Other People (16 page)

'The dog doesn't wag its tail,' said Mary nervously.

'Probably scared it'll drop off,' said Prince.

A heavy bird flapped overhead, and they could hear the hum its wings made against the damp air. Mary thought of the photograph she had once seen of an American eagle, its oriental trousers, the old eyes and their faith in the power of the ripping beak. Mary hurried on. They turned into an alley, and immediately Prince ducked through a low door, beckoning her to follow. She went in after him. The darkness and its dust made a connection with something in her head or throat, a tickle in the veins that feed the nose, the movement of a familiar but disused vent in the track of her blood. Ringed by candles, his face seemingly eyeless in their light, an old black man sat at a table by the inner door. He saw Prince and got to his feet with a sigh. Gingerly he slipped the bolt, stepping back to let Prince in. Prince could go anywhere. Everywhere had to let Prince in. Mournful, embarrassed music timed their ascent on the mis-angled staircase. Through a hole in its floor they came up into the arching shadows of the long room.

This is a slower world, thought Mary, where cause and effect never need to come around. Here people try to live on fever and magic; they can't, but they try. She looked about, then stared at the black floorboards, letting Prince guide her by the arm. There were twenty or thirty people there, perhaps many more. In a far corner film flashed. The talk was low and drowsy with all the fever in the air.

'Don't worry,' said Prince, leading her towards the music and the floppy, clumping dancers, miming chaos against the dusty lights. 'It's a quiet night tonight. Nothing live.' They sat down on bendy chairs round a small square table. An old man sidled up and banged a bottle and two glasses down in front of them. 'Christ, I hate this place,' he said, leaning forward and starting to drink quickly.

Mary watched the dancers. There were only two couples on the floor. An eerily tall black man shuffled slumped over a little ruined blonde. His eyes were quite dead. The girl seemed to be supporting all his weight, hauling him as if in eternal punishment round the littered floor.

'You know what they do here, Mary? Do you?' 'No,' said Mary exhaustedly. 'What do they do here.' 'All the usual things, all the trite things. You'd think people with these needs would pay other people to have them on their behalf, and just sit back and watch. Really this is the last place of boredom. When the world has bored you flat, you come to this place and have it bore you here. Remember?'

Mary watched the dancers. The second couple was different: it still harboured energy. They swayed together with the remains of method, the man forming elaborate patterns on the girl's back with his tensed claws, trailing them up the knobbled curve of her spine and down past the underhang of her breasts. As they worked round the floor the girl stood facing Mary, treading air for several slow beats. She smiled. One of her eyes was puffed and purple; her hollow mouth fell open slackly with silent laughter. In her face was all the relief of having no further to fall. The man jerked her head up to his and they kissed. The girl's good eye still held Mary—see? See? it seemed to say. I'm lost at last, lost.

'Amy used to get down here pretty often, I think,' said Prince.

'Did she?' said Mary.

'That's right, that's right. Amy used to like it best when they had live action here.' His voice moved closer. 'Don't you remember? Are you finding this
boring?
But vice is—it
is.
What's your special interest, Mary? Voodoo, video, violence, vagrants, vandals, vampires? What's your
interest,
Mary, what's your special
interest?

Mary turned away. She couldn't deal with the agitation of his tone. It wasn't anger but perhaps the eagerness of woken despair.

'Then they find people who already know what a few teeth are worth. And after they've been roughed up and batted about and peed on, then you get to go up on stage and kick them about a bit yourself. The kickbags get paid—oh good, good. It's fine, fine. Don't you
remember?
Don't you?'

Mary said nothing. The dancers were still kissing, with redoubled violence, as if eating each other's tongues. The man was urging her to the corner where the room was darkest. Wait—there was a door there, a low door almost consumed by shadow. Still kissing, still dancing, still urging, he steered her to the door. Suddenly the girl's head snapped back; she had seen the door and seen it open. Yes, this was further, this was a lot further, this was more, this was a whole new ledge on the way down. But she laughed and stretched her shoulders as if they were wings for flight. They were through and on the other side. The door swung shut behind them.

Mary turned to Prince. She could tell that he had been staring at her for a long time.

'What's behind that door?' said Mary, as they drove back.

'I've been behind the door once. You have too, I believe.'

'Stop playing with me. Why don't you leave me alone? Whatever I was I am
me
now.'

That's my Amy,' said Prince. 'That's the opposition talking.'

'Stop it. Leave me alone. I'm not doing anyone any harm. And I can't have been murdered, can I, because
here I am:

Prince laughed. After a while he said, 'Is there life after death? Who knows. Actually I wouldn't put it past life, would you? That would be just
like
life, to have a trick in its tail... Okay. Okay. We'll let you be for a while. In fact, the only thing behind the door these days is a mattress or two, as far as I know. For fucking on. You know about all that, Mary?'

'A bit.'

'Oh well done.'

Mary said, 'You know I'm living in a squat now. I suppose you'll disapprove of that too.'

'Me? Not really. Some squats are nice. Some are even legal. People are serious about living together. Whoops,' he said, as the car in front seemed about to wobble free from its tracks.

'It's—'

'I know where it is.'

The car sniffed its way up the play street. Now all the children were sleeping. The garden walls looked frozen in the moon's light, the ghostly court where the young girls sat and watched.

'Mary—two things.' Prince got out of the car so quickly that when Mary opened her door his hand was already there, outstretched and waiting. He straightened her up and said, 'The photographs on the mantelpiece in your old room. Think about them. Try to —see if you can't follow yourself back a little way. Your past is still out there. Somebody has to deal with it.' He paused and turned his head up to the sky. 'Look,' he said.

Spanned out to mist, to white smoke, a lone lost white creature, separated from its flock, curled like a genie round the silver fire of the half-moon. It didn't look worried; it looked pleased to be left alone to its night game.

'They're not alive, you know,' said Prince. They're just clouds, air, gas.'

His breath came near her lips for an instant—that median breath— then passed across her cheek. She was walking towards the steps when she heard the door slam and the car start up again.

Mary climbed through the sleeping house. She could be quite silent when she wanted to be. She glided up through the house to the room she loved. Her stairs were there. All things are alive, even these seven stairs, she thought. Everything is alive, everything has something to be said for it.

She paused on the last step. She knew beyond doubt that there was someone in her room, someone waiting behind the door. Never stop now, she thought, and pushed the door open. Someone was sitting in the dark. It was Alan. He didn't even dare take his hands from his face. His arms were as stiff and brittle as thin wood. He couldn't stop crying. Mary undressed. She got into bed and told him to come too. He came. He wanted to get inside her—but not to hurt her, as Trev had wanted to do. Alan only wanted to hide there for a while. She let him in, she helped him in. It was all over after a minute. Mary just hoped
he
wouldn't break anything. But she thought he probably had.

• • •

Is
there life after death? Well,
is
there?

If there is, it will probably be hell. (If there is, it will probably be murder.)

If there is, it will probably be very like life, because only in life is there variety. There will have to be many versions of death, to answer all the versions of life.

There will have to be a hell for each of us, a hell for you and a hell for me. Don't you think? And we will all have to suffer it alone.

14

• • •

Sadly Waiting

Alan and Mary ... 'Alan and Mary'.
Alan and Mary
—as a team. Well, how would
you
rate their chances? Personally (and it's just my opinion), I don't think this hook-up is a good idea for either of them, not really. Love is blind, you might point out. But where can the blind lead the blind? Down blind alleys, down unknown paths, with faces shuddering. And then there are other people to consider too.

Russ, for instance, is
terribly angry.
Alan is in
terrible trouble
with him about this. Here's a secret that will help explain why. Until very recently Russ was in the habit of spending three or four nights a week in the bed of thieving, unemployable Vera down in the basement (this is actually the extent of his connection with stars of stage and screen). But last night he strolled in there as usual—to find the glistening Paris staked out complacently on her bed, coolly reading the
New Standard.
The next thing he knows, Alan and Mary are coming down to breakfast hand in hand.

Well, a major rethink seemed inevitable; and once he started thinking, fresh doubts assailed him on every score. As an illiterate, Russ is covertly very impressed by many of Alan's attributes. Many things about Alan fill him with almost boundless admiration.
That's
why she likes him: because he can read and write so well. Furthermore, following an unpleasant remark of Vera's, Russ has begun to entertain radical and sweeping doubts about the size of his penis. Perhaps little Alan packs a whopper (after all, you never know who'll get them)? All this Russ believes during his dark nights of the soul, his skunk hours. Choirs of betrayal serenade his every thought, and in the black night he broods on revenge.

'Well at least
Alan
will be all right for a while,' I hear you murmur. But he won't be. Alan thinks that other stuff was bad. He thinks that other stuff was as bad as stuff could get. He's wrong. You wait.

• • •

'Do you want to go down first?' he asked her the next morning.

Mary turned over. Alan was sitting on the brink of the bed, his legs placed together, fully dressed. The night had changed him very little. All his facial colour appeared to have seeped into the whites of his eyes: the red they held was more brilliant than their blue. His mouth still rippled drily along its parting line. Mary sat up and Alan turned away quickly.

'Why should I want to do that?' said Mary.

'I don't know,' he said, and finally there was a tremor of furtive triumph in the contours of his face. 'I mean, do you want everyone to know?'

'Know what?'

'About us.'

'What about us?'

'I really love you, you know, Mary.'

'What does that mean exactly?'

'It— I'd die for you, on my mother's life I would.'

'I see. But you don't have to die for me, do you?'

'No, but I would.'

'But you don't have to.'

'No.'

'Then what does it mean?'

'I'd do anything for you,' he croaked, and took a tug at his hair. 'Look, I'll go down now so that they won't know.'

But they soon found out. They found out because all through that Sunday Alan was either staring palely into her face from close quarters or actually holding her hand (his hand was cold and wet, too, and he always kept
moving
it, either wiggling a finger or buffing her knuckle with his thumb). Mary was bewildered further by the immediate effect these attentions had on other people. An awful hushed twinkliness started emanating from Norman and Charlie, and a set-smiled, clear-eyed disdain from Wendy and Alfred. Ray and little Jeremy at least seemed quite indifferent to the matter; but there was a palpable coarseness and loss of distance in the looks and laughter of Vera and Paris. And Russ simply gazed at her all day with an expression of disgusted incredulity on his face.

Mary, feeling intensely confused, took her earliest opportunity to plead with Alan to forget whatever had happened and go back to how things had been before. Alan said he would do anything for her, apart from that. 'Go on—ask me. Anything,' he said. But Mary couldn't think of anything she wanted him to do for her, apart from that. He shed tears when she relented. Mary began to wonder what she had got herself into.