it. Privacy. That lot made such a thing about privacy; 99 percent of the world’s population wouldn’t know the word. If they had ever heard it. No, it was better like this, healthy, a group of comrades. Sharing. But at this, worry started to nibble and nag, and she was thinking: That’s why I am so upset this morning. It’s Mary, it’s Reggie. They are simply not one of us. They will never really let go and meld with us, they’ll stay a couple. They’ll have private viewpoints about the rest of us. Well, then, that was true of Roberta and Faye, a couple: they made it clear they had their own attitudes and opinions; they did not like what was happening now, with the house. And Bert and Pat? No, they did not have a little opinion of their own, set against the others; but Pat was only here at all because she actually enjoyed being screwed (the right word for it!). Jim? Philip? She and Jasper?

When you got down to it, she and Jasper were the only genuine revolutionaries here. Appalled by this thought, she nevertheless examined it. What about Bert? Jasper approved of him. Jasper’s attachments to men who were like elder brothers had nothing to do with their politics but with their natures; they had always been the same type. Easygoing. Kind. That was it. Bert was a good person. But was he a revolutionary? It was unfair to say Faye and Roberta are not real revolutionaries just because I don’t like them, thought Alice.… Where were these thoughts getting her? What was the point? The group, her family, lay in its parts, diminished, criticised out of existence. Alice sat alone, even thinking, Well, if we don’t get the house, we’ll go down to the squat in Brixton.

A sound upstairs, immediately above. Faye and Roberta: they had not gone with the others. Alice listened to how they got themselves awake and up: stirrings, and the slithering sound the sleeping bags made on the bare boards; a laugh, a real giggle. Silence. Then footsteps and they were coming into the kitchen.

Alice got up to put the saucepan on the heat, and sat down. The two smelled ripe—sweaty and female. They were not going to wash in cold water, not these two!

The two women, smiling at Alice, sat together with their backs to the stove, where they could look out of the window and see the morning’s sun.

Knowing that she was going to have to, Alice made herself tell about last night, about Mary and Reggie. She did not soften it at all. The other two sat side by side, waiting for their coffee, not looking at each other, for which Alice was greatful. She saw appear on their faces the irony that she heard in her own voice.

“So the CCU has two recruits?” said Roberta, and burst out laughing.

“They are good people,” said Alice reprovingly. But she laughed, too.

Faye did not laugh; little white teeth held a pink lower lip, her shining brown brows frowned, and the whole of her person announced her disapproval. Roberta stopped laughing.

Hey, thought Alice, I’ve seen this before: you’d think it was Roberta who was the strong one—she comes on so butch-motherly, she’s like a hen with one chick—but no, it’s Faye who’s the one, never mind about all her pretty bitchy little ways. And she looked carefully and with respect at Faye, who was about to pronounce. And Roberta waited, too.

“Listen, Alice, now you listen, you listen carefully, for I am about to say my piece.…” And Alice could see it was hard for her to assert herself, that this was why she had so many little tricks and turns, little poutings and hesitations and small wary glances and little smiles at Roberta and at herself, but underneath she was iron, she was formidable. “Once and for all, I do not care