Other People (17 page)

Take Wednesday evening.

With a blanket between herself and the moist grass, Mary was sitting in the late sun of the garden,' reading a book. She was reading
Lady and Lapdog and Other Stories
and being told some curious things about women. It had been an averagely turbulent afternoon at the café. When Alan's back was turned Russ ran into his office and came dancing out again brandishing some secret pamphlets that Alan kept in a drawer. They were called things like
Hair Transplants: The Facts, How To Save Your Hair
and, more brutally,
Going Bald?
Alan was dizzy about it all afternoon. Later he said to her tremulously, with a bad-stomach grin on his face, 'Mary. You know Russ? Guess what. He can't even read and write.'

Alan suddenly didn't look as pleased as he thought he was going to be about imparting this information.

'Poor Russ,' said Mary.

Mary read on in the waning light. She turned a page. Every now and then her dark fringe was lifted by a stray salvo of wind. She leaned forward and scratched her bare ankle with a careless fingernail. She turned a page: the turning paper threw light on her eyes as she lifted her chin calmly to face the next oblong of print. Her eyes did not wander. But she knew Alan's face was watching her from behind the sitting-room window, a pale fish in its pond.

Now. Mary knew that Alan would soon make his bid to join her. She knew he knew he shouldn't try it: clearly she didn't want him there, and he would just subtly augment her pity and her weariness. But he would have to try it, his mind made up by love. If he didn't do it quickly, then Russ would do it instead. By some random dispensation, Russ seemed to be able to do more or less as he pleased with Mary, in public too, without the slightest forethought or constraint. Twice now she had spent whole evenings on his lap. It was comfortable there, she had to admit, and Alan didn't appear to mind. He looked the other way and concentrated on his hair. He never said anything about it.

Through the corner of her eye, where the eye joins the brain and its radar, Mary saw Alan begin his wheel towards the garden steps. She turned the page. He reappeared on the shallow wooden balcony and looked up at the sky, as if simply savouring the shrewd evening air. He looked as though he might try to seal his nonchalance with a whistle. He did. God, what a bleat it was. She turned the page. His raised leg dangled above the top step—but then he heard the familiar jinking bustle behind him. Russ! The whistle was his great mistake! He moved aside and looked at the flowers while Russ jogged down the steps.

'There you are, my flower,' said Russ.

Mary put down her book. It was no use trying to read with Russ there. He liked playing instead, pinching and tickling mostly. They played for about twenty minutes. Mary laughed a lot as she rolled about with her legs in the air—Russ was very funny, she had to admit. Afterwards he led her by the hand up the steps. Alan was still on the balcony, watching the flowers. As Mary passed him he turned to her and audibly wrenched a fistful of hair from his head. He looked down in astonishment: an entire pigtail bristled in his palm. He looked up at Mary. They both thought: he can't do that many more times. He's only got about three or four of those left.

Mary followed Russ into the sitting-room. She felt very sorry for Alan and wished he could stop worrying about his hair.

After the staggered suppers, after the television had run its course and all the other people had dispersed in ones and twos, Russ, Mary and Alan stayed up late in the communal sitting-room.

Mary was on Russ's lap. She didn't really know what she was supposed to do about this or whether it mattered. Russ just took her and put her there. Alan had tried it once, but the experiment had not been a success. He put her on his legs rather than his lap, and almost immediately his knees started trembling with such violence that it made Mary's voice quaver when she spoke. She got up and went and sat on Russ's lap. It was more comfortable there. Russ worked you properly into the enclave of his body and fastened his arms securely round your waist.

'Why do you bother with that fucking little wreck?' Russ asked her, wagging his head towards Alan, who smiled.

Mary shrugged. There was nothing she could say. The evenings always ended like this now. It made her uneasy and she didn't know why. But the boys seemed to enjoy it. Russ kissed her ear with a pop. She put an arm round his shoulders, to be more comfortable.

'You me babe,' Russ whispered loudly, 'we could go to the stars. We could make sweet-sweet music.
Mm-hmm ...
I mean,
look
at him.'

'Come on, Russ,' said Alan shyly.

'He's gunna be bald as an egg in about—half an hour. Hah! I got more air on me left armpit than he's got on his whole bonce! Look at the chest on me.' Russ breathed in deeply. Mary felt his chest for something to do. 'See? Now look at fuckin Alan!'

'Come on, Russ,' said Alan, shrugging modestly.

''Look
at him... Did you ever see such a fuckin little spaz in all your life. What's he like inna cot, eh Mary?
Fuckin pathetic,
I bet. What's he do, eh? Eh? Shoe-horns it in, quick sneeze-job, then wipes it onna pillow? Eh? Eh? Hah! Now with
me,
what
I
do is, first I—'

'Come on, Mary,' said Alan.

He was standing before her with his arm outstretched. Mary took his hand—to stop it shaking, apart from anything else. She got up and went with him towards the door.

'Sweet dreams, Baldie. Stay in one piece, my love,' Russ called after them, and for a long time they could hear his bitter laughter skirling up the stairs.

Mary lay naked in her bed, waiting for Alan. He preferred to ready himself downstairs for the final stage of his daily ordeal. In a few minutes he would make his entrance. Then he would untie and slip off his oddly hirsute dressing-grown and come forward in a crouch to join her iri between the sheets. Then he would do what he needed to do.

Clearly this was giving him no more pleasure than it gave her. Few aspects of life on earth made as little sense to Mary as all this did. She and Alan had tried the two things—sleeping apart and sleeping together—and neither was any good. Perhaps they could go back, or move on, to sleeping apart again. Perhaps, if she had to sleep with anyone, she could sleep with Russ, who looked as though he would mind doing it less. She had presented these alternatives to Alan, and he had seemed very much against them. He said he would do anything she asked of him but not those two things, although those two things were the only things she had ever asked of him. What she really wanted was to go back to the old way. She could then read a book at night and sleep far more comfortably. Russ would perhaps revert to how he was before, and she might lose this unwanted power she had over Alan, the power to make feel bad. Surely he couldn't bear this much longer. Surely he couldn't love her that much.

Alan came into the room. He tried to whisper a secretive 'Hi', but it just sounded like a parched gasp escaping from the back of his throat. With movements that were hurried and yet took quite a long time, he disentangled himself from his dressing-gown, seeming towards the end to be fighting off the hairy, clinging thing. He dropped it on the chair and crept low towards her through the dark.

His chest was damp but his mouth was completely dry. Alan was always getting things wrong like that. His body smelled of atrophied anti-perspirant, his mouth of toothpaste and the remains of a powerful, wide-spectrum mouthwash. There was an acrid sponginess about him at such moments, with his moist scalp and his shimmering hands. Poor ghost, thought Mary. She lay crucified as his clamped mouth kissed her lips. His hanging, creaturely part was just a soggy presence against her thigh, neither limp nor hard, sadly waiting. Sadness, that's what this is, thought Mary. He rose above her starfished body. Oh my God, he's dying, she thought, he's streaming everywhere, he's melting away.

It never lasted long and soon he slept, or he tried. He wasn't very good at that either. For many hours Mary lay awake and listened to his dream talk, the words not forming properly but managing to say quite a lot about his confusion and sadness at being alive among all these other people.

This was a turbulent and tiring time for Mary; but nothing really happened. She brought many feelings to bear on her night out with Prince, from defiance to numb surrender. But she didn't know what to do about it—except try to be good, and she was doing that, she
was
trying. The phantom of the past wasn't about to go away, so Mary just worked on getting used to it, getting not to mind about it so much. She lived the huff-and-puffstep by step, along with everybody else. She was waiting. Time was waiting. Then one Sunday her next move became clear.

It was the day they went to the local swimming-pool:

Mary, Alan, Russ, Ray, Paris, Vera, Alfred, Wendy and Jeremy. Mary was nervous about the scheme to begin with, particularly about what she should wear, but Wendy reassured her. Wendy had become a good friend to Mary, explaining to her, for instance, about contraception. Mary thought for some reason that only people in books had babies. But
Wendy
had a baby, didn't she? Mary thought about what she had risked—having a baby, Alan's baby. Ay! And to think that the act of pain or sadness was also the act that peopled the world.

'Can you swim, Mary?' asked Wendy as they splashed their way down the tunnel with Jeremy and Vera, heading for the booming echoes of the pool.

'I don't know,' said Mary, pleased with her hired costume. Mary looked good in black.

'What you mean, you don't know?' said Vera.

'I mean, I may have forgotten how,' said Mary in confusion, stepping out into the high arena.

'Come down the shallow end then,' said Wendy.

'I think I'll just sit down first,' said Mary.

Mary didn't know where to turn. Never had the brazen present thronged so mightily. Look, look, look, look at this, look at that, look at him, look at her, all in such liquid lucidity. The water sent out ribboned oceans along the high walls. The raw, tangled, stinging forms thrashed and leapt in chaos, ignited by the light ... Black Ray flashed past, thumped both feet on the pool's corky edge, and climbed in a failing arc through the air to topple as his arms pierced the water. His face and shoulders shot up again and he yelled at Paris, who bounded up the leaning gangplank, clutched his knees to his chest, and scattered the water with his atomic splash. Even Alan, looking no older than Jeremy in furry grey trunks, ran past waving and dived with his legs spread into the deep end. Jeremy himself stood tensed on the poolside, eight fingers in his mouth, watching his father trying to drown his mother. Wendy seemed to have plenty of appetite for the deed, yodelling lasciviously after each fresh attempt, until Alfred tired and flopped back gratefully into the shallows, where Paris now strode about with Vera on his shoulders.

Do I dare go in? she thought, feeling a great eagerness tearing at her. She watched Alan help lift a thrashing Jeremy into the shallow end. Even Alan seemed at freedom in this glazed and glassy element.

'Look at those mad coons.'

Russ sat dripping moodily at Mary's side. He pointed to Paris and Ray, who were obviously destined to distinguish themselves as the true heroes of the afternoon. At present they grappled on the board; Paris hooked Ray's right leg out from beneath him and together they twirled into the water. Vera and Wendy shouted from the side, Wendy clapping her hands and Vera bouncing up and down.

'They're like fucking kids,' said Russ.

'Look,' said Mary.

Ray was back on the board, standing on his head. He opened his legs in a Y. Paris raced up the chute and dived between Ray's pink quivering feet. Paris tumbled over backwards slightly when he hit the water. Black people always did that when they dived, Mary noted. They couldn't keep the lines of their vigour straight; their bodies were always busy getting ready for the next thing.

'Big deal,' said Russ. 'So Paris can stand on his head. Brill. "Paris". Hah! What kind of a name is that?
Paris.
Call that a name? Call that a name?'

'It was Ray who stood on his head,' said Mary.

'Yeah?' said Russ boredly. 'Well what the fuck difference does it make. They all look alike to me.'

Mary had heard this said before. She agreed. They all looked relatively alike to her too. It was self-evident: it was like saying that their teeth all looked alike. The reason that they all looked so alike is that they all looked so alive, so well-made. They just have a better time with their bodies than we do, that's all, she thought. Whereas nothing could be more monstrously various, so traumatically patched and motley, as the pandemonium of pink dripping and bubbling before her eyes. A man whose swelling, disjointed belly and behind bore the same relation to each other as the Americas on a globe; a woman whose legs were all snakes and ladders; an old man constructed entirely of barbed wire and sheep fur. Even the young shouldered their differences. The business of breasts, for instance: Vera was thin and had big ones, which gave an immediate impression of sly bendiness and athleticism; Wendy, though, was fat and had small ones, a clear and hurtful injustice. Fat but no tits: thanks a lot. And this was before time got to work. Mary saw the work of time everywhere she looked. So
this
was time's work ...