Free The Seven Sisters by Margaret Drabble

always pools of standing water, even when it has not rained for days. Then there is the sputum, and the gum. The pavement, irregular enough in itself – it is always being dug up by an endless and unbroken cycle of water men and telephone men and television men and gas men – is marked with thick incrustations of expectorations and sediments of unidentifiable substances. Pigeon dirt, dog dirt, cat dirt, human dirt. City dirt.
    I have made friends with a pet rat which lives up on Ladbroke Grove Tube station. I must remember to record the story of my rat.
    Some of the garden walls of the more regular houses that front the pavement are broken down. Slabs lie around. Then there are prefab huts cordoned off by barbed wire. God knows what is in them, or who would want to break in to steal any of it.
    That first evening, I walked past the tall six-storey red-brick penitentiary of the college which is now my Health Club, and noted that it was offering Adult Evening Classes. I was surprised to find this archaic educational survival and thought I might perhaps join one of its offerings – and indeed, as I have already noted, a week or two later, I did. The advertisements for the college were easier to decipher than the casual and plentiful flyposters that were stuck all the way along walls and garage doors – I couldn’t tell if these were announcing restaurants, or pop groups, or clubs, or services. I couldn’t decode any of the messages. What were they, these things called SEA
FOOD: SURVIVING THE QUEUE and EAT STATIC and DAY ONE ? One trade sign seemed at first glance to read SHOCKS and EXHAUSTION , as though these were marketable commodities, but the objects on sale were,
en effet
, exhausts and shock absorbers.
    FITTED WHILE U WAIT . I didn’t wait. I couldn’t quite absorb the shock. I repeat. I haven’t absorbed it yet.
    TRAINING FOR KILLS , that was another advertisement. I worked that one out quite quickly. But many of the graffiti were impenetrable. Who was speaking to whom, on these city streets? Nobody was speaking to the person that is me. Nothing was aimed at me. The only message I thought I could understand was the one that said COMMUNISM IS ALIVE AND WELL AND FIGHTING IN PERU . This was applied to the wall in stencil, and it was accompanied by a hammer and sickle. It is so unlikely and so old-fashioned a message that it may well be an anagram for something else – some sexual perversion, probably. Like the dead Christmas tree, it’s still there. It may be there for ever. It may be there when I am dead and gone.
    She first hears them speaking in unknown tongues
    The shop is called PriceCutter. It is a fair-sized grocery store, part of a cheap chain, and it sells food, newspapers, liquor. The people who work there are not white, nor are they black, and they speak a language that I do not know. The body of the shop occupies a long, deep oblong space, with shelves on both sides, and a central head-high block bearing racks of merchandise. The aisles are not quite wide enough and people are always banging irritably and sometimes angrily into one another. Londoners are not patient people. They anger quickly. That first evening, I was bemused by the shop’s layout, as large cardboard boxes impeded access to many of the shelves, but I was to discover that this was a temporary (though recurrent) problem – I had come on some kind of delivery day, and groceries were piled around at random. Towers of lavatory paper, crates of tinned beans, pallets of packets of rice blocked the way at every turn. It was not like this in Woodbridge or Farlingham.
    At first sight, the produce looked varied and quite tempting, but on closer inspection the charm palled. There were hard shiny bright
green apples, and large round brown onions, and a choice of greenish or speckled bananas, and pallid browning lettuces balled up in Cellophane, and unnatural tomatoes. There was a wall of refrigerated shelves lined with small plastic pots of salad