The Good Terrorist - Doris May Lessing [7]
“Hello, Mum, this is Alice.”
Silence.
“It’s Alice.”
A pause. “What do you want?” The flat voice, toneless.
Alice, all warm need to overcome obstacles in behalf of everyone, said, “Mum, I want to talk to you. You see, there’s this house. I could get the Council to let us stay on a controlled-squat basis—you know, like Manchester? But we need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas.”
She heard a mutter, inaudible, then, “I don’t believe it!”
“Mum. Look, it’s only your signature we want. We would pay it.”
A silence, a sigh or a gasp, then the line went dead.
Alice, now radiant with a clear hot anger, dialled again. She stood listening to the steady buzz-buzz, imagining the kitchen where it was ringing, the great warm kitchen, the tall windows, sparkling (she had cleaned them last week, with such pleasure), and the long table where, she was sure, her mother was sitting now, listening to the telephone ring. After about three minutes, her mother did lift the receiver and said, “Alice, I know it is no use my saying this. But I shall say it. Again. I have to leave here. Do you understand? Your father won’t pay the bills any longer. I can’t afford to live here. I’ll have trouble paying my own bills. Do you understand, Alice?”
“But you have all those rich friends.” Another silence. Alice then, in a full, maternal, kindly, lecturing voice, began, “Mum, why aren’t you like us? We share what we have. We help each other out when we are in trouble. Don’t you see that your world is finished? The day of the rich selfish bourgeoisie is over. You are doomed.…”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Alice’s mother, and Alice warmed into the purest affection again, for the familiar comforting note of irony was back in her mother’s voice, the awful deadness and emptiness gone. “But you have at some point to understand that your father is not prepared any longer to share his ill-gotten gains with Jasper and all his friends.”
“Well, at least he is prepared to see they are ill-gotten,” said Alice earnestly.
A sigh. “Go away, Alice,” said Alice’s mother. “Just go away. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear from you. Try to understand that you can’t say the things to people you said to me this morning and then just turn up, as if nothing had happened, with a bright smile, for another handout.”
The line went dead.
Alice stood, in a dazzle of shock. Her head was full of dizzying shadow and light. Someone behind her in the queue said, “If you’ve finished …,” pushed in front of her, and began to dial.
Alice drifted onto the pavement and wandered aimlessly around the perimeter of that area, now fenced off with high, corrugated iron, where so recently there had been a market, full of people buying and selling. She had had a pitch there herself last summer; first she sold cakes and biscuits and sweets, then hot soup, and sandwiches. Proper food, all wholemeal flour and brown sugar, and vegetables grown without insecticides. She cooked all this in her mother’s kitchen. Then the Council closed the place down. To build another of their shitty great enormous buildings, their dead bloody white elephants that wouldn’t be wanted by anyone but the people who made a profit out of building them. Corruption. Corruption everywhere. Alice, weeping out loud, blubbering, went stumbling about outside the enormous iron fence like a fence around a concentration camp, thinking that last summer …
A whistle shrieked. Some factory or other … one o’clock. She hadn’t done anything yet.… Standing on the long shallow steps that led to the public library, she wiped her face, and made her eyes look out instead of in. It was a nice day. The sun was shining. The sky was full of racing white clouds, and the blue seemed to dazzle and promise.
She went back to the telephones in the Underground and rang her father’s office on the private number.
He answered at once.
“This is Alice.”
“The answer is no.”
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“Say it.”
“I want you to guarantee our expenses, electricity and gas, for a squat.”
“No.”
She hung up, the burning