There on a display stand, packed in little Perspex boxes, were what appeared to be row upon row of human eyelashes. Fascinated, Muriel moved closer. She gazed down, no expression on Mrs. Wilmot’s face. Dismemberment, she thought. Bones in the canal, those detachable teeth the real Mrs. Wilmot had. The teeth that other people had, at the hospital. Evelyn’s body, sliced up after death. And distributed? She bent over the display stand and peered at it. Would she know Evelyn’s eyelashes if she saw them? Some were black and spiky, others were feathery and fair; all were for sale.
At once she saw the solution to her problem. Alone in her room she had been practising Edna; but Edna needed a shape. It was easy to assume the abject form of Poor Mrs. Wilmot, but the imitation of Edna’s vitality seemed to deplete her own inner resources to the point of near-extinction. She could not risk a situation where Edna and Poor Mrs. Wilmot wiped out Muriel entirely; who would mediate between their demands, and organise their different clothing? But if she could be Edna, yet not Edna; Edna’s soul in an invented body, a body made up of other moving parts? A body for self-assembly, an easy-build knockdown effort? Eyelashes; and something for the head, auburn or blonde, to go over Muriel’s hair. She straightened up and looked around her at the glowing counters of cosmetics. She pictured Mother; Mother reassembling herself, trotting her spectral bones round the department stores until she found those bits of her that had been dispersed. “Can I help you?” an assistant enquired.
“Of course you can,” she said. “I’ll have the whole shop.”
“What?” Crisp started up from the bed. She hadn’t realised she’d spoken out loud. In fact, she’d forgotten he was there; it seemed hours since her remembering began. With a great yawn, Crisp swung his legs to the floor. He looked at her intently. “Do you ever think about the future, Muriel?”
“Of course I do,” she said angrily. “I’m not an animal.”
“I don’t think about it.”
“But there’s possibilities, Crisp. You don’t have to be a reverend. You can be a safe-breaker, a shopkeeper, a tailor’s dummy. You can be a monumental mason.”
“Perhaps. Arson’s not much to keep you going.”
“You could be a singing telegram. You want to get yourself organised.” She paused. “I won’t always need to be three people. It’s only till I give them their comeuppance…all those people that were in my life. Mr. Colin Sidney and Mrs. Sylvia Sidney, and Miss Florence Sidney, and Miss Isabel Field. I used to think about them when I was taking the cigarette packets apart…when I was on Ripping. I keep myself busy, but I always feel, you know, as if there’s something I need…and they might have it.”
Crisp let the newspapers slide to the floor. “I’ll have another snooze,” he said. Barelegged and bedraggled, Muriel went out for what was left of her free afternoon.
CHAPTER 3
The label of the collecting box was peeling off a bit. Muriel smoothed it with a damp forefinger. No one ever read it. Trapped in their doorways by her accusatory stare, they delved into their pockets and purses and paid up. Stopped on the street, they produced a coin and moved away as fast as they could. One man, caught on his front step, tried to argue with her. “I believe in the primacy of individual effort,” he said. Muriel brought up her boot—it was wet that day—and caught him painfully on the kneecap.
She didn’t need the money. It was the social side of it she valued. Lauderdale Road was a good area. People gave generously; there was guilt behind those festoon blinds.
What if I did Buckingham Avenue, she wondered idly. What if I went up the path of number 2 and rang the doorbell; what if Mother answered the door?
Think when old Mrs. Sidney came up the path, Master Colin’s mum. Think when she came for her seance, with her crocodile shoes and her bag over her wrist. By the time she went out again something had gone permanently wrong inside her head. Death wasn’t what she’d thought; she was put in a home before the year was out.
When she was bored with collecting Muriel retraced her steps towards the town centre. She passed the public library, where she often called in to steal books. She didn’t go inside, but stopped in the lobby, arrested, as she had been before, by the advertisement for the Colorado Beetle. She didn’t study the text, but gazed entranced at the creature; a gaudy beast, and, as portrayed, about the size of a small kitten. She was not surprised they were thought a public menace.
Then back to the shopping mall; there were some keys she had to get cut, Sylvia’s house, Mr. K.’s house. She made a point of getting hold of keys, because you never knew when they might be useful. She paid for the keys out of her purse, not out of her collecting box, but she put it on the counter, and when the man had served her he slipped a 5p piece into it. Never let it be said that she was greedy, that she kept it all to herself. If in the mall she saw a wheelchair, parked by the litter bins and next to the municipal flowerbeds, she would often toss its occupant a small coin, with a cheery “There you go, you poor cripple,” as she passed by.
Now she left the precinct behind. It was teatime; the sun was declining, the air was mild. Out towards the land of the link road she tramped in her sandals; the houses ran out on her, the pavements grew pitted, torn posters flapped from the broken walls. SORRY NO COACHES said an ancient sign in the window of the Rifle Volunteer. Across the wasteland the shop could be picked out easily; no other building had a roof for a quarter of a mile. Doggedly she struck out across country, picking up her feet over the fallen plaster and the tangle of low-growing weeds. She stopped to examine an iron grate and a pile of broken bottles. A breeze got up, and brown paper blew against her legs.
There were notices outside: GOLD AND SILVER ARTICLES WANTED, HOUSE CLEARENCES BEST PRICES PAYED. She pushed the door, heard the bell ping. From the darkness at the back of the shop came the clarion call of a bugle, and at the next moment, a squat and powerful figure leaped into view, brandishing a sabre.
“Cut it out, Sholto,” Muriel said.
Sholto dropped his guard and sucked his bottom lip. He replaced the bugle on a high shelf. As he emerged from the dimness his manner became obsequious. He was blue-chinned, seedy and wild-eyed, and as he shuffled forward, sword in hand, it would have been no surprise to hear him claim that now was the winter of his discontent. Instead he smiled at Muriel, displaying his dreadful teeth, and asked her, “What can I suit you with today?”
“A cage,” Muriel said.
Sholto ignored her. It was his pride that he sought out the secret whims of his clients. “Assorted brass knobs, 50p each. Door handles assorted, ?2 a pair. What about a brass fingerplate?” He slapped one down on the counter. Muriel looked at it without interest. “And here—” he reached up to a shelf and produced an outstretched brass hand—“we have some brass fingers to go with it.”
