Vacant Possession

by Hilary Mantel

  Effie subsided. She began to cry, her chest heaving with the shock and horror of her outburst.

  I’ve killed a psychiatrist…I pulled all the stuffing out of the doll…they put gunpowder through my letter box…they sang in the streets outside my house…a strange letter came, postmarked Scarborough.

  Philip had the secret of perpetual motion. Chug, chug, chug. I am a tractor. I am a Centurion tank. I am a shiny red new Flymo. Otherwise sensible, Philip oils his moving parts each morning.

  Crisp attributes it to the decline of faith. You may hear it, he says, as Philip garages himself for the night: the melancholy long withdrawing roar. In days gone by, Philip might have believed he was possessed by a devil, but the trend this century is to penetration by rays, bombs in the skull, and possession of men by machines.

  I am the internal combustion engine, says Philip.

  After a year or two Muriel became angry. She went to the end of the ward where the charge nurse sat in his little plastic cubicle. He was a fair-haired belligerent man, with a habit of sucking on his underlip. His biceps bulged pink and scrubbed beneath the short sleeves of his tunic. He was reading his racing paper.

  When he saw Muriel he folded up his paper and put it down.

  “Eh up, it’s Jane Fonda,” he said. Muriel did not know why he used this name, which he always did. He was looking amiable, but amiable was not his bent.

  “I have a question,” she said.

  The charge nurse lit a cigarette. “Fire away.”

  “Can’t I be treated like a normal person?”

  I’m worried about everything. What things? The bomb. What do you think will happen to you? Stay in hospital; then I’ll die. You got very drunk, didn’t you? Why did you go to the pub, do you think? My sinful nature. When did you last eat, do you think? 1952.

  I’m dead of misery. Dead inside. There are murderers in this place, murderers in the night. They used to wear uniforms so you knew them but now you don’t know them any more. There are murderers in the night. Lizzie Borden. Ruth Ellis. Constance Kent.

  Lizzie, thought Muriel. Later she couldn’t recall the surname. Lizzie Blank.

  How would you like a new life? they asked Muriel one day. How would you like a new life, with your needs met by the community instead of the institution?

  When Muriel looked at herself in the mirror, she knew that she was changing. She was a woman of forty, a woman of almost forty-three. In repose, her face was empty and expressionless, but at a word of inner command she could set it to work, assuming expressions acceptable to the people around her. The grimaces, she called them. The nods and smiles, the frown of concentration, the puzzled stare; all these were within her scope nowadays.

  If you knew the language and the logic, you could get into people’s workings. You could press the right keys, get out the response you wanted. You have to appreciate their prejudices: good defeats evil and love conquers all. That two plus two equals four, that cause precedes effect. Remembering, all the time, that this is not really how the world works. Not at all.

  The hospital was changing too. There were new nurses, milder in their ways; at least for the first month or so. The patients were left to their own devices, allowed to stroll about the grounds together while Crisp lectured them on eschatology. He looked forward to the day of a more immediate and worldly release. There was so much to be done; the Church was in a parlous state, and the General Synod—than where you would not find a bigger collection of atheists—had quite lost its grip. There were dwindling congregations, rectories turned into guest houses and deans living in maisonettes; and a demand for women in the ministry. Can you imagine, he asked, can you imagine Effie, in a sacramental character?

  Crisp’s preoccupations were his own; but more and more, their thoughts were turning to the outside world. “I’m learning to make meals,” Muriel said to Effie.

  Effie laughed. “Get away. Meals come out of those big trays in the canteen.”

  “Oh, do they?” Muriel said passionately. “That shows your ignorance. When I was at home I used to get meals from my mother, eggs, vegetables, that sort of rubbish, peas out of a tin. Where do you think the nurses get meals when they go home?”

  “They live here,” Effie said. “Don’t they? This is where we all live.” She relapsed into silence, and took up the occupation of looking at the wall.

  Emmanuel was the first to go. “Social Services will be responsive,” the doctors said. Emmanuel made a little speech, thanking them for their support as a congregation over the years. They sang a few of his favourite hymns, and he shook hands all round. He would be returning, he said, by the road to town which had brought him here some ten years ago; as if Calvary had an exit route. He turned up his face. A stray shaft of autumn sunlight gilded the waxen tip of his nose.

  “The heart’s gone out of things,” Sholto said. He kicked at a stone and dug his hands further into his pockets. “It will dull our wits, trying to pass for normal.”

  They were walking in the grounds, their numbers diminished. “Do you think you can pass?” Sholto asked her. He looked at her keenly. “You might, Muriel. I might pass, if I don’t fall down and foam. Crisp will pass. But Effie—never.”

  “After all, Muriel,” they said. “Look at all the stuff we’ve taught you. You know how to do your shopping. You can count your change. You can use the telephone.” Muriel nodded. “We’ll find you a place,” they said. “A nice little flat with a warden. You’ll be a free agent, you can come and go as you please.” They patted her hand. “You’ll have lots of support. The social worker will call and see you. And you know how to make your meals.”

  Muriel thought: When I get out I shall get out, just let those wardens try; Four and twenty social workers baked in a pie.

  Sholto said: “When you get out of here your aim should be to get as far away as possible from all those people who are going to treat you as an abnormal person. You have to get away to where nobody knows your face. You don’t want a pack of people around you who are going to say, oh, you know, you mustn’t expect too much, she comes from there. You don’t want people making loopy signs at every trifling embarrassment. You want to get right away. Get a fresh start. Get treated on your own merits.

  “If you let the Welfare house you they’ll tell all the neighbours that they’re to keep an eye out. Is that any way to start life? Everybody makes mistakes, but as long as they’re watching you all your mistakes will be put on file. You want equal treatment, don’t you? You want to merge into the crowd. Not to be pointed out in the public library as that cove who has fits. Not people coming up helping you all the time. Stuff them, I say. If I want to lie in the gutter and foam at the mouth it should be my entitlement. What are gutters for?”

  The odd letter came, here and there. Tales drifted back from the outside. “Crisp is walking the streets now,” Sholto said bitterly.

  “I thought you didn’t want nothing from nobody, Sholto.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” Effie said timidly. “But he’d like a little residence.”

  “Philip got a council flat,” someone said.

  “How did he like it?”

  “He hanged himself.”

  Sholto was a man of very good sense; wise and lucid, and ready for anything, except for the days when he sat on the floor, holding his head. “What they claim,” he said, “is an ongoing beanfeast, flats, nurses, jobs, day centres. But if you want to avoid all that you’ll have no trouble at all. There aren’t enough to go around.”

  “They’re going to close this place,” Effie said. “What will happen to me? Where will I go? What will happen to my bedside mat? It’s all I’ve got.”

  “You get money given you,” Muriel said.

  “Of course, I shall have the Civil List.” Effie cheered up. “I’ll see you right, everybody.”

  Hunniford Ward was closed. Effie got desperate, crying frenziedly and pulling at her hair. “Look, we’ll all keep in touch,” Sholto said. He wrung her hand. “Me and you
, Muriel, the Reverend Crisp. We’ll go on trips together. We’ll have donkey rides and such. We’ll hire a little bus and go to places of interest.”

  Effie blew her nose, consoled a little. The next day she came running up, her face alight; the greatest animation seen on her features since 1977, when she set fire to a cleaning lady. “Giuseppe is back,” she said, “that was thrown off Hunniford. If you don’t like it they take you back. Giuseppe didn’t like it.”

  They went to see Giuseppe after he was dried out. “I went down London,” he said. His podgy face was lemon-yellow; his fingers played tunes on the bedcovers. “I went in a hotel. There was women in that hotel,” he crossed himself, “they was tarts. I never paid those women. A man come threatened me get out of that hotel. I went down the coach station. I went down the café. I went down the Sally Army.”

  “Five more minutes,” the nurse said. “He’s been poorly.”

  They smiled at her. The nurses liked it when you were poorly. They were kind to you. If you were sick in bed, they knew what you were up to and what they ought to be doing.

  “I went up Camden Town,” Giuseppe said. “I went down Bayswater. I went up Tottenham Court Road to see my grandmother, but she was dead. I went in the bed and breakfast. I went in the night shelter. I ask for an extra blanket but they say, no no, fat man.” Giuseppe rubbed his side. “My chest hurts. I’m a tramp. I go to Clacton. It’s winter. I get a lodging and I walk by the sea.” He closed his eyes and screwed up his face. “Mother of God, it’s so lonely in Clacton.”

  “Just remember your medication,” they said to Sholto. “A community nurse will call and see you.”

  “Not if I see her first,” Sholto said.

  Sholto got out on a Thursday. He was all set for his sister Myra’s house. He made his way along the street, carrying his navy-blue holdall, the yellow nylon straps wound around his wrist. When Myra saw him coming she locked the door.

  Sholto walked on to the corner. When he turned off Adelaide Street, a terrible sight met his eyes. The whole district had been razed. Osborne Street was down, Spring Gardens had been flattened. The Primitive Methodist Chapel was boarded up and all the gravestones had been taken away. He tramped through the meadow of blight where the bones of Primitive Methodists had once rested; the ground was strewn with glass and broken pots. He squatted down, turning over the shards. The weather was damp; his holdall was smeared with yellow clay. From where he knelt he looked up and read a sign: MOTORWAY LINK BEGINS MAY 1983.

  Where the Travellers’ Call had been there was a field of rosebay willowherb and scrap metal. There were a few aimless piles of red brick, two feet high, and in places the earth was turned up, as if someone had begun to dig foundations here and then thought better of it. Only the Rifle Volunteer was still standing, at the corner of where Sicily Street used to be. It was eleven-thirty, and while he watched, the landlord put on the lights and came out to open the doors. He stooped ponderously to draw out the bolt, and stood gazing for a minute at the sky; then he looked across the wasteland, shading his eyes as if he were scanning the prairie. Sholto was the only human figure within his view. There was a rusting refrigerator lying on its back, a swastika spray-gunned on a wall; human faeces. Sholto felt the straps of his holdall cutting into his wrists. Picking his feet out of the mud, scraping his shoe on a handy brick, he began to make his way towards the Rifle Volunteer. I thought the war was over, Sholto said.

  Miss Tidmarsh was nearly fifty now, and still going strong. Her shiny new car waited outside on the gravel. Muriel followed her; withered flanks inside a scarlet bib-and-brace. “Guess what!” Miss Tidmarsh said. “We think we’ve found you a job. Who’s a lucky girl?”

  She reached a hand across Muriel, pulled her seat belt, and snapped it fastened. They crunched off over the gravel. Even Miss Tidmarsh’s style of driving seemed less mature than it had been. Muriel said, “Whatever happened to Miss Field?”

  Miss Tidmarsh glanced at her sideways. “Fancy you remembering Miss Field! Was she your social worker?”

  “Such a lovely person,” Muriel said dotingly. It was an expression the nurses used, about lady doctors who did not snub them and relatives who did not pester.

  “Did you think so? She left. Went to work in a bank, if I remember. I think she got married or something.”

  They shot out of the main gate and onto the road to town. Muriel didn’t look back.

  She started off as a cleaner, pulling a little trolley with her brush and her mop and her scouring powder and her special bucket. She had her name written on the trolley: MURIEL. She slopped her water about the corridors and under the tables in the canteen; she tipped her powder down the lavatories, and sang while she plied her mop. She learned to sing with a cigarette in her mouth, because cigarettes were what the factory made, and any worker was at liberty to pluck the finished article from the machines and puff away during the tea break and the half-hour for lunch.

  At the end of the first week Maureen said to her: “Muriel, love, I don’t know what to say. Look at your brush, it’s all worn down to stumps. Have you been chewing it?” Maureen sighed heavily. “There’s a wheel coming off MURIEL. You’ve got through as much powder as I use in three months. And look at your Eeziwipes; they’re all over the place.”

  Muriel stood looking down at her feet.

  “No point putting your bottom lip out,” Maureen said. “I don’t know, where’ve you been all your life? I suppose some can clean and some can’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Am I discharged then?”

  “That’s not up to me, duck. There’s enough on the dole as it is. On your own at home, are you?”

  “I am at the moment. But I’m expecting my mother.”

  “Ah, that’s nice. Well, look, lovey, buck up now. Perhaps we can get you on Ripping.”

  That first weekend of freedom, Muriel paid a visit to her old home. It was quite a distance from the room that Miss Tidmarsh had found for her. She saw buses going about the streets, but she didn’t know how to get one to go in the right direction. So she walked; she had nothing else to do.

  Considering how many years had passed, the district hadn’t changed much. She turned off Lauderdale Road, where she used to wait for the minibus. She paused for a few moments before the house where the fox terrier used to live, and took a good look. The stained glass and the net curtains had gone. The woodwork was painted white, and there was a panelled front door of polished wood, with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head; and a carriage lamp on the wall. It looked very smart. If the dog came out, I could kick it, she thought. She turned the corner. Buckingham Avenue had hardly altered at all. Each house stood set back from the road behind its neat privet hedge. Peering down between the houses, she saw the thick clumps of rhododendrons, the striped lawns, the trellised archways for climbing roses. At number 2, her home, there were big stone urns on either side of the door; flowering plants spilled out of them, and a hanging basket swung from the porch. The shrubs had been cleared from the side of the house, and they had put up a flat-roofed extension, bright red brick against the pebble-dash. The windows gleamed. She walked to the gate and traced the number with her finger. She would never have believed that her mother’s house could look like this. She felt lonely.

  She hung about for a while on the other side of the road, waiting to see if anyone would come out. Other people lived in the house, and she knew who; that monster of lust called Colin Sidney, who had seized his chance to buy it up cheap and move in next door to his scheming sister. What about the spare room, she wondered. Had there been an eviction, or were they still forced to keep the door locked?

  Muriel waited for an hour. No one came in or out of number 2. Her feet hurt and she was thirsty. Presently she set off to walk back to her lodgings and sleep until it was time to go to the factory again. I can come again next week, she thought.

  The Ripping Room had sixteen occupants, ranged at two long tables. Kieran came from the lift, pulling his tro
lley. “I’m a YOP,” he told Muriel. “They get me cheap.”

  “What’s a Yop?” Muriel asked.

  “Don’t you know? It’s a Youth Opportunity.” He added, “We get a lot of those.”

  “Kieran brings the boxes,” Edna said. “Right? These are old cigarettes, right, off shop shelves what have gone out of date. On that trolley he’s got two hundred thousand rotten old fags. You get your box, right? Take out the packets. Open the packets, right?” She looked around her. “Kieran, where’s our boxes, where’s our bloody stacking boxes, where’s our Universal Containers?”

  Kieran came sloping up. “I was putting me lipstick on,” he said. “I’m entitled.”

  “Get on with it!” Edna said. “Empty the fags out, right? Fags to the left, foil to the right. Fags to the left, foil to the right. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Muriel said. Edna was an angry-looking woman, with varicose veins and black corkscrew curls. She wore an overall and white cap. “Away you go then,” she said, and went off grumbling back to her own table.

  “What happens to them all?” Muriel asked.

  “Oh, they scrunch ’em all up and make ’em into new ones,” Kieran said.

  There were two tables, and Edna’s got preferential treatment. When the Navy Issue came back in their tins, with the mould growing under the lids, it was never Edna’s table that got them. They were Permanent Rippers. On the other table, the girls could be moved, as the work required, to the Making Room, to the Blender, or the Hogshead. Before the week was out, Muriel had learned to rip very nicely. She was never moved; nor was the elderly lady who worked opposite her.

  This was a humble little woman, with a worn bony face, and eyes and nose and mouth so insignificant that to call them features was an inflation of the truth. A scant amount of iron-grey hair was pinned fiercely to her little skull. The skin of her neck was yellow, her shoulders were bowed, and her hands shook a little as she reached for her cigarette boxes. She hardly seemed to have the strength for ripping. Every morning, before Kieran brought his first trolleyload, she would take out her teeth and wrap them in tissue paper, and slide them into her handbag. She would snap the clasp and hold the bag to her for a moment, looking around her with an anxious little smile; then she would put on her overall, over her pinny, over her old polyester dress. She seldom spoke. Her eyes watered continuously. She walked with her knees bent, her head down; a soft silent creature of depressive aspect. From time to time—once a week perhaps—some word from one of the other girls would catch her fancy, some gossip or quip, and she would tip her head back, open her toothless mouth, and roar with silent laughter, wiping her eyes the while and trembling at her own temerity.