Alan and Russ moved towards her at the same time. Alan checked himself, and so had to watch Russ take Mary confidently in his arms.
‘Come on, Mary,’ he remonstrated with his soft breath. ‘No grief. I always keep a couple of rooms free for my girls. When a new one comes along—you, for instance—I kick an old one out, don’t I. Guess whose turn it was for the chop this time? Ekberg. She was getting a bit scuffed-up anyway.’
‘Actually it’s technically a squat,’ said Alan quaveringly. ‘But it’s an organized squat.’
‘No, it’s nice there,’ breathed Russ. ‘Come on, Mary. You’ll be miles better off with us.’
• • •
Will she be? Do you really think so?
Squats are rich people’s houses where poor people come and live when the rich people aren’t looking. Some squats are hippie hells, but some squats are nice—if you can cope with the ghastly uncertainty of it all. Some squats are practically legal. People are serious about living together.
But things are always happening there and no one has the power to stop them happening. Downstairs people are arguing about half-bottles of milk and bathroom rosters and utility bills, just like anywhere else; but upstairs, through a different window, there’ll be someone staked out on a bed, panting, boiling, coruscating, and one night soon the house will be full of screams. They just can’t stop things, they just can’t keep things out. And they too might go bad at any minute, because it is easy to go bad when you live on the breaking line.
I want Mary out of all this. I want her out of this whole risk-area of clinks and clinics and soup-queues, of hostels and borstals and homes full of mad women. I want her away from all these deep-divers. She might go bad herself: it happens. She might smash. I see her as a crystal glass that someone has tapped too hard with his knife; she sings along her breaking line.
The breaking line is where I walk, or where I sometimes think I do. On the breaking line you can hear things getting ready to crack, the ground, the walls of air, the sealing sky. Other people walk here but I don’t see them. The lines are always somewhere else, they never cross. No lines cross, no figures loom, all are alone on the breaking line.
I’ve done things to her, I know, I admit it. But look what she’s done to me.
Look what she’s done to me.
• • •
12
• • •
Poor Ghost
That night the boys moved Mary out of the Hostel and into the squat.
That night the Hostel was hushed and rumbling. It was always that way when something had happened to someone. Something happened to someone pretty often in the Hostel, about every three nights. It had happened to Trudy this time. She had fought with a man and she had lost. It had been no contest, as usual. The man had broken her nose and two front teeth, whereas Trudy hadn’t succeeded in breaking anything of his. She lay on her bed, in a turban of gauze, while Mary packed her case. Trudy would have to be moving on too: any trouble and the girls were out. Trudy didn’t know where. It seemed a sensible rule, to make girls leave for trouble. They would never have come here if it hadn’t been for trouble. And they could never leave trouble until they left here.
‘It’ll be better somewhere else,’ Mary told her.
‘Oh yeah? How the fuck do you know, Mary?’
‘This is the worst place, isn’t it?’
Trudy didn’t answer.
‘Well I hope you’ll be all right,’ said Mary.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Yeah,’ said Trudy.
Mary might have said something else, but she could tell by the way Trudy looked at her that she was already on the other side.
Honey accompanied her upstairs. Mary had to say goodbye to Mrs Pilkington and give her a fixed address.
Russ and Alan were hovering uneasily about in the hall. Neither of them liked it here—that was obvious. And Russ liked it less than Alan. Mary tried to be as quick as she could.
‘Well, good luck,’ said Mrs Pilkington gloomily. ‘There’s some money outstanding but I expect your gentleman friend will deal with that.’
‘Who’s my gentleman friend?’ asked Mary, really wanting to know.
‘The man who pays for your upkeep! This place doesn’t run on buttons, you know.’
‘But who is he?’
‘How many men have you got who pay you money? You girls … He’s called—Mr Prince. Does that ring any bells for you, Mary?’
Mary said goodbye to Honey in the hall. Honey told Russ that he had nice eyes and Russ fanned her away playfully. He took Mary’s case.
‘You very lucky, Mary,’ said Honey, ‘to have this nice strong man to live with.’
‘See?’ said Russ. ‘See? See?’
Mary was pleased that Honey had said this. It gave them—or Russ—something to talk about as they walked to the squat. She herself didn’t mind the routine, exitless, snow-blind silences that quite often opened up when she was with Russ and Alan, but Russ and Alan seemed to mind them, particularly Alan. Silences sometimes made Alan’s throat swell into speech, any old words, and he would then have a few contorted minutes trying to tame them back to sense. Mary preferred it when he just relaxed and went back to worrying about his hair, and when Russ quietly continued worrying about whatever it was he continually worried about.
‘It’s going to be a new life for you, girl,’ said Russ. ‘I’ve been thinking about it and, well—if you’re good, you migh t even get a little nibble of the big one.’
‘Russ,’ said Alan, and gave a tug at his hair. ‘No,’ he added croakily, ‘it’ll be nice with you there.’
And it was nice.
The squat was a spindly house in a dead-ended play road: cars could be parked there but they came and went with diffidence, knowing very well that the peremptorily hollering children were the true celebrities of the street. The house was full of ordinary people—but then, ordinary people are really terribly strange, deep with dreams and infamies, or so Mary thought. You only have to listen: they’ll tell you everything if you give them time. In the basement lived artful, buck-toothed Vera, a young Irish girl with a loose swing in her movements, an actress who seldom found anything to act in; her ambition was to become famous and make lots of money. Next door lived Charlie, a twinkly old Australian who prided himself on not being ashamed of his conviction for child-molesting seven years previously; he kept boasting that he would never molest any children again, and now had thoughts only for tuning his motorbike, which was already so fast that he hardly dared ride about on it. And Russ himself had his room down in the basement too.
The ground floor was communal except for the spacious bedsitter which Norman had allotted himself—fat, pale, floppy-jeaned Norman, who was generally revered as the brains behind the squat. His life had so far been a running battle with what he called a serious weight problem; he hadn’t solved it either, not yet, since the slightest variance from a starvation diet rendered him helplessly obese more or less overnight; and he was already incredibly fat as it was. Up on the second floor lived an entire three-strong family, Alfred, a sullen business flop from the Midlands who was ransacking the city for business opportunities and not finding any, Wendy, his broad-shouldered but sickly wife who spent all day in her dressing-gown, and their eight-year-old son Jeremy, who was too frightened to talk much about what he wanted or feared.
Alan lived on the second storey, next to the room shared by two black men, Ray and Paris. They spent the money they earned at Battersea Funfair on the horses or the dogs; but they never had any horses or dogs, or any money either. Together they nursed a dream of becoming professional footballers (and could often be seen perfecting their skills out in the street), Ray intending one day to represent Leyton Orient, Paris shoring up all his hopes with Manchester United. They were both thirty years old and alike in several other respects.
Alone in the attic was Mary.
Her room had a soul, the vestiges of a presence frailly lingering. But the presence moved over with good grace, and the room let Mary in. She had one bed, two sheets, three blankets, one window divided into four, two tables, one high, one low, one lamp, one basin, two taps, three shelves, one cupboard, two drawers, four walls, six coat-hangers, and fourteen sunlit floorboards. It was ideal. With the money she had earned from time sold (and with some pressed on her by Alan: his time was more valuable than hers, though he didn’t seem to want the money it realized) Mary bought some Imperial Leather, some Antique Gold, some Cracker Pink, some Honey Beige, some Scotties, some Corgis, some Panthers, some Penguins. When she got back from work she would always run upstairs to see that her room was still there and still all right, still ideal. And later she would lie on her bed and read unquenchably into the night.