‘Now you’re talking,’ said Sharon, uncapping a brown bottle and drinking from it freely.
‘Gavin—what’s he like?’
‘Gavin? You can forget him. He’s queer. Can’t you tell? You see all that shit on his eyes?’
‘Yes I see,’ said Mary, giving up hope for the time being.
‘God he’s handsome though. Now my girl. We don’t really want a proper bath, do we. Do we? We’ll just give you a nice stand-up wash, you know, just do your underarms and your love-pot. Mind your legs. Because they’ll be opening soon, won’t they?’ she added ominously. ‘Pull it over your head. That’s it. Now let’s have a little think. You can have my white boots for a start. What size are you? And Mum’s red crimplene’ll be nice on you. Bit mini on you, mind, but there’s no harm in that, is there? Eh? Sorry, does that tickle? I’m awful, I am. I am, I know. Lift up your arms. Mm, you can have my white polo-neck, show off your little titties. You’ll knock them dead, girl.’ She went away but she soon came back again. ‘You know, Mary—sit down there. You know, Mary, I’ll be surprised if we aren’t a couple of bob to the good by the time tonight’s over. Oof! They’re a bit loose, but there it is. I know Whitey will do his nut when he sees you—if he’s there of course. He’ll jump on you like a kangaroo. No, just slip into it. You don’t want any knicks or anything, this time of year. I don’t believe I’ve got a clean pair myself. Still, they won’t mind that, will they. Eh? Eh? Let’s just tuck it in. I tell you, they’ll think it’s Christmas when you walk in there. Right. Let’s have a look at you.’
Sharon swung open the cupboard door again and Mary saw herself. She turned away quickly.
‘What’s the matter? Go on, look. Enjoy … That’s it. Don’t say I don’t look after you. You look a real cracker, you do. A real dish. I tell you, when we get you down the pub, they’re going to eat you alive.’
It hadn’t been easy getting into the house, and it wasn’t easy getting out again.
Sharon told Mary to be prepared to leave in a hurry. When they came down the stairs Mr Botham was already standing by the front door, his arms folded.
‘You’re not going anywhere, young lady,’ he said. ‘You’re stopping home.’
A half-hearted scuffle took place, and Mrs Botham limped down the passage to make her scandalized contribution. Mr Botham vowed that Sharon would not go through that door unless she stepped over his dead body. She went through it anyway, and Mary went with her.
‘Don’t go, Mary, for the love of God,’ cried Mrs Botham. ‘Don’t go with her! You’ll regret it…’
Mary was pretty sure Mrs Botham was right. It all confirmed her suspicions about houses and homes. They were hard to get into; and once you were inside, it probably wasn’t a good idea to go out again.
4
• • •
Bad Language
The pub was a public house, one of those rare places where people could go without being asked. Appropriate care had therefore been taken to make things as hard on the senses as possible—or else everybody would come here, or else none of them would ever leave. There was a stale, malty, sawdust heat, and an elusive device to hurt the ears; the wall of sound came and went at you very cleverly, with deceptively brief intervals, never giving you time to rearrange your thoughts. Everything clamoured for exchange—the multi-coloured glass banked up high over its trench, the boxy machines with their clicking trapdoors, their conditions and demands. Even the air stung the eyes and made them cry. It had been full in there for quite a time but no one was ever turned away. In the tall and endlessly proliferating room people formed in laps and circles of power and exclusivity, sometimes opening to let another in and sometimes closing to let another out. They were all playing with what Mary knew to be fire.
‘Of course, I’m not a nymphomaniac or anything like that, you know,’ Sharon assured her, looking towards the door. ‘I think that’s such a silly word, don’t you?… Where are they? I mean, I just like a good time.’
Time—she needed more and more of it as time went by. Sharon was known, valued and believed in here: she had credit. A few minutes of coy pleading at the bar secured her a Stingo every time. Mary was given one too, a fizzy black liquid so candidly hostile to the palate that after a few cautious sips she put it back on the table and left it alone. But Sharon couldn’t get enough of it; she seemed to like the way it slowed her down, and closed her eyes off behind their layer of time.
‘It puts me in the mood,’ she said. ‘No harm in that, is there? Jolly good luck to you, that’s what I say.’
Mary found Sharon’s remarks more compelling than might be supposed. Harm, luck and time were precisely the sort of things she was keen to know more about. Sharon’s references to them were of course too intimate to be of much help, but they told Mary that language was out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and used by her. Each word she recognized gave her the sense of being restored, minutely solidified, as if damaged tissue were being welded back on to her like honey-cells. Even now she knew that language would stand for or even contain some order, an order that could not possibly subsist in anything she had come across so far—that shadow driving across a colourless wall, cars queueing in their tracks, the haphazard murmur of the air which gave pain when you tried to follow it with your mind … Reading might well hold the key to any order the world disclosed, Mary felt; and she was keen to exercise this new skill of hers. There wasn’t much to read in the public house. Only a few stark announcements of exchangeability, and one or two things like ‘you don’t have to be mad to work here—but it HELPS!’ and ‘all right, sojou ‘re difficult. with a little effort, you could be IMPOSSIBLE!’
”Fuck. Whoops!’ said Sharon. ‘Beg pardon. Gone on my dress. Don’t usually use bad language. We all do it though, don’t we. We do, don’t we.’
Sharon went to the bar again. She was gone quite a long time, but she came back without a new Stingo. She sat down heavily. ‘Fuck,’ she repeated. After a while, and with an expression of dignified appraisal, she began to contemplate Mary’s unattended glass. Her hand moved across the table. ‘I don’t know why it’s so dead in here,’ she said.
Mary looked briefly round the room and listened to it. She wondered why people kept using that word fuck and its cognates quite so often. It wasn’t like all the other words, although the people who used it pretended that it was. And they used it so often that the air seemed to quack.
In the centre of the room two men were pushing one another while several onlookers shouted encouragingly. But you could hardly hear them anyway. Mary thought: If this is what it’s like when it’s dead, what’s it going to be like when it’s alive?
‘I mean, but with some blokes,’ Sharon went on sadly, ‘well—it’s like electricity, isn’t it? Bigger than both of you, you know. I get that electricity thing with quite a few blokes. With most blokes, actually. Just lucky, I suppose. I—’ A harsh shout jumped from between Sharon’s lips. She had clamped a hand over her mouth, but just a second too late. ‘Ooh… Excuse me. I mean, I just like a good time. No harm in it. But they’re buggers sometimes, aren’t they Mary? The trouble is, and I’ve been with an awful lot of blokes, is that if you go with a lot of them they give you these diseases. You’re supposed to stop then. My trouble is—I can’t! Why should I? I mean I’m a healthy young girl!’ Tears began to run unhindered down her cheeks. Mary wondered whether other people often just melted like this. Sharon sniffed and said, ‘When I was little I was going to be a nun when I grew up. My mum said I’d look lovely in a nun’s veil. I can, I mean it’s still—never too late, is it Mary? It’s never too late to change. And then you have all those years of happiness to look forward to, don’t you? Father Hoolihan was the only man who ever really understood me. I’m going to go and— There they are! Yoo-hoo, Jock! Jock, we’re over here!’
Two men joined them, and Mary saw that she was in quite serious trouble. For one thing, it was instantly clear that Sharon was no longer on her side, if indeed she had ever been. Sharon had brought her as far as she was going to bring her, and now Mary was on her own again. Sharon wasn’t on Mary’s side any more. Sharon was on the other side.