Mary picked up the top half of the letter. She turned it over. There was a photograph of a girl. It was Mary.
8
• • •
Stopped Dead
It was Mary. Was it? Yes… it was Mary. How could it be?
Late at night in the basement bathroom when all the lights were meant to be out, Mary stood in front of the mirror and held up the pink letter beside her face. Above her a bare lightbulb burned in its dust.
It was Mary. But it was older than Mary … The face looked out at her defiantly, with perhaps even the beginnings of a sneer or a snicker in the raised left-hand side of the mouth. The mouth itself was looser than Mary’s, more crinkled along its parting line. The mole beneath her right temple was there, but on the wrong side. And the eyes—they weren’t her eyes. The eyes were dead, they were knowing, they were incurious, they were old. Mary stared. The half-smile in the photograph seemed momentarily to broaden, to become the real smile, to admit Mary. She blinked and looked again. The smile had gone but the eyes now held triumph. Quickly she dropped the letter and turned away with a hand to her head. She knew what the real difference was. Mary’s face—Mary believed, Mary liked to think—was a good face, the face of somebody good. But the face of the girl in the photograph—
‘Oh God, what have I done in my life?’ said Mary.
All day nausea had tried to climb the rope-ladder in her chest. Now, with relief, with humiliation, with terror, she knelt on the bathroom floor and was convulsively and disgustedly sick, sick inside out, just sick to death. She couldn’t get rid of enough of herself. She was sick for so long she was afraid her heart might fall out, might fall out and break.
Now she waited each morning for more news about herself but no news came. No news came and nothing happened.
Time was passing so slowly. She had no money left to help time on its way. You needed money to make time pass: that was how money got its own back on time. And time was taking for ever.
Mary read all the books again. She read the devotional literature splayed out on the hall table. Its general drift, in common with Mrs Botham’s pamphlets from Al Anon, was that everything turned out right in the end, whether it seemed that way or not. We all had a second chance in life and could probably be redeemed quite easily. It had always been this way since the Fall of Man, when man fell and broke. But you shouldn’t worry. God would handle everything. The girls talked about God quite a lot, or at least they referred to Him frequently, and to His son, Jesus Christ. And it didn’t seem to be doing them much good at all.
‘I don’t know what you girls are thinking of half the time,’ said Mrs Pilkington. ‘You lose everything, you come here, you have nothing.’
Mary agreed with her, in detail.
‘You say you don’t know your National Insurance number.’
That’s true.’
‘You have no idea whether your contributions are up to date.’
‘I don’t, no.’
‘Where on earth are your records?’
‘I give up,’ said Mary without thinking,’—where are they?’
‘Now don’t you be cheeky to me. You say you want a job, it will take you a long time to get a job. First you must do all this.’ She tapped the stack of forms with a warning finger. ‘Here. Fill them all in.’ She returned to her work. She added without looking up, ‘You’re only allowed to stay here three months, you know.’
‘Three months? said Mary.
Mary sat outside in tears on the windy bench. She spent quite a lot of time doing this nowadays. She dropped the last of the forms on to her lap. She couldn’t read them. She could read Timon, but she couldn’t read them. Even if she slowed down, and followed the phrases in a moronic lip-mime like Honey frowning over Love Yourself, the words were giving nothing away, smug, sated, chockful of good things sneeringly denied to her. Mary wanted to get out of here and on to another plane of life; but these words weren’t going to help her out. They had been put together with only one thing in mind: to lock her in.
No news came. Mary looked for news in the mirror. She played the mirror game. Mary Lamb was getting to know Amy Hide quite well now.
Was Mary Amy, or had she at some point been Amy, and to what extent? Amy had done things. To what extent, and how automatically, had Mary done them too? Did it matter? What authority was there? God? Prince? Who minded?
Mary did. She minded. She locked herself in the bathroom and looked into the mirror. She wanted to be good, and she didn’t believe that Amy could have been all bad if Mary had in some sense come out of her. Perhaps every girl was really two girls … Mary looked into the mirror. She didn’t look too bad. On the contary, she looked quite good. Look at the whites of her eyes, like whites of egg, the true angle of her nose; the teeth gave occasional refuge to small pockets of discoloration but the intimate pink of the gums was smooth and whole; and the line of her lips shaped well with the oval evenness of her chin … As she turned away from the mirror she saw the ghost of a smile from the knowing genius that lived behind the glass. The image flickered: there was chaos in there somewhere. Mary stared on. Her eyes fought with all their light until they had subdued whatever hid behind the glass. But as she turned away she knew that whatever was hiding there would now coolly reassemble and go on waiting for whatever it was waiting for.
Her dreams changed. Her dreams ceased, or at least she thought they had. Dreams were about variety, and her dreams were no longer various. The nights were all the same now, like the days.
For the first hours she lay back and let her head boil with the opposite of sleep, wild thoughts, wounding thoughts, thoughts that did not mind whether or not she could bear them. Then sleep began and it was always the same.
Amy was running across a black sky. Amy was flying: she could go where she wanted just as fast as she wanted to go. She was unterrified by her pursuer; she even turned sometimes and gave a shout of excited, taunting laughter. The pursuer was the beast. It was black, naturally—a panther, perhaps, but with the yellow tusks and top-heavy square head of a hog. Amy would often let her pursuer come quite close before veering off delightedly, with such airy sharpness that the beast would hurtle on into the distance, make a great trundling arc, then straighten out along her track, its mechanical, unvarying tread picking up through the darkness behind her. She swerved again but this time the beast flashed past only inches away and she felt the hot rush of goaded rage and the smell of inflamed saliva and gums. Now she was Mary and now she was food. Suddenly the black terrain was a tight tunnel, and she was running with such desperate speed that she seemed about to overtake herself, her limbs like golden cartwheels, her hair like a mane of nerves. The beast followed in extravagant bounds. At any moment she expected to feel its grip and its headlong weight on her back, riding her to the ground and washing its hands in her face. So she slowed down to make it happen quicker, she stopped dead to make the next thing happen faster, and the beast veered up and, with dispatch, with contempt, swiped her body into flames of blood. Then she awoke to a brain already boiling again with thoughts that did not mind whether or not she could bear them. It happened every night, every night.—Why?
• • •
Because this is one of the ways the past gets back to you, the thwarting, indefatigable past.
You know, don’t you, that your forgotten wrongs will never cease to caffeinate your thoughts? … How is your sleep? Can you trust it? Is everything reasonably quiet down there? Or is it swelling—will it burst? Is it all coming out to get you?
Oh man … sometimes I wake up at night and there’s nothing. I am a dead tooth in the jaws of the living world. My mind just isn’t on my side any more. It’s on the other side. It is the prince of the other side … Mary: get it right next time, be good next time. Oh Mary—heal me, dear.