It’s different now. The empty, pale blue sky, the green pea stalks, and grass and clay: all that makes it different, like looking for the ring together did. When he said, No luck? he wanted her to be in luck, he wanted everything to be all right. He wanted her to tend his baby, to give it all her love: in the nursery you could tell he wanted that. His voice is as it always is; it has not left her, his face has not blurred.
When she reached up for the fisherman’s hand it was only to be affectionate, and when the rictus began in his face she thought he was smiling back, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t go quickly on the shingle, his flopping fisherman’s boots a drag, holding him for another instant to her. When he was far away she picked a stone up, and felt her bitterness like vomit in her stomach when she tried to damage his boat. Riff-raff was what the old woman would have said, is maybe saying it again. The other woman was snooty on the landing that afternoon, you could tell by the way she looked. It was only him that wasn’t, and he never would be.
Pettie walks again, and rests again, and then the evening shadows come, and lengthen as she watches, the shapes of trees and stubble softening. Joe Minching walked coast to coast, he said, labouring at anything, killing rabbits, skinning squirrels, sleeping out. She’d have gone with him if he wanted it, giving him affection, a baby if he wanted it. But he’d finished with the country then and was after a barmaid — Dainty he said her name was and showed round pictures of her, not dainty at all, spreading all over the place.
It’s twilight now and Pettie sleeps, and wakes when it is dark. She put the blade back in the razor, not caring if they returned, if they walked into the bathroom while she was at it. She’d get sent to a Borstal, Marji Laye and Sylvie said when she phoned up the woman, but she didn’t care about that either. You reach out for a ballpoint, you slip away a counter tricket, or panties or a vest. No one calls out, no one bars your way. She could have said to the old woman that the worms are in the body now; she could have said that all the flowers in the world won’t keep the worms out of a body, but no good would come of that.
He wanted to agree about a grandmother being beyond it. Everything they both felt was in his expression and in his eyes. But the old woman has come and what is meant cannot happen until her greed for a baby is taken from the house she has invaded, until her venom ceases, until she isn’t there.
Sometimes the words Albert removes are scrawled in mammoth letters on the tiled surfaces, sometimes they are cramped, pushed into one another, as if recording a private utterance. Often such attempts at communication are in a language unknown to him, a pattern of strokes and marks that seems like decoration. Strictly speaking, only the tiles are Albert’s concern in the Underground stations: to remove as best he can all messages, statements, pronouncements, incitements to violence, abuse of the police authorities, expressions of lust. But he also, for his private satisfaction, erases with a rubber anything in pencil on a nearby poster, any crude additions to figures advertising stage shows or films.
He works on the tiles with cloths and brushes, bottles of erasing liquid, a bucket of soap and water. In the eerie quiet of the night it again outrages his orderly nature that he cannot cleanse the posters as he does the tiles, that it is not his remit to do so, that only the pencilled messages can be rubbed away while bolder obscenities must remain.
Tonight there is the further disappointment that he has failed in his visit to the Dowlers. ‘I can’t go rodding, this hour,’ Mr. Dowler crossly protested, misunderstanding and continuing to misunderstand. A smell of beer came from him, specks of foam on the moustache that joined up with his sideburns. A woman’s voice called down the stairs, inquiring what the problem was, and Mr. Dowler didn’t answer and Albert explained that it was Pettie he’d come about. ‘Pettie was the girl was looking after your kids, Mr. Dowler. Only she made a mistake.’ Mr. Dowler, still confused, shook his head; Mrs. Dowler shouted down again, drawing attention to the time. ‘Look, what’s your problem, son?’ Mr. Dowler demanded and Albert repeated what he’d said several times already. ‘Listen, son,’ Mr. Dowler said then, ‘you ask that little bitch where the wife’s shoes is.’ Pettie was wanted by the police, he said, and closed the door.
Eyes smile at Albert from the advertisements that, every night, become his world. Mouths simper, limbs are frozen as they gyrate, words ooze their promise. Black on pale yellow, a scrawl records an experience of Ecstasy. A smiling woman is defiled in two places and Albert tears part of the paper away, bundling it under a seat on the platform. AIDS the Saviour! is written, and beside it an account of how a woman was humiliated in a car park. Up Wharfdale the needles are thrown down on the street and in the gutters. There’s vomit in the doorways; the girls go by, not seeing you. The time the rent boys turned on him, Little Mister joined in because he was afraid not to.
He bombed… She couldn’t resist him… The message is edged with fire, its urgent letters spread across an explosion, the concrete of buildings a dance of destruction, debris arrested in a night sky. No more than a shadow a man was once, five past three in the morning, stayed down to leave a device after they’d locked the gates.
Albert squeezes dirty water out of his cleaning rags and stares morosely at the scum of bubbles in his bucket. The water that came out of the standpipe at the seed nursery was clean enough, rusty at first but then becoming clear. They should never have left that place. They could have found a Primus stove and done their cooking on it. You see things on skips when you go wandering, no reason why there wouldn’t be a Primus stove. He could have got in crisps and more Heinz beans and long-lasting milk and Mother’s Pride. They could have bought seeds themselves and grown lettuces and carrots in the tumbled-down glasshouse. They could have got blankets thrown out on a skip.
She’ll go up Wharfdale now. What else can happen to a girl without a bed to sleep in? It’s fourteen months since Bev went missing. It’s a week already since Pettie’s been about.
Albert empties the water from his bucket on to the track and replaces his rags and brushes, soap and bucket, in a cupboard on Platform 2. His night’s work hardly begun, he climbs up a moving staircase that is stationary now. He’ll make up the time, he promises the man who’s tidying up around the turnstiles at the top.
The thump of music reaches him as he walks away from the Underground entrance, and when he turns a corner there’s a disco’s flashing neon, a bouncer with cropped head and stubble belligerent in a doorway. A bigger man than Mr. Dowler, he cups the remains of a cigarette in the palm of a hand, a dirty blue T-shirt stretched over his beer-sag. Three girls leave the disco as Albert passes, one pausing to ask the bouncer for a light. A decoration glistens in her nostril as she bends her head over the massive, lazily raised hand. ‘Ta,’ she says, and for a moment Albert wonders if she’s Bev, then sees she isn’t. He wonders if Bev would remember him, or pretend she doesn’t. Up Wharfdale, Ange pretended once.
Voices from the disco follow him, incomprehensible and loud, beating out the music’s rhythm. Leeroy heard voices, Bob Iron and the Metalmen, Ivy On Her Own. Famous, Leeroy said, but no one else at the Morning Star was familiar with Bob Iron and the Metalmen or Ivy On Her Own. A woman in the gas queue said if you hear voices they never go away.