The food that Jamie was unzipping and slapping about was elementary but expensive-looking. It was the kind of food Mary had only seen through glass, looking too artful to eat behind its pitying sheen. Mary helped him as best she could, and her hands were naturally much steadier than his.
‘I’m surprised you’ve got a baby,’ she said.
‘What? A baby?’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not mine, pal. It’s hers. Babies! … babies?’ he muttered, rather in the way that the boys had muttered ‘Books.” ‘Not me, pal. I haven’t got no baby. Can’t you tell?’
‘No. How can you tell?’ she asked. This was just the sort of thing she had always hoped she would one day be able to tell about other people.
‘I’m childish. Childless people always are. Terrifying, isn’t it. Life is full of terrifying tricks like that. I’m getting more and more respect for it.’ He looked up. He came towards her, holding a knife. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You know, you look really good.’ He looked down at the red shoes, the white skirt and sweater. ”Really good.’
It worked, thought Mary.
‘I look terrible,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I don’t know it. You should see what I look like from my end. I look really bad.’
‘No you don’t,’ said Mary. ‘You look good.’
He placed the side of his cold face on her bare throat and made several strange noises—grateful sobs, they might have been. As if prompted by memory, Mary felt the impulse to put her arms round his shoulders. It was an option. It was one of the things you could do at such moments. But she didn’t do it, and, anyway, he soon moved back to where he was before and started taking lunch more seriously.
For the next hour Jamie was busy serving food and encouraging people to eat it. Mary sat alone near the window with a plate on her lap. Only one of the people there said anything to her during this time, a billowing, leather-faced man with the loudest voice Mary had ever heard. He stood above her, one leg wriggling or palpitating inside his trousers.
‘Are you a great pal of Jamie’s?’ he shouted.
‘Yes,’ said Mary.
‘Curious set-up he’s got here. What’s he like?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mary. And that was that. But Mary didn’t mind. She had the couples to watch, and it was all very interesting.
There were fourteen people in the room not including the baby, who was called Carlos. They arranged themselves easefully within the generous ventricles of light. In sudden bursts clockwork Carlos shinnied along the floor on palms and sore kneecaps, the theme of delighted speculation wherever he went. If anything caught his eye he tried to snatch it. All it had to be was a thing, for Carlos to want to snatch it. At several points he came near Mary and stared up with awe. She tried to talk to him but he didn’t respond. He just couldn’t work Mary out.
The room contained six couples. It took Mary quite a while to make the right connections. Some were easy. One couple held hands practically all the time, even when they were eating. Another couple seemed to pool their nervous intimacy in everything they did; there was a flexible yet constant avenue of collusion between their eyes: Mary could tell that they hadn’t been a couple for very long. The billowing man who had talked to Mary was older than everyone else by the same amount that Carlos was younger; the wild-haired girl he formed a couple with seldom looked his way, and then only to refresh her contempt: Mary could tell that they weren’t going to be a couple for much longer. Other people there often seemed unaligned or mis-attached; but then their lovers loomed up on them inexorably, and they once again submitted to the bitter pact. Jamie didn’t appear to be a part of a couple, but then you never really knew.
And the room, the flat, the labyrinth: it was like the house of Mr and Mrs Hide, airy and blank with its own superfluity, full of spaces between things. This is different all right, thought Mary. This is new, this is more. All the people here have been specially differentiated; they are all together freely, and seldom have to do things that they aren’t already quite keen on doing. Although varying in many of the ways that people vary, the people here enjoy a brash unanimity about money and time. And they think that this is all right.
Only scurrying Jamie, and clockwork Carlos, and of course Mary herself, continued to operate on their own uncertainty principles.
‘Look at all these people,’ said Jamie excitedly, crouching down on the floor beside her. Mary looked at them all. He coughed and said, ‘I’m drunk again now, thank God, so don’t be surprised by the general lowering of my tone … Look at them all. You know what they’ve all got in common?’
‘What?’ said Mary.
‘They’ve all done it to each other,’ he said, as if referring to a mysterious and distasteful habit of theirs. ‘Everyone I know has done it to everyone I know. You haven’t done it to anyone here, have you?’
‘No,’ said Mary, who was fairly sure she hadn’t.
‘That’s a relief. Actually that’s one of the things I like about you.’ He started to make a regular bobbing motion, originating from somewhere in the region of his bony waist. ‘All the girls here—they’ve all been there. They’ve all done it like that, and then round from the back, and then on their sides with one leg up, and then bent triple with their knees hooked under their elbows. Why do they do it? Women aren’t in it for sex. They used to do it because everyone else did it and they didn’t want to miss out. Now they’re all pushing thirty and terrified because they want husbands and kids same as anybody else. They all want second chances. They all pretend they haven’t been doing it now, though they all keep on doing it. They all think they’re all virgins now. But who wants them all now, eh? Who wants the old fuckbags?’
Mary decided to try something. She leaned forward and said, ‘I’ve lost my memory.’
‘Oh, don’t even talk about it,’ he said, flinching with a hand on his cheek. ‘I get that all the time. And I’m only twenty-nine! I do things twice—I mean letters and things like that. Like an old fuck. I—’
‘No. I mean I can’t remember any of the things I’ve done.’
‘Me too! I wake up, and for a moment the night before is all there. Then a black hand just swipes it from my head. And it’s all gone for ever. You get some clues sometimes. Like if your stomach hurts you know you must have been laughing a lot. Things like that. I—’
‘You don’t understand. I mean—I don’t know who I am. I might be someone else.’
‘Right! Right! I mean, half the time I could be anyone as far as I’m concerned. Anyone at all—I don’t mind. There’s just a great blankness about me. I’m just… wide open. I—’
‘Is everyone here like that?’
‘Yeah! Well. No. No, they’re not. This lot, they’re just out of their fucking minds, that’s all.’
‘I see,’ said Mary, and turned away to hide her disappointment.
Now people started to leave. Mary thought at first that they were just going out somewhere; but then it became clear that they were going home, that they lived in other places… In confusion Mary announced that she was going home too. Jamie nodded abstractedly and said he might walk with her some of the way if he felt up to it. He would walk with her as far as he could.
Mary went to the lavatory. She felt strange, slipped, dangling. The flat was shadowy and vast, possibly endless. The high corridor had no light at the end, so any distances might be covered by the granulated air: anything might be happening down those distances. She went where she had been told to go. People were still leaving but by now she couldn’t hear them. She had been heading for the fourth door on her right for quite a long time and still had a fair way to go. What was overwhelming her? At last she reached the door. She knew at once there was someone inside.
‘It’s open,’ said a girl’s voice.
Mary opened the door and stepped forward cautiously. It was a long room, and thickly carpeted—not a bathroom so much as a room with a bath in it. At the far end stood the small muscular girl who belonged to the tall billowing man. She stood in front of the mirror, shaking her electric red hair.
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said to Mary’s image in the glass.