‘I’ve been behind the door once. You have too, I believe.’
‘Stop playing with me. Why don’t you leave me alone? Whatever I was I am me now.’
That’s my Amy,’ said Prince. ‘That’s the opposition talking.’
‘Stop it. Leave me alone. I’m not doing anyone any harm. And I can’t have been murdered, can I, because here I am:
Prince laughed. After a while he said, ‘Is there life after death? Who knows. Actually I wouldn’t put it past life, would you? That would be just like life, to have a trick in its tail… Okay. Okay. We’ll let you be for a while. In fact, the only thing behind the door these days is a mattress or two, as far as I know. For fucking on. You know about all that, Mary?’
‘A bit.’
‘Oh well done.’
Mary said, ‘You know I’m living in a squat now. I suppose you’ll disapprove of that too.’
‘Me? Not really. Some squats are nice. Some are even legal. People are serious about living together. Whoops,’ he said, as the car in front seemed about to wobble free from its tracks.
‘It’s—’
‘I know where it is.’
The car sniffed its way up the play street. Now all the children were sleeping. The garden walls looked frozen in the moon’s light, the ghostly court where the young girls sat and watched.
‘Mary—two things.’ Prince got out of the car so quickly that when Mary opened her door his hand was already there, outstretched and waiting. He straightened her up and said, ‘The photographs on the mantelpiece in your old room. Think about them. Try to —see if you can’t follow yourself back a little way. Your past is still out there. Somebody has to deal with it.’ He paused and turned his head up to the sky. ‘Look,’ he said.
Spanned out to mist, to white smoke, a lone lost white creature, separated from its flock, curled like a genie round the silver fire of the half-moon. It didn’t look worried; it looked pleased to be left alone to its night game.
‘They’re not alive, you know,’ said Prince. They’re just clouds, air, gas.’
His breath came near her lips for an instant—that median breath— then passed across her cheek. She was walking towards the steps when she heard the door slam and the car start up again.
Mary climbed through the sleeping house. She could be quite silent when she wanted to be. She glided up through the house to the room she loved. Her stairs were there. All things are alive, even these seven stairs, she thought. Everything is alive, everything has something to be said for it.
She paused on the last step. She knew beyond doubt that there was someone in her room, someone waiting behind the door. Never stop now, she thought, and pushed the door open. Someone was sitting in the dark. It was Alan. He didn’t even dare take his hands from his face. His arms were as stiff and brittle as thin wood. He couldn’t stop crying. Mary undressed. She got into bed and told him to come too. He came. He wanted to get inside her—but not to hurt her, as Trev had wanted to do. Alan only wanted to hide there for a while. She let him in, she helped him in. It was all over after a minute. Mary just hoped he wouldn’t break anything. But she thought he probably had.
• • •
Is there life after death? Well, is there?
If there is, it will probably be hell. (If there is, it will probably be murder.)
If there is, it will probably be very like life, because only in life is there variety. There will have to be many versions of death, to answer all the versions of life.
There will have to be a hell for each of us, a hell for you and a hell for me. Don’t you think? And we will all have to suffer it alone.
14
• • •
Sadly Waiting
Alan and Mary … ‘Alan and Mary’. Alan and Mary—as a team. Well, how would you rate their chances? Personally (and it’s just my opinion), I don’t think this hook-up is a good idea for either of them, not really. Love is blind, you might point out. But where can the blind lead the blind? Down blind alleys, down unknown paths, with faces shuddering. And then there are other people to consider too.
Russ, for instance, is terribly angry. Alan is in terrible trouble with him about this. Here’s a secret that will help explain why. Until very recently Russ was in the habit of spending three or four nights a week in the bed of thieving, unemployable Vera down in the basement (this is actually the extent of his connection with stars of stage and screen). But last night he strolled in there as usual—to find the glistening Paris staked out complacently on her bed, coolly reading the New Standard. The next thing he knows, Alan and Mary are coming down to breakfast hand in hand.
Well, a major rethink seemed inevitable; and once he started thinking, fresh doubts assailed him on every score. As an illiterate, Russ is covertly very impressed by many of Alan’s attributes. Many things about Alan fill him with almost boundless admiration. That’s why she likes him: because he can read and write so well. Furthermore, following an unpleasant remark of Vera’s, Russ has begun to entertain radical and sweeping doubts about the size of his penis. Perhaps little Alan packs a whopper (after all, you never know who’ll get them)? All this Russ believes during his dark nights of the soul, his skunk hours. Choirs of betrayal serenade his every thought, and in the black night he broods on revenge.
‘Well at least Alan will be all right for a while,’ I hear you murmur. But he won’t be. Alan thinks that other stuff was bad. He thinks that other stuff was as bad as stuff could get. He’s wrong. You wait.
• • •
‘Do you want to go down first?’ he asked her the next morning.
Mary turned over. Alan was sitting on the brink of the bed, his legs placed together, fully dressed. The night had changed him very little. All his facial colour appeared to have seeped into the whites of his eyes: the red they held was more brilliant than their blue. His mouth still rippled drily along its parting line. Mary sat up and Alan turned away quickly.
‘Why should I want to do that?’ said Mary.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, and finally there was a tremor of furtive triumph in the contours of his face. ‘I mean, do you want everyone to know?’
‘Know what?’
‘About us.’
‘What about us?’
‘I really love you, you know, Mary.’
‘What does that mean exactly?’
‘It— I’d die for you, on my mother’s life I would.’
‘I see. But you don’t have to die for me, do you?’
‘No, but I would.’
‘But you don’t have to.’
‘No.’
‘Then what does it mean?’
‘I’d do anything for you,’ he croaked, and took a tug at his hair. ‘Look, I’ll go down now so that they won’t know.’
But they soon found out. They found out because all through that Sunday Alan was either staring palely into her face from close quarters or actually holding her hand (his hand was cold and wet, too, and he always kept moving it, either wiggling a finger or buffing her knuckle with his thumb). Mary was bewildered further by the immediate effect these attentions had on other people. An awful hushed twinkliness started emanating from Norman and Charlie, and a set-smiled, clear-eyed disdain from Wendy and Alfred. Ray and little Jeremy at least seemed quite indifferent to the matter; but there was a palpable coarseness and loss of distance in the looks and laughter of Vera and Paris. And Russ simply gazed at her all day with an expression of disgusted incredulity on his face.
Mary, feeling intensely confused, took her earliest opportunity to plead with Alan to forget whatever had happened and go back to how things had been before. Alan said he would do anything for her, apart from that. ‘Go on—ask me. Anything,’ he said. But Mary couldn’t think of anything she wanted him to do for her, apart from that. He shed tears when she relented. Mary began to wonder what she had got herself into.
Take Wednesday evening.
With a blanket between herself and the moist grass, Mary was sitting in the late sun of the garden,’ reading a book. She was reading Lady and Lapdog and Other Stories and being told some curious things about women. It had been an averagely turbulent afternoon at the café. When Alan’s back was turned Russ ran into his office and came dancing out again brandishing some secret pamphlets that Alan kept in a drawer. They were called things like Hair Transplants: The Facts, How To Save Your Hair and, more brutally, Going Bald?Alan was dizzy about it all afternoon. Later he said to her tremulously, with a bad-stomach grin on his face, ‘Mary. You know Russ? Guess what. He can’t even read and write.’