Other People (28 page)

There was nothing to do but wait. One o'clock tiptoed by. Amy had two books beside her on the sofa—she was reading them concurrently, as was her habit. Now she tried to become absorbed by each in turn, but her head couldn't hold the curlicued print and the lines trooped past her eyes without meaning. She put the book aside; she felt that this couldn't be good for either of them. Briefly she experimented with the gramophone, playing the early movement of the piano concerto that she especially liked. But there was something open-ended in its plangency, just as there had been something exclusive about the ideal order that the books had passively hinted at, the order of words. Amy was not yet quite whole, and she would have to fill up the time herself, waste the time, kill it.

The minute-hand completed its slow lob between two and three. The time was not now and the time was not now. Amy fetched her diary. She described her day, she described Baby. She reread some earlier passages, but they too seemed nugatory, pitiable; it wasn't much, was it, not much to make up a past? 'How do I know that I am me?' ... She made a last effort to send herself back in time. She had been a child with Baby once; she had grown older; she had got bored, met the man, gone bad; she had been cruel to her mother and father, and to many others; the man had nearly killed her; she had wanted him to and he nearly had; he
thought
he had, but he hadn't quite. Then she had woken up again and memory began.

No, she couldn't remember. She only remembered entering a room full of other people, waking early on a weekend morning, stopping dead in a courtyard frozen by the light, weeping on a chair at school, wanting to shine a light into other people's houses when the boys had all gone home. She listened to the seconds race. Dawn came, but Prince did not come.

Amy didn't mind, Amy wasn't worried. Light brought the present back. She stood in the garden, dew moistening her hair, and watched the morning star go out. She made some coffee and gave David his illicit breakfast, which he ate unconcernedly. David had nine lives. She wished he knew how good this one was: four meals a day and more or less ceaseless stroking. Other cats had much harder lives; but it was one of cats' privileges to be indifferent to the fates of other cats.

She walked out into the waking dormitory town. Now stretched by time, her perceptions had lost much of their doleful sharpness, but it was still interesting all this, still interesting, interesting; and she watched everyone in their human lights, their human traffic. A certain unwanted lucidity remained. When she saw other people, she kept seeing how they would look when they were old and how they had looked when they were young. This was poignant, but tiring. As she walked she smiled at the very young and at the very old. Her affection for things seemed congruent: her affection for a sparrow was a small affection, perhaps the same size as the bird. She felt no desire to go home. He wouldn't mind, he wouldn't worry. He could always come and find her.

She sat on a bench in the flat park. An old man came up and perfunctorily bothered her; but he couldn't be bothered to do it for long ... She sat quite still, without blinking. As the day began to turn on its axis, colour bled from the grass. Slowly criss-crossed by parkies and prams under the blank sheet of the sky, the green stretch turned milky and alkaline, like a lake, in the neutral afternoon. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Something was happening to her, something endless and ecstatic. Everything in the named world was pressing for admittance to her heart; at the same time she knew that all these things, the trees, the distant rooftops, the skies, had nothing to do with her. Their being was separate from hers, and that was their beauty. Only a little of life is to do with you, she thought, with relief, with rapture. She felt—she felt dead. They're wrong when they say that life's too short. Life isn't: it's too long. I've lived enough. He can come for me now.

Prince sat down on the bench beside her. He was breathing fast and rhythmically. After a while he said, 'I'm very sorry.'

'It's all right now,' she said. 'Everything's all right now.'

He moved nearer. The sleepless moons of Amy's face shored up pallor against the darkness of her brows and hairline; and yet her skin glowed with the tranquil advance of fever. His breath came closer, sweet and distempered like her own.

24

• • •

Time

It was still dark when she woke up. The pleasant, rusty tang of exhaustion in her throat told her that she hadn't slept for long. She was in Prince's room, of course, and in his bed.

He was sitting there naked with his feet on the floor, shoulders bunched, looking at her sideways. She could see by the set of his forehead that he had been looking at her for a long time.

'How are you feeling?' he asked.

'I'm so happy, I think I must be going to die.'

He looked away.

Amy said, 'I am. Aren't I. Going to die.'

'No, that's not strictly the case,' he said and stood up. He took her hand. 'Come on, Amy. It's time, I'm afraid.'

After a moment he turned and walked across the room. Amy pulled off the sheet and sat up, her arms crossed in front of her.

'There's just one last thing to do,' he said, shaking out his clothes. 'It's—we've got to go and see someone.'

'Mr Wrong.'

He nodded. 'Right,' he said, 'that's right.'

'How bad will it be?'

'No worse and no better than this. You won't be alone. I won't ever leave you, I promise. Ever.'

'Ever? ... I must wash.'

'Yes.'

'What's he like?' asked Amy as they drove up into black empty London. She felt like a child being taken on holiday or to hospital at an impossible hour, submitting to the grown-up machines. There was mist lying low in the dark defiles, thin and salty in places, then as thick and fat as collapsed cloud.

Prince shrugged. 'Oh I think you'll like him. After all, you always did before.'

'Why are you doing this to me?'

'You know,' he went on, and his voice had the pressing, driving quality she had heard once before, 'I think you liked him for the same reason you like me. The policeman, the murderer. We're both—outside.'

Amy turned away from him. The mist cleared briefly at the open vault of the river. The water was stretched and taut, as if being tugged at from either end. It shone like scratched armour. She glimpsed the plumed factory, sensed the aloof mass of the warehouses, saw black grass and its elliptical pond.

'You know why we're doing this?' he asked. 'You do really, don't you.'

'I think so.'

'You can't have a new life without...'

'I know,' she said. 'I never really thought you could.'

They came back to the river—or another river, perhaps. Whoever had been holding it tight had let go again. The water writhed now, lunar and millennial beneath the turbid mist. He stopped the car in the same place. There were no people there any more, and the rat-like, threadbare dogs owned the land.

'Why aren't there any people? There were before.'

'It's all dead here now,' said Prince, leading the way. 'Condemned.'

He ducked in through the same door, using his own keys. The vegetable damp had entered the building with its moist osmosis. The air was hard to breathe; something in the lungs shut it out. Prince paused on the stairs, listening.

They climbed out into the wide room. He helped her through the trapdoor. She was glad she was so tired; it would make this easier to bear. A bottle clinked suddenly and there was a frantic patter across the floor.

'Only rats,' he said.

He pulled a cord and a lone bare purple bulb winked into life. Prince started out across the smudged boards; they were damp and gave slightly underfoot. He guided her into the deeper shadows, where the door was.

'Now we go behind the door.'

She turned to him. 'I'm—I'm tired,' she said.

'I know.'

He kissed her forehead. Moving behind her, he turned the handle and urged her forward through the door.

As soon as she heard the door close behind her she knew that Prince was no longer there. She turned quickly. She was right. She tried the handle. It wouldn't give. She heard his footsteps somewhere. She straightened herself. Nothing mattered.

A red glow came from behind thin veils or curtains suspended from the roof. She heard the distant creak of someone shifting his weight in a chair. The room was unexpectedly long and narrow, more like a tunnel than a room.

'Amy?' he called. 'Come closer. Is it really you?'

She walked under the veil; it slid slowly over her head, seeming to linger in her hair, like a hand or the trail of a bird, or like a known dress with its intimate pink.

'Does this take you back?' he said.

Amy stared. The man was a long way away. She could see that he wore some kind of hood or cowl. He began to move towards her. There was time for her to run but she did not run. Perhaps there was no time, either, not really. She knew who the man was now.

'Do you remember?'

'Yes, I remember,' she said.

'Look what you've done to me. Look what I've done to you...'

'Are you—will you kill me now?

'Again? How can I? You're already dead—can't you see? Life is hell, life is murder, but then death is very lifelike. Death is terribly easy to believe.'

He had been coming forward for some time now and still had quite a way to go. She started to move towards him, to make the next thing happen sooner, to save time.

'You know who I am?'

'Yes.'

'And now you know I can never leave you. I am the policeman, I am the murderer. Try again, take care, be good. Your life was too poor not to last for ever. Get it right this time. Come, I'll be very quick.'

His arms enfolded her. She felt a sensation of speed so intense that her nose caught the tang of smouldering air. She saw a red beach bubbled with sandpools under a furious and unstable sun. She felt she was streaming, she felt she was undoing everywhere. Oh, father, she thought, my mouth is full of
stars.
Please put them out and take me home to bed.

The sensation of speed returned for a moment, then nothing did.

• • •

Her first feeling, as she smelled the air, was one of intense and helpless gratitude. I'm all right, she thought with a gasp. Time—it's starting again. She tried to blink away all the water in her eyes, but there was too much to deal with and she soon shut them tight.

'Are you all right now, Amy?' her mother asked.

'Yes.'

'You're yourself again? Are you sure?'

Amy opened her eyes. She was lying on her bed. 'I'm sorry,' she said.

'I don't know what comes over you sometimes. You just
have
to have your own way, don't you. Oh well. Off you go then, this time.'

'Thank you. I'm sorry.'

'Be good now.'

Her mother left the room. Amy sat up. She must have been crying for a long time. It was a relief to be able to stop, and to rejoin things again. She wiped her tears away in front of the mirror and hurriedly brushed her hair.

She ran down the stairs. Her father stood with his back turned in the hall. He was winding the grandfather clock. She walked up to him and put her hand on his shoulder, her face full of gentle insistence.

'Amy,' he said, and turned slowly. 'Back in the land of the living, are you?'

'Forgiven?'

He took her hand and kissed it. 'Forgiven. Now take care.'

Amy opened the door and stepped out into the afternoon.

• • •

Epilogue

This is a promise. I won't do anything to her if she doesn't want me to. I won't do anything to her unless she
asks
for it. And that's not very likely, is it, at her age? That's not very
realistic?
Still, at least she's legal—just about, I'm pretty sure.

Here she comes, shutting the front door behind her and walking quickly down the path. I'm standing in the deep shade on the other side of the street. Even at this distance I can tell by the brightness in her eyes that she's been crying. Poor baby ... Oh man, what is that girl doing to me? She's doing something. I'll find out in time. Time ... I feel as though I've done these things before, and am glazedly compelled to do them again. But perhaps all things like this feel like that. I'm—I'm tired. I'm not in control any more, not this time. Oh hell. Let's get it over with.

Any moment now I'll step out into the street. I can see her coming to the end of the path and hesitating as she reaches the road, looking this way and that, wondering which way to go.

• • •

Table of Contents

Prologue