The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Why did these big boys like Ben?
She would look at them, from the stairs perhaps, as she came down into the living-room, a group of youths, large, or thin, or plump, dark, fair, or redheaded—and among them Ben, squat, powerful, heavy-shouldered, with his bristly yellow hair growing in that strange pattern, with his watchful, alien eyes—and she thought, But he’s not really younger than they are! He’s much shorter, yes. But it almost seems that he dominates them. When they sat around the big family table, talking in their style, which was loud, raucous, jeering, jokey, they were always looking at Ben. Yet he spoke very little. When he did say something, it was never much more than Yes, or No. Take this! Get that! Give me—whatever it was, a sandwich, a bottle of Coke. And he watched them carefully all the time. He was the boss of this gang, whether they knew it or not.
They were a bunch of gangly, spotty, uncertain adolescents; he was a young adult. She had to conclude this finally, though for a while she believed that these poor children, who stayed together because they were found stupid, awkward, and unable to match up to their contemporaries, liked Ben because he was even clumsier and more inarticulate than they. No! She discovered that “Ben Lovatt’s gang” was the most envied in the school, and a lot of boys, not only the truants and drop-outs, wanted to be part of it.
Harriet watched Ben with his followers and tried to imagine him among a group of his own kind, squatting in the mouth of a cave around roaring flames. Or a settlement of huts in a thick forest? No, Ben’s people were at home under the earth, she was sure, deep underground in black caverns lit by torches—that was more like it. Probably those peculiar eyes of his were adapted for quite different conditions of light.
She often sat in the kitchen, by herself, when they were across the low wall in the living-room, watching the box. They might sprawl there for hours, all afternoon and evening. They made tea, raided the refrigerator, went out to fetch pies, or chips, or pizzas. They did not seem to mind what they watched; they liked the afternoon soap operas, did not turn off the children’s programmes; but best of all they enjoyed the bloody fare of the evening. Shootings and killings and tortures and fighting: this is what fed them. She watched them watching—but it was more as if they were actually part of the stories on the screen. They were unconsciously tensing and flexing, faces grinning, or triumphant or cruel; and they let out groans or sighs or yells of excitement: “That’s it, do it!” “Carve him up!” “Kill him, slice him!” And the moans of excited participation as the bullets poured into a body, as blood spurted, as the tortured victim screamed.
These days the local newspapers were full of news of muggings, hold-ups, break-ins. Sometimes this gang, Ben among them, did not come into the Lovatts’ house for a whole day, two days, three.
“Where have you been, Ben?”
He replied indifferently, “Been with my friends.”
“Yes, but where?”
“Been around.”
In the park, in a café, in the cinema, and, when they could borrow (or steal?) motorbikes, off to some seaside town.
She thought of ringing the headmaster, but then: What is the point? If I were in his place, I’d be relieved they took themselves off.
The police? Ben in the hands of the police?
The gang always seemed to have plenty of money. More than once, dissatisfied with what they found in the refrigerator, they brought in feasts of food, and ate all evening. Derek (never Ben!) would offer her some.
“Like a bit of take-away, love?”
And she accepted, but sat apart from them, for she knew they would not want her too close.
There were rapes, too, among those news items.…
She examined those faces, trying to match them with what she had read. Ordinary young men’s faces; they all seemed older than fifteen, sixteen. Derek had a foolish look to him: at ugly moments on the screen he laughed a lot in a weak excitable way. Elvis was a lean, sharp blond youth, very polite, but a nasty customer, she thought, with eyes as cold as Ben’s. Billy was a hulk, stupid, with aggression in every movement. He would get so lost in the violence on the box that he would jump to his feet and seem almost to disappear into the screen—and then the others jeered at him, and he came to himself and sat down. He scared her. They all did. But, she thought, they weren’t all that intelligent. Perhaps Elvis was.… If they were stealing (or worse), then who planned it all, and looked after them?
Ben? “He does not know his own strength.” That formula had gone with him through school. How did he control the rages that she knew could overcome him? She was always covertly on the watch for cuts, bruises, wounds. All had them, but nothing very bad.
One morning, she came down the stairs to find Ben eating breakfast with Derek. That time she said nothing, but knew she could expect more. Soon she found six of them at breakfast: she had heard them, very late, creep upstairs and find beds for themselves.
She stood by the table, looked at them bravely, ready to face them out, and said, “You aren’t just to sleep here, any time you feel like it.” They kept their heads down and went on eating.
“I mean it,” she insisted.
Derek said, laughing, intending to sound insolent, “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry I’m sure. But we thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“I do mind,” she said.
“It’s a big house,” said Billy the lout, the one she was most afraid of. He did not look at her, but crammed food into his mouth, and made a noise eating.
“It’s not your house,” said Harriet.
“One day we’ll take it away from you,” said Elvis, laughing loudly.
“Oh, perhaps you will, yes.”
They all made “revolutionary” remarks like this, when they remembered.
“Come the revolution, we’ll …” “We’ll kill all the rich shits and then …” “There’s one law for the rich, and one for the poor, everybody knows that.” They would say these things amiably, with that air of repletion people use when copying what others do; when they are part of a popular mood or movement.
David came back from work late, these days, and sometimes did not come at all. He stayed with one of the people he worked with. It happened that he arrived early one night and found the gang, nine or ten of them, watching television, with beer cans, cartons of take-away Chinese, papers that had held fish and chips, all over the floor.
He said, “Clear that mess up.”
They slowly got to their feet and cleared it up. He was a man: the man of the house. Ben cleared up with them.
“That’s enough,” said David. “And now go home, all of you.”
They trailed off, and Ben went with them. Neither Harriet nor David said anything to stop him.
They had not been alone together for some time. Weeks, she thought. He wanted to say something, but was afraid to—afraid of arousing that dangerous anger of his?
“Can’t you see what is going to happen?” he finally asked, sitting down with a plate of whatever he could find in the refrigerator.
“You mean, they are going to be here more often?” “Yes, that’s what I mean. Can’t you see we should sell this place?”
“Yes, I know we should,” she said quietly, but he mistook her tone.
“For God’s sake, Harriet, what can you be waiting for? It’s crazy.…”
“The only thing I can think of now is that the children might be pleased we kept it.”
“We have no children, Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children. You have one child.”
She felt that he would not be saying this if he were here more often. She said, “There is something you aren’t seeing, David.”
“And what’s that?”
“Ben will leave. They’ll all be off, and Ben will go with them.”
He considered this; considered her, his jaws moving slowly as he ate. He looked very tired. He was also looking much older than he was, could easily be taken as sixty, rather than fifty. He was a grey, rather stooped, shadowy man, with a strained look, and a
“Why? They can come here any time they like, do what they like, help themselves to food.”
“It’s not exciting enough for them, that’s why. I think they’ll just drift off one day to London, or some big town. They went off for five days last week.”
“And Ben will go with them?”
“Ben will go with them.”
“And you won’t go after him and bring him back?”
She did not reply. This was unfair, and he must know it; after a moment or two, he said, “Sorry. I’m so tired I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”
“When he’s gone, perhaps we could go and have a holiday together somewhere.”
“Well, perhaps we could.” This sounded as if he might even believe it, hope for it.
Later they lay side by side, not touching, and talked practically about arrangements for visiting Jane at her school. And there was Paul, at his, with a Parents’ Visiting Day.
They were alone in the big room where all the children but Ben had been born. Above them the emptiness of the upper floors, and the attic. Downstairs, the empty living-room and kitchen. They had locked the doors. If Ben decided to come home that night, he would have to ring.
She said, “With Ben gone, we could sell this and buy some sensible house somewhere. Perhaps the children would enjoy coming to visit if he wasn’t there.”
No reply: David was asleep.
Soon after that, Ben and the others went off again for some days. She saw them on the television. There was a riot in North London. “Trouble” had been forecast. They were not among those throwing bricks, lumps of iron, stones, but stood in a group at one side, leering and jeering and shouting encouragement.
Next day they returned, but did not settle down to watching television. They were restless, and went off again. Next morning the news was that a small shop had been broken into, one that had a post-office counter in it. About four hundred pounds had been taken. The shopkeeper had been bound and gagged. The postmistress was beaten up and left unconscious.
At about seven that night they came in. Except for Ben, they were full of excitement and achievement. When they saw her, they exchanged glances, enjoying the secret she did not share. She saw them pull out wads of notes, fingering them, pushing them back into pockets. If she were the police, she would be suspicious on the strength of their elation, their hectic faces.
Ben was not fevered, like the others. He was as he always was. You could think he had not been part of—whatever it was. But he had been there at the riot, she had seen him.
She tried: “I saw you lot on the television, you were at the Whitestone Estates.”
“Oh yeah, we were there,” boasted Billy.
“That was us,” said Derek, giving himself thumbs-up approval, and Elvis looked sharp and knowing. Some others with them, who came sometimes, not regulars, looked pleased.
A few days later, she remarked, “I think you lot ought to know that this house is going to be sold—not at once, but quite soon.”
She was watching Ben particularly, but while he did turn his eyes on her, and—she supposed—took the news in, he said nothing.
“So you’re going to sell, then?” said Derek, she felt as much for politeness as for anything.
She waited for Ben to mention it, but he did not. Was his identification with this gang of his now so great that he did not think of this as his home?
She remarked to him, when he was out of earshot of the others, “Ben, if for some reason you can’t find me here, I’m going to give you an address where you can always reach me.” As she spoke, she felt that David was watching her satirically, disapprovingly. “All right,” she said silently to the invisible David, “but I know you would do the same, if I didn’t.… That is the kind of person we are, and there’s nothing we can do about it, for better or worse.”
Ben took the sheet of paper on which she had written her name, Harriet Lovatt, care of Molly and Frederick Burke and their Oxford address, which did give her a certain spiteful pleasure. But she found the sheet of paper lying forgotten or unregarded on the floor of his room, and did not try again.
It was spring, then summer, and they came less often, sometimes not for days at a time. Derek had acquired a motorbike.
Now, whenever she heard of a break-in, or a mugging, or a rape anywhere, she blamed them; but thought she was unjust. They could not be blamed for everything! Meanwhile, she was longing for them to leave. She was a ferment of need to start a new life. She wanted to be done with this unhappy house, and the thoughts that went with it.
But they did come, sometimes. As if they had not been absent for so long, saying nothing about where, they would drift into the living-room, and sit themselves around the set, four or five of them, sometimes as many as ten or eleven. They did not now raid the refrigerator: there was very little in it these days. They brought in enormous quantities of a variety of foodstuffs that originated in a dozen countries. Pizzas, and quiches; Chinese food, and Indian; pita bread filled with salad; tacos, tortillas, samosas, chili con carne; pies and pasties and sandwiches. These were the conventional and hidebound English, were they? Not prepared to eat anything but what their parents knew! It did not seem to matter to them what they ate, provided there was a lot of it, and they might strew crumbs and crusts and cartons about, and not have to clean anything up.
She tidied up after them and thought: It’s not for long.
She would sit by herself at the big table while they sprawled about on the other side of the low wall, and the television noises made a counter-current to their loud, noisy, rancorous voices—the voices of an alienated, non-comprehending, hostile tribe.
The expanse of the table soothed her. When first bought, as a discarded butcher’s table, it had had a rough, much-cut-about surface, but it had been planed down, and at that stage of its life had shown the clean creamy white of the new layer of wood. She and David had waxed it. Since then, thousands of hands, fingers, sleeves, the bare forearms of summer, the cheeks of children who had fallen forward asleep sitting on adults’ laps, the plump feet of toddlers held up to walk there, everyone applauding: all this, the smoothings and caressings of twenty years, had given the wide board—it was all of a piece, cut long ago from some gigantic oak—a gleaming silken surface, so smooth fingers skated over it. Beneath this skin the knots and whorls lay submerged, their pattern known intimately to her. The skin had been scarred, though. Here was a brown half-circle where Dorothy had set down a too hot saucepan and, angry with herself, had snatched it up. There was a curving black weal, but Harriet could not remember what had made it. If you looked at the table from a certain angle, it had areas of tiny dimples or dents, where trivets had been set to keep the heat of dishes off the precious surface.
When she leaned forward, she could see herself in the gleam—dully, but enough to make her lean back again, out of sight. She looked like David: old. No one would say she was forty-five. But it was not the ordinary ageing of grey hair, tired skin: invisible substance had been leached from her; she had been drained of some ingredient that everyone took for granted, which was like a layer of fat but was not material.
Leaning back where she could not see her blurry image, she imagined how, once, this table had been set for feasts and enjoyment, for—family life. She re-created the scenes of twenty, fifteen, twelve, ten years ago, the stages of the Lovatt board, first David and herself, brave innocents, with his parents, and Dorothy, and her sisters … then the babies appearing, and becoming small children … new babies … twenty people, thirty, had crowded around this gleaming surface and been mirrored in it, they had added other tables to the ends, broadened it with planks set on trestles … she saw the table lengthen, and widen, and the faces mass around it, always smiling faces, for this dream could not accommodate criticism or discord. And the babies … the children … she heard the laughter of small children, their voices; and then the wide shine of
Did he feel her eyes on him, as a human would? He sometimes looked at her while she looked at him—not often, but it did happen that his eyes met hers. She would put into her gaze these speculations, these queries, her need, her passion to know more about him—whom, after all, she had given birth to, had carried for eight months, though it had nearly killed her—but he did not feel the questions she was asking. Indifferently, casually, he looked away again, and his eyes went to the faces of his mates, his followers.
And saw—what?
Did he ever remember now that she—his mother, but what did that mean to him?—had found him in that place, and brought him home? Had found him a poor creature half dead in a strait-jacket? Did he know that because she had brought him home, this house had emptied itself, and everyone had gone away, leaving her alone?