Other People (8 page)

'You get him and her. I'll get the queer,' ginger Trev had panted to his friend a few seconds earlier. Big Jock, who actually has little taste for the venture, heard Trev out with considerable relief. 'Him and her' meant Mr and Mrs Botham, and Mr and Mrs Botham were old people. Jock is quite good with old people. He has a way with old people. Jock is only doing this because Trev wants him to so much. Being Trev, Trev thinks that Jock wants to do this as much as he himself wants to, and he wants to do it very much indeed.

... Uselessly, like a sick old seal, Trev's tongue flaps round among the rockpools and barnacles of his mouth. He remembers that night, what he did to her and what she did to him. Ever since, his mouth has throbbed and roared, a hellish reef of flayed roots and frayed nerves. Trev isn't quite sure what Mary did to him, but he remains entirely clear about what he's going to do to her. He's going to turn her inside out. 'Let's go,' said Trev.

Time is a race, a race that gets faster all the time. If you listen hard you can hear each second gasping with the strain of keeping up. Do it!
Listen.
Time is a relay, sixty after sixty, each moment passing on its baton and dropping back exhausted, its race run. Time will end too, one day. Time will end too, one day, you know, thank God. Everything, your bones, the air itself, all of it will end in time.

• • •

The moment she heard the door make its signal, Mary felt the tranquil advance of change. It was late. Mr and Mrs Botham straightened their backs in unison, and Gavin stirred gruffly, lifting his eyes from the page. To Mary's eyes the room became stark and exemplary, fugitive and yet eternalized in her gaze. She knew that she had lost it then, the room and all it contained.

'If that's that Sharon...' said Mrs Botham tightly as her husband rose to his feet. 'I'll bloody murder her, so help me God.'

Mr Botham moved past Mary towards the door. It was clear from his face that he had nothing on his mind. He walked slowly down the passage. He knew he would get there in time ... They heard the door open. They heard Mr Botham's smothered rising shout, and then a double-thud, a thud in two stages, the second somehow more abrupt than the first. There was only time for Mrs Botham to start screaming before the men were in the room.

Mary saw it all.

To his palpable confusion and distress, Jock found himself in the lead. Trev had lingered to do some more loud stomping in the hall. Egged on by time, Jock dashed miserably across the room and started doing one or two things to Mrs Botham. Instantly and galvanically her reinforced foot shot up in hair-trigger self-protection, catching Jock a mighty blow between the legs with its heavy black brick. Jock gasped, clutched himself, and wandered dreamily away before subsiding slowly to his knees. By this time Trev himself stood in the doorway, already past his best, half-winded by all that stomping. But then he saw Mary and lumbered hungrily forward, seeming to have no time for Gavin, who stood up and with a short arc of the arm drove a muscular fist into the lower half of Trev's face. Trev paused, glanced sideways with a vexed, put-upon expression, before being snatched backwards flailing through the air to land upside down and motionless by the passage doorway. Jock, meanwhile, was on his hands and knees, vomiting (by some last courteous reflex) into the ornamental coal-scuttle. Mrs Botham screamed so much the louder. Gavin rubbed his knuckles, frowning, and stepped over Trev into the passage. Mary never moved.

She did the next day: she had to—there was no choice. The next day she found herself alone again. Mary always knew a thing like this would happen to her some time.

'I said if I saw you again there'd be trouble. Didn't I.'

'Yes you did,' said Mary.

'And now I'm seeing you again.'

'That's right.'

'And there's trouble.'

'I know.'

'How old are you... Mary Lamb? Do your parents know what you get up to?'

'I'm in my twenty-fifth year,' said Mary carefully. 'My parents died.'

'Of what?'

Mary hesitated. 'One of consumption,' she said, 'the other of a broken heart.'

'People don't die of those things any more. Well they do, but we call it something else these days ... What did they die of, Mary—if of course this isn't
too painful?'

But it was. More out of a desire to change the subject than from any real indignation, Mary said, 'I'm not sure you're allowed to talk to me like this.'

'Oh I am, I am. You ought to know that I am.'

'Why?'

'You've broken the law.'

Mary didn't know what this meant. Her first instinct, understandable in the circumstances, was to ask if the law would ever get better again. But she said, 'I'm sorry. I didn't know. What do you get when you break the law?'

'Time,' he said.

His room was like his breath; it had that dead, hospitalic tang. There was something extra, something acrid, in its taste, the taste of headaches and wax.

'I see,' said Mary.

'Don't worry.'

'Why not?'

'You haven't done anything that serious yet, not in the eyes of the law.'

Mary turned away from him. His eyes terrified her: they knew too much. They were a feminine green, narrow and oddly curved at the outside edges. Instead of light they contained only a glint of yellow, a bad yellow, the yellow of urine and fever. Or were these just law's eyes, she wondered, the eyes of authority and change? He stood up. He was shaped into his clothes with the obedient indifference of a shopwindow dummy. Who had put him together, who had dreamed him, the thin wedge of the nose, the perfectly horizontal mouth, the short but innumerable hair? He took out a white handkerchief and waved it lightly.

'You're crying,' he said.

'I'm sorry. Thank you,' said Mary.

'Listen to me. You've started badly. You're going to have to cut away from that kind of life, that kind of people. You don't belong there and they'll just spit you out every time. You'll need a job. You'll need a place. Hang on.' He leaned over his desk and started writing something, very fast. 'You can stay here for a while. I'll call them. If you need help you know where I am. My name's John Prince. I'll put it here.' He straightened up. He held Mary's eye for several seconds. She didn't think that face could ever look puzzled, but that's what it looked. She could tell he was trying to place her in his mind.

'You're trying to place me, aren't you,' she said in fear.

He laughed and said, 'I've got a lot of time for you, Mary.'

Mary and Gavin went back on the Underground. Gavin had made a statement, but didn't want to talk about it. Mary had never travelled on the Underground before, though she'd used the red buses once or twice with Mrs Botham in the past. Gavin gave her laconic warning, and Mary was grateful. He didn't want to talk much on the way back and neither did Mary.

When you considered this world—people winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cages and speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking shut everywhere, and arctic winds mingling with dusty gasps of fire from the planet's core—it was hard to believe how delicate life was, how breakable things were. Things were easy to break; things were terribly delicate. Evidently Mary had broken the law now, just as the night before she had broken Mr Botham's back. Yes she had—crack, she had broken it for him. It wouldn't have broker, if it hadn't been for her. Trev would get time for this, but so would Mary in her way. Mr Botham's condition was 'most serious', everyone said. Mary agreed, but she thought it could have been more serious: she could have broken his heart or his nerve, and people died of that. But it was still very serious indeed. Mary had heard from Gavin that Mr Botham was a carpet-layer when he could find work. Well, he wouldn't be able to find it now; he wouldn't even be able to look. No one knew if his back would get better again. And he was old, which made it even more serious.

The small house was well aware that things had changed; it didn't like being looked over at a time like this. The expression it wore was vulnerable and strained. There was no one inside, of course. Mrs Botham was at the hospital day and night, by her husband's side; she was drinking more heavily now, or more openly anyway. Mary couldn't stay—really there was nothing to stay with—but she said, 'Why can't you and I stay here and hope they come back?'

He looked at her with reluctance—and with scorn. She knew she shouldn't have said it. 'Be
serious,'
he said. 'We can't afford to have you here. We never could. We're not—there's no leeway here. Don't you
understand?'

'I'm sorry.'

He said, 'Where will you go?'

'Here.' She took out the piece of paper she had been given.

'Christ,' he said.

'He said he'd call them. He said it would be all right.'

Gavin looked away. 'I suppose it'll be all right for a while,' he said. 'But I'm not going to like thinking of you in there.'

Together they packed Mary a suitcase; there were some clothes of Sharon's, and some of Mrs Botham's that were more or less Mary's by now. Mary would have liked to take along a book or two, but she didn't want to risk asking. He told her how to get there on the Underground. He gave her four pounds: it was all he could spare. He embraced her quite tightly at the front door but Mary could tell he was already on the other side; she broke away quickly and hurried down the steps.

Mary didn't want to go underground again.

She walked. The suitcase was light at first but became steadily heavier as the day closed in. She asked other people the way, holding up the small sheet of paper. They read the address and did what they could. Some were no help; some were so bad at talking that they couldn't have told her anyway; some found the piece of paper distasteful in itself and moved on without answering. She got there in the end. It didn't take too long.

On the way she had her first memory. It made her stand still and put the case down and lift her hands to her hair. She heard a child shout and turned round shyly; she was in a quiet street, one marked by an air of prettiness and poverty; its small houses were clubbed together with their doors and windows open, and the staggered gardens displayed the family clothes. She was in a quiet street—but then, nowhere was a quiet place for Mary. She wanted to be somewhere the same size as herself and indolently dark, a place where she could shut out the clamorous present. But Mary stood where she was, her hands on her hair, and remembered.

She remembered how as someone young she had wanted to shine a light through other people's windows, to see into other people's houses ... She was standing on the grey brow of a terraced hill at evening. The spiked gates of the city park have just been shut; the keeper walks back into the distance, glancing sideways and pocketing his keys. The boys have all gone home. They are all safe and having tea in other people's houses, behind other people's windows. Turning her head, she could look down the hill and into the square. Here in all their rooms they were shoring up against the darkness. She wanted to see them, to shine a light, to sense the careless ripples of their carpets, the unregarded cracks in their papered walls, the shadows on their stairs. She knew it was impossible—she would never be let inside. She turned and ran wherever she was supposed to go.

Mary dropped her hands to her side. That was all: she could follow herself no further. She looked up. Immediately, the street—the air, the incorrigible present— seemed a little less bright and unanimous to her eyes. She picked up her suitcase and walked on, quicker than before, anxious to find her place. She knew now that she would find it in time.

7

• • •

Don't Break

The young women at the Church-Army Hostel for Young Women have all taken smashes recently. They have all taken big ones. Some have broken. (Some are not so young, either.) They have all gone out too deep in life.

They have all done too many things too many times with too many men, done it this way, that way, with him, with him. They are all inside here because they have all used everything up on the outside—used up money, friends, chances, all their good luck. They have all taken a smash and turned a corner. Some are trying to turn back. Some have stopped trying. They are fallen women.

Their position is shameful, or could be considered so. But
shame
is not the word for what they feel. That's fine by me. But what are they supposed to feel instead? Who did this to them? How would
you
feel?

... Have you ever taken a smash in your time? What, a big one? Will you get better again? If you see a smash coming, and you can't keep out of the way, the important thing is—don't break. Don't break! ... Can you see another smash coming? How big will it be? If you see a smash coming and can't keep out of the way—don't break. Because if you do, nothing will ever put you back together again. I've taken a big one and I know. Nothing. Ever.

• • •

So now Mary started living by the rules.

She awoke in the basement with her two room-mates at six-thirty sharp, to the sound of a bell. She always woke up in fright, quickly gathering her scattered senses. She got dressed at the same time as Trudy, a shrill-faced, chainsmoking divorcee, and together they joined the queue outside the bathroom while Honey, an apathetic young Swede, was left to linger moaning in bed before rejoining them later for breakfast in the dining-room upstairs, among all the other girls. There they would be stared at with cursory severity by Mrs Pilkington, the Sri Lankan co-superintendent, who ate alone at a table set apart. Her husband, lean Mr Pilkington, the other co-superintendent, would already be thrashing flusteredly through the day's paperwork in his hot office near the front door. Any trouble and the girls were out. Breakfast cost sixty pence, so Mary just drank her tea.