Vacant Possession Read Online Free PDF Page B

on their insurance,” Crisp said, absorbed. “Heretics have no insurance.” He smiled as he read. Muriel yawned, and scratched her itching scalp.
    “I’m going to change,” she said. “Don’t watch me, Crisp.”
    She took off her leopard-skin jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, kicked off her shoes with a groan, and delved about under the bed for the flat open sandals that Muriel wore. She hauled up her skirt and released her black stockings from their suspenders. From under his eyelids Crisp watched her, rubbing with her fingertips at the indentations the suspenders had left in her blue-white flesh. Her blouse went over her head and onto the floor, and with a grunt she undid the fastening of her painful padded brassiere. Her own body, free from Lizzie’s underpinnings, seemed flat and meagre. “Give me a towel,” she said to Crisp. He watched her as she scrubbed off Lizzie’s mouth, erased her lurid eyelids. After five minutes Muriel was back; her almost colourless eyes, her bland inexpressive features, her short dark hair now beginning to grey.
    “Are you getting a multiple personality?” Crisp asked her.
    She gave him a look. “I know who I am,” she said.
    She put on Muriel’s skirt, and a limp cheesecloth blouse, embroidered on the bodice with blue flowers. She had a faraway look, Crisp thought; she was planning what she would do on the street. “Don’t go,” he said. “We could pass the afternoon in a study of the Psalms.”
    “Stuff that,” Muriel said. “Where’s my collecting box?”
    “Bodily resurrection is a fact.”
    “I never said different. Don’t go picking quarrels.”
    “Do you know, it’s not the first fire at York Minster. Jonathan Martin, 1829, described as a lunatic. Emmanuel Crisp, 1984, right hand of the Lord.”
    “I hear you, talking like a nutter. Trying to get yourself readmitted.”
    “What if I am? We all pretend to be something we’re not. Especially you, Muriel.” She was heading for the door. “Don’t leave me on my own. I feel jittery.”
    “Well, what is it you want to do then?”
    “Stay with me a bit. You can talk to me if you like.”
    “What about?”
    “About your life. I could give you absolution, Muriel.”
    She hesitated, came back into the room. “What’s that?”
    “Forgiveness for your sins.”
    “What’s forgiving? It doesn’t change anything. Anyway, I don’t do sins.”
    “Your crimes, then. It’s a nice point.”
    “But I don’t like remembering, Crisp. It upsets me, thinking about my mother and all that. I’d like to oblige you. But it gives me a pain behind my eyes.”
    “Do you good to have a pain. You’re a malicious old bat.”
    “What about you? Burning down churches?”
    “I do it for God.”
    “I do it for me. I do it for fun. I do what I like.”
    But already the unwelcome process had begun. Her recall had nothing dim about it. Ten years ago, she had been a woman with a mother and a child. She’d had a lifetime of Mother, but the baby she’d only had for a few days. She had disposed of both of them: 1975. Only hours after the disposal, her life had changed completely; chance had shackled her in the long chain of events that brought her to where she was now. And they say crime doesn’t pay! She was better off now than she’d ever been; it was only one of the things people said to comfort themselves. Before that dark February afternoon, with the social worker screaming in an upstairs room, she’d been nothing but a girl at home; a girl at home with her mother at 2, Buckingham Avenue, for thirty-four years.
    Mother was not an easy woman. She was a landlord, a gaoler. She did a manoeuvre she called “keeping ourselves to ourselves.” It involved close planning, bad manners; cowering in the back room if anyone came knocking at the door. It was not age that did this to Mother; it had always been her policy. When Muriel went to school, Mother waited for her by the gate. She took her by the neck and by the arm and