Vacant Possession Read Online Free PDF Page A

did tell her, I didn’t know how many other people you did for.” Biting her cucumber: “You’re a bit of an enigma, Lizzie.”
    “I can’t take anything else on.” Lizzie screwed the cap back on the bleach bottle. “I work at night.”
    She bent down to put the bleach away under the sink, presenting to Sylvia her large rear end. “Yes, well, I thought I’d ask. I’d better get off to my committee meeting. Can I give you a lift?”
    Lizzie took off her large plastic apron and hung it behind the kitchen door. “Thank you kindly, Mrs. S. You’re a good woman. An angel, I might add.”
    With a baffled smile, Sylvia went off to get her purse. Weird was the word. As it happened, though, Lizzie Blank was the only person who had answered her ad in the Reporter . The purplish, pinpoint, foreign-looking hand had prepared her for—well, a foreigner; a person of strange diction and eccentric ways of cleaning lavatories. Lizzie did not seem exactly foreign; but perhaps her parents were, perhaps she came from a funny background. She seemed a good-hearted soul, Sylvia thought, and willing enough; even if she was rather lavish with the cleaning materials.
    She went back into the kitchen. Lizzie Blank was now in her outdoor garb; a dirndl skirt of red and blue, and a leopard-skin jacket. “I’m surprised you don’t feel the heat,” Sylvia said, counting out her money. “There you are, love.” Lizzie’s false nails flashed, and the notes vanished into one of her pockets.
    “It’s my pride and joy, this jacket,” she said. “As my mother used to say, Pride must Abide.”
    Lizzie took out a chiffon scarf, pink shot through with gold, and went out into the hall. In front of the mirror, she adjusted it carefully over her coiffure. “Ready?” Sylvia said, swinging her car keys. “You’ll have to give me directions.”
    Damn, she thought, I’ve been stuffing myself again; and I meant not to have any lunch.
     
    They drove downhill towards the town centre. Right here, left here, said the charwoman, leading them into the maze of streets that still stood on the southern side of the motorway link. “All this will be coming down soon,” Sylvia said. “You’ll all be dumped over Hadleigh way in a high-rise. How do you feel about that?”
    “All right.”
    “But it’ll break up your community.”
    “Not my community. I wasn’t born here.”
    “Oh, I see. But still, you won’t like life in a towerblock.”
    “I shan’t mind. You can throw things off the balconies.”
    Sylvia gave her a sideways look, then switched her attention back to the road. She slowed down. Small brown children played by the kerb, barelegged in the July heat, crouching in the gutter and darting out into the road. There was not a blade of grass for miles. Midsummer brought out the worst in it, baking the cracks in the pavements, raising a stench from the dustbins. The long ginnels that ran between the houses discharged a dim effulgence of stale sweat and stale spices; a thin ginger cat slept on a coal-shed roof, its scarred limbs splayed, its eyes screwed tight against the glare. Not a tree, not a patch of shade. “Displacing people from their environment,” Sylvia said. “You’d think the lesson would be learned by now.”
    “Here it is. Eugene Terrace.”
    “Whereabouts?”
    “This will do.” Lizzie opened the car door and began to lever her bloated body out of the seat, swivelling sideways and kicking her feet over the kerb. Her ankle chain flashed in the sunlight. Out at last, she leaned down and stuck her face in at the passenger door. “Thanks a million, Mrs. S.” Inside the leopard-skin jacket she was perspiring heavily, and patches of grease were breaking through her face powder; she gave a terrifying impression of imminent dissolution, as if fire had broken out at Madame Tussaud’s.
    Sylvia drew back from her grinning mouth and heavy scent. “Is this where you live, at this shop?”
    “Over the top. It’s temporary. I’m