Other People (7 page)

But Mary will gain ground fast now. If you ever make a film of her sinister mystery, you'll need lots of progress-music to help underscore her renovation at the Bothams' hands ... Ironically, she enjoys certain advantages over other people. Not yet stretched by time, her perceptions are without seriality: they are multiform, instantaneous and random, like the present itself. She can do some things that you can't do. Glance sideways down an unknown street and what do you see: an aggregate of shapes, figures and light, and the presence or absence of movement? Mary sees a window and a face behind it, the grid of the paving-stones and the rake of the drainpipes, the way the distribution of the shadows answers to the skyscape above. When you look at your palm you see its five or six central grooves and their major tributaries, but Mary sees the numberless scratched contours and knows each of them as well as you know the crenellations of your own teeth. She knows how many times she has looked at her hands—a hundred and thirteen at the left, ninety-seven at the right. She can compare a veil of smoke sliding out of a doorway with a particular flourish of the blanket as she strips her bed. This makes a kind of sense to her. When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.

Mary always knows what time it is without having to look. And yet she knows hardly anything about time or other people.

• • •

But she was gaining ground fast now.

She got to know her body and its hilly topography—the seven rivers, the four forests, the atonal music of her insides. By watching Mr Botham, who did it often and expressively, she learned to blow her nose. Her body ceased to surprise her. Even the first glimpse of lunar blood left her unharrowed. Mrs Botham talked constantly about these things and Mary was prepared for almost any disaster. (Mrs Botham was obsessed by her grisly torments during what she ominously called 'the Change'. The Change didn't sound worth having to Mary and she hoped it wouldn't get round to her for a long time to come.) She told Mrs Botham about the blood, and Mrs Botham, in her unembarrassable way, told Mary what she had to do about it. It seemed an ingenious solution. On the whole, yes, Mary was quite pleased with her body. Gavin himself, who was a body-culture expert, announced that she had a good one, apart from her triceps. Conversely Mary didn't think that Gavin's body was all it was built up to be— Gavin, with his dumb-bells, his twanging chest-flexers and his stinking singlets. But she assumed he must know what he was talking about. There were many really bad bodies round where they lived, with bits missing or added, or twisted or stretched. So Mary was pleased with hers; and it was certainly all very interesting.

She started reading in earnest.

At first she was inhibited by not knowing how private reading was. She kept an eye on all the things the others read and secretly read them too.

Mr Botham read a dirty sheath of smudged grey paper that came and went every day. It was never called the same thing twice. There were pictures of naked women in it; and on the back pages men but not women could be bought and sold: they cost lots of money. In the centre pages someone called Stan spoke of the battle between cancer and his wife Mildred. Cancer won in the end, but heroism such as Stan and Mildred's knows no defeat. It was all about other places, some of them (perhaps) not too far away. It told of atrocious disparities of fortune, of deaths, cataclysms, jackpots. And it was very hard to read, because the words could never come to an agreement about the size or shape they wanted to be. Mrs Botham read pamphlets sent to her by Al Anon, of whom she always spoke most warmly. The pamphlets were all about alcoholics and sounded just like Mrs Botham did. They had scales and graphs of what alcoholics got up to: they drank alone, they lied and stole things, they trembled and had visions of mice and shellfish. Then they forgot everything. Then they died. But if you put your faith in A.A. and God, it would all turn out right in the end.

Gavin spent a lot of time gazing disdainfully through his slippery magazines, but he had some other things in a cupboard in his room which he would occasionally consult or sort through. They were books, and books turned out to be where language was kept. Some were from school; others were acquired for a night course that Gavin had got too disheartened to complete; still others had been pressed on him by a friend of his, a poet, a dreamer. Mary was rather dashed to discover that Gavin had gone to school for eleven years and yet even now considered himself to be lamentably ill-educated. She never knew there was so much to know. Gavin said she could help herself to his books, and so, slackly prompted by his nods and scowls, Mary got started straight away.

Books were difficult. She read
The Major Tragedies of William Shakespeare.
It was about four men made up of power, mellifluousness and hysteria; they lived in big bare places that frightened them into speech; they were all cleverly murdered by women, who used an onion, a riddle, a handkerchief and a button. She read
A Dickens Omnibus.
It was about parts of London she had not yet seen. In each story a nice young man and a nice young woman weaved through a gallery of grimacing villains, deformed wags and rigid patriarchs until, after an illness or a separation or a long sea-voyage, they came together again and lived happily ever after. She read
Rhyme and Reason: An Introduction to English Poetry.
It was about an elongated world of elusive vividness and symmetry; there was a layer, a casing on it that she found nowhere else and knew she would never fully penetrate; the words marched to the end of their rank, sounded a chime, darted back again, and marched forward cheerfully, with renewed zest, completely reconciled to whatever it was that determined their role. She read
The Jane Austen Gift-Pack.
The six stories it contained spoke more directly to her than anything else had done. The same thing happened in every book: the girl liked a bad man who seemed good, then liked a good man who had seemed bad, whom she duly married. What was wrong with the bad men who seemed good? They were unmanly, and lacked candour, and, in at least two clear instances, fucked other people. Mary re-read one of these stories and was anxious that things would turn out the same way as they had before. They did, and she found this very comforting. She read
The Rainbow, What Maisie Knew,
and two fat shiny works about natural disaster and group jeopardy ... At one point it occurred to her that books weren't about other places: they were about other times, the past and the future. But she looked again and saw that Shakespeare's book, for instance, was much newer than Lawrence's, and that couldn't be right. No. Books were about other places.

Where were they? How far did life stretch? It might go on for ever, or it might just stop dead a few corners away. There was a place across the river called the World's End. For a long while in Mary's mind this was the limit of life. (Similarly she once half-heard from the television that there was fighting in Kentish Town—with machine-guns and tanks. When she discovered that the fighting was actually taking place in Kurdistan, she didn't know how relieved to be about this.) She wondered where the end of the world was and what the world ended with—with mists, high barriers, or just the absence of everything. Would you die if you went there? Often she nauseated herself by sending her mind into the sky, past the bloated nursery-toys of the middle-air, ever upwards into the infinite limey blue. She knew a little about death now. She knew that it happened to other people, to every last one of them. It was a bad thing, obviously, and no one liked it; but no one knew how much it hurt, how long it lasted, whether it was the end of everything or the start of something else. It couldn't be that bad, Mary thought, if people did it all the time.

With Gavin, with Mrs Botham, and sometimes alone, Mary walked the streets of London, London South, as far up as the River, as far down as the Common, carving a track of familiarity from the grid of ramshackle streets, eviscerated building-sites, and the caged sections of high-wire concrete. You needed to walk through somewhere seven times before it ceased to be frightening. Knowing other people helped, and Mary was getting to know quite a few of them these days. They waved at her as she moved past them in the streets, or talked in her direction when she went to the shops and exchanged money for goods under Mrs Botham's stern-eyed but unsystematic tutelage. Mary invested inordinate emotion in these routine sallies. A courtly particularity from the greengrocer could make her smile all afternoon; an unreturned glance from the milkman could bring the beginnings of tears to her eyes and sink the whole day in mist. At the newsagent's one morning Mary got briefly excited by all the magazines called things like
People, Life, Woman
and
Time.
But they weren't what she had hoped for. They were still all about other places instead.

In shops everyone talked about money. Money had recently done something unforgiveable: no one seemed to be able to forgive money for what it had done. Mary secretly forgave money, however. It appeared to be good stuff to her. She liked the way you could save money as you spent it. Mary developed a good eye for bargains, especially in the supermarket where they openly encouraged you to do this anyway. Mrs Botham was always saying how much money Mary saved her. Pretty good going, she thought, considering that all she ever did was spend it. But Mrs Botham still couldn't find it in her heart to forgive money. She hated money; she really had it in for money. She would repetitively abuse money all day long.

So on top of all this and one way or another, Mary learned a little about glass, desire, voodoo, peace, lotteries, libraries, labyrinths, revenge, fruit, kings, laughter, despair, drums, difference, castles, change, trials, America, childhood, cement, gas, whales, whirlwinds, rubber, oblivion, uncles, control, autumn, music, enmity, time.

Life was good, life was interesting. Only one thing worried her, and that was sleep.

'Good night,' said Gavin, still panting rhythmically from the fifty press-ups he always did last thing.

'I hope so,' said Mary.

'You—why do you always say that? I hope so.'

'Well I do. I hope they're going to be all right. They haven't been good so far.'

'What, you have nightmares, do you?'

'Yes, I think that's what I have.'

She had expected sleep to be ordered and monotone. It wasn't. She lived through the days on tracks because that was what other people did. But her nights were random, and full of terror.

Mary knew other people had bad dreams but she was pretty certain they weren't as bad as hers. Incredible things happened to her while she was asleep. For hours in the darkness her mind struggled fiercely to keep the dreams away, when Mary would as soon have given up and let the dreams begin. But her mind wouldn't listen to her: it thrummed on its own fever, dealing her half-images of graphic sadness and fluorescent chaos, setting her hurtful tasks of crisis and desire, trailing before her that toy alphabet with its poisonous ps and qs. And then the dreams came and she must suffer them without will.

She felt that the dreams came from the past. She had never seen a red beach bubbled with sandpools under a furious and unstable sun. She had never felt a sensation of speed so intense that her nose could remember the tang of smouldering air. And the dreams always ended by mangling her; they came down like black smoke and plucked her apart nerve by nerve.

And she asked for it, and wanted more.

6

• • •

Law's Eyes

'Moderation,' said Mrs Botham. 'Temperance. Calmness. Reserve. Not being drunk all the time.
That's
what sobriety means, Mary! And if you lose your sobriety you lose everything. I admit it, oh, I admit it, Mary! Shoe-polish, shampoo, Pledge, Brobat, Right-Guard, Radox, Sanflush, Harpic...'

The air tasted sweetly of toast and tea. The television flashed and rumbled about other places, wryly monitored by Mr Botham. Gavin sat beside Mary with a magazine on his lap. The splayed glistening pages depicted a new kind of person, a man with hair all over his body. Judging by the man's expression, people of this kind were very exalted and rare, and generally much prized. Gavin's forearm rested limply on Mary's lap. She liked it being there. She liked Mr and Mrs Botham being where they were too. She liked the fire whose flames did not burn. She smelled the air and liked its taste. I'm all right, she thought. She looked at the hump-backed teapot and her dutiful children; she looked at the high shoulders of the comical armchairs, spreading out their wings in gestures of arthritic welcome. This is enough, thought Mary—and why should it end?

• • •

Here's why.

One hundred yards away down the stone terrace, in a three-walled wasteland peopled by destitute furniture and mangled prams, Jock and Trev crouch opposite one another, panting with cunning and gurgling with adrenalin and drink. Their eyes confer about when to make their move. Gradually Trev starts sniggering in the dark...

It is indeed a noble dream: to come running into the Botham home, to do it and its occupants as much harm as they reasonably can in the few noisy minutes they have earmarked for the occasion—and to inflict on Mary, our Mary, that special damage which she had feared. Possibly they will be obliged to take Mary with them when they leave. Trev, for example, has quite a few things that he wants to do to Mary, and he is counting on time and leisure to do all that needs to be done.