Every Camera Slashed! another message is. Olympus! Minolta! Praktica! A Pizzaland is brightly lit, people occupying all the tables along the windows, a girl in a red beret talking urgently to her companion, a man with a ponytail who keeps nodding. A crowd of eight share a single table. A couple with a child gesture at the child, cross because she won’t eat the food. A man wearing a cap is on his own. ‘I’ll go for a Kentucky,’ someone passing by on the pavement says. ‘I’d rather a Kentucky.’
Cartons are thrown down outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Colonel Sanders is reassuring in the window, his honest gaze, his white goatee, Finger Lickin’ Good. The voice of Sheena Easton on a ghetto-blaster is drowned by Michael Jackson’s. Bright neon sparkles: Coca-Cola is a Way of Life, it says in the sky.
Two women rattle charity boxes. A West Indian is talking to himself, gesturing with his hands. A gang of hooligans push through the pedestrians, pretending to elbow them aside. In a gambling arcade men and youths, grim-faced, play the machines.
Felicia’s eyes dart about as she continues on her way, still searching in the crowd. When she arrives at the bus station she settles herself on a seat, but an hour later she is told that no further buses are due either to arrive or depart, and is asked to go. She finds the railway station, and lies on a wooden seat in the waiting-room, but from there, too, she is eventually moved on.
She rests in the entrance to a shop that is more than just a doorway: a wide secluded area hidden from the street by a central pillar with windows in it, displaying watches. She sits there, crouched on the tiled ground. One of her shoes has come through in the sole. She roots in her bags and when she has changed her shoes she remains where she is because it is quiet.
She wanders on eventually, resting sometimes on a pavement seat, moving again when it becomes too cold. At a stall beneath a bridge where taxi drivers stand about she buys a sausage roll that is reduced to fourpence because it’s stale. The air is dank with mist.
Already, hours ago, the homeless of this town have found their night-time resting places – in doorways, and underground passages left open in error, in abandoned vehicles, in the derelict gardens of demolished houses. As maggots make their way into cracks in masonry, so the people of the streets have crept into one-night homes in graveyards and on building sites, in alleyways and courtyards, making walls of dustbins pulled close together, and roofs of whatever lies near by. Some have crawled up scaffolding to find a corner beneath the tarpaulin that protects an untiled expanse. Others have settled down in cardboard cartons that once contained dishwashers or refrigerators.
Hidden away, the people of the streets drift into sleep induced by alcohol or agitated by despair, into dreams that carry them back to the lives that once were theirs. They lie with their begging notices still beside them, with enough left of a bottle to ease the waking moment, with pavement cigarette butts to hand. Homeless and hungry is their pasteboard plea, scrawled without thought, one copying another: only money matters. All ages lie out in the places that have been found, men and women, children. The family rejects have ceased to weep into their make-do pillows; those brought low by their foolishness or by untimely greed plead silently for sleep. A one-time clergyman no longer dwells on his disgrace, but dreams instead that it never happened. Rejected husbands, abandoned wives, victims of chance, have passed beyond bitterness, and devote their energies to keeping warm. The deranged are lulled by voices that often in the night persuade them to rise and walk on, which obediently they do, knowing they must. Men who have failed lie on their own and dream of a reality they dare not contemplate by day: great hotels and deferential waiters, the power they once possessed, the limbs of secretaries. Women who were beautiful in their day are beautiful again. There is no arrogance among the people of the streets, no insistent pride in their sleeping features, no lingering telltale of a past’s corruption. They have passed the stage of desperation, and on their downward path some among the women have sold themselves: faces chapped, fingernails ingrained, they are beyond that now. Men, in threes and fours, have offered the three-card trick on these same streets. Beards unkempt, hair matted, skin darkened with filth, they would not now attract the wagers of their passing trade. In their dreams there is occasionally the fantasy that they may be cured, that they may be loved, that all voices and visions will cease, that tomorrow they will discover the strength to resist oblivion. Others remain homeless by choice and for their own particular reasons would not return to a more settled life. The streets, they feel, are where they now belong.
‘Looking for a kip, dear?’ Felicia is addressed by a limping woman who is pushing a pram full of rags, with plastic bags tied around the belt of her coat. The woman’s face is crimson and gnarled, her eyes bloodshot. Wisps of white hair escape from beneath a woollen muffler that’s tied under her chin. Scabs have formed around her mouth.
‘Nowhere to settle, dear?’
‘The hostel’s full.’
‘Happen it would be.’
‘I had my money stolen.’
‘Am I right you’re an Irish girl?’
‘I am.’
‘I’m from the County Clare myself. A while back.’
‘I’m looking for someone.’
The lame woman isn’t interested in that. She has been going about the streets for forty-one years, she says; forty-one years, two months and a day. ‘I keep the count. Sharpens you to keep the count.’
Feeling safer in company than alone, Felicia walks with the woman through a neighbourhood that becomes quieter and darker as they advance. Their progress is slow, each litter-bin investigated, the remains of food rescued and gnawed, bottles drained of their dregs. ‘What age would you call me?’ Felicia is asked during such a pause, and she says she doesn’t know.
‘Eighty-two years of age, still going strong. I’ve been all over. Liverpool, Plymouth, all the sailor towns. I was in Glasgow one time. I knew all sorts in Glasgow. I knew the cousin of the Queen. Lovely, considerate man. Lovely in his uniform.’
Skirting an area of waste ground, they have left the streets and are approaching the tow-path of a canal. The water lies below them, at the bottom of an incline, reached by a path through scrub and weeds. Good shelter down on the cut, the lame woman promises, and delves among the rags in her pram. She holds a few up to demonstrate their usefulness as blankets, and Felicia shudders, affected by the fetid odour this rummaging has brought with it.
‘Lena’s out!’ a voice cries, near them somewhere, and then two figures emerge from the mist, one of them waving and exclaiming again that Lena is out. From time to time weak moonlight filters through the clouds, and as the figures come closer Felicia distinguishes a skinny young man with a boyish face and clipped fair hair, and a scrawny middle-aged woman with matchstick legs. The man is attired in flannel trousers and a knitted jersey under a tweed overcoat torn at one pocket, a tie knotted into the collar of a grubby shirt. Orange dye is growing out of the woman’s grey hair; in a skeletal face her lips are sensual, pouted into a tulip shape, shiny now with lipstick. Stubble sprouts on her companion’s chin and upper lip and in a soft growth on the sides of his face. In the misty twilight the woman’s clothes seem shabby.
‘How are you, George?’ the lame woman inquires after she has welcomed Lena back. Lena was released that morning at eight, subsequent exchanges reveal, and got a lift on a narrow boat to the Flowers and Castle, where George was waiting. They’ve been drinking barley wine. ‘I’m off if you’re not coming,’ the lame woman abruptly threatens and, not waiting for Felicia’s reply, she disappears into the scrub of the slope, the wheels of her pram rattling and juddering over the uneven surface.
‘Haven’t you a place for the night?’ the skinny young man asks Felicia. ‘Are you stuck?’
‘I’ve nowhere tonight.’
Still preferring to be in company than on her own, Felicia remains with the two, returning with them the way she has come with the limping woman. They are curious at first: she tells them that she has been looking for a lawn-mower factory because a friend works there. She gives a description: dark hair kept short, medium height, greenish eyes, grey you’d probably call them. Johnny Lysaght, she says, and tells about the money that has disappeared from the sleeves of her jersey.
‘Typical, that,’ is Lena’s response, the description Felicia has given eliciting no interest. ‘Turn your head and you’re robbed while you’d blink.’
As they walk, Lena talks a lot. Stale as old cabbage, a prison social worker is; another one’s called Miss Rubbish. She was lucky, this time, with her cell-mate. ‘Wants me to go in with her when she gets out, Phyllsie does. Some type of dodge she has with the benefit. I wouldn’t go in with no one, Felicia, I give it to her honest. Now I’ve found the boy I ain’t looking for nothing else. Me and George stick together, Felicia, know what I mean? I wouldn’t want nothing dodgy there, not with young George. Don’t know the meaning of it, the boy don’t.’
‘You’re hungry, Felicia?’ George interrupts.
His voice is the most beautiful Felicia has ever heard. Each word he utters is perfectly enunciated, undistorted by accent or slurred delivery. Lena speaks roughly.
‘Yes, I’m hungry.’
Felicia adds that she hasn’t any money to spare for food, but George says that doesn’t matter and Lena agrees. In the streetlight Lena’s threadbare coat has acquired colour: a faded yellow, with ersatz gold buttons.
They buy portions of chips in a fish-and-chip shop and eat them on the street. She’s London herself, Lena says, bred and born. She and George met up there and decided on a change of scenery a while back on account of a problem they had, a woman who gave a description. They were sleeping under cardboard in London, and previous to that she was on the game, playing the motors. She never took to it. Before that, a man she met in Westbourne Grove persuaded her to have snow-capped mountains tattooed on her back. They’re there for ever now; act on an impulse and you have a landscape all over you for the rest of your days.
George is silent while Lena talks, content to nod sympathetically when the tattooing episode is recounted. His eyes screw up when he’s sympathetic, spreading geniality into his soft, boy’s features.
‘Wet as draining-boards some of them magistrates is,’ Lena comments, but adds that the judge who sent her down this time was a different kettle of fish, loving every minute of his sentencing. She describes the hot, red face, excitedly stern. ‘Example-to-others stuff. Know what I mean, Felicia?’
‘Yes.’
‘You pregnant then, Felicia? Bun in your tin, have you?’
‘That’s why I’m looking for Johnny.’
‘Johnny-come-lately, eh? Johnny-I-hardly-knew-you?’
‘It’s not like that.’
‘Course it ain’t. Course not.’ Lena pauses, then adds: ‘I’m not the boy’s mother, Felicia. Did you think I was his mother? He’s sixteen, you know, mother of his own down London way.’
‘Drives a Daimler,’ George says.
‘Don’t stand for a word against her, Georgie don’t. I hear that boy called a saint, Felicia, many’s the time. Bring him into a Pricerite or a Victor Value or a Lo-Cost, he don’t lift nothing, never has in his life, not so much as a tube of pastilles.’ All the time she was inside, George was out begging, sleeping rough, making do on cups of tea, never touched a thing. ‘Sends a card to the bishops on their birthdays, never forgets one of them. Education done that to him, Felicia, know what I mean?’
They arrive at a house with scaffolding around it and a temporary front door, made of unpainted blockboard. ‘No charge here for a doss,’ George reassures Felicia, pressing a bell that hangs on its wires, no longer attached to the door frame. From somewhere within the house comes the thump of music, and occasional hammering.
‘You’re welcome.’ A man in a bomber jacket, with a mug in his hand, greets them when the door is opened. ‘Come on in.’
He leads the way through an uncarpeted hall, towards uncarpeted stairs. Wallpaper has been partially removed from the walls, torn strips of it still hanging. Pieces of plaster, bricks, wood shavings and lengths of electrical wire are strewn about in the hall and on the stairs. Bags of cement, shovels, buckets and a stack of concrete blocks almost fill the first-floor landing. Coming from behind a closed door from which the paint has been burnt off, the music is louder at the top of the house. In another room the intermittent hammering is louder also.
‘So they’ve turned you loose again, Lena.’ Opening the third door on the landing, the man in the bomber jacket has to shout to make himself heard. ‘Remit, eh?’
‘That’s it, Mr Caunce.’
An unshaded bulb dimly lights a small room, empty of furniture. Several rust-marked mattresses, two of them occupied, lie close together on the floor.
‘There you go.’ The man in the bomber jacket smiles another welcome at the three newcomers. ‘OK then?’
Lena says the accommodation is fine. ‘Good-night, Mr Caunce.’
The occupants of the mattresses are a young man and a girl, fully dressed, without further covering. Both are lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling. Neither addresses the newcomers, nor ceases to gaze upwards.
‘The toilet’s across the way.’ Lena directs Felicia before she makes the journey herself.
When she returns, George and Felicia go in turn. Felicia doesn’t like the lavatory. There is no bolt on the door and it isn’t clean. The floorboards are sodden because the bowl is cracked and oozes water. A piece of rope has replaced the chain. A single tap protrudes from the wall, but the basin that was once beneath it has been removed. There is no lavatory paper.
She doesn’t like the room when she returns to it. She doesn’t like the house. Lena has taken her coat off, revealing a tight black imitation-leather skirt and a black jumper, which she now removes also. George has taken off his overcoat and his shoes.
‘All right for you?’ Lena asks, not pausing for a response. ‘Looks like our friends is on the needle.’ Lena and George share one of the mattresses, with George’s overcoat spread over them. Felicia lies down on the remaining one. Lena asks her to turn the light off. Mr Caunce doesn’t charge, George assures her again.
Felicia lies listening to the noisy breathing of the drugged couple, and the music and the hammering. These sounds and the rank smell in the room pass into Felicia’s sleep, until another sound wakes her. A woman is shouting. From somewhere lower down in the house come desperate, hysterical cries of distress.
The breathing of the couple does not alter. Neither Lena nor George wakes up. Then the music ceases, and with it the hammering, leaving behind only the woman’s shrill cries, words occasionally articulated. ‘Bestial! Bestial animals!’ Sobbing begins when the woman becomes exhausted, then silence until the music starts again, a