Authors: Margaret Drabble
FITTED WHILE U WAIT
. I didn’t wait. I couldn’t quite absorb the shock. I repeat. I haven’t absorbed it yet.
TRAINING FOR KILLS
, that was another advertisement. I worked that one out quite quickly. But many of the graffiti were impenetrable. Who was speaking to whom, on these city streets? Nobody was speaking to the person that is me. Nothing was aimed at me. The only message I thought I could understand was the one that said
COMMUNISM IS ALIVE AND WELL AND FIGHTING IN PERU
. This was applied to the wall in stencil, and it was accompanied by a hammer and sickle. It is so unlikely and so old-fashioned a message that it may well be an anagram for something else – some sexual perversion, probably. Like the dead Christmas tree, it’s still there. It may be there for ever. It may be there when I am dead and gone.
She first hears them speaking in unknown tongues
The shop is called PriceCutter. It is a fair-sized grocery store, part of a cheap chain, and it sells food, newspapers, liquor. The people who work there are not white, nor are they black, and they speak a language that I do not know. The body of the shop occupies a long, deep oblong space, with shelves on both sides, and a central head-high block bearing racks of merchandise. The aisles are not quite wide enough and people are always banging irritably and sometimes angrily into one another. Londoners are not patient people. They anger quickly. That first evening, I was bemused by the shop’s layout, as large cardboard boxes impeded access to many of the shelves, but I was to discover that this was a temporary (though recurrent) problem – I had come on some kind of delivery day, and groceries were piled around at random. Towers of lavatory paper, crates of tinned beans, pallets of packets of rice blocked the way at every turn. It was not like this in Woodbridge or Farlingham.
At first sight, the produce looked varied and quite tempting, but on closer inspection the charm palled. There were hard shiny bright
green apples, and large round brown onions, and a choice of greenish or speckled bananas, and pallid browning lettuces balled up in Cellophane, and unnatural tomatoes. There was a wall of refrigerated shelves lined with small plastic pots of salad stuffs which looked enticing from afar but which, when challenged, turned out to contain pasta twirls coated in synthetic-looking mayonnaise in lurid shades of bright salmon or mustard yellow. There were also on offer some tubs of rust-tinted couscous spotted with dubious red and green specks of vegetable matter, and containers of lurid bathroom-paint-pink taramasalata. I am used to this kind of fare and ware now, and know how to avoid it or pick my way through it, but on that evening I felt mesmerized by the display. A sense of cheap poison prevailed. Everything was false and showy. It reminded me of my mother’s warnings against the confectionery in Woolworths. Nevertheless, I risked an experimental little pot of stuffed vine leaves swimming in dark oil. We didn’t get those in Suffolk.
I played safe after that, with a small block of processed Cheddar cheese, some milk, some Quaker macaroni, some bacon, a packet of cornflour and a bottle of Spanish wine. There was a whole wall of alcohol, with many bottles of unknown and brightly coloured drinks with names like Bacardi Breezer and Hooch and Dandelion. Pale chalk green and mauve pink and yellow gold and turquoise are these drinks, in their smart frosted bottles. To my surprise I couldn’t see any of those delicious little Microwave Meals for One which I know make up most of Sally’s not-very-slimming diet. It has taken me some time to realize that those meals are expensive. Those are a luxury. They don’t stock them in PriceCutter, though they do stock turquoise beverages.
I have a microwave. Microwaves are sinful. Andrew didn’t approve of them and wouldn’t allow the School to install them. That’s why I got one. Andrew thought they might be bad for the children’s health. He didn’t approve of laziness and short cuts and aerosols. He may have been right. I’m not saying he was wrong about everything. But I don’t mind if I poison myself, do I? What does it matter, at my age?
Near the checkout desk, where the attendants were speaking to one another in tongues, there was a heap of cut-price items in a dump
bin – packets of food past their sell-by date, tins with dents or torn labels, that kind of thing. I picked out a heavily reduced wall calendar in a Cellophane wrap, portraying scenes of ‘London’s Tourist Sites’, and added it to my purchases. Then I set off to my new home. I let myself in with some pride and some satisfaction. So far, so good.
(My use of that phrase ‘dump bin’ there is anachronistic. I didn’t know those words when I moved here. I learnt them, at my Virgil class, from Anaïs Al-Sayyab. But I don’t suppose that matters. Nobody will know. I don’t have to be too careful about chronology, do I? This document isn’t going to be used in evidence in a court of law, is it?)
A lot of the shops around here are covered in metal grilles. PriceCutter isn’t, so I must suppose it has a complicated but concealed alarm and surveillance system instead. The video shop and the off-licence and the post office are all boxed in with this sinister grillwork. Like prisons. Like Wormwood Scrubs.
I boldly thought of buying myself some flowers, from the flower shop on the corner, which, as I now know, always has a fine array of blooms. (I didn’t know that then.) But I hadn’t got a spare hand to carry them with, so I didn’t. I was glad, later, that I hadn’t attempted to cheer myself with a bouquet on that first evening, because I found that I couldn’t understand a word that the old flower man said to me. He was incomprehensible. Forget Eliza Doolittle. That old man doesn’t speak in tongues, he speaks in English, but it’s an extreme Cockney English, far more obscure than the English of any Shavian heroine I have heard, and anyway I don’t know what the
words
mean. London flowers seem to have different names from Suffolk flowers. What is ‘jip’, I ask you? (I know the answer now.)
He calls his ‘Alstro Marias’ ‘Ulster Marys’. I’ve learnt that one too. I like it.
When I got home, on that first evening, I opened the wine and poured myself a glass and stood and stared out of the high window. I switched on the radio, and found some music. Classic FM. The reception was excellent. I quite like that man who speaks to me in a friendly Irish accent between recordings.
This was the first evening of the rest of my new life. I was hungry. I hadn’t had lunch. I started to prepare my supper, although it was so
early. I hadn’t brought a grater. I had to chop the cheese up into little chunks. I thought I’d get it all ready, then reheat it in the microwave later.
When I’d finished my second glass of wine, I hung up the calendar on the wall by the cooker, and crossed off all the used-up days in red pen. I crossed them out heavily till the paper was dented by the ballpoint. I obliterated them. All of January, and half of February. I told myself that I would cross off each day as it came. I would measure out my days.
As I sat there, on that first evening, I was suffused by a sense of what I can only call keen anticipation. I felt an intensity of anticipation for I knew not what. My destiny had no shape and no direction. It shone before me like the diffused radiance of dawn breaking over an unknown landscape.
My macaroni cheese was excellent. I ate it with relish. (I tried the vine leaves, but they were horrible.) Then I sat and stared out of the window from my one armchair. Mine is the most urban of views. Instead of the well-tended sloping lawn and the herbaceous borders and the distant glint of estuary that I could see from Holling House, I can see a two-tiered stretch of motorway, and blocks of high-rise council flats with their bright and intermittent lights, and the rooftops and skylights and aerials and satellite dishes and balconies and window boxes and windows of the nameless residents of these streets. Some of my third-floor neighbours hang their washing out on cleverly contrived lines and pulleys, and in the summer they put their shoes out to air at night. I can see geraniums, and a small palm tree in the middle distance, and pots of what Anaïs tells me is cannabis. I wouldn’t know about that, but that’s what she says.
The house I live in has a long untidy garden, to which I have no access. Occasionally I see a young yellow fox with a white apron walk delicately along the wall. At the bottom of the garden grows a tall London plane tree. Its branches spread on a level with my windows. The tree has never been pollarded, but its crown has been heavily and brutally pruned, and the branches end abruptly, like amputated limbs. On that first evening, I watched the silvery-grey tree in the blue night, and it seemed to me that as I watched the strangest bird in the world
alighted upon it. It was as large as an egret, and its neck was as long as an egret’s. I could not distinguish its true colour in the twilight, but it was a pale bird. I wondered if it had come to visit me from the Suffolk salt marshes. I wondered if it was an omen. It bobbed and stretched and preened itself upon the bough, and its neck seemed to stretch like a snake’s. I peered at it, and its shape seemed to shift and change and alter before my eyes. After a while, curiosity overcame exhaustion and inertia, and heaved me out of my chair, and I got up and crossed to the window – and behold, it was nothing more nor less than a common wood pigeon. I had been observing it through a flaw in the glass of the windowpane, and the glass itself had magnified and melted the form of the bird. I found I could make the bird’s shape change at will. It was not a town pigeon, it was not one of those birds of grey and white with pink misshapen stumps for feet, it was an iridescent dove-grey pigeon of the dark and bloody London woods, and it was roosting in my tree.
I had power over the bird. It shifted shape at my command.
The flaw in the glass is always there. Sometimes I sit and stare through it for what seems like hours, making the outer world shift, marginally, at my will.
There aren’t so many birds in London. The sparrows are dying or disappearing, nobody knows why. The omnivorous pigeons and the predatory magpies survive. I would like to visit the birdless lake of Avernus. Where no birds sing.
Why am I so certain that something exciting will happen to me in London? How can it, at my age? And what will it be?
I should feel powerless, but I do not. I feel more powerful than I did when I was married to that good man Andrew, the pillar of his community, the admired of all observers. I feel more powerful than I did then when I was a new and beloved bride, than when I became three times a mother and could rule over small lives. I cannot explain this sense of power.
One day soon I intend to put this sense of power to the test and buy myself a Lottery ticket. This will be a first for me, like so many things in my new existence. I’m not sure where they are on sale. Do people buy them at the post office, are they to be found at the
newsagent’s? I think it will be a question of First-Time Lucky. I haven’t decided yet what to do with all the money. Anaïs may have some ideas. She has known riches in her time and she is still by temperament a big spender. She will be pleased when I win the jackpot.
Sally Hepburn will not be pleased. Sally wants me to be miserable. Sally wants to come and pry into my misery, and to report on it to those false friends in Farlingham. I should never have said she could come to this flat. What shall I give her for lunch? She’s a fussy eater, although she eats so much. She has fads and phases. One year she is a vegetarian, then she suddenly decides she can’t eat milk products but can accept white meat. One year fish is forbidden, the next it is the cure to all health problems. She even went through a phase when she decided she couldn’t stomach wheat. It is all nonsense. These whims are designed only to swell her sense of her own importance. They are designed to make trouble for other people. Macaroni cheese is safe, isn’t it? I can’t remember what her position is on milk products at the moment, but I think she ordered a pizza last time we met in the Gallery, and it was covered with cheese. I pointed this out, and she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. She said she’d always liked cheese. So she must have decided dairy products are all right. And they are what she is going to get.
She introduces her friends in their persons to this story
Suddenly my thin life is thick. It has filled up. Sally has been to lunch, and I have survived her visit. And Julia Jordan is coming to see me next week when she is in London. My social life is almost too busy. Activity attracts activity.
A pleasant middle-aged woman in the sauna at the Health Club spoke to me this evening. She asked me where she could find some scales to weigh herself. I couldn’t help her (oddly, I don’t think there are any scales in the Ladies’ Changing Room), but it was good to be asked. We spoke a little about the merits of the Steam Room. She said she had high blood pressure and was not supposed to spend too long in the heat.
Then, on the way back, the elegant young man with dreadlocks who lives under the bridge spoke to me. My face must have been
open, not shut. And so he spoke. He said, ‘Good evening, Ma’am, and how are you today?’ He was drinking cold Heinz chicken soup straight from the tin. I said I was fine, and that I hoped he was comfortable on his foam bedding. I gave him one of those new two-pound coins. He seemed quite pleased with it and turned it over several times as though it were a lucky charm. I used to be afraid to pass this man, and I would walk by on the other side, but I do not think he is at all dangerous. I am glad he spoke to me.
I gave Sally soup, but it wasn’t cold, nor was it out of a tin. It was out of one of those fancy cardboard cartons, and I pretended I’d made it myself, or rather I didn’t say I hadn’t. This wasn’t wholly cheating, as I did improve it – I added some mushrooms and parsley and cream. I don’t know if she was fooled or not. I wasn’t going to let on. Then we had our macaroni cheese. She ate that up all right, too, and I had made that from scratch. I hesitated over wine, but decided I’d better offer her some. I didn’t want her thinking I couldn’t afford it. But I didn’t want her thinking I spent all my life drinking either. So I made a bit of a fuss about opening the bottle and not being able to find a corkscrew and told her I never usually drink at lunchtime. And that’s true. I don’t drink at lunchtime. I don’t know if my performance was convincing or not. It wasn’t a performance, as I was telling the truth, but she made me feel as though it was a performance.