‘Now that’s a bit more bloody like it,’ said Sharon. It was Mary’s turn. ‘Go on then,’ said Sharon, ‘down the hatch.’ Mary opened her mouth and poured.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Sharon a few minutes later. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you? You must be in a shocking state, my girl. Nice little drop of brandy and you cough yourself inside out. I mean, it’s not natural, is it?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary.
Sharon drank. ‘It’s all very well being sorry. You spilt half of it!’ Sharon drank. ‘I mean, brandy’s supposed to do you good.’ Sharon drank.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary.
Sharon dropped the dead bottle to the ground. She stared at Mary sharply. ‘I’m not an alcoholic, you know.’
Mary stared back. Oh yes you are, she thought. Oh I bet you are.
• • •
Sharon is an alcoholic, of course (among many other accomplishments) … Alcoholics: you know what they’re like, don’t you. Certainly you do. Chances are, you know one or two personally, or you know someone who does. Think about it. How many do you know? There are an awful lot of drunks about these days. It wouldn’t really surprise me if you turned out to be one yourself. Are you?
Drunks are people who can’t stay sober. They would rather be drunk. They can’t bear being themselves. They have a point. It is harder being yourself than it is being drunk.
Drunks aren’t themselves: they’re drunks. They aren’t like other people, though they used to be before they started being drunks. People are various: drunks aren’t.
When drunk, drunks all think, feel and behave in exactly the same way. When sober, drunks just think about drink, all the time. They do. That’s what they’re thinking about. If you ever wonder what they’re thinking about when they’re not being drunk, that’s what they’re thinking about: being drunk.
Most of them know some things about why they can’t bear being themselves, and some of them know a lot. But they all think they know things that other drunks don’t know, and they think they are special. They are wrong about that. They aren’t special: they’re drunks, and all drunks know the same things. It seems sadder and more interesting from their end. It is, too, in a sense. They all have their reasons, and some of their reasons are good. I don’t blame anybody for being one.
It’s my theory that everybody would be a drunk if they could bear to get that way. We’d all feel so much better if we were drunk all the time. But it’s very hard going, getting to be a drunk. Only drunks seem to be able to manage it.
I’m forever having to cope with these rather puzzling and regrettable people. You’ll be running into a few more of them too. But all under my control, of course, all under my protection and control.
• • •
Sharon was telling Mary why she liked a few drinks every now and then—it was because of her nerves, she explained, together with her partiality to a good time—when without much warning the buildings dropped back to reveal a great breezy rift in the stacked and staggered city. Only a few arched, magical streets had been selected to ride this swathe of air. It made Mary’s body hum; she would have turned and tried to run again but Sharon urged her on, unterrified. As they walked up the wide entrance to the sky Mary looked downwards and saw that the turbid tract beneath them was in fact alive, boiling, throwing bits of itself restlessly in the air, as if to catch the screaming birds that swerved and hovered just above its surface, taunting, enraged.
‘It’s too big,’ said Mary.
‘Pardon? I love the river. Go quietly, sweet Thames. We’re going to the other side,’ she explained, nodding towards the hulked structures gaping like battlements on the far shore. ‘We’re going home first, then I’m taking you up the pub.’
Mary wondered what these places would be like as she speeded up and followed Sharon south.
‘We’re home!’ shouted Sharon.
Mary stood behind her in the cuboid vestibule. So this was what it was like on the inside: they were home. Everything was padded or reinforced, and it was hotter than she had thought it would be.
Immediately a half-glass door flew open further up the passage. A man who combined the attributes of being very small and very big peered out, let his head jerk back in consternation, then came bowling down the passage towards them.
‘No you don’t, my girl,’ he said rumblingly. ‘Come on—out, out, out!’
‘Ah come on, don’t be so mean’ cried Sharon as the man began to crowd her back towards Mary and the door.
‘You don’t belong here!’
‘But this is my bloody home.’
Although Sharon was far more redoubtable than the man with whom she clumsily grappled, it was clear that all strength and stubbornness were melting from her face. Sharon looked like somebody who had yet to do all the things that Sharon had done. We’re going to get put outside again, thought Mary—no question. But then Sharon’s features twisted back through their layer of time, and as if in response her shoulders performed a similar convulsion, causing the little round man to give a harsh shout and lie down very quickly on the floor.
‘See? See?’ he said.
‘Oh Dad, get off, I didn’t touch you!’ As she leant over him, with every appearance of solicitude, a leg shot out from beneath her and suddenly the two of them had formed a thrashing tangle at Mary’s feet.
‘Mother!’ he yelled. ‘Lord help me somebody!’
‘What’s happening now’ said a voice full of exhausted compliance. A woman appeared at the doorway and limped speedily into the light. ‘Murdering her own father now, is she? I see,’ she said in the same tone.
A pudgy hand slithered free of the panting combatants on the floor. The new arrival took the opportunity of stomping on it with her right foot. Her shoe, Mary noticed, was grotesquely enlarged, sporting a brick-like extension on its sole—perhaps for this very purpose.
‘That’s my hand you’re treading on, Mother,’ the man pointed out. ‘Get her by the hair.’
‘Bloody Ada. Give us a hand then,’ the woman said to Mary. ‘Gavin! Gavin!’
Before Mary had time to comply with such a doubtful request, Gavin strolled down the stairs and sighingly extricated the people below. Mary watched this spirited reunion with a feeling of provisional panic. (She knew the streets were full of traps and pits and nets …) It made no sense to her, but perhaps it did to them.
So it proved.
Very soon Sharon and her Mum and Dad were squabbling companionably in the comfort of the lounge, a cramped inner chamber whose prisms were much too various for Mary to begin to break them down with her eyes. Time passed—lots of it passed. Far from demanding an explanation of her presence, or ignoring her altogether, Mr and Mrs Botham appealed constantly to Mary for corroboration and support in their cheerful denunciations of their daughter. Mary didn’t know why she was expected to know anything that they didn’t know already. And although she was quite reassured by the way they kept calling her Mary, she couldn’t help wondering what they wan ted from her or what they were using her for. I must be pretty amazing, she thought, a girl with bare feet who has lost her mind. But they didn’t seem to think so at all. Either this was because they were related in some way (a fact indignantly emphasized with phrases like ‘his own daughter’ and ‘her own father’ and ‘your own mother’), or else everybody was even queerer than Sharon had let on.
Yet how dismal if this was all there was. She wouldn’t admit that it could be so. Gavin sat beside her. Throughout he had been marked by his own air of cool exemption, and he was without that aura, that drift of lost time. Mary was particularly impressed by his eyes. Apart from their abundance of colour and light, they seemed to know things that nobody else’s eyes had so far known. They knew things not contained here.
He turned to her and said, ‘Are you one of them too?’
‘One of what?’ said Mary.
‘Another lush-artist.’ His eyes flicked towards the other three. ‘They’re at it all the time,’ he said. They never know what the hell’s going on.’
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘… Know what’s going on?’
‘Now if you’ll excuse us,’ said Sharon loudly, ‘I think what my friend Mary would like is a nice hot bath.’
‘Yes of course she would, the poor little thing,’ said Mrs Botham. ‘However did she get like that?’
‘Oh,’ said Sharon, ‘she just had a little accident.’
As soon as they were safely locked in with the bathroom’s porcelain and steel, Sharon threw open a cupboard and started rummaging inside it. She did this with the same edge of frenzy that she had shown when looking for money in Mary’s bag. And sure enough she met with the same reward.