Free Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel Page B

Ripping Room had sixteen occupants, ranged at two long tables. Kieran came from the lift, pulling his trolley. “I’m a YOP,” he told Muriel. “They get me cheap.”
    “What’s a Yop?” Muriel asked.
    “Don’t you know? It’s a Youth Opportunity.” He added, “We get a lot of those.”
    “Kieran brings the boxes,” Edna said. “Right? These are old cigarettes, right, off shop shelves what have gone out of date. On that trolley he’s got two hundred thousand rotten old fags. You get your box, right? Take out the packets. Open the packets, right?” She looked around her. “Kieran, where’s our boxes, where’s our bloody stacking boxes, where’s our Universal Containers?”
    Kieran came sloping up. “I was putting me lipstick on,” he said. “I’m entitled.”
    “Get on with it!” Edna said. “Empty the fags out, right? Fags to the left, foil to the right. Fags to the left, foil to the right. Got it?”
    “Got it,” Muriel said. Edna was an angry-looking woman, with varicose veins and black corkscrew curls. She wore an overall and white cap. “Away you go then,” she said, and went off grumbling back to her own table.
    “What happens to them all?” Muriel asked.
    “Oh, they scrunch ’em all up and make ’em into new ones,” Kieran said.
    There were two tables, and Edna’s got preferential treatment. When the Navy Issue came back in their tins, with the mould growing under the lids, it was never Edna’s table that got them. They were Permanent Rippers. On the other table, the girls could be moved, as the work required, to the Making Room, to the Blender, or the Hogshead. Before the week was out, Muriel had learned to rip very nicely. She was never moved; nor was the elderly lady who worked opposite her.
    This was a humble little woman, with a worn bony face, and eyes and nose and mouth so insignificant that to call them features was an inflation of the truth. A scant amount of iron-grey hair was pinned fiercely to her little skull. The skin of her neck was yellow, her shoulders were bowed, and her hands shook a little as she reached for her cigarette boxes. She hardly seemed to have the strength for ripping. Every morning, before Kieran brought his first trolleyload, she would take out her teeth and wrap them in tissue paper, and slide them into her handbag. She would snap the clasp and hold the bag to her for a moment, looking around her with an anxious little smile; then she would put on her overall, over her pinny, over her old polyester dress. She seldom spoke. Her eyes watered continuously. She walked with her knees bent, her head down; a soft silent creature of depressive aspect. From time to time—once a week perhaps—some word from one of the other girls would catch her fancy, some gossip or quip, and she would tip her head back, open her toothless mouth, and roar with silent laughter, wiping her eyes the while and trembling at her own temerity.
    She’d had a hard life, Edna said. Her name was Sarah; but everybody called her Poor Mrs. Wilmot.
     
    Muriel’s second trip to Buckingham Avenue was more enlightening than the first. She had only been hanging around for five minutes when who should she see, coming up the road with her Saturday shopping, but Miss Florence Sidney?
    Miss Sidney had put on weight, and her frizz of hair was now grey. She wore stout shoes, a check skirt, and a woollen scarf with bobbles on it, and she advanced along the street looking neither left nor right. As she passed number 2, going around the corner to her own gate, the front door flew open and a gang of screaming teenage children swarmed down the path and fanned out across the road. Miss Sidney was almost knocked into the hedge. Steadying herself against the gatepost, her face flushed, she called out after the children, “Alistair! For heaven’s sake!”
    “Eff off, you old cow,” the boy called Alistair shouted back; wailing and yodelling, the gang careered around the corner into Lauderdale