Other People (18 page)

'Atta boy, atta monkey,' said Russ loudly.'... Bitch.' Paris and Ray now had Vera hammocked between them. Alan stood near by, counting. They swung her once, twice, three times—and let go. Vera sailed up into the air, sailing on her scream, until her frantic body collapsed in the water. Paris dived in and surfaced near her like a giant tadpole wriggling up from the depths.

Later, while the others were having tea at the stall, Mary slipped off alone. She walked down the skiddy poolside to the shallow end. The pool was nearly empty now, but the water still slopped thirstily round its banks. Using the rails, Mary backed her body into the cold medium. Without hesitation she turned and pushed herself forward. Yes. She could do it. She could join in too. Her legs mirroring her arms, she shinnied smoothly through the water, which still lapped loosely, smacking its lips, eager for more. Her head erect and her face shining in the light, Mary made her way up into the deep end.

So when the message came that night she was ready for it. After all, it was a very simple message. She had probably heard it before and not quite recognized it. The message was on television.

Mary was used to television by now, its contests, its suspended worlds, its limitless present of vociferous catastrophes. No one came on (as Mary nightly expected someone to do) and explained what was wrong with Earth and why it was coming to the boil with crisis and rage in this way. Everyone on television seemed to be a little bit mad, which perhaps accounted for it. Mary imagined that the world contained a fizzing knot of flame and metal that wriggled ever outwards from its core. When the pressure became critical, parts of the world's vast distances would sprout fire in the form of liberty, terror and boredom. Fire chose hot places but the heat was spreading. Earth seemed to be sprouting fire all the time now. There seemed no stopping it now. Perhaps one day soon all the earth would be fire. How strange and lucky it was that she lived in a place where the fire showed only in tiny points that were soon extinguished. How lucky and strange to live on a quietly simmering island.

'And later on tonight,' said the television fondly, 'we'll also be hearing from Michael Shane, who has just come back from Ethiopia with a two-part report.'

Mary looked up from her book. The screen was filled by the photograph of a smartly posed young man, his chin on his knuckles, gazing out at them with patient, serious eyes. Mary remembered what Prince had told her—the photographs in your old room, think about them. She thought about them, and then she heard Marge say in her mind: 'That's Michael. He's famous now of course ... Such a thoughtful boy.'

15

• • •

By Heart

'Hello, can I speak to Michael Shane?'

'Moment please,' said a woman's voice.

Mary waited. She yawned. She had stayed up late the previous night to see Michael Shane on television. Heralded by a series of brooding guitar chords, the lights had found him nimbly seated on the edge of a squeaky black armchair. To his right, perched on childishly high stools, sat a white man, a black woman and a black man. Behind him was a large screen on which Michael proudly showed his recent exploits.

'Current Affairs,' said a male voice with quiet pleasure, as if Current Affairs were his name.

'Hello, can I speak to Michael Shane?'

'Ah. Just hang on one moment please.'

Michael's sun-helmeted adventures had taken place somewhere on fire in Africa. He had visited a coffee factory, a tin mine and a banana plantation. He had crouched in a helicopter. He had stumbled through slums. He had spoken to key black men, some of whose faces and names could not be revealed. Everyone had been very hot, scared and angry, what with all the fire about. And there was one authentically bad moment when Michael had had to go down on his knees while a black soldier approached, sternly unslinging his rifle. Overweight, T-shirted white friends of Michael's quickly appeared and the soldier had gone off looking very embarrassed. Mary thought that it was clever of Michael to go down on his knees like that.

'Hel
lo
,' said a female voice of almost asphyxiating warmth. 'This is Mr Shane's personal assistant. May I help you?'

'Hello, can I speak to Michael Shane?'

'Ah,'
said the voice understandingly. 'Who's calling please?' she asked, clearly hoping to get this stray detail out of the way.

'Mary Lamb,' said Mary.

'
I
see,' she said. 'One moment please...'

Michael had then talked about his exploits to the people on the stools. They had got very angry too, with each other and with Michael, and Michael had got quite angry back. The programme ended before they did. You could see them still gesticulating intelligently at each other as the lights went down and the guitar chords started up. Mary thought that Michael acquitted himself exceptionally well throughout, considering the plain fact that he was only about twelve years old.

'Hello,' said the voice with fresh warmth. 'I'm afraid that Mr Shane is just going into conference at the moment. Would you like to tell me what it's about?'

'Yes. I want to talk to him about Amy Hide.'

'One moment please.'

'Hello?'

'Hello. Is that Michael Shane?'

'Speaking,' said Michael Shane.

Ah, so the world works, thought Mary, or parts of it do. The things that happened on television weren't all on the other side. Thin lines connected the two.

'Did you say Amy Hide?' he asked 'Yes.'

'Who are you?'

'Mary Lamb. I'm a cousin of Amy Hide's. I want to talk about her.'

'Amy ... I haven't thought about her for—for at least ten minutes. Well you've found the right guy. She's my pet topic, Amy Hide. When can we meet?'

'Next Sunday?'

'Now let's think. I'm going to Australia this afternoon,' he said calmly.

'What?'
said Mary. 'I mean—are you?' That's that then, she thought.

'Mm. It's a drag, actually. If I'd known I'd have gone straight from L.A. I'm only going for a day or two—let's see. I want to stop over in Madras to catch an afternoon of the Test, and there'll probably be something in the Gulf to check out. Sorry about this, I'm just thinking aloud. Now I've got to go to Tokio
some
time next week. Boring boring boring. Carol! Is Tokio
after
Bogota? Right, right. No,' he said, 'Sunday'll be fine.'

'Are you sure?' said Mary.

'Yeah, I'll be here all day putting the lid on this Eritrea thing. The trouble is it's hard for me to get across town. Why don't you come here?'

Mary ran from the callbox to the café. Alan was covering for her at the sink (she had told him a lie about wanting to go to the chemist) and Antonio didn't see her, so everything was still all right. Sunday was six days away, six days tugged at by Russ and Alan, six days of walking to work when the sky looked like heaven and walking back when the sky looked like hell.

Mary went to Michael Shane. The building in which he sold his time was just over the river, not far from where the Bothams had lived before Mary broke Mr Botham's back. She wondered, as she often wondered, where they were now and whether she would ever see them again. The river's surface was goose-pimpled in the swiping wind. It looked like chainmail. Overhead, the clouds were having a hard time of it too. She knew now that clouds were dead— air, gas, spore—but these clouds resembled the ghosts of living things, the ghosts of pigs, perhaps. The weather was turning, no question; the air was full of change. Michael hopped from furnace to cauldron, from desert to volcano-mouth, but Mary's stretch of earth was getting colder. She looked again at the clouds nosing about above, their ears fringed with pink. The changing air reminded her of something, something transient in itself: stopping dead in a courtyard, frozen by the strange tang of the light. Times of year must take you back, she thought—if there are times for you to go back to. Everyone is getting older all the time; they all have big houses in their minds where they can hang around. I'm tired of my narrow stretch, this gangplank of time. I'm tired. I'm tired of these thin shallows, littered with spoons and dishes, where now pallid Alan paddles. I want to swim a little deeper now. I can't go on sucking each passing second dry ... A mad gull with a terrible face, a rodent's face clenched with rage and panic, dropped down past her in search of leavings on the water. What is life like for that bone-nosed rat on wings? Mary hurried over the bridge. Ten yards from the other side the mad gull flew out of nothing and hurtled past her face, its eyes aware that it had been watched. It knows about me, thought Mary. She asked a tall old man the way. He bent down to tell her, resting one hand on his knee and pointing with the other, and staying that way for quite a while after she had gone.

Mary had somehow idly acquired the notion that Michael Shane would confront her in the shrill clarity of the studio—the guitar chords, the squeaky chair, the lean-browed questions. It wasn't like that. A polished, burnished girl was waiting for her when she came through the flashing segments of the revolving door. Mary was on time. Mary was always on time. The girl, who had transfixed brown hair and a good deal of knowingness of an elementary kind in her nerveless eyes, chose not to approach Mary immediately when she gave her name at the desk. She looked at Mary first, quickly, with coldness and relief. The look made Mary think about her clothes— the unseasonal sandals and insubstantial cotton dress, the cheap but flamboyant shirt that Paris had strongly urged her to buy in the market near the squat, Alan's brown cardigan, which she wore because it was too cold not to. (Mary had an overcoat, one of Sharon's. It had an orange check and was permanently damp. It lived in herwardrobe. Mary didn't like it, and it didn't like Mary much either.) It made Mary feel hot, thinking about her clothes. As she followed the girl along the corridor, Mary admired the rumpy convexities of her narrow black skirt, the dark veins of her stockings, the noisy shoes and their smug shine. How well did I know this man? wondered Mary. How well did he know me? They entered an empty room—the girl's room, clearly, with its splayed handbag on the desk, the cigarette packet and gold lighter, the overcoat nonchalantly at rest on its hanger. The room had an inner door. The girl opened the inner door and smiled at Mary with encouragement and triumph.

'You can go right in,' she said.

Michael sat behind a desk with his back to the door, a black telephone nestling like a kitten on the boxy material of his shoulder. He was murmuring affirmatively into the mouthpiece.

'Right, right. You're making a big Mustique, you know,' he said and chuckled to himself. 'No, I hate that place. Give me Guadeloupe every time. Yeah, or St Lucia. Or Tobago, yeah. Barbados?
Barbados?

He swivelled and faced her. Mary needed all her courage to hold his gaze. At first she thought that his expression had not changed but before she could sigh she noticed an urgent thickening in his fleshy brow. He had stopped listening to what the telephone whispered.

'Stay where you are,' he said, looking straight at her. 'I'll get back to you.

'You're very like Amy,' he said then. 'Very like, very like.'

'People do say that,' said Mary.

He stood up. 'I'm sorry. My name is Michael Shane. And you're Mary Lamb. Ah—the hands are different. Amy had white hands, lazy hands. The eyes are different too. Colour's the same, but they're different.'

He sat down again. At his invitation Mary sat facing him across the shining plane of the desk. His open face gave off exceptional light—eyes, hair, teeth. She saw now that he wasn't twelve years old by any means, but at least seventeen or eighteen, possibly even older.

'Really?' she said.

'What side of the family are you from?'

'Oh, the mother's side,' said Mary, who had looked into all this a bit. Mary straightened her cardigan. She found she was trying to project herself differently, deceptively, to put herself forward in light disguise—quieter, milder, nicer. Saner.

'You look more like Baby, actually,' he said vaguely. 'What do you want to know, Mary?'

'I knew Amy as a child,' said Mary. 'Then I went and lived somewhere else. I never heard from her again until I—'

'Yes, that was a shaker, wasn't it. They're still not absolutely sure though, are they?'

'No, they're not,' said Mary. 'You see, I just want to know what she was like.'

He joined his hands together and flexed them. 'Would you like some
wine?'
he asked. 'I don't drink a great deal but what I do drink tends to be ... rather good.' He produced a bottle and two glasses from the cupboard beneath-his bookcase. There was a little refrigerator down there too, Mary noticed. 'It's a rather audacious Brouilly, whose initial tart piquancy soon subsides into optimism and warmth. And it won't fuck up the taste of your cheeseburgers.' He turned to her with an expectant smile. It had all the ingredients, all the material, of a good smile. But it wasn't a good smile.

Mary, who had no idea what he was talking about, smiled back.

Michael Shane wrenched out the cork and poured the wine. He sipped, sighed, and flexed his hands again. He gazed out of the window for a while. Mary knew as soon as he started to speak that he had said all this many times before, had let it all out many times, had used it all many times before.