Doris Lessing

"Where is it?" He whipped about on her, standing very close. She had stood up, holding on to the back of her chair. Now he didn't look smooth and clerkly and nothing. All the terror that she might reasonably have felt during the last half hour swooped down into her. She could hardly stand. He seemed enormous and dark and powerful looming over her, and his eyes were like guns.

"It's on the rubbish tip at Barstone. You know, the local rubbish dump, the municipal dump." Her knees seemed to be melting. She was cold, and wanted to shiver. She had understood, but really, that this was indeed a serious situation, and that somewhere she had gone wrong. Without meaning to. It was not her fault! But the way this man was looking at her - nothing like this had ever happened to her before. She had not known that there could be a situation where one felt helpless.

He was so angry. Ought he to be so angry? He was white, not red, a leaden white, with the effort - she supposed - of holding himself in, the effort of not hitting her. Of not killing her. She knew that was it.

She should not have said, in that casual way, "rubbish dump," that the stuff was on the rubbish tip. Yes, that had been foolish. Hasty. Perhaps even now she should say, No, I was joking, the cases are upstairs. But if she did, he would go upstairs and find Jocelin at work, and then...

She felt she might faint, or even begin to weep. She could feel tears filling her, begi

He said, "I am by myself. I have a car. I need someone - better, two people - to go out to this place and get the packages."

"Oh," she said, breathlessly, her voice sounding weak and silly. "I shouldn't do that. Not in full daylight. There might be people there. Rubbish vans emptying rubbish, for a start. It would be dangerous."

"It would be dangerous?" he enquired. Again she felt he might easily kill her, do something he could not stop himself from doing. "We can't have that lying around on a rubbish dump," he said.

"Why not? Have you ever seen one? It's full of all kinds of stuff. Acres of it. A couple of ordinary brown packages wouldn't be noticed much." She was begi

"Two new, large, unopened packages?" he enquired, his face close to hers, eyes quite dislocated with anger.

"All the same, I'd wait till tonight."

"I'm not waiting till tonight. Get two people down here. Men. There are men in the house, aren't there?"

She said, cold, almost herself again, "I and another girl carried the cases" - she was going to say "upstairs," but caught herself in time - "to the car."

"Then two women. It doesn't matter."

"Yes, it does matter," she informed him. "Don't give us orders. Don't you understand, you can't give us orders, we aren't Russians."

Her eyes were shut, not so much because she did not feel well (in fact, she felt better) as because she could sense his hatred for her enclose her. Well, that was it, she was going to be killed. A movement, the sounds of footsteps; she opened her eyes and saw him going off. But at the door he stopped and turned and said very quietly, with an extraordinary intensity of contempt, of personal dislike, "Don't imagine that this is the end of it, Comrade Mellings. It is not the end, far from it. You can't play little games with us like that, you'll see, Comrade Mellings." And his face convulsed briefly, in that movement of cheeks and tongue which if continued would have ended in the action of spitting. And he stood with eyes narrowed, staring at her, determined to mark her, force her down, with the strength of what he felt.

And now this was the man himself, absolutely what he was. She knew this, knew she saw him. This was not the smoothie, the conforming spy who had been taught to control every movement, gesture, look; but something behind that. This was power. Not fantasies about power, little games with it, envy of it, but power itself. He embodied the certitudes of strength, of being utterly and completely in the right. He knew himself to be superior, dominant, in control. Above all, in the right.

He went out, shutting the door - she noted - gently. No loud bangs that might alert neighbours.

She went swiftly to the sink and was sick.

Tidily she swirled away all that nastiness, scrubbing and cleaning, though she had to hold on with one hand, her knees were so weak. She took herself, actually staggering, to the lavatory, for terror, it seemed, sat in her bowels. She came back, holding on to door edges and door handles, to the kitchen, where she collapsed on the table, face down, arms sprawled out, limp as a rag. She had never before felt anything like this physical weakness. She lay there for perhaps half an hour, while strength slowly returned.

Then Jocelin came in, hardly glanced at her - so she couldn't be so obviously in a ruinous state - and said that she must have strong coffee: not sleeping did not suit her. If she started now, she was sure she could get ready the appropriate explosive device for their work tonight. She spoke in an abstracted way, but with the cold relish that was her way of showing the excitement that, Alice knew, would shortly again be restoring herself. To hasten the healing process, she went up with Jocelin to her workroom, taking a chair with her this time, and watched those careful, intelligent hands at work. And soon she did feel so much better she had almost forgotten Comrade Gordon O'Leary. She thought vaguely: We'll have to decide about whether to take those packages to the rubbish tip or not. As things are, he'll believe they have already been found and taken off somewhere. So far behind her now did her real terror seem that she actually thought: Well, that'll give him a bad moment or two. Serve him right. She told Jocelin about him as if he had been some sort of importunate salesman she had sent packing.

"Who the hell do they think they are?" Jocelin agreed.

Their elation began to fill the whole house, like the aromas of one of Alice's soups, and for a while they were all up there, watching Jocelin at work, joking about how they would like to use this bomb or that. Tower blocks of flats. Police-computer information storage. Any information storage systems, for that matter. Certain housing estates. Any nuclear shelters that had been built anywhere, for it was only the rich who would benefit from them. Nuclear power stations.

This game got wilder and noisier, until Caroline pointed out that Reggie and Mary would be in soon. Jocelin was left to her work, and the others dispersed about the house, but kept meeting on landings, or in the kitchen, for today it was hard not to be in one another's company, to share this tide of excitement, of power.

Everything went well that night, which was a Thursday. Reggie and Mary came in long enough to collect a few things; they were off for the weekend. A stroke of luck: it meant they could all spend that evening together. They gathered in the kitchen, laughing, joking, as if they were drunk. But no one drank. And Jocelin was quiet, self-absorbed, set apart from them by the necessities of her task.

She decided that it would be better if there were three in all, not two, because of lifting that heavy cement post. They competed for the honour, and Jocelin chose Bert. Faye was disappointed, and a little bitchy. Roberta said, "Never mind, there'll be other times."

At a quarter to four, Jocelin, Bert, and Alice quietly left the house. All the windows in the little street were dark. In the main road the lamps seemed to be withdrawing light back into themselves; their yellow was thickening as a cool abstract grey stole into the sky. Along the pavements between the lamps it was dark. Low down in front of them this darkness agitated itself, and became a small black-and-white dog, trotting with a modest and thoughtful air from somewhere to somewhere. There were no people in this street, and no one in the little street where they had to do their work. The whole business took a minute, with Alice and Bert heaving up the bollard, and Jocelin placing the bomb under it. The bollard stayed upright. They did not run off, but walked slowly to a corner, then walked fast. Some minutes after they reached home, and were in the kitchen drinking chocolate, they heard the thud of the bomb. It was louder than they expected.