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By Root 1419 0

but on in the bedroom. An hour or so ago, she had seen a stone of the right size and shape lying on the edge of a garden, and had put it into her pocket. She looked up and down the quiet street, where the lights made golden leafy spaces in the trees. A couple, arm in arm, came slowly up from the direction of the Underground. Old. An old couple. They were absorbed in the effort of walking, did not see Alice. Who went to the end of the street, nevertheless, and came back briskly on the impetus of her need, her decision. There was now not a soul in the street. As she reached her father’s house, she walked straight in at the gate, which she hardly bothered to open quietly, and flung the stone as hard as she could at the glass of the bedroom window. This movement, the single hard clear line of the throw, with her whole body behind it; and then the complete turn in the swing of the throw, and her bound out to the pavement—the speed and force of it, the skill, could never have been deduced from how Alice was, at any other time of the day or night, good girl Alice, her mother’s daughter.… She heard the shattering glass, a scream, her father’s shout. But she was gone; she had run down in the thick tree shadows to a side street, was down that and in the busy main street within sixty seconds after she had thrown the stone. She was breathing too hard, too noisily.… She stood looking into a window to slow her breath. She realised it was crammed full of television sets, and sedately moved to the next, to examine dresses, until she could walk into the supermarket without anyone’s remarking her breathing. There she stayed a good twenty minutes, choosing and rejecting. She took the loaded wire basket to the outlet, paid, filled her carrier bags, and went homewards by Underground. Since the stone had left her hand, she had scarcely thought about what might be happening in her father’s house.

Now, seeing the sober blue gleam from the police station, she went in. At the reception desk, no one, but she could hear voices from a part of the room that was out of sight. She rang. No one came. She rang again, peremptorily. A young policewoman came out, took a good look at her, decided to be annoyed, and went back. Alice rang again. Now the young woman, as tidy and trim in her dark uniform as Alice in hers—jeans and bomber jacket—came slowly towards her, an annoyed, decided little face showing that words were being chosen to put Alice in her place.

Alice said, “It might have been an emergency, how were you to know? As it happens, it isn’t. So you are lucky.”

The policewoman’s face suddenly suffused with scarlet, she gasped, her eyes widened.

Alice said, “I have come to report on an agreed squat—you know, short-term housing—surely you know …”

“At this time of night?” the policewoman said smartly, in an attempt to regain mastery.

“It can’t be much more than eleven?” said Alice. “I didn’t know you had a set time for dealing with housing.”

The policewoman said, “Since you’re here, let’s do it. What do you want to report?”

Alice spelled it out: “You people were around—a raid, three nights ago. You had not understood that it was an agreed tenancy—with the Council. I explained the situation. Now I’ve come to confirm it. It was agreed at the regular meeting of the Council, today.”

“What’s the address.”

“Number forty-three Old Mill Road.”

A little flicker of something showed on the policewoman’s face. “Wait a minute,” she said and disappeared. Alice listened to voices, male and female.

The policewoman came back, with a man; Alice recognised him as one of those from the other night. She was disappointed it was not the one who had kicked in the door.

“Ah, good evening,” she addressed him kindly. “You remember, you were in forty-three Old Mill Road, the other night.”

“Yes, I remember,” he said. Over his face quivered shades of the sniggers he had just been enjoying with his kind. “You were the people who had buried … who dug a pit.…”

“Yes. We buried the faeces that the previous people had left upstairs. In buckets.”

She studied the disgusted,