Do you know, for instance, what little Alan is afraid of now? He is afraid that Russ and Mary will shortly go off together somewhere for a protracted session of hysterical sex. He is. He can see Mary unfurling her immaculate white panties, glancing shyly over her shoulder, while the mightily hung Russ lolls smiling on the bed. And Alan can see himself, Alan, watching the whole spectacle from some abstract vantage, silent, unblinking, and perfectly bald, like a being from the future. Russ, on the other hand, is afraid that Alan will tell Mary, or that Mary will inadvertently discover, that he, Russ, can neither read nor write. (Russ has a further heroic foible: he refuses to believe that he has an unusually small penis. He is wrong about this; he ought to stop refusing to believe it; he does in fact have an unusually small one.) Whereas Mary is afraid of the address in her bag. She is afraid of Prince and what he knows. She is afraid that her life has in some crucial sense already run its course, that the life she moves through now is nothing more than another life’s reflection, its mirror, its shadow. Everything she sees has an edge on it, like prisms in petrol, like faces in fire, like other people hurrying through changing light—visions that we sense ought to reveal something, or will soon reveal something, or have already revealed something that we have missed and will never see again.
• • •
‘Time,’ said the man behind the bar, ‘time, gentlemen, please.’
Alan sprang up guiltily, barking his kneecap on the table and toppling an empty glass. As it fell, Russ tried to catch it, but only slapped the glass still faster to the floor. It didn’t smash or break. It rose up to live again on the wet tabletop.
‘Here, let’s uh—we’ll walk you home,’said Alan quickly.
‘Yeah, where d’you live?’ said Russ.
‘Near here. With some girls,’ said Mary.
‘I’m not coming,’ said Russ. ‘I can’t risk it.’
But Russ risked it. They all did. They all walked through the shouts and shadows of the night. For every slammed car door a light went out. This was the week ending with a nervous sigh, and getting ready to start all over again.
‘You’ll have a word with them, won’t you, on my behalf,’ said Russ. ‘Explain and that.’
‘If you like,’ said Mary. ‘I don’t think you’ll see them. You can’t come in.’
‘It’s one of those places, is it?’ said Alan. ‘Landlady on the stairs, no radios, no cats.’
‘And no film stars,’ said Russ. ‘That’s the big itch.’
‘It’s not really like that,’ said Mary.
They came to Mary’s place. Two girls were sitting smoking on the steps. The girls gazed out blankly for a few seconds, then went on talking. Mary could read the smoke coming in thin wafts from their mouths. They weren’t talking about anything much. Through the open door you could see the old green passage, and the notice-board breathing softly.
Alan swung his head round at her. ‘You don’t live there, do you Mary?’ he said in a stretched, pleading voice.
‘Yes,’ said Mary, ‘I do, I’m afraid.’
‘How’d you end up here, girl,’ said Russ.
‘There was nowhere else.’
‘Can’t have this,’ said Russ gravely.
‘What happened to you?’ said Alan, with his beseeching eyes. ‘I mean—haven’t you got any family or anything?’
Mary couldn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say any more. Now Mrs Pilkington loomed in the doorway, the ring of keys in her hand. The girls stood up and flicked their cigarettes into the air, then turned with their heads bowed. Mary moved forward. There was nothing to say. On the steps she turned and waved. The boys looked on, their hands in their pockets, then they too turned and started off down the long defile of the street.
‘This is you,’ said the driver.
And what have you done in your life, thought Mary, as she lowered herself from the hungry red bus. The driver watched her, breathing through his mouth. He was big and fat and red like the bus he drove. She returned his stare, or she let it bounce back off her, as if she were no more than the mirror of his gaze. Obediently the red bus lay there, breathing through its mouth, panting to be off again. The door slid shut, and with a snorting shudder they rode away.
Mary started walking. Grey, bookish, moss-scrawled houses with many windows stood stoically back from the road, beyond shallow stretches of grass where water-machines washed the transient rainbows of the air. In the treacly shadows beneath the garden walls confetti butterflies and corpulent bees flew in their haze… All this Mary saw in the Sunday morning light. There was a time when she would have let her senses out to play in the voluptuous present, but now her mind was hot and ragged. She had lost the knack of choosing what she wanted to think about; it seemed she could no longer call her thoughts her own.
Clearing her throat, straightening her shirt, needlessly clicking her handbag, Mary asked other people the way. There weren’t many of them about—men carrying bales of newspapers, women pushing prams, children, the old— but asking the way was a sound method of getting to other places. It always worked in time.
She had found the street and was counting numbers, missing a beat, missing a beat, when she halted and lifted a hand to her mouth, and another memory came her way… Not now, not now, she thought, and remembered how as someone young she had had to leave her own room and enter a different room containing other people. She was putting on a pink dress, a dress her skin loved. Its pink was not the pastel that little girls ought to wear; it contained tenderness but also blood, the colour of gums and the most intimate flesh. She lifted the dress and blinked as its shadow slipped past her eyes. She smoothed the-material out along her hips as if it were the same colour and texture as her soul. She glanced swiftly round her room—her room, which again was no more than a setting for her self— then opened the door and moved down the passage to that other door with its voices and its eyes.
Will it open? thought Mary, stalled on the silent street, her hands on her hair. Well, now I’ll find out.
11
• • •
Whose Baby?
The door opened. It revealed a woman in black.
Mary tried to begin but couldn’t.
‘Why, Baby,’ said the woman, with worry or concern in her voice.
Mary’s teeth shivered. ‘Baby?’ she said.
The woman leaned forward, her eyes flickering in simple puzzlement. ‘Oh I do beg your pardon. Goodness!’ She stepped back with a hand on her heart. ‘Don’t take any notice of me. Can I help you, dear?’ she added matter-of-factly.
‘Oh I see. I’m sorry, I’m …’
‘I say, are you all right, dear? You look quite … take my… George!’
Five minutes later Mary sat drinking a cup of tea in the sun-washed kitchen. Like the woman in black, Mary held her cup with both hands. She thought, I’m a girl, so I drink hot drinks with both hands. Girls always do that for some reason. Why? George uses only one. Men use only one hand, although their hands aren’t nearly so steady as ours. Perhaps girls’ hands are just colder hands. The kitchen, the passage, the house, meant nothing to her, nothing.
‘It must be the heat,’ said the woman in black. ‘And I probably gave you a turn. I thought she was Baby, George. I could have sworn for a moment she was Baby come to see us. Don’t you think she looks like Baby, George?’
‘Not really,’ said George.
‘I’m sorry—whose baby?’ said Mary.
‘Baby’s the youngest. She’s called Lucinda really, but we always called her Baby. I’m sorry, what did you say your name was, dear?’ she asked in her other, more neutral voice.
‘Mary Lamb. I came here to ask about Amy Hide.’
The effect of the name was immediate—what a strong name, Mary thought with a wince, oh what a powerful name. The woman in black stared at her shrilly in surprised anger, and George turned away, seeming to give in the middle, his head ducking slightly on his neck. Mary sometimes had the same reflex when she thought about what she had done to Mr Botham.
‘Well the least said about her the better,’ said the woman with finality. George grunted in agreement, and reached for his pipe.
Mary said quickly, as she had half-planned to say, ‘I’m sorry. I knew her a long time ago, before she… I know it’s very sad, what happened.’
The woman then did something that Mary had only ever read about. She gave a bitter laugh. So that’s what a bitter laugh is, Mary thought. It wasn’t a laugh at all, she realized: it was just a noise people made to conjure a unanimity of dislike.