The earth was soft. They came on the skeleton of a large dog; two old pennies; a broken knife, a rusting garden fork, which would be quite useful when cleaned up; and then a bottle…another bottle. Soon they were hauling out bottles, bottles, bottles. Whisky and brandy and gin, bottles of all sizes, hundreds, and they were standing to waist level in an earthy sweet-smelling pit with bottles rolling and standing around the rim for yards, years of hangovers, oblivion, for someone.
People were coming home from work, were standing and looking, were making comments. One man said unpleasantly: ‘Burying a corpse?’
‘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.’
‘45? 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, on 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 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 lightbulb 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 Jim and I…
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 on 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 streetlights 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, 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 just explode? With sewer-gas?’ He laughed again.
She did not know what to say.
‘I mean, we just go on living in this city,’ he said, full of despair. ‘We just go on living…’
Very far from his usual self was Jim now. Gone was that friendly sweet-cheeked face. It was bitter, and angry, and fearful.
She said, ‘Come in, Jim, let’s have a cup of tea and forget it, it’s done.’
‘That’s just what I mean,’ he said, sullen. ‘You say, come and have a cup of tea. And that’s the end of it. But it isn’t the end of it, not on your life it isn’t.’
And he flung down the spade and went in to shut himself in his room.
Alice followed. For the third time that day she stood in the grimy bath labouring with cold water to get herself clean.
Then she went upstairs. On the top floor all the windows were open, admitting a fresh smell. It was raining steadily. The sacks of refuse would have a lot of water in them, and the dustmen might be bad-tempered about it.
Midnight. Alice slumped down the stairs, yawning, holding the sense of the house in her mind, the pattern of the rooms, everything that needed to be done. Where was Jasper? She wanted Jasper. The need for Jasper overtook her sometimes, like this. Just to know he was there somewhere, or if not, soon would be. Her heart was pounding in distress, missing Jasper. But as she reached the bottom step, there was a pounding on the door as if there was a battering-ram at work. The police. Her mind raced: Jasper? If he was in the house, would he keep out of sight? Old Bill had only to take one look at Jasper and they were at him. He and she had joked often enough that if the police saw Jasper a hundred yards off and in the dark, they would close in on the kill; they felt something about him they could not bear. And Roberta and Faye? Please God they were still at the picket. The police would have only to take one look at them, too, to be set off. Philip? The wrong sort of policeman would find that childish appeal irresistible. But Pat would be all right, and Bert…Jim where was he?
As Alice thought this, Pat appeared at the sitting-room door, closing it behind her in a way that told Alice that the two men were in there; and Philip stood at the kitchen door, holding a large torch, switched on, and a pair of pliers.
Alice ran to the front door, and opened it quickly, so that the men who had been battering at it crashed in, almost on top of her.
‘Come in,’ she said equably, having sized up their condition in a glance. They had their hunting look, which she knew so well, but it wasn’t too bad, their blood wasn’t really up, except perhaps for that one, whose face she knew. Not as an individual but as a type. It was a neat, cold, tidy face, with a little moustache: a baby face with hard cold