I used to think there was no time like the present. I used to think there was no time but the present. Now I know better—or different, anyway. In the end, the past will always be there. The past is all there is: the present never sticks around for long enough, and the future is anybody’s guess. In time, you always have to hand it to the past. It always gets you in the end.
• • •
All the girls, the fallen girls—they just wanted a second chance, they were just looking for a break. That was what Mary was looking for too. And then she found one.
It was midday. She was walking the streets with a kind of half-studied aimlessness, with no conscious prejudice other than avoiding her familiar pathways, her known handholds on the city grid. She wandered into a busy, sheltered area of ramshackle houses and cavernous shops. Buckled men and women were arraying their belongings on bare racks in the road, and passers-by added their voices to the sound of junior commerce and informal exchange. Overhead, a stilted street climbed up into the cold morning lucency like a newly-opened gangway to the sky. Even the fat white layabouts of the middle-air dipped down closer to see what was going on… Yes, of course it is, thought Mary, and I must never forget it: life is interesting, life is good, everything you look at is secretly full of the real stuff. She turned another corner and saw a wide dark window: the window held a message for her but at that moment a speeding van played a trick with the sun and the words were erased in a bank of light. She waited, and the message reappeared, with belittled yet insistent clarity. It was a sign. It said: ‘waitress wanted’.
‘By the police?’ said Mary, thinking of Prince and his room.
She moved closer. It said: ‘waitress wanted—Help needed. Inquire within.’
Mary inquired within. Before her eyes had grown used to the gloom a yawning young man had looked her up and down, leant back in his chair to exchange nods with a woman behind the counter, and asked Mary if she could start tomorrow. Mary said she could and turned to leave before anything had a chance to go wrong.
‘Wait!’ he called. ‘You don’t want to know about anything else? Money? Time?’
‘Oh, yes please,’ said Mary.
‘Eight to seven with Sundays off.’
‘… And money?’
‘We talk about that in the morning. My name is Antonio but you can call me Mr Garcia. What’s your name?’
‘Mary Lamb.’
‘Okay, Mary. In the morning—eight sharp.’
‘I haven’t got an Insurance number or anything,’ she added quickly.
‘So what?’ said Mr Garcia, and yawned again. ‘We don’t care about that shit.’
Mary walked down the street again. She was very optimistic. She knew what waitresses did, and she knew she could do that shit as well as anyone else.
9
• • •
Force Field
Pallid Alan sat in his little office beyond the kitchen, gazing out of the window and worrying about going bald.
Mary watched him carefully. It was very interesting. Every ten or twelve seconds Alan’s right hand would slip off the desk and—jerkily, gingerly, as if only nominally under its master’s control—snake upwards to take a bite out of Alan’s hair. Next, and with an expression of shrewd annoyance, he would inspect the contents of his palm, with a quiet tightening of the pale lips; then he shook it all away in a bedraggled gesture and flapped his hand down again on the desk. Ten or twelve seconds passed, and then it all happened again.
Covertly, not for the first time, and out of unadorned curiosity, Mary did to her hair what Alan kept doing to his. Her hand disclosed the odd twanging wisp of light, which she duly flicked to the kitchen floor. But it didn’t bother Mary like it bothered pallid Alan. So far as Mary was concerned, there was always plenty more where that came from. Mary’s hair, in addition, was clearly good stuff, clearly worth having. Alan’s wasn’t. It was churned, parched, like failing corn—and in relatively short supply. In Mary’s view, the sooner Alan’s hair was all gone or used up the better things would be. He wouldn’t have to keep wrenching it out. And after all you didn’t need hair, did you? Plenty of people got along fine without it. Alan didn’t see it this way, though, and Mary watched his sufferings with comparable pangs of her own. She wanted to tell him to stop pulling it out if he prized it so much. But she didn’t. She knew that pallid Alan was terrified of talking about anything to do with hair.
‘Hey, Baldie!’
Mary felt the thud of air from the swing-doors and heard the comical death-rattle of the dirty plates. She turned, and Russ sauntered into the kitchen—loose-shouldered, sidling Russ, with his glamorous black T-shirt, his chunky blue jeans, and his extraordinary shoes, which resembled a pair of squashed rats. To Mary’s eyes, these rats were far from satisfied with their role in life and always seemed to be resentfully contemplating their comeback.
‘I said—hey, Baldie!’
‘Yes,’said Alan, tensed down over his desk.
Russ surged up behind Mary, so close that she could feel the pleasant hum of his force field, and, extending one arm artistically, toppled a skeleton of white plates into her sink. Mary turned to him and smiled. Mary had never met anyone quite like Russ before. But then Mary had never met anyone quite like anyone before.
‘Well looky here,’ murmured Russ, applying his fat lips to Mary’s bare neck. In the kitchen she wore her hair up, on old Mrs Garcia’s disdainful advice. Abruptly Russ backed off, dropping his head and raising his arms like someone embarrassed by a round of unwarranted applause.
‘No. No,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t get your hopes up. I’ve caused enough artbreak in my time to know better than that.’ He came forward again, rubbing an erect forefinger behind his ear. ‘You see, girl, I’m not sure you’re good-looking enough for my taste. On the whole, I like um a bit better-looking than you. Oh God, don’t cry, Mary! Oh God, please don’t cry!’ Mary nearly always did want to cry when he told her not to. He said it so seriously. ‘Hang on, though, eh girl? No arm in hoping, is there? You never know your luck, if the weather stays this hot. Here, I’ll tell you something: I wouldn’t mind murdering you. You’re well worth murdering, I’ll give you that.’
Mary didn’t say anything. You didn’t have to. Russ talked about murdering girls quite often, and so casually that Mary was beginning to wonder whether it was such a serious business after all. In Russ’s scale of things, it was better for a girl to be worth murdering than not worth murdering. ‘Not even worth murdering’ was the worst you could possibly say about a girl, and Mary was relieved that she wasn’t thought to be that bad.
Russ wheeled out into the centre of the room. ‘Fuck off, darling,” he yelled, addressing the air now and deftly removing a comb from the seat of his jeans, ‘you only look like Brigitte Bardot!’ He arched backwards in front of the dusty mirror on the wall—then buckled and jumped away as if invisible hands were snatching at his belt. ‘Leave it out, Sophia,’ he said in hardened warning. He straightened up. ‘Aah!’ He buckled again. He clawed at the phantom that was riding on his back. ‘Aah! Raquel! Will you—get off my—bloody—’ He flipped the phantom over his shoulder and on to the floor, where he gave it a good jabbing with his foot. Mollified, he corrected the shape of his jeans and leant back in front of the mirror again. ‘Gor, all this air,’ he said, patting and teasing it with both hands. ‘Where’s it all come from is what I want to know. You know,’ he said, turning to Mary and wagging the comb at her, ‘you know what’s really crippling me? You know where all my money goes? Onna haircuts! It does, I swear. Cheryl says let it grow but Farrah says she likes it short. What you reckon, Mary?’
‘Russ,’ said Alan.
Russ went on combing his hair. ‘What can I do for you, Baldie?’
‘I’m going to bloody murder you one of these days,’ said Alan in his cracked, uncertain voice. He added nervously, ‘You fat swine.’
‘Oh don’t do that, Al. Don’t murder me, please. Old me up, somebody,’ he drawled, ‘me knees are quaking. Fat? Fat?’ He sprang backwards, his hands flat on his stomach. ‘There’s not an ounce of surplus weight on this superb specimen. If I’m so fat, ow come all these film stars are after me? Eh? Eh? They’re not after you, are they, oh no. You know why? Because baldness disgusts them. That’s why.’