Books were difficult. She read The Major Tragedies of William Shakespeare. It was about four men made up of power, mellifluousness and hysteria; they lived in big bare places that frightened them into speech; they were all cleverly murdered by women, who used an onion, a riddle, a handkerchief and a button. She read A Dickens Omnibus. It was about parts of London she had not yet seen. In each story a nice young man and a nice young woman weaved through a gallery of grimacing villains, deformed wags and rigid patriarchs until, after an illness or a separation or a long sea-voyage, they came together again and lived happily ever after. She read Rhyme and Reason: An Introduction to English Poetry. It was about an elongated world of elusive vividness and symmetry; there was a layer, a casing on it that she found nowhere else and knew she would never fully penetrate; the words marched to the end of their rank, sounded a chime, darted back again, and marched forward cheerfully, with renewed zest, completely reconciled to whatever it was that determined their role. She read The Jane Austen Gift-Pack. The six stories it contained spoke more directly to her than anything else had done. The same thing happened in every book: the girl liked a bad man who seemed good, then liked a good man who had seemed bad, whom she duly married. What was wrong with the bad men who seemed good? They were unmanly, and lacked candour, and, in at least two clear instances, fucked other people. Mary re-read one of these stories and was anxious that things would turn out the same way as they had before. They did, and she found this very comforting. She read The Rainbow, What Maisie Knew, and two fat shiny works about natural disaster and group jeopardy … At one point it occurred to her that books weren’t about other places: they were about other times, the past and the future. But she looked again and saw that Shakespeare’s book, for instance, was much newer than Lawrence’s, and that couldn’t be right. No. Books were about other places.
Where were they? How far did life stretch? It might go on for ever, or it might just stop dead a few corners away. There was a place across the river called the World’s End. For a long while in Mary’s mind this was the limit of life. (Similarly she once half-heard from the television that there was fighting in Kentish Town—with machine-guns and tanks. When she discovered that the fighting was actually taking place in Kurdistan, she didn’t know how relieved to be about this.) She wondered where the end of the world was and what the world ended with—with mists, high barriers, or just the absence of everything. Would you die if you went there? Often she nauseated herself by sending her mind into the sky, past the bloated nursery-toys of the middle-air, ever upwards into the infinite limey blue. She knew a little about death now. She knew that it happened to other people, to every last one of them. It was a bad thing, obviously, and no one liked it; but no one knew how much it hurt, how long it lasted, whether it was the end of everything or the start of something else. It couldn’t be that bad, Mary thought, if people did it all the time.
With Gavin, with Mrs Botham, and sometimes alone, Mary walked the streets of London, London South, as far up as the River, as far down as the Common, carving a track of familiarity from the grid of ramshackle streets, eviscerated building-sites, and the caged sections of high-wire concrete. You needed to walk through somewhere seven times before it ceased to be frightening. Knowing other people helped, and Mary was getting to know quite a few of them these days. They waved at her as she moved past them in the streets, or talked in her direction when she went to the shops and exchanged money for goods under Mrs Botham’s stern-eyed but unsystematic tutelage. Mary invested inordinate emotion in these routine sallies. A courtly particularity from the greengrocer could make her smile all afternoon; an unreturned glance from the milkman could bring the beginnings of tears to her eyes and sink the whole day in mist. At the newsagent’s one morning Mary got briefly excited by all the magazines called things like People, Life, Woman and Time. But they weren’t what she had hoped for. They were still all about other places instead.
In shops everyone talked about money. Money had recently done something unforgiveable: no one seemed to be able to forgive money for what it had done. Mary secretly forgave money, however. It appeared to be good stuff to her. She liked the way you could save money as you spent it. Mary developed a good eye for bargains, especially in the supermarket where they openly encouraged you to do this anyway. Mrs Botham was always saying how much money Mary saved her. Pretty good going, she thought, considering that all she ever did was spend it. But Mrs Botham still couldn’t find it in her heart to forgive money. She hated money; she really had it in for money. She would repetitively abuse money all day long.
So on top of all this and one way or another, Mary learned a little about glass, desire, voodoo, peace, lotteries, libraries, labyrinths, revenge, fruit, kings, laughter, despair, drums, difference, castles, change, trials, America, childhood, cement, gas, whales, whirlwinds, rubber, oblivion, uncles, control, autumn, music, enmity, time.
Life was good, life was interesting. Only one thing worried her, and that was sleep.
‘Good night,’ said Gavin, still panting rhythmically from the fifty press-ups he always did last thing.
‘I hope so,’ said Mary.
‘You—why do you always say that? I hope so.’
‘Well I do. I hope they’re going to be all right. They haven’t been good so far.’
‘What, you have nightmares, do you?’
‘Yes, I think that’s what I have.’
She had expected sleep to be ordered and monotone. It wasn’t. She lived through the days on tracks because that was what other people did. But her nights were random, and full of terror.
Mary knew other people had bad dreams but she was pretty certain they weren’t as bad as hers. Incredible things happened to her while she was asleep. For hours in the darkness her mind struggled fiercely to keep the dreams away, when Mary would as soon have given up and let the dreams begin. But her mind wouldn’t listen to her: it thrummed on its own fever, dealing her half-images of graphic sadness and fluorescent chaos, setting her hurtful tasks of crisis and desire, trailing before her that toy alphabet with its poisonous ps and qs. And then the dreams came and she must suffer them without will.
She felt that the dreams came from the past. She had never seen a red beach bubbled with sandpools under a furious and unstable sun. She had never felt a sensation of speed so intense that her nose could remember the tang of smouldering air. And the dreams always ended by mangling her; they came down like black smoke and plucked her apart nerve by nerve.
And she asked for it, and wanted more.
6
• • •
Law’s Eyes
‘Moderation,’ said Mrs Botham. ‘Temperance. Calmness. Reserve. Not being drunk all the time. That’s what sobriety means, Mary! And if you lose your sobriety you lose everything. I admit it, oh, I admit it, Mary! Shoe-polish, shampoo, Pledge, Brobat, Right-Guard, Radox, Sanflush, Harpic…’
The air tasted sweetly of toast and tea. The television flashed and rumbled about other places, wryly monitored by Mr Botham. Gavin sat beside Mary with a magazine on his lap. The splayed glistening pages depicted a new kind of person, a man with hair all over his body. Judging by the man’s expression, people of this kind were very exalted and rare, and generally much prized. Gavin’s forearm rested limply on Mary’s lap. She liked it being there. She liked Mr and Mrs Botham being where they were too. She liked the fire whose flames did not burn. She smelled the air and liked its taste. I’m all right, she thought. She looked at the hump-backed teapot and her dutiful children; she looked at the high shoulders of the comical armchairs, spreading out their wings in gestures of arthritic welcome. This is enough, thought Mary—and why should it end?
• • •
Here’s why.
One hundred yards away down the stone terrace, in a three-walled wasteland peopled by destitute furniture and mangled prams, Jock and Trev crouch opposite one another, panting with cunning and gurgling with adrenalin and drink. Their eyes confer about when to make their move. Gradually Trev starts sniggering in the dark…
It is indeed a noble dream: to come running into the Botham home, to do it and its occupants as much harm as they reasonably can in the few noisy minutes they have earmarked for the occasion—and to inflict on Mary, our Mary, that special damage which she had feared. Possibly they will be obliged to take Mary with them when they leave. Trev, for example, has quite a few things that he wants to do to Mary, and he is counting on time and leisure to do all that needs to be done.