Essential Stories

The Sack of Lights She was an old charwoman whose eyes stared like two bits of tin and whose lips were twisted like rope round three protruding teeth. All day long she was down on her knees scrubbing flights of stone stairs, cleaning out evil passages, emptying oozy pails down the drain with the soapsuds frilled about it, and listening to its dirty little voice gulping out of the street. All day long she chattered to herself and sang "Valencia, land of oranges . . ." and broke out into laughter so loud at some fantastic recollection that it sounded as though she had kicked her pail downstairs. One evening, after a week's absence from her work, she said mysteriously, as she left the house, "I'm going to do it again. I'm going orf to git me lights." "Lights?" "Yes, 'e stopped me 'e did. 'Better practise it at 'ome,' 'e said. So I took the lot. I took the train, an' rockets, an' that wicked ol' General with the monercle, oh, I took 'im. I took 'em all 'ome. O, 'e warn't 'arf a wicked ol' dear." She laughed, and her teeth seemed to skip up and down like three acrobats with the rope lips twirling round them. "Yer know what 'e called me, the ol' monercle? 'Lor,' says 'e, peeping through the winder, 'ain't she a proper beauty!' That's what 'e called me. We didn't 'arf dance." "Trains! Rockets? Generals? Dance?" The people of the house touched their sound foreheads. "Gone, oh quite gone," said the people of the house. "Haven't you noticed, the last few days? Away a week and comes back singing and talking about dances and Generals worse than ever." Before there was time to say any more she was off again down the road singing "Valencia, land of oranges . . ." and gutter children calling after her. No one else could hear what her mind heard. No one else could see what her eyes saw. Alight with it, she walked from her room at the back of Euston to Piccadilly Circus with a sack on her backthe sack which she always carried in case there was anything worth having in the guttersand "Valencia, land of oranges . . ." twiddling like a ballroom of dancers in her head. No one noticed her as she stood on the curb of Piccadilly Circus, nor guessed that at that moment she could have died of laughter, she was so happy. She wanted to shout to see what would happen, but she laughed instead. A miraculous place as high and polished as a ballroom. The facades of the buildings were tall mirrors framed in gold, speeding lights. "Chucking it about," she cried out. The crowds did not even hear her in the roar. If she jumped, could she see herself in the mirrors? She jumped, but not high enough. She laughed. Rockets shot up in numbered showers and exploded noiselessly into brief diagrams of green stars. A tilted bottle dripped beads of wine as red as rail- way signals into a glass and there was the GeneralSmoke the Army Smokestanding on a house-top, with a white-hot monocle in his eye, and his cigarette pricking red. Diamonds and pearls and rubies were streamers flying into the Circus and flashed so that people's faces bobbed up and down like Chinese lanterns. But below the streaming lights everything was dancing. That was what she noticed. Below it was "Valencia, land of oranges . . ." She sang it out and waved to the cars as they passed. "Valencia . . .&Treglown, Jeremy is the author of 'Essential Stories', published 2005 under ISBN 9780812972948 and ISBN 0812972945.