Other People (13 page)

'Not really,' said George.

'I'm sorry—whose baby?' said Mary.

'Baby's the youngest. She's called Lucinda really, but we always called her Baby. I'm sorry, what did you say your name was, dear?' she asked in her other, more neutral voice.

'Mary Lamb. I came here to ask about Amy Hide.'

The effect of the name was immediate—what a strong name, Mary thought with a wince, oh what a powerful name. The woman in black stared at her shrilly in surprised anger, and George turned away, seeming to give in the middle, his head ducking slightly on his neck. Mary sometimes had the same reflex when she thought about what she had done to Mr Botham.

'Well the least said about her the better,' said the woman with finality. George grunted in agreement, and reached for his pipe.

Mary said quickly, as she had half-planned to say, 'I'm sorry. I knew her a long time ago, before she... I know it's very sad, what happened.'

The woman then did something that Mary had only ever read about. She gave a bitter laugh. So that's what a bitter laugh is, Mary thought. It wasn't a laugh at all, she realized: it was just a noise people made to conjure a unanimity of dislike.

'Sad?' she said. 'It isn't
sad.
Nothing about that girl was
sad:

Mary was desolated. She said, 'Well it's sad for me.'

'Oh I'm sorry—of course it is, dear. Are you feeling better now? Have another cup, dear,' she said, standing up and reaching for the pot.

'No thank you,' said Mary.

'No, it's just when I think of the pain she caused her poor parents. I swear her mother died of a broken heart over that girl. Ooh, I could...'

'Marge,' said George.

Marge sat down suddenly. She lifted both hands to her forehead, the fingertips spread along the pierced tender lines of the brow. Mary was appalled to see brilliantly clear and icy tears jump on to her cheeks.

'Marge,' said George.

'I—I'm sorry, I'll be myself again in a minute.'

'I'm sorry,' said Mary. Everyone was so sorry.

'Isn't it funny? She can still do this to us even now.'

Mary began crying too. She could feel the tears tiptoe down her face but she couldn't reach up and wipe them away.

'Oh Lord, you've started too.'

George ambled to the sink, returning with a large scroll of paper. He tore off sections and handed them out. He kept one for himself, into which he explosively blew his nose. Then, as if it were the natural thing, the three of them laughed softly, with weariness and relief.

Mary said, 'One more thing. I'm sorry, I'm very sorry. I really never meant to cause you pain ... Can I see her room, Amy's room? It would mean a great deal to me.'

Or it might, she thought. It might.

They moved in file down the first-floor passage. If Mary had had time, she would have wondered why people needed so much space and so many things to put in it. There was so much space in between things. But she was numb, she was raw, she just wanted the next thing to happen quickly.

'Here we are,' said Marge.

Mary felt another gust of heat in her head. Marge hesitated, and George came up close behind Mary, bringing the smell of earth and the sound of his slow breath.

'Of course it's all changed,' said Marge, her hand idling on the white doorknob. 'She hasn't, Amy's not been back here for, let me see, ooh it must be eight or nine years. It's a visitors' room now. But some of it is still the same.'

The door opened, let them in, and closed again.

The room looked Mary up and down. It was a normal room and it looked Mary up and down with intense suspicion. The white-clothed table basking in front of the window held her gaze for a few seconds, then glanced downwards and became itself again. The thin bed cowered in the corner, with its head covered in cushions. On the four walls the romping sprites and goblins of the paper pattern must have once provided food for tenacious nightmares but they held no message for her now. The elderly, slow-ticking clock on the dressing-table would not show its face and had turned its back on her in disdain, as if its arms were folded and its foot tapping with impatience. Mary caught her own eye in the mirror, and the mirror told her plainly that it did not know whether she belonged here, and that, besides, whatever soul the room once held had disappeared or died a long time ago.

'What's that?' said Mary to hide her panic.

Splayed photographs in steel wallets lined the mantelpiece. Mary and Marge approached and ran their gaze together along the shelf. There were people in scattered groups, waving or beckoning. There was a dog standing in a bar of sunlight, panting happily, perhaps hoping that the camera might turn out to be food. There was one of George and Marge themselves, cheek to cheek and looking pretty well stuck with each other. There was a larger and less formal study of a man, a woman and a young girl, standing in a field against a warlike sky. The man was tall and angular with starry grey hair, his narrow face half-averted in a forgetful smile; the woman—lean and dark, old but still a woman, still with the feminine light in the points of her face—reached up a hand to his shoulder, her face full of gentle insistence; and between them, encircled by their lines, stood the young girl.

''That's
Baby,' said Marge. 'Years ago, of course.'

'Yes, and who are they?'

'That's the Professor,' she said with a warm gulp, 'and Mrs Hide.'

Mary turned to her and said, 'Aren't you Mrs Hide?'

'What? Good Lord no dear! Goodness me. We just, you know, we're just keeping house while the Professor's away.'

'Oh I see.'

'Mrs Hide ...' Her face stiffened. She placed a hand on the black bosom of her dress. 'I'm not wearing black for
Amy,
you know,' she said.

'I'm sorry.' So she
did
break her heart, thought Mary. Amy did break it.

Marge looked back towards the shelf. The last photograph contained a smartly posed young man, his chin on his knuckles, gazing out at them with patient, serious eyes.

'That's Michael,' said Marge huskily. 'He's famous now of course. He phoned the Professor, you know, when he heard. Such a thoughtful boy.' Her eyes slipped away. 'None of Amy,' she added quietly.

Mary spent the rest of this day of heat sitting on a bench in the nearby park, watching the families play. They spread blankets, and hunched down on them in clumps. The whirring children cried and complained, spilt things and ran away. Most of them got beaten at some point or another, often hard and nastily. Their tall keepers were often quite unpleasant to each other too, or just frazzled by heat and dislike. In fact there were several families in which no one seemed to have any time whatever for anyone else, no time at all, just no time. But at the pall of the day when the light was used up the families always went home together, usually in pairs, the big holding hands with the small, and the old, too, edging along behind.

The next day when she went back to work it seemed that everything had changed.

Even the flies shunned her—even the flies had found her out.

Russ worked grimly behind his counter. As he handed her the plates he declined to meet her eye. It was difficult that way. Mary dropped one—a writhing egg flapping helplessly in a tempest of tomato blood and chipped plate. As she was clearing it up she glimpsed Russ's reflection in the glass panel—a vindictive grin splitting his fat-nosed face. Even Alan had greeted her coolly. She no longer felt him gently beaming her with his eyes, and when she turned to him nervously he was always looking the other way, seeming to snigger in silence at her and her losses. I can't bear it, thought Mary. It's unbearable. What do you do when you can't bear something like this?

At mid-morning Mary still trembled alone over the dishes in the smoked and yellowed kitchen. Her mind, too, churned and splashed in the villainous water. Why did they hate her? She thought it must be the Hostel. Was it so bad to be there? Did that part of you seep into all the other parts? Or was it the books! When she returned to the Hostel the night before she found that Mrs Pilkington had confiscated four of the boys' books, without explanation. Two remained:
Britt
and
Management: An Introduction.
Mary did not know how serious this was or what she was going to do about it. Then she had a thought that made her whole body fuss with heat. Was it out? Did everybody know about her now? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, she chanted to herself, and worked on. The flies still circled her, in widening arcs of anxiety. Oh, how vile you must be now, she thought. How vile you must be, when even the flies shun you.

Just after noon the telephone rang in Alan's cubicle. She heard him croak out a few words of muffled thanks. Mary sensed the lull next door in the scullery. She turned and saw that Russ was peering out eagerly at Alan, who stood in his doorway with a shame-faced smile.

'It's all all right,' said Alan. There's a room at our place if you want it. You only pay your share of the rates, and it's furnished. You can move in any time. It's sort of an attic.'

'An
attic?'
said Russ. 'That's a studio, mate—that's a bloody
penthouse
that is.'

'Well,' said Alan. 'Do you want it?'

'Yes please,' said Mary and started to cry, out of relief but also because she knew for certain now that something had gone wrong with the way she saw other people.

'Here come the waterworks,' said Russ. 'Listen to her owl!'

Alan and Russ moved towards her at the same time. Alan checked himself, and so had to watch Russ take Mary confidently in his arms.

'Come on, Mary,' he remonstrated with his soft breath. 'No
grief.
I always keep a couple of rooms free for my girls. When a new one comes along—you, for instance—I kick an old one out, don't I. Guess whose turn it was for the chop this time? Ekberg. She was getting a bit scuffed-up anyway.'

'Actually it's technically a squat,' said Alan quaveringly. 'But it's an organized squat.'

'No, it's nice there,' breathed Russ. 'Come on, Mary. You'll be miles better off with us.'

• • •

Will she be? Do you really think so?

Squats are rich people's houses where poor people come and live when the rich people aren't looking. Some squats are hippie hells, but some squats are nice—if you can cope with the ghastly uncertainty of it all. Some squats are practically legal. People are serious about living together.

But things are always happening there and no one has the power to stop them happening. Downstairs people are arguing about half-bottles of milk and bathroom rosters and utility bills, just like anywhere else; but upstairs, through a different window, there'll be someone staked out on a bed, panting, boiling, coruscating, and one night soon the house will be full of screams. They just can't stop things, they just can't keep things out. And they too might go bad at any minute, because it is easy to go bad when you live on the breaking line.

I want Mary out of all this. I want her out of this whole risk-area of clinks and clinics and soup-queues, of hostels and borstals and homes full of mad women. I want her away from all these deep-divers. She might go bad herself: it happens. She might smash. I see her as a crystal glass that someone has tapped too hard with his knife; she sings along her breaking line.

The breaking line is where I walk, or where I sometimes think I do. On the breaking line you can hear things getting ready to crack, the ground, the walls of air, the sealing sky. Other people walk here but I don't see them. The lines are always somewhere else, they never cross. No lines cross, no figures loom, all are alone on the breaking line.

I've done things to her, I know, I admit it. But look what she's done to me.

Look what she's
done
to me.

• • •

12

• • •

Poor Ghost

That night the boys moved Mary out of the Hostel and into the squat.

That night the Hostel was hushed and rumbling. It was always that way when something had happened to someone. Something happened to someone pretty often in the Hostel, about every three nights. It had happened to Trudy this time. She had fought with a man and she had lost. It had been no contest, as usual. The man had broken her nose and two front teeth, whereas Trudy hadn't succeeded in breaking anything of his. She lay on her bed, in a turban of gauze, while Mary packed her case. Trudy would have to be moving on too: any trouble and the girls were out. Trudy didn't know where. It seemed a sensible rule, to make girls leave for trouble. They would never have come here if it hadn't been for trouble. And they could never leave trouble until they left here.

'It'll be better somewhere else,' Mary told her.

'Oh yeah? How the fuck do you know, Mary?'

'This is the worst place, isn't it?'

Trudy didn't answer.

'Well I hope you'll be all right,' said Mary.