The Good Terrorist. Doris Lessing

Faye, Faye,’ until the girl suddenly shuddered and seemed to go limp, and collapsed into her arms.

      A silence.

      ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Bert, who was refusing to see that he was the cause of this outburst from Faye’s other self. Or selves? ‘If Faye doesn’t want to contribute, that’s fine. They always set the assessment very low, for squats anyway. And there’ll be other people coming in, of course, to replace the comrades who left yesterday. We’ll have to be sure they understand the arrangement we make with the Council.’

      Faye, half-hidden in Roberta’s arms, seemed to heave and struggle, but went quiet.

      Alice said, ‘If we don’t get this place cleared up, we’d have to leave anyway. We can clear it up, easy enough, but to keep it clean, we need the Council. There’s been all the complaints. The woman next door said she complained…’

      ‘Joan Robbins,’ said Faye. ‘That filthy fascist cow. I’ll kill her.’ But it was in her cockney, not her other, true, voice, that she spoke. She sat up, freed herself from solicitous Roberta, and lit another cigarette. She did not look at the others.

      ‘No, you won’t,’ said Roberta, softly. She reasserted her rights to Faye by putting her arm around her. Faye submitted, with her pert little toss of the head and a smile.

      ‘Well, it is disgusting,’ said Alice.

      ‘It was all right till you came,’ said Jim. This was not a complaint or an accusation, more of a question. He was really saying: How is it so easy for you, and so impossible for me?

      ‘Don’t worry,’ said Alice, smiling at him. ‘When we’ve got the place cleaned up, we will be just like everyone else in the street and after a bit no one will notice us. You’ll see.’

      ‘If you want to waste your money,’ said Faye.

      ‘We do have to pay at least the first instalment of electricity and gas. If we can persuade them to supply us,’ said Bert.

      ‘Of course we can,’ said Alice, and Pat said, ‘The meters are still here.’

      ‘Yes, they forgot to take them away,’ said Jim.

      ‘And what are we going to pay with?’ asked Faye. ‘We are all on Unemployment, aren’t we?’

      There was a silence. Alice knew that, paying a very low rent, there would be plenty of money. If people had any sense of how to use it, that is. She and Jasper, living with her mother and paying nothing, had about eighty pounds a week between them, on Social Security. But none of it was saved, because Jasper spent all his, and most of hers too, always coming to demand it. ‘For the Party,’ he said – or whatever Cause they were currently aligned with. But she knew that a lot of it went on what she described to herself, primly, as ‘his emotional life’.

      She knew, too, that in communities like this, there were payers and the other kind, and there was nothing to be done about it. She knew that Pat would pay; that Pat would make Bert pay – as long as she was here. The two girls would not part with a penny. As for Jim – well, let’s wait and see.

      She said, ‘There’s something we can do now, and that is, get the lavatories unblocked.’

      Roberta laughed. Her laugh was orchestrated; meant to be noticed.

      Faye said, ‘They are filled with concrete.’

      ‘So they were in one of the other houses I knew. It isn’t difficult. But we need tools.’

      ‘You mean tonight?’ asked Pat. She sounded interested, reluctantly admiring.

      ‘Why not? We’ve got to start,’ said Alice, fierce. In her voice sounded all the intensity of her need. They heard it, recognized it, gave way. ‘It’s not going to be nearly as difficult as you think now. I’ve looked at the lavatories. If the cisterns had been filled with concrete, it would be different, they’d have cracked, probably, but it isn’t difficult to get it out of the bowls.’

      ‘The workmen concreted over the tap from the main,’ said Bert.

      ‘Illegal,’ said Alice bitterly. ‘If the Water Board knew. Are there any tools?’

      ‘No,’ said Bert.

      ‘You said you have a friend near here? Has he got tools?’

      ‘She. Felicity. Her boyfriend has. Power tools. Everything. It’s his job.’

      ‘Then we could pay him. He could get the electricity right, too.’

      ‘With what do you pay ‘im,’ said Faye, singing it. ‘With what do we pay ‘im, dear Alice, with what?’

      ‘I’ll go and get the fifty pounds,’ said Alice. ‘You go and see your friend.’ She was at the door. ‘Tell him, plumbing and electricity. Plumbing first. If he’s got a big chisel and a heavy hammer we can start on this lavatory here in the hall. We really need a kango hammer. I’ll be back,’ she cried, and heard Jasper’s ‘Bring in something to eat, I’m starving.’

      On the wings of accomplishment Alice flew to the Underground, and on the train she thought of the house, imagining it clean and ordered. She ran up the avenue to Theresa. Only when she heard Anthony’s voice did she remember Theresa would be late.

      ‘Alice,’ she said into the machine. ‘It’s Alice.’

      ‘Come in, Alice.’

      Anthony’s full, measured, sexy voice reminded her of the enemies that she confronted, and she arrived outside their door wearing, as she knew, her look.

      ‘Well, Alice, come in,’ said Anthony, heartily but falsely, for it was Theresa who was her friend.

      She went in, knowing she was unwelcome. Anthony had on a dressing-gown, and there was a book in his hand. An evening off was what he was looking forward to, she thought. Well, he can spare me ten minutes of it.

      ‘Sit down, do. A drink?’

      ‘No, Anthony, I never drink,’ she said, and went straight on, ‘Theresa said this morning I could have fifty pounds.’

      ‘She’s not here. She’s got one of her conferences.’

      ‘I thought, you could give it to me. I need it.’ This was fierce and deadly, an accusation, and the man looked carefully at the young woman, who stood there in the middle of his sitting-room, dressed in the clothes he thought of as military, swollen with tears and with hostility.

      ‘I haven’t got fifty pounds,’ he said.

      A lie, Alice recognized, and she was staring at him with such hate that he murmured, ‘My dear Alice, do sit down, do. I’m going to have a drink if you won’t.’ He was trying to make it humorous, but she saw through it. She watched, standing, while the big dark bulky man turned from her, and poured himself whisky from a decanter. All her life, it seemed to her, she had had moments when she thought that he, and her friend, Theresa, were naked at nights in bed together, and she felt sick.

      She knew from her mother that the sex life of these two was vivid, varied and tempestuous, in spite of Anthony’s heavy humorous urbanities, Theresa’s murmuring, smiling endearments. Dear Alice, darling Alice, but at night…She felt sick.

      And she thought, as she had done when she was little, And they are so old! Watching the man’s broad back, grey thick silk, his smooth head, dark as oil, small for that body, she thought, they have been sexing all night and every night for all those years.

      He turned to her in a swift movement, glass in his hand, having thought what he should do, and said, ‘I’ll ring Theresa. If she’s not actually in conference…’ And he went swift and deadly to the telephone.

      Alice looked around the big expensive room. She thought: I’ll take one of those little netsukes, and run out, they’ll think it was the Spanish woman. But just then he came back and said, ‘They say they’ve called