Doris Lessing - Doris Lessing

Jocelin went on looking at Alice, waiting for her to explain herself. She was formidable and frightening, Alice thought. Yet what could be more ordinary than Jocelin? A stranger would see a rather slatternly blonde, strands of pale hair falling over her face, smears of some sort of white powder on her old grey sweater. But it was her concentration, her focussing of herself behind what she did...

Alice said feebly, "Hello," and Jocelin did not respond, but went on working, pouring white grains from an old saucepan into a copper pipe.

"I didn't like what happened down there," said Alice, sounding ineffective even to herself, and Jocelin nodded and said, "No, neither did I. But I don't see that we can do anything but go on. We must get the job done quickly, and then scatter."

There was nowhere in the room to sit, only the trestle and behind it the stool on which Jocelin sat. Windows showed a greying sky. The birds would start soon. Alice stood in front of Jocelin like a schoolgirl in front of a teacher, and said, "Have you thought yet what we should do?"

"Yes, of course. What we blow up depends on our means, doesn't it. I've got a pretty good idea of what the capacity of these things is. But we have to discuss it."

"Have you... I mean... you've..."

"No, I haven't done this before. But it's a question of using your common sense," said Jocelin briskly. She set aside one copper tube, which was about ten inches long and presumably had reached some stage of readiness, and took up another. She nodded sideways at the "recipe book," which lay open. This production shared the same qualities as the devices made according to its recipes. It was not printed, but photographed, which gave it a technical, ugly look. It was on bad paper. It had a yellowish plastic cover, like a cheap cookery book. Everything on that trestle looked cheap, makeshift, sharpedged, and for some reason unfinished. Everything, that is, except the clever packets of chemicals, which seemed glossy with the amount of thought and expertise that had gone into them.

"And it wouldn't be a bad idea if we had a practice run," said Jocelin, smiling. It was, as might be expected, a cold, off-putting smile.

"Right on," said Alice. "Of course."

"We could choose something that deserves to be blown up."

Alice came to life with, "Yes. Something absolutely shitty... something revolting, yes."

Jocelin looked at her curiously, because of this sudden animation. "Have you anything in mind? I want something defined, if you know what I mean. Something definite, not too big; and solid. So that I can check quantities."

Alice was reviewing in her mind's eye things she would enjoy seeing blown up. She had to discard the high corrugated iron fences around the former market where everyone had had such a good time; which, all through the week, and particularly on Saturdays and Sundays, had been like a festival. A fence was not "defined." It went on and on.

"Not a telephone box," said Jocelin. "It says here exactly how much one needs to do one of those in."

"A car?"

"Yes, we might have to use a car, because of the difficulty of access. Of being seen. But I know what a car would need. Something else."

Alice smiled. "I know what." A passion of loathing had taken her over, so that she felt quite shaky with it. "Oh God, yes," she breathed. "I'll show you. It's not far."

"Right." Jocelin left her post and was beside Alice as they went silently down the stairs. The hall was not dark, but grey. Daylight. There would soon be people in the streets, the early workers.

They had only to walk half a mile, to an area of small streets that had been built before the invention of the motorcar. Now lorries trundled there all day, crunching backwards around corners, passing one another with inches to spare. The pavements, built so that two people could pass each other, were narrow, and in two of these little streets, at right angles to each other, the pavement had been widened on one side, thus further narrowing the streets by about a yard. This piece of official brilliance was dazzling enough, but in addition, to make it all totally incomprehensible to the ordinary mind, having gained this extra yard or so of pavement for the comfort and satisfaction of the citizens, the Council had then stuck all along the reclaimed edge of pavement cement stanchions or bollards of a peculiarly ugly grey-brown, about a yard tall, and round, like teeth. These hideous and pointless and obstructive objects, twenty or so around each corner at either end of the afflicted street, which Alice passed whenever she went to the Underground, provoked in her the all-too-familiar helpless rage, useless, violent, and unappeasable. She would stand there, examining this scene as she had done when seeing how the Council workmen had filled in lavatories with cement, smashed pipes, vandalised whole houses, saying to herself, People did this. First, in some office, they thought it up, and then they made a plan, and then they instructed workmen to do this, and then workmen did it. It was all incomprehensible. It was frightening, like some kind of invincible stupidity made evident and visible. Like modern university buildings.

Side by side on the pavement, which was, because of the cement teeth, as narrow as it had been before the widening, Alice and Jocelin looked at the scene. A reversing or too narrowly turning lorry had knocked one of the teeth sideways. Their bases were stained with dog urine and shit. Under the low grey dawn sky, the still-sleeping houses held the people who would be insulted by these pavements, these cement teeth, every time they came out of doors. The houses seemed tender and innocent, the sky pure and sad. Then began the dawn chorus.

Alice was weeping with rage.

Jocelin sighed, and said, "Right. I see what you mean. But this isn't an easy location. There must be people around most times of the day and night."

"There are none now."

"But there are always night owls looking out of windows, or women up with their babies."

Alice was comforted by this evidence of the ordinary in Jocelin, but said, "But that is true of everywhere, all the time, isn't it?"

Jocelin did not answer. She was looking at the knocked-askew tooth. Without guiltily glancing around, or looking along the rows of windows, she went quickly to this stanchion and tried to lift it. It moved a little. Alice joined her, and together, with difficulty, they raised it to the perpendicular and let it go again.

Swiftly, Jocelin examined the gap at the base of this tooth, where there were some thin metal wires, and said, "This will do. I'll put the charge under it. Then make it stand upright. All I want to know is how much I need to use of something. Tomorrow. We'll do it tomorrow. About an hour earlier than this."

It was getting on for five.

They had been standing there for a good ten minutes, but not a soul had appeared. Yet they were surrounded by windows and, possibly, eyes. A familiar feeling of recklessness, excitement, was stealing through Alice. Her awful lethargy had gone. The dim, grey numb feeling like a poison - gone!

And as they turned the corner to their street, she broke into a run, and sprinted, from sheer excess energy, up to their gate, and vaulted over it, and then up the path, to be brought to a halt by the door, which after all had to be opened. With a key.

Jocelin, arriving calmly, said, "One has to be very together for this job. Calm. Not excitable." Alice muttered something apologetic.

They went up to bed.

Alice did not sleep much; she was thrilling with excitement, with anticipation. Coming downstairs in a sleeping house, she made herself walk sedately, because of what Jocelin had said.

She sat in the kitchen and thought, Well, here I am again, waiting for people to wake up. She drank tea, ate wholemeal toast and honey, then remembered the packages in the attic. At once her whole self seemed afflicted with confusion, with division. What was needed was a car... but there was no car at 45.... How to get hold of a car? Checking that it wasn't too late - about eight, time to get her before she went to work - Alice walked as fast as she could to Felicity's place.