Other People (12 page)

He laughed and said, 'Oh boy—I'm going to have a lot of fun with you, I really am.'

'Mary!' called Mr Garcia. 'I say
bring
the poached egg toast!'

Mary was about to hurry away but Prince reached out and took her by the wrist. Mr Garcia saw him then and said quickly, 'It's okay. It's okay, Mary.'

'Sit down,' said Prince. 'Mary, Mary Lamb—that name kills me.'

'What do you want from me?'

'Who you are—that's the first thing I want to find out. Who are you? Eh? Eh? Are you Amy Hide?'

'I don't know,' said Mary.

'She was quite a girl, Amy.'

Mary looked down. 'Oh God, I hope it isn't true,' she said.

'The things she did.'

'I, I want forgiveness.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'That's right.'

'Sorry?' '

'Yes:

He laughed again. 'I can't get enough of this,' he said. 'But let's be serious for a while. I'm in a hell of a position actually. And so are you. You be straight with me and I'll be straight with you. Let's get our story straight. Okay?'

'Okay,' said Mary.

'Now. Some people have been working on the assumption that Amy Hide came to a sticky end.'

'Did she?'

'Apparently very sticky, yes. Mind you, she was cruising for a bruising all along. And yet, and yet—here you still are.'

'If it's me.'

'If it's you.' He took a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his overcoat. 'I've got something for you, an address.

'Home, perhaps,' he said, and stood up. Cigarette smoke came like spectral tusks from his nostrils. 'Why don't you go and find out, Mary?' he said.

Mary looked down at the address—Mr and Mrs Hide and where they lived.

'Be in touch,' he said.

Mary watched him amble out into the street. A black car swooped down and he got into it. 'He knows about me,' Mary murmured as she walked up the vault of the crowded café.

'Is the feeling of self-loavin I can't bear. Inna mornins.
Used
again. I'm just a bloody pushover, I am. I'm just bloody anybody's—providing they're film stars, I'm a cinch. Open me eyes, and there'll be Mia or Lisa or Bo or Elke, Nasstassia, Sigourney, Imogen, or
Ju
lie or
Tues
day or
Cher
yl or
Mer
yl
.
Hah! It's not my mind they're after—I know that, mate, don't worry! Take you now, Mary—'

'Ah fuck off, Russ,' drawled Alan. They had both got much worse at talking over the last half-hour.

'No, come on. This is
serious.
Mary. You see someone like me, dirty great unk like me, the tight T-shirt and the jeans and all, all the equipment. It says only one thing to you now dunnit? S, E, X. Come on, it does dunnit?'

'Russ,' said Alan.

'Is true! Admit it, goo on. Here all right darlin, here's to you. Your good elf.'

'Yeah cheers,' said Alan, raising his glass.

'Tell you what, girl,' said Russ, 'you really livened the place up, you have. Strew. The one we had before was a right dog. A right old poodle.'

'No,' said Alan, 'strew. That's right.'

'No,' said Russ, 'you have.'

'No,' said Alan, 'this is it.'

Til tell you what and all. The voice on her. She talks like a
fuckin
princess, she does.'

'Strew. Like a
fuckin
duchess, mate.'

'Like a
fuckin emp
ress mate! She does. I could listen to her all day and all night. Here's to you Mary! Your good elf!'

You see? she wanted to say. I'm
good
—I
am.

Mary looked round the public house. Though only mildly furious in its pattern of exchange, the room was as crowded and cacophonous as the place she remembered from her second day—when she had been with Sharon, and with Jock and Trev. But how much less loud and various things seemed to her now. Oh, it was still interesting all right, interesting, interesting: did you see the way that woman looked up from her evening paper and towards the stained window with a ragged gasp, or the way that man tried to suppress a beam of love at his patient dog, lying under the table with its nose on its paws? Yes, but it's not enough to fill my thoughts, even here with friends, spending money earned from time sold. She thought, I'm becoming like other people. I'm getting fear and letting the present dim.

• • •

But it had to happen, Mary.

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.

Don't eat fear soup. Send it back.

Some people have fear but some have confidence instead. Which do you have? You're not confident, I know that. I know that, because actually no one has confidence. The most confident men and women you know—they haven't got confidence. No one has. Everyone has fear instead. (Unless they have that third thing, which men call madness.)

They fear they are a secret which other people will one day discover. They fear they are a joke which other people will one day see, which other people will one day
get.

Do you know, for instance, what little Alan is afraid of now? He is afraid that Russ and Mary will shortly go off together somewhere for a protracted session of hysterical sex. He is. He can see Mary unfurling her immaculate white panties, glancing shyly over her shoulder, while the mightily hung Russ lolls smiling on the bed. And Alan can see himself, Alan, watching the whole spectacle from some abstract vantage, silent, unblinking, and perfectly bald, like a being from the future. Russ, on the other hand, is afraid that Alan will tell Mary, or that Mary will inadvertently discover, that he, Russ, can neither read nor write. (Russ has a further heroic foible: he refuses to believe that he has an unusually small penis. He is wrong about this; he ought to stop refusing to believe it; he does in fact have an unusually small one.) Whereas Mary is afraid of the address in her bag. She is afraid of Prince and what he knows. She is afraid that her life has in some crucial sense already run its course, that the life she moves through now is nothing more than another life's reflection, its mirror, its shadow. Everything she sees has an edge on it, like prisms in petrol, like faces in fire, like other people hurrying through changing light—visions that we sense ought to reveal something, or will soon reveal something, or have already revealed something that we have missed and will never see again.

• • •

'Time,' said the man behind the bar, 'time, gentlemen, please.'

Alan sprang up guiltily, barking his kneecap on the table and toppling an empty glass. As it fell, Russ tried to catch it, but only slapped the glass still faster to the floor. It didn't smash or break. It rose up to live again on the wet tabletop.

'Here, let's uh—we'll walk you home,'said Alan quickly.

'Yeah, where d'you live?' said Russ.

'Near here. With some girls,' said Mary.

'I'm not coming,' said Russ. 'I can't risk it.'

But Russ risked it. They all did. They all walked through the shouts and shadows of the night. For every slammed car door a light went out. This was the week ending with a nervous sigh, and getting ready to start all over again.

'You'll have a word with them, won't you, on my behalf,' said Russ. 'Explain and that.'

'If you like,' said Mary. 'I don't think you'll see them. You can't come in.'

'It's one of those places, is it?' said Alan. 'Landlady on the stairs, no radios, no cats.'

'And no film stars,' said Russ. 'That's the big itch.'

'It's not really like that,' said Mary.

They came to Mary's place. Two girls were sitting smoking on the steps. The girls gazed out blankly for a few seconds, then went on talking. Mary could read the smoke coming in thin wafts from their mouths. They weren't talking about anything much. Through the open door you could see the old green passage, and the notice-board breathing softly.

Alan swung his head round at her. 'You don't live
there,
do you Mary?' he said in a stretched, pleading voice.

'Yes,' said Mary, 'I do, I'm afraid.'

'How'd you end up
here,
girl,' said Russ.

'There was nowhere else.'

'Can't have this,' said Russ gravely.

'What happened to you?' said Alan, with his beseeching eyes. 'I mean—haven't you got any family or anything?'

Mary couldn't answer. She didn't know what to say any more. Now Mrs Pilkington loomed in the doorway, the ring of keys in her hand. The girls stood up and flicked their cigarettes into the air, then turned with their heads bowed. Mary moved forward. There was nothing to say. On the steps she turned and waved. The boys looked on, their hands in their pockets, then they too turned and started off down the long defile of the street.

'This is you,' said the driver.

And what have
you
done in your life, thought Mary, as she lowered herself from the hungry red bus. The driver watched her, breathing through his mouth. He was big and fat and red like the bus he drove. She returned his stare, or she let it bounce back off her, as if she were no more than the mirror of his gaze. Obediently the red bus lay there, breathing through its mouth, panting to be off again. The door slid shut, and with a snorting shudder they rode away.

Mary started walking. Grey, bookish, moss-scrawled houses with many windows stood stoically back from the road, beyond shallow stretches of grass where water-machines washed the transient rainbows of the air. In the treacly shadows beneath the garden walls confetti butterflies and corpulent bees flew in their haze... All this Mary saw in the Sunday morning light. There was a time when she would have let her senses out to play in the voluptuous present, but now her mind was hot and ragged. She had lost the knack of choosing what she wanted to think about; it seemed she could no longer call her thoughts her own.

Clearing her throat, straightening her shirt, needlessly clicking her handbag, Mary asked other people the way. There weren't many of them about—men carrying bales of newspapers, women pushing prams, children, the old— but asking the way was a sound method of getting to other places. It always worked in time.

She had found the street and was counting numbers, missing a beat, missing a beat, when she halted and lifted a hand to her mouth, and another memory came her way... Not now, not now, she thought, and remembered how as someone young she had had to leave her own room and enter a different room containing other people. She was putting on a pink dress, a dress her skin loved. Its pink was not the pastel that little girls ought to wear; it contained tenderness but also blood, the colour of gums and the most intimate flesh. She lifted the dress and blinked as its shadow slipped past her eyes. She smoothed the-material out along her hips as if it were the same colour and texture as her soul. She glanced swiftly round her room—her room, which again was no more than a setting for her self— then opened the door and moved down the passage to that other door with its voices and its eyes.

Will it open? thought Mary, stalled on the silent street, her hands on her hair. Well, now I'll find out.

11

• • •

Whose Baby?

The door opened. It revealed a woman in black.

Mary tried to begin but couldn't.

'Why, Baby,' said the woman, with worry or concern in her voice.

Mary's teeth shivered. 'Baby?' she said.

The woman leaned forward, her eyes flickering in simple puzzlement. 'Oh I do beg your pardon. Goodness!' She stepped back with a hand on her heart. 'Don't take any notice of me. Can I help you, dear?' she added matter-of-factly.

'Oh I see. I'm sorry, I'm ...'

'I say, are you all right, dear? You look quite ... take my...
George!'

Five minutes later Mary sat drinking a cup of tea in the sun-washed kitchen. Like the woman in black, Mary held her cup with both hands. She thought, I'm a girl, so I drink hot drinks with both hands. Girls always do that for some reason. Why? George uses only one. Men use only one hand, although their hands aren't nearly so steady as ours. Perhaps girls' hands are just colder hands. The kitchen, the passage, the house, meant nothing to her, nothing.

'It must be the heat,' said the woman in black. 'And I probably gave you a turn. I thought she was Baby, George. I could have sworn for a moment she was Baby come to see us. Don't you think she looks like Baby, George?'