Miss Carter's War (36 page)

At first, the ‘family’ terrified Marguerite. There were alcoholics and drug addicts and those who were obviously mentally ill. One man, whose enclosure was unusually neat, left each morning in a creased pinstriped suit to a maybe mythical job ‘in the City’. She occasionally joined them round a brazier that they lit on freezing nights and heard their stories of decline, and soon her fear was replaced by profound pity. Having lost all connection, by choice or misfortune, with their previous lives, they had good reason to cling together in this bleak underworld, lit only by candles, and stinking of rot and urine. The police were tolerant of their encampment, preferring to have these outcasts where they could keep an eye on them. They even turned a blind eye to a group of small children who congregated in an archway up the road, living off petty thieving and late-night soup runs. One despairing policeman pointed out that this was preferable to abusive parents, or some uncaring care home.

This insight into the Dickensian underclass existing beneath the hurly-burly of increasing affluence in the streets above filled Marguerite with disgust. And that Elsie, her beautiful Saint Joan, should be part of it broke her heart. It took all her self-control not to weep and somehow force Elsie to get treatment for her addiction, to rid herself of the octopus that was strangling the life out of her. When Elsie went into a rambling eulogy about the benefits of heroin, saying how she could manage perfectly well to live a normal life on drugs, Marguerite wanted to shake her and drag her by her hair to Dr Chapple’s esteemed day centre, but Major Lily always insisted that it would not help Elsie. She pointed out that it was an improvement that Elsie had moved from sleeping in doorways to creating some sort of home for herself in the underpass. She had even taken on the responsibility of a puppy that along with the rest of the dogs that roamed there was considerably more healthy than its owner. It, like her, was washed in Waterloo Station’s public lavatories.

‘Let us rejoice in small mercies.’

Major Lily managed to find joy in everything. Whereas Marguerite would rage to Donald and Tony about her impotence to save Elsie – ‘Beware the Messiah complex, Mags’ – Major Lily James faced horrors with radiant confidence in her God. A God who was, Marguerite thought, at the very least, inefficient.

Marguerite had almost given up hope that Elsie would ever propel herself out of the twilight world of living from one drug hit to the next, risking death through overdose, when she received a phone call from her. This time it was not to ask for money.

‘I’ve lost that piece of paper. I need to see that doctor.’

‘Elsie, he won’t give you a script unless you opt for treatment, so don’t even try. You are getting enough to sustain you. For heaven’s sake stop trying to get more.’

‘Honestly, Miss Carter, this is not a trick. If I want more gear I can get it on the street. I’ve decided I want to stop. Please help me.’

Marguerite was used to Elsie using any lie or subterfuge to feed her habit but this time there was a new tone to her pleading.

Marguerite phoned Major Lily.

When she arrived at the Bull Ring Major Lily was already there.

‘Our lost sheep is returning to Jesus. She’s ready.’

‘But why, what happened?’

Elsie was sitting on the edge of her filthy camp bed, trembling and staring ahead in a daze. The cardboard walls were down and folded in a pile and her books were in a bundle tied with string, her few clothes stuffed into a pillowcase. Marguerite sat next to Elsie and took her fidgeting hands in hers.

‘What happened, Elsie?’

Elsie didn’t look at her.

‘It was my son.’

‘Your son? But you told me you didn’t know where he was.’

‘Well I do now.’

Elsie tried to continue and couldn’t. She said to Major Lily, ‘You tell her.’

Major Lily put an arm round Elsie and spoke to Marguerite.

‘Well, Elsie OD-ed yesterday and they took her to St Thomas’s Accident and Emergency. It was apparently chaotic because there had been a bomb at the Ideal Home Exhibition and there were so many casualties they needed to use lots of hospitals. So I’m afraid they shoved poor Elsie into a corridor on a trolley with an oxygen mask and left her.’

Elsie took up the story in an expressionless drone.

‘The nurse said, “People like you are not a priority.” I could hear groaning and weeping. Then two doctors came rushing by and the younger one knocked over my oxygen canister. He said, “What the hell is this? Why is this patient out here?” And then—’

Elsie turned her head away from Marguerite.

‘The older one said, “Oh she’s a junkie. A regular. Bloody nuisance. Let her die. We’ve got people with limbs blown off who want to live. There’s a girl with shrapnel in her eyes who is going to be blind. Don’t waste time with this useless bitch.” And then he said, “Come on, Dr Miller, leave her. Don’t waste your time. You’re going to have to learn to prioritise.” ’

Marguerite put her arm around Elsie.

‘They didn’t mean it, Elsie. They were in the middle of an emergency.’

‘As they ran off I heard the older one say, “How’s the new baby, by the way?” and Dr Miller said, “A joy.” ’

Marguerite looked at Major Lily who smiled and said, ‘A miracle.’

Elsie was mumbling, ‘Dr Miller. My son. Dr Miller.’

‘Your son?’

‘Yes. He was my son.’

‘But Elsie, Miller is a common name—’

‘No, I knew when I looked at him. He is exactly like his father. The bastard. His father, I mean – not him. Although that’s what he was. My baby. A bastard. Get rid of that bastard, he said.’

‘Who said, Elsie?’

‘My father – the bastard. Sorry, that’s a lot of bastards. So I did. It was just until I made good. Just until I could manage. But I couldn’t, could I? “Useless bitch,” he said.’

‘Well, you’re doing something now, Elsie. You’re going to make good now.’

‘And a baby, Miss Carter. A joy, he said. A grandchild. I can’t see the baby – like this. I could love that baby properly – start again.’

Marguerite thought of Bert’s description of Ethel’s loss.

Elsie was rocking backwards and forwards.

‘I’ve lost touch with everyone – everything. Too busy enjoying the good life.’

She looked around. A rat was scrabbling in a pile of rubbish. And then she started to laugh. Marguerite and Major Lily joined in, as did two drunks in the next-door box. As the three of them walked out, carrying Elsie’s books and bag of clothes, Elsie trailing her dog on a piece of string, maniacal laughter echoed round the hell they were leaving behind.

Chapter 37

Major Lily suggested Marguerite delay visiting Elsie whilst Dr Chapple grappled with her withdrawal from the various drugs she was on. He had offered her the chance of the gentler system of taking an oral version of heroin, methadone, with gradual reduction in the dose over a longer period, but he preferred, and she opted for, cold turkey ‘to get it over with’. At last, after four anxious weeks, Major Lily phoned Marguerite to tell her that Elsie wanted to see her. Both Tony and Donald offered to accompany her but she felt it was better for Elsie if she went alone.

The clinic was in a blighted area of Chelsea, at the unglamorous end of the modish King’s Road, called, appropriately, World’s End after a local pub. It was a desolate place. Marguerite’s walk from the bus stop did nothing to quell the anxiety she felt. Badly bombed during the war, it was now a building site. Old terraced houses were being pulled down and replaced with high-rise blocks; side roads of derelict, once grand houses, were now inhabited by squatters. She noticed a poster on the side of a half-demolished building, advertising a car with the slogan, ‘If this car were a lady it’d get its bottom pinched.’ Marguerite was delighted to see someone had scribbled on it, ‘If this lady was a car, she’d run you down.’ On the main road there was an eclectic mix of shops. Dotted amongst the tacky local butcher, greengrocer, and fish and chips shop, were oddities like a cheap-dress boutique called Quick Nicker and one for antique clothing, named Granny Takes a Trip. As she was passing a furniture shop called Sophisticat, with what she thought was a stuffed lion in the window, she jumped out of her skin when the beast turned to look at her and opened its mouth in a toothy yawn.

Another boutique called SEX was crowded with grotesque apparitions. Men and women, regardless of sexual orientation, wearing maxi- and mini-skirts, or trousers, made of leather and rubber, bedecked with chains, their hair shaved or dyed in vivid colours and glued into elaborate shapes, their faces made up like works of art. Others, wearing layers of ripped clothing, and a superabundance of safety pins in their garments and alarmingly their flesh, looked like ornamental paupers. She was troubled by the swastikas displayed on T-shirts and jewellery.

Her ears were assaulted by the pounding beat of the music blaring out from one café she passed, where she had to step into the road to circumvent the pavement crowded with smoking, shouting, heedless youngsters. From the smell of the smoke and their hyperenergy, she suspected that they were boosting their excitement with something other than the milkshakes or coffees of the 1950s. She felt like Miss Fryer as she suppressed the urge to warn them of the risks they were taking of drifting into more dangerous waters. Or maybe it was too late. How far had the plague affecting Elsie already spread?

On the shabby door of what looked like a warehouse was a hand-painted sign reading, ‘Care Understanding Research Education’. Fearful of what lay behind it, she could feel her heart pounding as she rang the bell. Major Lily let her in. Inside, people were drifting around or sitting on ancient chairs and sofas talking quietly. In a side room, she could hear someone crying and groaning and vomiting, and looking in, she saw a young man, covered in sweat, writhing on a bed, with someone sitting by his side, stroking him and talking calmly.

Marguerite was worried.

‘Don’t you have nurses and doctors here?”

Major Lily pointed.

‘They are all medical staff. Peter insists on no uniforms or white coats, as our members often have a horror of hospitals. They all look after one another. This floor is used solely for consultations and treatment. Nobody goes upstairs until they are clean.’

They went up some ramshackle wooden steps and entered a large room, where a frail-looking girl was working on a potter’s wheel. Several others were sitting on the floor or on wooden chairs sketching. A rangy, long-haired young man with a beard and a sweet smile was walking around discussing their work. On one side of the room was a big table around which some were eating soup, apparently made by the woman with shaking hands who was ladling it inaccurately into bowls.

No one leapt up to help her, they just watched patiently.

One of them said, ‘Well done, Stella. You’re doing fine.’

They all looked badly in need of sustenance but seemed relaxed and comfortable with one another. People were coming in and out and it was difficult to see who, if anyone, was in charge.

Major Lily stopped by one door with a glass window. Inside were about six sitting in a circle talking.

‘That’s a group therapy session – afraid we can’t interrupt that.’

A door at the end of the big central room was open, and inside Marguerite could see a man perched on a desk, and talking to Elsie on an armchair in front of him. Unlike everyone else, with their sloppy jeans and T-shirts, he was smartly dressed in a grey suit and what Marguerite recognised as a Rugby School tie, her father’s old school. His hair was cut into a neat short, back and sides revealing a large broad forehead. With his glasses and small mouth he was not a handsome man, but had the same all-seeing, compassionate eyes as Michael Duane. He certainly seemed to be enthralling Elsie, who was listening to him intently.

Seeing Major Lily and Marguerite hovering in the doorway, he beckoned them in.

‘Welcome – welcome. I’m Peter Chapple. Join our conversation. We were expecting you, Miss Carter. Elsie and I were just discussing her next commitment.’

‘Commitment?’

Marguerite hugged Elsie then sat on the chair he set down next to her.

‘Yes. We work here on making commitments to the group. Elsie, are you comfortable talking in front of Miss Carter?’

‘Yes. She’s my friend.’ She took Marguerite’s hand.

‘We are a self-governing therapeutic community, Miss Carter. When people come here their only distinguishing feature is their sex. All have an addiction problem. Everyone is equal. We support one another. We make commitments to our group. Starting with what seem like easy things to most. Getting here on time in the morning, which is a big step if your life is as chaotic as Elsie’s has been. Then we gradually add different things to aim for. Having a bath, helping cook the meals, helping the others withdraw. Elsie has made amazing progress. As you can see.’

Marguerite said, ‘You look so much better, Elsie.’

‘Thank you. Yes, I feel it. Thanks to Peter.’

And indeed Elsie was transformed from the woman who a month ago had staggered out of the Waterloo Bull Ring. She was clean and neatly dressed. Her face was deathly pale but her eyes were clear and steady. Her bare arms and legs were scarred but not bleeding and oozing pus. Even her dog looked more perky.