Other People (9 page)

'You'll go blind, you will, girl,' said Trudy.

'No blind,' said Honey, blinking.

'You will, you know. You can't leave yourself alone, can you? She can't. Knowing you, you'll probably nip down for another one, won't you, before clear-out. Just a quick one, just in case.'

'Is good, it says.'

'What
says?
All those pussy cookbooks you read?'

'Is not cookbook. It say is good to touch yourself.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Is good for tension.'

'What's so tense about you, brilliant? What have
you
got tension for. All you do is lie around wanking all day.'

'I want a job,' said Mary. 'How do you get one?'

'Oh you want a job, do you,' said Trudy, turning to Mary and nodding slowly. Beneath the table she waggled a crossed leg. 7 see. Well what's your
calling,
Madame? What sort of thing have you
done before?'

'I don't know yet,' said Mary, who often wondered what sort of things she had done before, before she broke her memory.

'You people...' said Trudy. Trudy disliked Mary's good looks. She did: Mary could tell. She disliked Mary's looks because they were better than hers. On her bad looks Trudy blamed all her bad luck. Mary used to watch her staring out of the bedroom window, at nothing at all, with her stretched, smarting face. Mary knew what she was thinking. She was thinking: If I could have just traded in some of my good brains for some good looks. Boy, could I have done with some good looks ... Mary thought that people were probably quite right to go on complaining in their minds about this sort of thing. But she wasn't sure.
Were
things changeable? They had to be. People couldn't just be wasting their time.

Honey was quite good-looking too, so when she said, 'I go down now', and began to move away with her cup and saucer, Trudy called out loudly, 'Off for another quickie, are you? You'll get dishmaid's hand, you will, Honey chile. Dumb split,' she added to Mary. 'She's amazing, that girl. Wanked to a frazzle. I mean, she's just all
wanked out.'

'I want a job,' said Mary. 'I want to make some money.'

'Hang on, girl,' said Trudy. She looked at Mary narrowly. 'Jobs—they take time, you know.'

'I know they do,' said Mary.

You had to be out by nine. You couldn't come back until twelve. Time was slow on the streets when you had no money. Time took for ever. Through diamond-wire Mary watched children playing in the sun. Children gave off noise and motion helplessly all the time. She watched the tublike housewives plod from shop to shop. Housewives accumulated goods grimly until they could hardly walk, martyrs to their carrier-bags. She watched the men idling in loose knots outside the turf accountants' or on the corners by the closed pubs. Men moved their heads around in the wind and gestured freely, having for the time being nothing that they needed to do. A big dog lay panting in the parched gutter. Ants weaved up from the cracks and over the planes of the uneven pavement. The fat white creatures of the sky loved it on days like this. They were all there. Not one of them had been left behind.

Mary was looking for a job. She didn't know whether you found them by moving or by staying still. Where were they? Who gave them away? She had all this time to sell, but didn't know who might want to buy it. She thought about the jobs she had seen other people doing, and the special kinds of time they had to sell. They were all the masters of their conspiratorial skills. The grocer with his lumpy racks, the adroit swivel of his paper bag, the jerking, centipedic apparatus that dealt him money: but he had food to sell (layered like ammunition in a cave), as well as time. The bus-conductor, clambering through the day with his expert handholds, yelling news about his progress, unravelling his costly paper from the machine beside his moneybag: but as well as time he had the bus he shared with the man in front, and the travel they sold. Who paid the roadsweeper for his buckled back, the gladiatorial dustmen with their poles and shields, the policeman and his lucrative swagger? They all got paid by someone. It was only tramps who chose to waste their valuable time... When she walked the streets Mary often looked up at the spangled canyons and saw with a sense of glazed exclusion the people up there behind the high windows, all intent about the sky's business.

Mary had lunch because lunch was what everybody had at that time. In the afternoons you could stay in the common-room so long as you stayed quiet. Girls wrote letters hunched over the table, or knitted things, or sat watching dust move. The day was already getting to them, reducing them to themselves, prying at their emptinesses ... You could read the books in the cupboard if you put them back. Mary read them all. The girls in the books in the cupboard were taunting parodies of the girls condemned to read them. Will Alexandra marry elderly Lord Brett or the young but unreliable Sir Julian? When Bettina goes to stay at Farnsworth, all the Boyd-Partingtons except Jeremy treat her shabbily until she saves little Oliver from drowning and turns out to be an heiress after all. Lonely lodges, postillions, horses ridden to death, forests, vows, tears, kisses, broken hearts, rowing-boats in the moonlight, happiness ever after. Like many stories, they ended when marriage came; but they couldn't make you care. They made you sure of something that other books made you only indifferently suspect: that stories were lies, imagined for money, time sold.

Then at evening the girls gathered here and on the stairs and in their rooms. The talk was all about good luck and how they had never been given any. The talk was low. If only I hadn't, if they just didn't, if it only would. Some of them had been given babies by men and then had them taken away again by somebody else. They talked all the time about these babies who had passed through their hands, and about how, if they ever got them back or were given another one, they would treat them properly this time and never neglect them or have fights with them again. Some girls kept having fights with their men, and always losing. They bore the marks. Why would a man fight a woman? wondered Mary. He would always win; he wasn't fighting—he was just doing harm, doing damage. The girls talked about the men they had fought, some with fear and great hatred, some with languor, some with haggard wistfulness for this inconvenient but at least unmistakable form of attention, as if a black eye were a valued emblem among the spoken-for. Some were prostitutes, or were trying to be. Most of them weren't very good at it, apparently. They were prepared to offer their bodies to men for a certain price; but the men never thought the price was worth it. So they offered their bodies for nothing instead. Mary watched them closely, these adepts of men, acquiescence and time. They talked about the things that money could buy as if money were a game, a trick, a word. Some girls were drunks. They talked about... well, Mary already knew what drunks talked about. She knew about drunks. She knew what drunks did.

But she really didn't know whether she would ever get away from these people, these people who went out too deep in life and then swam up at you through the fathoms, trying to tug you under to where you would choke or drown. Would she ever get to the other side, the side that Prince had hinted at, the place where money didn't matter and time passed coolly? She looked at the girls and she knew there would always be these other people out there, always out there and always wanting her back, the lost, the ruined, the broken, the effaced. She thought: I mustn't go out too deep in life. I must stay in the shallows. I must keep to the surface. It's too easy to go under, and too hard to get up again.

At night after lights-out Mary listened with a sense of deliverance to Honey's routine and low-IQ yodels of abandonment and release. 'I finish soon!' she would plead in response to Trudy's unpredictably vehement rebukes. Honey's pleasure was real, and Mary approved of that pleasure. But it worried her too. Secretly Mary had tried the technique herself, without success. She couldn't find anything to catch her mind on to. Her mind had nothing to do, so it thought about other things.

'What do you think about when you do it?' she once asked Honey.

'Nice men,' said Honey with a delighted glare. Her smile had an almost celestial vapidity at such moments. 'Nice big men.'

'Oh I see,' said Mary.

That night Mary tried to think about Gavin and Mr Botham. It didn't work. And she kept unwillingly thinking about Trev, which was no help either. That was it: you couldn't seem to control what you were thinking about. The whole activity was clearly among the strangest things that other people did.

'What is it you think about the nice men when you're doing it?' she asked Honey the next day.

'I think of Keith. He's my most favourite. And of Helmut. They whip me,' said Honey, beaming furtively, 'and make me do all these terrible things. Keith get me from the back and Helmut put his—'

'Oh I see.'

Honey looked up at her meekly and said, 'I do it to you if you wish?'

'No, it's all right,' said Mary. 'But that's very kind of you.'

'It's okay, don't mention it,' said Honey.

As soon as she was alone in the bedroom Mary glanced through Honey's pamphlets—
Love Yourself, To Be A Woman, Female Erotic Fantasies.
She understood quickly: it was a memory game. Now she knew why she couldn't play.

Mary wondered whether she had ever done the thing before, when she was alive. Had she gone into a room somewhere, and taken off all her clothes, and made herself so open like that? Had she
wanted
to? And who else had been there at the time? She couldn't remember: it might have been anybody. Trev said she had 'done this before'. Trev had meant it too—Mary never doubted that. But it was still hard to believe that she would ever want to do it again.

It was on the seventh day that the letter came.

'It's for you,' said Trudy.

Mary was sitting over her morning tea. She looked at the white envelope, at the name and the address. Yes, Trudy was right. It was for her.

'Is from a
man?'
said Honey.

'Course it's from a
man,'
said Trudy. 'Look on the back.'

Prompted by their eyes, Mary turned the letter over. Small black letters said, 'Be alone when you open this.'

'Told you,' said Trudy bitterly.

Mary went downstairs and sat on her bed. As she waited for her breathing to subside she inspected the envelope—quite calmly, she thought. She had seen other people opening letters but it turned out to be far more difficult than it looked. The envelope would jump and twirl from her hands, and kept incurring subtle rips whenever she tried to prize the letter free. Then she lost her nerve and brutally yanked it out.

The letter tore, right across the middle. Mary knew she had done a terrible thing. With a moan she squared up the two scraps of pink paper and flattened them out on the blanket. The letter didn't say much. It said:

Dear Miss Lamb, Is it all right if I call you that? I mean—is it
accurate?
I said I'd seen you before, didn't I? Don't you remember?

Of course I could be mistaken. But stick around while I look into this. I'll be in touch.

Yours sincerely,

JOHN PRINCE

Mary read the letter several times. It still made no sense to her. On an impulse she flipped over the bottom half of the pink sheet. There were more words. They described a girl called Amy Hide (26, 5' 7", Dark, Brit., None), who had recently become a missing person. The police thought she had been murdered, but they didn't seem to be absolutely sure.

Mary picked up the top half of the letter. She turned it over. There was a photograph of a girl. It was Mary.

8

• • •

Stopped Dead

It was Mary. Was it? Yes... it was Mary. How could it be?

Late at night in the basement bathroom when all the lights were meant to be out, Mary stood in front of the mirror and held up the pink letter beside her face. Above her a bare lightbulb burned in its dust.

It was Mary. But it was
older
than Mary ... The face looked out at her defiantly, with perhaps even the beginnings of a sneer or a snicker in the raised left-hand side of the mouth. The mouth itself was looser than Mary's, more crinkled along its parting line. The mole beneath her right temple was there, but on the wrong side. And the eyes—they weren't her eyes. The eyes were dead, they were knowing, they were incurious, they were old. Mary stared. The half-smile in the photograph seemed momentarily to broaden, to become the real smile, to admit Mary. She blinked and looked again. The smile had gone but the eyes now held triumph. Quickly she dropped the letter and turned away with a hand to her head. She knew what the real difference was. Mary's face—Mary believed, Mary liked to think—was a good face, the face of somebody good. But the face of the girl in the photograph—

'Oh God, what have I done in my life?' said Mary.

All day nausea had tried to climb the rope-ladder in her chest. Now, with relief, with humiliation, with terror, she knelt on the bathroom floor and was convulsively and disgustedly sick, sick inside out, just sick to death. She couldn't get rid of enough of herself. She was sick for so long she was afraid her heart might fall out, might fall out and break.