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.