Other People (22 page)

Alan had left a note on the table. It was all about his
hair.

• • •

Poor Alan. Poor ghost.

Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me,' you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.

How often does suicide cross your mind? Every day? Once a week? Hardly at all any more? It probably depends on how old you are. Old takes nerve but suicide takes far more. It's a very risky business. Young Alan must have had a lot of nerve up there that afternoon. He was lucky he was young. He wouldn't have managed it otherwise.

Old is when you see that life is poor but it's all there is. Death is derisory; it only lasts a second; it's gone before you know it, so far as we know.

I've considered suicide, naturally. Yes, I've considered it. Some days I consider nothing else. Of course I can't consider it seriously until I've settled my score with Mary. And besides, I'm getting too old for it now. It's already too romantic a notion for me: I mean, it isn't very
realistic,
is it, suicide?

People are doing it younger and younger—eighteen, fifteen, ten. They gag on life early now. When you're young: that's the time for it. Do I wish I'd done it then, back in the good old days when I was young? No, not really. Life is poor but it's all there is, so far as we know.

• • •

The first thing Mary had to do about Alan's suicide was make a statement about it, too.

'It's just a formality,' said the shabby policeman whose Sunday they had spoilt, moving hushedly round the room. 'Course, you're not
obliged
to say anything at all, but in my experience ... it's usually ... Actually, this isn't reaily my province at all, really.'

Mary sat and stared across the table at Russ's dipped, soaking face. She had no idea what she was going to say.

'Now, now let's see ...' said the policeman, tugging on his ear. At first he proposed to transcribe a verbal narrative from each inhabitant of the squat. With a pimpled tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, he wrote very slowly as Paris and Ray successively drawled and stuttered identical accounts of Alan's discovery. The policeman looked at his watch. 'Perhaps I should... It's a pity, really, that there's so many of you here.' Then, flusteredly, and trying to ignore Russ's great wet sniífs (sniffs that managed to drain whole sinusfuls of grief into his reddened throat), he began to deal out scraps of paper and a sprig of biros silently provided by Norman. Mary sat at the long table with Russ, Ray, Paris, Vera, Charlie, Alfred, Wendy and Norman, and with much scratching of heads and flexing of shoulders they hunched down like schoolchildren to their task.

What could Mary possibly say? She was sorry she had broken Alan's neck; she had never meant to. She wondered whether Alan's hair was responsible, as he had claimed. But it didn't seem very likely that your hair could break your neck. It must have been Mary again.
I'm sorry,
she wrote in her fair hand.
I didn 't mean to. I'll try not to do it again.

But then two old men in uniform came downstairs with a lumpy stretcher. Russ stood up and cracked his pen down on the table. He looked across at Mary with his childish, dismal face.

'What am I doing?' he said. 7 can't
write.'
He pointed with a finger. 'You did it, didn't you! He was only twenty-one. You did it, and you don't even
care.
Christ!'

Mary went on a journey, a journey that took several days. She rode the tubes, to and fro and round and round in the city's fuming entrails. She rode the Circle Line until, on this new scale of time and distance, the Circle made her head reel. And it never got her anywhere. She walked the clotted concrete of Piccadilly and Leicester Square. She slept in a room full of other people and the gurgles and gases of bad food. She leaned against a wall where other girls were leaning. Two different men came up and asked her if she was free; she shook her head both times and they went away again. For a while, time turned into a series of boxes. She rode in a van to a place where you had to empty your pockets and your bag and submit to the far-flung presence. They shut her in for the night with a girl who kept weeping and getting up to pee drillingly into the pot beneath her bunk. In the morning they made her undress and a woman examined her: by what right, Mary didn't know. She rode in a van again. She slept in a white row of other women who yelled and yodelled through the night. 'O you are hard!' the woman next to Mary kept saying. 'O you are ... oh so unkind.' Mary knew that already; the woman didn't have to keep on telling her. They gave her her possessions in a brown envelope and some yellow pills that made the present recede some distance. You could walk in a garden or sit in a green room where lights and faces incessantly flickered. Mary did these things for quite a time. Then Prince came and got her out. They had to let him in, of course. They had to let him in and let him get her out.

'I've got your style at last, Mary,' he told her in his office. 'Oh, so you're smoking now, are you? That's another new accomplishment of yours?'

Mary puffed on her cigarette. She had perfected this skill over the past few days, under the intent tutelage of various mad men and women. They said it would do her good, especially her nerves. Mary didn't know about that, but she liked having something to occupy her hands and her mouth—particularly her mouth. She said, 'I'm sorry.'

'... Brilliant,' he said. 'Now everything's fine.'

'I tried to be good.'

'And now you've stopped trying? That's the way a child talks.'

Mary said nothing.

'I 've got some news for you,' he said more quietly. 'Mr Wrong—he's recanted.'

'Mr Wrong?'

'The author of the confession to your murder. He's taken it back. He says he didn't do it now.'

'What does that mean?'

'Well it's hardly a staggering move from his point of view. He was informed that you were alive and well. So he recanted. Wouldn't you?'

Mary said nothing.

'I've got to hand it to him. It took quite a time before he was convinced. He was sticking to his story. You don't often get that.'

'Don't you?' said Mary. He was waiting for her to look up. She looked up.

'No. You don't. He said he'd done it all right. He said you asked him to. So he did.'

Tears lined up in Mary's eyes. She didn't try to staunch them when they came. Some fell on her lap. One even landed on her cigarette. She heard Prince sigh and stand up. He came towards her waving his white handkerchief.

'Don't worry,' he said. 'He's not out and about yet— he's still got time to do. That's why we waited. We wanted to get him on some other shit... What now then, Mary? What's left? The job's gone. The squat's gone too, by the way.'

'Where? Why has it?'

'Any trouble at a place like that...' He flapped his hand limply. 'No, Mary, there's nowhere you can go now. It looks like you've used up all your good luck.'

'There is. There is somewhere I can go.' She showed him the piece of paper.

'Oh you made that connection, did you,' he said, nodding.

'He told me I could just ring up and go there any time.'

Prince picked up one of the telephones on his desk and banged it down in front of her. 'So ring him up.'

Mary called Jamie and Jamie was there. She wasn't surprised by the relaxed way he said, 'Yes, sure. Come over.' Whatever other people had done to Mary, they hadn't lied to her. As with so much else, they kept most of that for themselves. There was only one person, Mary felt, who was really in the business of lies; and he was sitting opposite her now.

'But wait,' said Jamie. 'What about all your shit?'

Mary blushed. 'What?'

'All your stuff. Can you get it all in a cab or something?'

'Oh. No, I haven't got any stuff any more.'

Prince didn't look up when Mary finished. He was writing something with a steel pen. 'All fixed?' he said.

'Yes.' Mary looked at him, and with hatred. What did he ever do but tell her lies and make her cry? 'He's rich,' she said randomly.

'Oh good.'

'I'm going now,' she said.

'That's right.' He didn't look up. He said, 'Remember, Mary. Beware your own power. No one is powerless.'

'I'm going now, and I hope I never see you again until my dying day,' said Mary, and walked out of the room.

18

• • •

No Need

'Now the first thing we've got to do,' said Jamie sternly, 'is get you drinking and smoking properly. Right. How much do you drink?'

'You mean alcohol?'

'Of course I mean alcohol. You mean there's other stuff?'

'Once a week,' said Mary.

'What?
Well, we'll soon fix that, young lady. Have a drink. We'll start you on this. The trick is to drink very heavily every lunchtime. It saves a lot of effort in the early evening.'

'I feel terrible all day if I drink at lunchtime,' said Jo, who also lived where Jamie lived.

'So?' said Jamie.

'I don't like feeling terrible all day.'

'None of us
likes
it. That's not the point. You're not supposed to
like
it. Now Mary. What about your smoking.'

'Three or four a day?' said Mary hopefully.

But Jamie looked at her for a long time and then shook his head sadly. 'No. That won't do at all, I'm afraid.' He turned away, his eyes slightly hooded, and said breezily, 'I'm up to three-and-a-half packs a day..."

'Really?' said Mary.

'Yup. Oh, it was hell at first, I admit. Working your way from two packs to three—that's what takes real balls. After that it's quite easy. Now we'll set you a realistic target, say twenty a day, and then you can build up slowly from there. Okay? It's simply a question of willpower, that's all. The thing is: if you want to enough, you can. Believe me. It's possible Mary!'

'What's so clever about killing yourself,' said Augusta, who also lived where Jamie lived.

'Now don't
you
start. Oh I get it. I've got your number. Well check you out. You want to live, don't you. You want to
live.'

Mary sipped her drink and stubbed out her cigarette. At once Jamie rebrimmed her glass and offered her a fresh cigarette, which he lit.

'That's it.
You
can do it.
You
can do it, Mary. Now just eat a lot of rich food and don't take any exercise, and you should pull through this thing okay.'

'You're quite manic, Jamie. It's not funny, you know,' said Lily, who also lived where Jamie lived.

'How would
you
know whether it's funny?'

'It doesn't make me laugh.'

'But you're a woman! Women don't laugh when things are
funny.
They laugh when they're
feeling
well.'

'Yawn yawn yawn,' said Lily.

'Oh what crap,' said Jo.

'Give him a Valium, somebody,' said Augusta.

'It's true! Why should you mind? It's just
different
for you ...' He turned to Mary with his bowed head and hot eyes. 'Well. I just think, since none of us does anything, and is never going to do anything, we might as well do the other stuff, that's all.'

'Oh Mary,' said Lily. 'Are you all right for sheets and towels and everything?'

'Why, has the little man been?' said Jo.

'Did he bring back my shirt?' said Augusta.

'Which one?'

'They lost it. You know, the grey silk one with the—'

'I think,' said Jamie, climbing unevenly to his feet, 'I think I might just manage to tear myself away from this conversation.' He hesitated in the middle of the room. His eyes were burning with boyish eagerness and shame. 'I, it's just...'

Don't, thought Mary. It's all right. There's no need.

'That stuff about women not laughing,' he said, and at once the girls started to sigh and mumble and turn away. 'If I'd said
most
women, you'd have all agreed and had a laugh on your sisters. But I mean
you
, because you never read a book or
do
anything. That's why you only laugh when you like someone
or feel
well.'

'Boring,' said Augusta.

'Boring? Oh, it's boring, is it. Well in that case, man, I'm just fucking fuckin out. Gimme
shelter,'
he said, and stumbled from the room.