Mary even glanced around the room from time to time, or she sent her restless senses out on their patrol. There on the table was the empty blue plate, the teapot and its family. At nine o’clock every night Mrs Botham would lollop into the kitchen and shut the door behind her. She said she hated the Nine o’Clock News. Mary didn’t blame her. Mary feared the television too. It was a window with everything happening on the other side—it was too much and Mary tried to keep it all out. At half-past nine Mrs Botham would emerge in processional triumph, bearing the small metropolis on her tray: the twin stacks of toast woozy with butter, the boiling pink tea so powerful that it made the mouth cry, the fanned brown biscuits like the sleeping dogs on the tin from which they came. According to Gavin, Mrs Botham always got drunk again while she was in the kitchen alone. Mary believed him. Mrs Botham was certainly very anxious to talk about sobriety on her return. But Mary didn’t mind. She was very grateful to Mrs Botham for everything she had done in making her so welcome here.
‘Don’t worry,’ Gavin told Mary on the first night. ‘I’m queer.’
They were to share a room and a bed. Mary was still terrified, seeing no good reason why she shouldn’t get fucked again.
‘What does that mean exactly?’ she asked.
‘It means I like men. I don’t like women.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said again, looking at her with his knowledgeable eyes. ‘I like you. I just don’t want to fuck you or any thing.’
‘That’s good,’ said Mary to herself.
‘It’s a drag actually,’ said Gavin, taking off his shirt. He had built his own body too, but he hadn’t done it quite so badly as the people in his magazines. ‘It’s supposed to be okay liking men. I don’t like it. I don’t like liking men.’
‘Why don’t you stop?’
‘Good thinking, Mary. I’ll pack it in tomorrow.’ He sighed and said, ‘I know a man who’s queerer than me. He only likes Spanish waiters. Only them. I mean he doesn’t even like Italian waiters. I said, “That’s funny. I like all sorts.” He said—then you’re very lucky. But I’m not lucky. I’m just not as unlucky as him. Do you, can you remember who you like?’
‘No,’ said Mary.
‘That’ll be interesting, won’t it.’
‘Perhaps I’ll like men too.’
‘That won’t make you queer.’
‘Won’t it?’
‘We’ll see. Good night, Mary.’
‘I hope so,’ she said.
• • •
Queers like men more than women because they liked their mothers more than their dads. That’s one theory.
Here is another: queers like men more than women because men are less demanding, more companionable and above all cheaper than women are. Queers, they just want shelter from the lunar tempest. But you know what queers are like.
Soon, Mary will know too. She will learn fast here, I’m sure. The Bothams were just what she needed. She isn’t alarmed by them and, more importantly, they aren’t alarmed by her.
Mrs Botham is in fact alone in her conviction that Mary is an amnesiac—hence her constant spearheading of this unpopular view. Gavin, who spends more time with her than the others, has vaguely formed the opinion that she must be somehow retarded: Mary had the mind, he thought, of an unusually bright, curious and systematic twelve-year-old (she would be very clever when she grew up, he often found himself thinking). Mr Botham, finally, and for various potent reasons of his own, is secretly under the apprehension that Mary is quite normal in every respect. Granted, Mr Botham is something of an enigma. A lot of people—neighbours and so on, Mary, perhaps you yourself—assume that he must be a man of spectacularly low intelligence. How else has he managed to live with an alcoholic for thirty years? The answer is that Mr Botham himself has been an alcoholic for twenty-nine of them. That’s why he has stuck to Mrs Botham’s side during all these years when she’s been drunk all the time: he’s been drunk all the time.
But Mary will gain ground fast now. If you ever make a film of her sinister mystery, you’ll need lots of progress-music to help underscore her renovation at the Bothams’ hands … Ironically, she enjoys certain advantages over other people. Not yet stretched by time, her perceptions are without seriality: they are multiform, instantaneous and random, like the present itself. She can do some things that you can’t do. Glance sideways down an unknown street and what do you see: an aggregate of shapes, figures and light, and the presence or absence of movement? Mary sees a window and a face behind it, the grid of the paving-stones and the rake of the drainpipes, the way the distribution of the shadows answers to the skyscape above. When you look at your palm you see its five or six central grooves and their major tributaries, but Mary sees the numberless scratched contours and knows each of them as well as you know the crenellations of your own teeth. She knows how many times she has looked at her hands—a hundred and thirteen at the left, ninety-seven at the right. She can compare a veil of smoke sliding out of a doorway with a particular flourish of the blanket as she strips her bed. This makes a kind of sense to her. When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.
Mary always knows what time it is without having to look. And yet she knows hardly anything about time or other people.
• • •
But she was gaining ground fast now.
She got to know her body and its hilly topography—the seven rivers, the four forests, the atonal music of her insides. By watching Mr Botham, who did it often and expressively, she learned to blow her nose. Her body ceased to surprise her. Even the first glimpse of lunar blood left her unharrowed. Mrs Botham talked constantly about these things and Mary was prepared for almost any disaster. (Mrs Botham was obsessed by her grisly torments during what she ominously called ‘the Change’. The Change didn’t sound worth having to Mary and she hoped it wouldn’t get round to her for a long time to come.) She told Mrs Botham about the blood, and Mrs Botham, in her unembarrassable way, told Mary what she had to do about it. It seemed an ingenious solution. On the whole, yes, Mary was quite pleased with her body. Gavin himself, who was a body-culture expert, announced that she had a good one, apart from her triceps. Conversely Mary didn’t think that Gavin’s body was all it was built up to be— Gavin, with his dumb-bells, his twanging chest-flexers and his stinking singlets. But she assumed he must know what he was talking about. There were many really bad bodies round where they lived, with bits missing or added, or twisted or stretched. So Mary was pleased with hers; and it was certainly all very interesting.
She started reading in earnest.
At first she was inhibited by not knowing how private reading was. She kept an eye on all the things the others read and secretly read them too.
Mr Botham read a dirty sheath of smudged grey paper that came and went every day. It was never called the same thing twice. There were pictures of naked women in it; and on the back pages men but not women could be bought and sold: they cost lots of money. In the centre pages someone called Stan spoke of the battle between cancer and his wife Mildred. Cancer won in the end, but heroism such as Stan and Mildred’s knows no defeat. It was all about other places, some of them (perhaps) not too far away. It told of atrocious disparities of fortune, of deaths, cataclysms, jackpots. And it was very hard to read, because the words could never come to an agreement about the size or shape they wanted to be. Mrs Botham read pamphlets sent to her by Al Anon, of whom she always spoke most warmly. The pamphlets were all about alcoholics and sounded just like Mrs Botham did. They had scales and graphs of what alcoholics got up to: they drank alone, they lied and stole things, they trembled and had visions of mice and shellfish. Then they forgot everything. Then they died. But if you put your faith in A.A. and God, it would all turn out right in the end.
Gavin spent a lot of time gazing disdainfully through his slippery magazines, but he had some other things in a cupboard in his room which he would occasionally consult or sort through. They were books, and books turned out to be where language was kept. Some were from school; others were acquired for a night course that Gavin had got too disheartened to complete; still others had been pressed on him by a friend of his, a poet, a dreamer. Mary was rather dashed to discover that Gavin had gone to school for eleven years and yet even now considered himself to be lamentably ill-educated. She never knew there was so much to know. Gavin said she could help herself to his books, and so, slackly prompted by his nods and scowls, Mary got started straight away.