The Good Terrorist Read Free Page A

right,” said Alice. “We did it in Birmingham. The Council smashed the place to a ruin. They pulled the lavatories completely out there. All the pipes. Filled the bath with cement. Piled garbage in all the rooms. We got it clean.”
    “Who is going to pay for it?” That was Bert.
    “We are.”
    “Out of what?”
    “Oh, belt up,” said Pat, “it costs us more in take-away and running around cadging baths and showers than it would to pay electricity and gas.”
    “It’s a point,” said Bert.
    “And it would keep Old Bill off our backs,” said Alice.
    Silence. She knew that some people—and she suspected Bert, though not Pat, of this—would be sorry to hear it. They enjoyed encounters with the police.
    Bert said unexpectedly, “Well, if we are going to build up our organisation, we aren’t going to need attention from Old Bill.”
    “Right on,” said Pat. “As I’ve been saying.”
    Silence again. Alice saw it was up to her. She said, “One problem. In this borough they need someone to guarantee the electricity and gas. Who is in work?”
    “Three of the comrades who left last night were.”
    “Comrades!” said Bert. “Opportunistic shits.”
    “They are very good, honest communists,” said Pat. “They happen not to want to work with the IRA.”
    Bert began to heave with silent theatrical laughter, and Jasper joined him.
    “So we are all on Social Security,” said Alice.
    “So no point in going to the Council,” said Bert.
    Alice hesitated and said painfully, “I could ask my mother …”
    At this Jasper exploded in raucous laughter and jeers, his face scarlet. “Her mother, bourgeois pigs …”
    “Shut up,” said Alice. “We were living with my mother for four years,” she explained in a breathless, balanced voice, which seemed to her unkindly cold and hostile. “Four years. Bourgeois or not.”
    “Take the rich middle class for what you can get,” said Jasper. “Get everything out of them you can. That’s my line.”
    “Yes, yes,” said Alice. “I agree. But she did keep us for four years.” Then, capitulating, “Well, why shouldn’t she? She is my mother.” This last was said in a trembling, painful little voice.
    “Right,” said Pat, examining her curiously. “Well, no point in asking mine. Haven’t seen her for years.”
    “Well, then,” said Bert, suddenly getting up from the chair and standing in front of Pat, a challenge, his black eyes full on her. “So you’re not leaving after all?”
    “We’ve got to discuss it, Bert,” she said, hurriedly, and walked over to him, and looked up into his face. He put his arm around her and they went out.
    Alice surveyed the room. Skilfully. A family sitting room it had been. Comfortable. The paint was not too bad; the chairs and sofa probably stood where they had then. There was a fireplace, not even plastered over.
    “Are you going to ask your mother? I mean, to be a guarantor?” Jasper sounded forlorn. “And who’s going to pay for getting it all straight?”
    “I’ll ask the others if they’ll contribute.”
    “And if they won’t?” he said, knowingly, sharing expertise with her, a friendly moment.
    “Some won’t, we know that,” she said, “but we’ll manage. We always do, don’t we?”
    But this was too direct an appeal to intimacy. At once he backed away into criticism. “And who’s going to do all the work?”
    As he had been saying now for fourteen, fifteen years.
    In the house in Manchester she had shared with four other students she had been housemother, doing the cooking and shopping, housekeeping. She loved it. She got an adequate degree, but did not even try for a job. She was still in the house when the next batch of students arrived, and she stayed to look after them. That was how Jasper found her, coming in one evening for supper. He was not a student, had graduated poorly, had failed to find a job after halfhearted efforts. He stayed on in the house, not formally living there but as