The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing Read Free Book Online Page A

people say such nasty things about them.’ She went to the window to watch them out there lifting the bottles to their mouths, passing around hunks of food as they shared their meal. Emily was subdued: perhaps she was even afraid, wondering how she could have gone out to them at all. Yet every one of us, the hundreds of people at our windows, knew that, watching them, we were examining our own possibilities, our future.
    Soon, without looking at me, Emily pushed Hugo into her bedroom and shut the door, and she was off out of the flat and across the road again. Now the light of the fire made a tight bright space under the singeing trees. All the lower windows were dark but reflected the blaze or a cold gleam of fight from a half-moon that stood between two towers of flats. The upper windows were full of heads outlined against varying kinds and degrees of light. But some of the ordinary citizens had already joined the young people, curious to find out where they had come from, where they were going; Emily was not the only one. I must confess that I had more than once visited an encampment for an evening. Not in this part of the town: no, I was fearful of my neighbours, of their condemnation, but I had seen faces I knew from my own neighbourhood: we were all doing the same, from the same calculation.
    I was not fearful for what might happen to Emily if she behaved sensibly. If she did not then I planned to cross the street and rescue her. I watched all night. Sometimes I was able to see her, sometimes not. Most of the time she was with a group of boys younger than the rest. She was the only girl, and she did behave foolishly, challenging them, asserting herself. But they were all drunk, and she was only one of the many ingredients of their intoxication.
    There were people lying asleep on the pavement, their heads on a bundled sweater or on their forearms. They slept uncaring while the others milled about. This careless sleep, confident that the others would not tread on them, that they would be protected, said more than anything could about the kind of toughness these youngsters had acquired, the trust they had for each other. But general sleep was not what had been planned. The fire had died down. It would soon be morning. I saw that they were all gathering to move on. I had a bad half-hour, wondering if Emily would leave with them. But after some embraces, loud and ribald, like the embraces and the jesting of tarts and soldiers when a regiment is moving off, and after she had run along beside them on the pavement for a few yards, she came slowly back - no, not to me, I knew better than to think that, but to Hugo. As she came in her face was visible for a moment in the light from the corridor, a lonely, sorrowful face, and not at all the face of a child. But by the time she had reached the living-room the mask was on. ‘That was a nice evening, say what you like,’ she remarked. I had not said anything, and I said nothing now. ‘Apart from eating people, they are very nice, I think,’ she said, with an exaggerated yawn. ‘And do they eat people?’ ‘Well, I didn’t ask, but I’d expect so, wouldn’t you?’ She opened the door to her little room, and Hugo came out, his green eyes watchful on her face, and she said to him: ‘It’s all right, I haven’t done anything you wouldn’t have done, I promise you.’ And with this unhappy remark, and a hard little laugh, she went off, saying over her shoulder: ‘I could do worse than go off with them one of these days, that’s what I think. They enjoy themselves, at least.’
    ‘Well, I preferred that goodnight to many others we had exchanged when at ten o’clock she would cry, ‘Oh, it’s my bedtime, off I go’ - and a dutiful goodnight kiss hung between us, a ghost, like the invisible white gloves of Professor White.
    It happened that during that early autumn, day after day, fresh gangs came through. And, day after day, Emily was with them. She did not ask if she