But she really didn’t know whether she would ever get away from these people, these people who went out too deep in life and then swam up at you through the fathoms, trying to tug you under to where you would choke or drown. Would she ever get to the other side, the side that Prince had hinted at, the place where money didn’t matter and time passed coolly? She looked at the girls and she knew there would always be these other people out there, always out there and always wanting her back, the lost, the ruined, the broken, the effaced. She thought: I mustn’t go out too deep in life. I must stay in the shallows. I must keep to the surface. It’s too easy to go under, and too hard to get up again.
At night after lights-out Mary listened with a sense of deliverance to Honey’s routine and low-IQ yodels of abandonment and release. ‘I finish soon!’ she would plead in response to Trudy’s unpredictably vehement rebukes. Honey’s pleasure was real, and Mary approved of that pleasure. But it worried her too. Secretly Mary had tried the technique herself, without success. She couldn’t find anything to catch her mind on to. Her mind had nothing to do, so it thought about other things.
‘What do you think about when you do it?’ she once asked Honey.
‘Nice men,’ said Honey with a delighted glare. Her smile had an almost celestial vapidity at such moments. ‘Nice big men.’
‘Oh I see,’ said Mary.
That night Mary tried to think about Gavin and Mr Botham. It didn’t work. And she kept unwillingly thinking about Trev, which was no help either. That was it: you couldn’t seem to control what you were thinking about. The whole activity was clearly among the strangest things that other people did.
‘What is it you think about the nice men when you’re doing it?’ she asked Honey the next day.
‘I think of Keith. He’s my most favourite. And of Helmut. They whip me,’ said Honey, beaming furtively, ‘and make me do all these terrible things. Keith get me from the back and Helmut put his—’
‘Oh I see.’
Honey looked up at her meekly and said, ‘I do it to you if you wish?’
‘No, it’s all right,’ said Mary. ‘But that’s very kind of you.’
‘It’s okay, don’t mention it,’ said Honey.
As soon as she was alone in the bedroom Mary glanced through Honey’s pamphlets—Love Yourself, To Be A Woman, Female Erotic Fantasies. She understood quickly: it was a memory game. Now she knew why she couldn’t play.
Mary wondered whether she had ever done the thing before, when she was alive. Had she gone into a room somewhere, and taken off all her clothes, and made herself so open like that? Had she wanted to? And who else had been there at the time? She couldn’t remember: it might have been anybody. Trev said she had ‘done this before’. Trev had meant it too—Mary never doubted that. But it was still hard to believe that she would ever want to do it again.
It was on the seventh day that the letter came.
‘It’s for you,’ said Trudy.
Mary was sitting over her morning tea. She looked at the white envelope, at the name and the address. Yes, Trudy was right. It was for her.
‘Is from a man?’ said Honey.
‘Course it’s from a man,’ said Trudy. ‘Look on the back.’
Prompted by their eyes, Mary turned the letter over. Small black letters said, ‘Be alone when you open this.’
‘Told you,’ said Trudy bitterly.
Mary went downstairs and sat on her bed. As she waited for her breathing to subside she inspected the envelope—quite calmly, she thought. She had seen other people opening letters but it turned out to be far more difficult than it looked. The envelope would jump and twirl from her hands, and kept incurring subtle rips whenever she tried to prise the letter free. Then she lost her nerve and brutally yanked it out.
The letter tore, right across the middle. Mary knew she had done a terrible thing. With a moan she squared up the two scraps of pink paper and flattened them out on the blanket. The letter didn’t say much. It said:
Dear Miss Lamb,
Is it all right if I call you that? I mean—is it accurate? I said I’d seen you before, didn’t I? Don’t you remember?
Of course I could be mistaken. But stick around while I look into this. I’ll be in touch.
Yours sincerely,
JOHN PRINCE
Mary read the letter several times. It still made no sense to her. On an impulse she flipped over the bottom half of the pink sheet. There were more words. They described a girl called Amy Hide (26, 5′ 7″, Dark, Brit., None), who had recently become a missing person. The police thought she had been murdered, but they didn’t seem to be absolutely sure.
Mary picked up the top half of the letter. She turned it over. There was a photograph of a girl. It was Mary.
8 Stopped Dead
It was Mary. Was it? Yes . . . it was Mary. How could it be?
Late at night in the basement bathroom when all the lights were meant to be out, Mary stood in front of the mirror and held up the pink letter beside her face. Above her a bare lightbulb burned in its dust.
It was Mary. But it was older than Mary . . . The face looked out at her defiantly, with perhaps even the beginnings of a sneer or a snicker in the raised left-hand side of the mouth. The mouth itself was looser than Mary’s, more crinkled along its parting line. The mole beneath her right temple was there, but on the wrong side. And the eyes—they weren’t her eyes. The eyes were dead, they were knowing, they were incurious, they were old. Mary stared. The half-smile in the photograph seemed momentarily to broaden, to become the real smile, to admit Mary. She blinked and looked again. The smile had gone but the eyes now held triumph. Quickly she dropped the letter and turned away with a hand to her head. She knew what the real difference was. Mary’s face—Mary believed, Mary liked to think—was a good face, the face of somebody good. But the face of the girl in the photograph—
‘Oh God, what have I done in my life?’ said Mary.
All day nausea had tried to climb the rope-ladder in her chest. Now, with relief, with humiliation, with terror, she knelt on the bathroom floor and was convulsively and disgustedly sick, sick inside out, just sick to death. She couldn’t get rid of enough of herself. She was sick for so long she was afraid her heart might fall out, might fall out and break.
Now she waited each morning for more news about herself but no news came. No news came and nothing happened.
Time was passing so slowly. She had no money left to help time on its way. You needed money to make time pass: that was how money got its own back on time. And time was taking for ever.
Mary read all the books again. She read the devotional literature splayed out on the hall table. Its general drift, in common with Mrs Botham’s pamphlets from Al Anon, was that everything turned out right in the end, whether it seemed that way or not. We all had a second chance in life and could probably be redeemed quite easily. It had always been this way since the Fall of Man, when man fell and broke. But you shouldn’t worry. God would handle everything. The girls talked about God quite a lot, or at least they referred to Him frequently, and to His son, Jesus Christ. And it didn’t seem to be doing them much good at all.
‘I don’t know what you girls are thinking of half the time,’ said Mrs Pilkington. ‘You lose everything, you come here, you have nothing.’
Mary agreed with her, in detail.
‘You say you don’t know your National Insurance number.’
‘That’s true.’
‘You have no idea whether your contributions are up to date.’
‘I don’t, no.’
‘Where on earth are your records?’
‘I give up,’ said Mary without thinking, ‘—where are they?’
‘Now don’t you be cheeky to me. You say you want a job, it will take you a long time to get a job. First you must do all this.’ She tapped the stack of forms with a warning finger. ‘Here. Fill them all in.’ She returned to her work. She added without looking up, ‘You’re only allowed to stay here
three months, you know.’
‘Three months?’ said Mary.
Mary sat outside in tears on the windy bench. She spent quite a lot of time doing this nowadays. She dropped the last of the forms on to her lap. She couldn’t read them. She could read Timon, but she couldn’t read them. Even if she slowed down, and followed the phrases in a moronic lip-mime like Honey frowning over Love Yourself, the words were giving nothing away, smug, sated, chockful of good things sneeringly denied to her. Mary wanted to get out of here and on to another plane of life; but these words weren’t going to help her out. They had been put together with only one thing in mind: to lock her in.
No news came. Mary looked for news in the mirror. She played the mirror game. Mary Lamb was getting to know Amy Hide quite well now.
Was Mary Amy, or had she at some point been Amy, and to what extent? Amy had done things. To what extent, and how automatically, had Mary done them too? Did it matter? What authority was there? God? Prince? Who minded?
Mary did. She minded. She locked herself in the bathroom and looked into the mirror. She wanted to be good, and she didn’t believe that Amy could have been all bad if Mary had in some sense come out of her. Perhaps every girl was really two girls . . . Mary looked into the mirror. She didn’t look too bad. On the contrary, she looked quite good. Look at the whites of her eyes, like whites of egg, the true angle of her nose; the teeth gave occasional refuge to small pockets of discoloration but the intimate pink of the gums was smooth and whole; and the line of her lips shaped well with the oval evenness of her chin . . . As she turned away from the mirror she saw the ghost of a smile from the knowing genius that lived behind the glass. The image flickered: there was chaos in there somewhere. Mary stared on. Her eyes fought with all their light until they had subdued whatever hid behind the glass. But as she turned away she knew that whatever was hiding there would now coolly reassemble and go on waiting for whatever it was waiting for.
Her dreams changed. Her dreams ceased, or at least she thought they had. Dreams were about variety, and her dreams were no longer various. The nights were all the same now, like the days.
For the first hours she lay back and let her head boil with the opposite of sleep, wild thoughts, wounding thoughts, thoughts that did not mind whether or not she could bear them. Then sleep began and it was always the same.
Amy was running across a black sky. Amy was flying: she could go where she wanted just as fast as she wanted to go. She was unterrified by her pursuer; she even turned sometimes and gave a shout of excited, taunting laughter. The pursuer was the beast. It was black, naturally—a panther, perhaps, but with the yellow tusks and top-heavy square head of a hog. Amy would often let her pursuer come quite close before veering off delightedly, with such airy sharpness that the beast would hurtle on into the distance, make a great trundling arc, then straighten out along her track, its mechanical, unvarying tread picking up through the darkness behind her. She swerved again but this time the beast flashed past only inches away and she felt the hot rush of goaded rage and the smell of inflamed saliva and gums. Now she was Mary and now she was food. Suddenly the black terrain was a tight tunnel, and she was running with such desperate speed that she seemed about to overtake herself, her limbs like golden cartwheels, her hair like a mane of nerves. The beast followed in extravagant bounds. At any moment she expected to feel its grip and its headlong weight on her back, riding her to the ground and washing its hands in her face. So she slowed down to make it happen quicker, she stopped dead to make the next thing happen faster, and the beast veered up and, with dispatch, with contempt, swiped her body into flames of blood. Then she awoke to a brain already boiling again with thoughts that did not mind whether or not she could bear them. It happened every night, every night.—Why?
* * *
Because this is one of the ways the past gets back to you, the thwarting, indefatigable past.
You know, don’t you, that your forgotten wrongs will never cease to caffeinate your thoughts? . . . How is your sleep? Can you trust it? Is everything reasonably quiet down there? Or is it swelling—will it burst? Is it all coming out to get you?
Oh man . . . sometimes I wake up at night and there’s nothing. I am a dead tooth in the jaws of the living world. My mind just isn’t on my side any more. It’s on the other side. It is the prince of the other side . . . Mary: get it right next time, be good next time. Oh Mary—heal me, dear.
I used to think there was no time like the present. I used to think there was no time but the present. Now I know better—or different, anyway. In the end, the past will always be there. The past is all there is: the present never sticks around for long enough, and the future is anybody’s guess. In time, you always have to hand it to the past. It always gets you in the end.
* * *
All the girls, the fallen girls—they just wanted a second chance, they were just looking for a break. That was what Mary was looking for too. And then she found one.
It was midday. She was walking the streets with a kind of half-studied aimlessness, with no conscious prejudice other than avoiding her familiar pathways, her known handholds on the city grid. She wandered into a busy, sheltered area of ramshackle houses and cavernous shops. Buckled men and women were arraying their belongings on bare racks in the road, and passers-by added their voices to the sound of junior commerce and informal exchange. Overhead, a stilted street climbed up into the cold morning lucency like a newly-opened gangway to the sky. Even the fat white layabouts of the middle-air dipped down closer to see what was going on . . . Yes, of course it is, thought Mary, and I must never forget it: life is interesting, life is good, everything you look at is secretly full of the real stuff. She turned another corner and saw a wide dark window: the window held a message for her but at that moment a speeding van played a trick with the sun and the words were erased in a bank of light. She waited, and the message reappeared, with belittled yet insistent clarity. It was a sign. It said: ‘WAITRESS WANTED’.
‘By the police?’ said Mary, thinking of Prince and his room.
She moved closer. It said: ‘WAITRESS WANTED—Help needed. Inquire within.’
Mary inquired within. Before her eyes had grown used to the gloom a yawning young man had looked her up and down, leant back in his chair to exchange nods with a woman behind the counter, and asked Mary if she could start tomorrow. Mary said she could and turned to leave before anything had a chance to go wrong.
‘Wait!’ he called. ‘You don’t want to know about anything else? Money? Time?’
‘Oh, yes please,’ said Mary.
‘Eight to seven with Sundays off.’
‘. . . And money?’
‘We talk about that in the morning. My name is Antonio but you can call me Mr Garcia. What’s your name?’
‘Mary Lamb.’
‘Okay, Mary. In the morning—eight sharp.’
‘I haven’t got an Insurance number or anything,’ she added quickly.
‘So what?’ said Mr Garcia, and yawned again. ‘We don’t care about that shit.’
Mary walked down the street again. She was very optimistic. She knew what waitresses did, and she knew she could do that shit as well as anyone else.
9 Force Field
Pallid Alan sat in his little office beyond the kitchen, gazing out of the window and worrying about going bald.
Mary watched him carefully. It was very interesting. Every ten or twelve seconds Alan’s right hand would slip off the desk and—jerkily, gingerly, as if only nominally under its master’s control—snake upwards to take a bite out of Alan’s hair. Next, and with an expression of shrewd annoyance, he would inspect the contents of his palm, with a quiet tightening of the pale lips; then he shook it all away in a bedraggled gesture and flapped his hand down again on the desk. Ten or twelve seconds passed, and then it all happened again.
Covertly, not for the first time, and out of unadorned curiosity, Mary did to her hair what Alan kept doing to his. Her hand disclosed the odd
twanging wisp of light, which she duly flicked to the kitchen floor. But it didn’t bother Mary like it bothered pallid Alan. So far as Mary was concerned, there was always plenty more where that came from. Mary’s hair, in addition, was clearly good stuff, clearly worth having. Alan’s wasn’t. It was churned, parched, like failing corn—and in relatively short supply. In Mary’s view, the sooner Alan’s hair was all gone or used up the better things would be. He wouldn’t have to keep wrenching it out. And after all you didn’t need hair, did you? Plenty of people got along fine without it. Alan didn’t see it this way, though, and Mary watched his sufferings with comparable pangs of her own. She wanted to tell him to stop pulling it out if he prized it so much. But she didn’t. She knew that pallid Alan was terrified of talking about anything to do with hair.
‘Hey, Baldie!’
Mary felt the thud of air from the swing-doors and heard the comical death-rattle of the dirty plates. She turned, and Russ sauntered into the kitchen—loose-shouldered, sidling Russ, with his glamorous black T-shirt, his chunky blue jeans, and his extraordinary shoes, which resembled a pair of squashed rats. To Mary’s eyes, these rats were far from satisfied with their role in life and always seemed to be resentfully contemplating their comeback.