“Nineteen sixty-two,” said Auntie.
John Lewis-that had been Jock’s name. Just like the Oxford Street store. How funny, she’d never thought of it like that before. If he’d lived she’d have been Mrs. Lewis and it would have been on envelopes, Mrs. J. Lewis. But she need not think of it, for he was gone. She put on her rubber gloves, washed the knife again, and dried it, wrapped it up in the sports pages of the paper, the ones she didn’t want to read, and then put it in a plastic carrier bag. Better not leave it in her wheelie bin. If no one could steal the bin they could steal what was inside it and what those gangs wanted was knives.
“That’s what they use,” said Auntie’s voice. “Guns aren’t easy to get hold of, you have to pay a lot of money for a gun, but knives are another thing. They all carry knives. That’s why there are all these murders. Gangs going after gangs. Good riddance to bad rubbish, if you ask me. It was a bomb killed Edward the Ninth, but he was different.”
“Go away,” Minty said, but Auntie went on muttering.
Maybe she should take the knife up to one of the big bins in the street. The one where she’d put her stained clothes would do. She was taking the third batch of washing out of the machine when the doorbell rang. Who could that be? Now that Laf didn’t come round with the papers, no one ever called on her unless it was Jehovah’s Witnesses. Auntie had liked the Jehovah’s Witnesses, she’d bought that Watchtower from them and agreed with everything they said, but she drew the line when it came to going about with them, knocking on people’s doors. Minty washed her hands and was drying them when the bell rang again. “All right, I’m coming,” she said, though no one could hear her out there on the step.
It was Laf and Sonovia. Minty stared. She didn’t say anything.
“Don’t shut the door in our faces, Minty love,” said Laf. “We’ve come in a spirit of goodwill and loving your neighbor as yourself, haven’t we, Sonny?”
“Can we come in?”
Minty held the door open wider. Sonovia tripped as she stepped on to the mat, her heels were so high. The blue dress that had hung loose on Minty was still a bit tight across the hips. She and Laf followed Minty into the front room, where it was gloomy as usual, even on a sunny day.
“It’s like this,” Laf began in the tone he used to teenage criminals who had reoffended. It sounded more like sorrow than anger. “Neighbors mustn’t go on not speaking. It’s not right and it’s not Christian. Now Sonn and me have just listened to this sermon all about loving your enemies, especially your neighbors, and we reckoned we’d come in here on the way back in a spirit of humility, didn’t we, Sonn?”
“I’m sure I’m not anybody’s enemy,” said Minty.
“And we’re not. Sonny has got something to say and it’s not easy for her, being somewhat puffed up with pride like the pastor said some folks are, but she’s going to humble herself and say it, aren’t you, Sonn?”
Sonovia said in a low, grudging voice that she hoped things would be all right now. “We could let bygones be bygones.”
“Say it, Sonn.”
She screwed up her face in agony at the prospect of an apology passing her lips. The words came out one by one and slowly. “I’m sorry. About the dress, I mean. I didn’t mean to upset anyone.” She looked at her husband. “I-am-sorry.”
Minty didn’t know what to say. This was a situation she’d never before been in. Auntie had quarreled with a lot of people but she’d never made it up afterward. Once you stopped speaking to someone you’d stopped for good. She nodded at Sonovia. As if all the words were new to her, as if in a foreign language she learned as a child but never since then used, she said, “Sorry. I’m the same as you. I mean, about bygones.”
The two women looked at each other. Sonovia took a step forward, with a helpful push from Laf. Awkwardly, she put her arms round Minty and kissed her cheek. Minty stood there and let herself be hugged and kissed.
Laf gave a sort of cheer and held up both his thumbs. “Mates again?” he said. “Pals? That’s the stuff.”
“My deah,” said Sonovia, her normal vitality restored, “to tell you the truth, I was actually quite glad to have this outfit cleaned, I should have had it done myself. After I’d let you have it I remembered there was this nasty ketchup stain on the hem.”
“That’s all right,” said Minty. “That soon came off.”
Laf smiled broadly. “So what we want is that you come to the pictures with us tonight. Not Marble Arch, not after that poor chap getting murdered, but we thought Whiteley’s and Saving Grace. How about it?”
“I don’t mind. What sort of time?”
“We reckoned on the five-fifteen showing and then we can all have a pizza afterward. Now, how about a kiss for me?”
The knife she’d wrapped up she put into a carrier bag, one of the anonymous plain blue ones the corner shops gave you, and walked the hundred yards to the bin in Harrow Road where she’d put her stained clothes. But the bin was full to overflowing, as it often was on a Sunday, bags of rubbish all round it, spilling out their contents on to the pavement. Minty wasn’t going to contribute to that, it was disgusting. She went home again and had her lunch, washing her hands before and after she ate it.
She seemed to remember a group of bins somewhere down Kilburn Lane and she walked a long way up there looking for them. In the end she had to make her way quite a distance down Ladbroke Grove, past the tube station, before she found what she was looking for: clean bins and no mess spilling from them. She opened the lid of a bin. It smelled nasty owing to people like Mr. Kroot not wrapping their rubbish up properly. On the top was a bright green Marks and Spencer’s carrier with nothing dirtier in it than something wrapped up in tissue paper, a couple of cereal packets, and an unused loaf of bread still in its cellophane packing. She didn’t too much mind being associated with any of that, so she thrust the knife in its blue bag in between the loaf and the cornflakes, and closed the lid.
On the way back she stopped for a while and looked down over the bridge to the railway track. The tube wasn’t really a tube at all here but underground trains doing this bit of the track above ground, and it was also the main line to places in the west of England. Here, she knew, just down there below her, the local train and the Gloucester express had collided. Many people had died in that crash, including her Jock. One of the trains caught fire and that was the one, she supposed, he’d been in.
He’d been visiting his mother. Minty thought of her as very old and bent, with wispy gray hair, walking with a stick, or maybe someone like Mr. Kroot’s sister. She ought to have been in touch with Jock’s fiancée, ought really to have come to see her. Minty imagined a nice letter from old Mrs. Lewis, saying how sad it was and inviting her to come and stay. She wouldn’t have gone, of course she wouldn’t. The house was very likely dirty and without much hot water. But she should have been asked. Of course, it was plain why she hadn’t been asked. Once she was in that house or even once she’d answered a letter, Mrs. Lewis would have had to give back the money.
It had begun to rain. Minty shook her head at it, though she knew it would take no notice. As soon as she got home she ran a bath. She scrubbed her fingernails and her toenails and Auntie’s voice said, suddenly coming out of nowhere, “Rain’s filthy stuff. It comes down through miles of dirty air.”