by Martin Amis
Just after noon the telephone rang in Alan’s cubicle. She heard him croak out a few words of muffled thanks. Mary sensed the lull next door in the scullery. She turned and saw that Russ was peering out eagerly at Alan, who stood in his doorway with a shame-faced smile.
‘It’s all all right,’ said Alan. ‘There’s a room at our place if you want it. You only pay your share of the rates, and it’s furnished. You can move in any time. It’s sort of an attic.’
‘An attic?’ said Russ. ‘That’s a studio, mate—that’s a bloody penthouse that is.’
‘Well,’ said Alan. ‘Do you want it?’
‘Yes please,’ said Mary and started to cry, out of relief but also because she knew for certain now that something had gone wrong with the way she saw other people.
‘Here come the waterworks,’ said Russ. ‘Listen to her owl!’
Alan and Russ moved towards her at the same time. Alan checked himself, and so had to watch Russ take Mary confidently in his arms.
‘Come on, Mary,’ he remonstrated with his soft breath. ‘No grief. I always keep a couple of rooms free for my girls. When a new one comes along—you, for instance—I kick an old one out, don’t I. Guess whose turn it was for the chop this time? Ekberg. She was getting a bit scuffed-up anyway.’
‘Actually it’s technically a squat,’ said Alan quaveringly. ‘But it’s an organized squat.’
‘No, it’s nice there,’ breathed Russ. ‘Come on, Mary. You’ll be miles better off with us.’
* * *
Will she be? Do you really think so?
Squats are rich people’s houses where poor people come and live when the rich people aren’t looking. Some squats are hippie hells, but some squats are nice—if you can cope with the ghastly uncertainty of it all. Some squats are practically legal. People are serious about living together.
But things are always happening there and no one has the power to stop them happening. Downstairs people are arguing about half-bottles of milk and bathroom rosters and utility bills, just like anywhere else; but upstairs, through a different window, there’ll be someone staked out on a bed, panting, boiling, coruscating, and one night soon the house will be full of screams. They just can’t stop things, they just can’t keep things out. And they too might go bad at any minute, because it is easy to go bad when you live on the breaking line.
I want Mary out of all this. I want her out of this whole risk-area of clinks and clinics and soup-queues, of hostels and borstals and homes full of mad women. I want her away from all these deep-divers. She might go bad herself: it happens. She might smash. I see her as a crystal glass that someone has tapped too hard with his knife; she sings along her breaking line.
The breaking line is where I walk, or where I sometimes think I do. On the breaking line you can hear things getting ready to crack, the ground, the walls of air, the sealing sky. Other people walk here but I don’t see them. The lines are always somewhere else, they never cross. No lines cross, no figures loom, all are alone on the breaking line.
I’ve done things to her, I know, I admit it. But look what she’s done to me.
Look what she’s done to me.
* * *
12 Poor Ghost
That night the boys moved Mary out of the Hostel and into the squat.
That night the Hostel was hushed and rumbling. It was always that way when something had happened to someone. Something happened to someone pretty often in the Hostel, about every three nights. It had happened to Trudy this time. She had fought with a man and she had lost. It had been no contest, as usual. The man had broken her nose and two front teeth, whereas Trudy hadn’t succeeded in breaking anything of his. She lay on her bed, in a turban of gauze, while Mary packed her case. Trudy would have to be moving on too: any trouble and the girls were out. Trudy didn’t know where. It seemed a sensible rule, to make girls leave for trouble. They would never have come here if it hadn’t been for trouble. And they could never leave trouble until they left here.
‘It’ll be better somewhere else,’ Mary told her.
‘Oh yeah? How the fuck do you know, Mary?’
‘This is the worst place, isn’t it?’
Trudy didn’t answer.
‘Well I hope you’ll be all right,’ said Mary.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Yeah,’ said Trudy.
Mary might have said something else, but she could tell by the way Trudy looked at her that she was already on the other side.
Honey accompanied her upstairs. Mary had to say goodbye to Mrs Pilkington and give her a fixed address. Russ and Alan were hovering uneasily about in the hall. Neither of them liked it here—that was obvious. And Russ liked it less than Alan. Mary tried to be as quick as she could.
‘Well, good luck,’ said Mrs Pilkington gloomily. ‘There’s some money outstanding but I expect your gentleman friend will deal with that.’
‘Who’s my gentleman friend?’ asked Mary, really wanting to know.
‘The man who pays for your upkeep! This place doesn’t run on buttons, you know.’
‘But who is he?’
‘How many men have you got who pay you money? You girls . . . He’s called—Mr Prince. Does that ring any bells for you, Mary?’
Mary said goodbye to Honey in the hall. Honey told Russ that he had nice eyes and Russ fanned her away playfully. He took Mary’s case.
‘You very lucky, Mary,’ said Honey, ‘to have this nice strong man to live with.’
‘See?’ said Russ. ‘See? See?’
Mary was pleased that Honey had said this. It gave them—or Russ—something to talk about as they walked to the squat. She herself didn’t mind the routine, exitless, snow-blind silences that quite often opened up when she was with Russ and Alan, but Russ and Alan seemed to mind them, particularly Alan. Silences sometimes made Alan’s throat swell into speech, any old words, and he would then have a few contorted minutes trying to tame them back to sense. Mary preferred it when he just relaxed and went back to worrying about his hair, and when Russ quietly continued worrying about whatever it was he continually worried about.
‘It’s going to be a new life for you, girl,’ said Russ. ‘I’ve been thinking about it and, well—if you’re good, you might even get a little nibble of the big one.’
‘Russ,’ said Alan, and gave a tug at his hair. ‘No,’ he added croakily, ‘it’ll be nice with you there.’
And it was nice.
The squat was a spindly house in a dead-ended play road: cars could be parked there but they came and went with diffidence, knowing very well that the peremptorily hollering children were the true celebrities of the street. The house was full of ordinary people—but then, ordinary people are really terribly strange, deep with dreams and infamies, or so Mary thought. You only have to listen: they’ll tell you everything if you give them time. In the basement lived artful, buck-toothed Vera, a young Irish girl with a loose swing in her movements, an actress who seldom found anything to act in; her ambition was to become famous and make lots of money. Next door lived Charlie, a twinkly old Australian who prided himself on not being ashamed of his conviction for child-molesting seven years previously; he kept boasting that he would never molest any children again, and now had thoughts only for tuning his motorbike, which was already so fast that he hardly dared ride about on it. And Russ himself had his room down in the basement too.
The ground floor was communal except for the spacious bedsitter which Norman had allotted himself—fat, pale, floppy-jeaned Norman, who was generally revered as the brains behind the squat. His life had so far been a running battle with what he called a serious weight problem; he hadn’t solved it either, not yet, since the slightest variance from a starvation diet rendered him helplessly obese more or less overnight; and he was already incredibly fat as it was. Up on the second floor lived an entire three-strong family, Alfred, a sullen business flop from the Midlands who was ransacking the city for business opportunities an
d not finding any, Wendy, his broad-shouldered but sickly wife who spent all day in her dressing-gown, and their eight-year-old son Jeremy, who was too frightened to talk much about what he wanted or feared.
Alan lived on the second storey, next to the room shared by two black men, Ray and Paris. They spent the money they earned at Battersea Funfair on the horses or the dogs; but they never had any horses or dogs, or any money either. Together they nursed a dream of becoming professional footballers (and could often be seen perfecting their skills out in the street), Ray intending one day to represent Leyton Orient, Paris shoring up all his hopes with Manchester United. They were both thirty years old and alike in several other respects.
Alone in the attic was Mary.
Her room had a soul, the vestiges of a presence frailly lingering. But the presence moved over with good grace, and the room let Mary in. She had one bed, two sheets, three blankets, one window divided into four, two tables, one high, one low, one lamp, one basin, two taps, three shelves, one cupboard, two drawers, four walls, six coat-hangers, and fourteen sunlit floorboards. It was ideal. With the money she had earned from time sold (and with some pressed on her by Alan: his time was more valuable than hers, though he didn’t seem to want the money it realized) Mary bought some Imperial Leather, some Antique Gold, some Cracker Pink, some Honey Beige, some Scotties, some Corgis, some Panthers, some Penguins. When she got back from work she would always run upstairs to see that her room was still there and still all right, still ideal. And later she would lie on her bed and read unquenchably into the night.
She read The Nice and the Good, The Long and the Tall, The Quick and the Dead, The Beautiful and Damned. She read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, A Temporary Life, The Life to Come and Other Stories, Life Studies, A Sort of Life and If Life’s a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? She read Dreams of the Dead, Dead Man Leading, Die, Darling, Die, From a View to a Death, and The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. She read Labyrinths, Scruples, America, Sadness, Despair, Night, Love, Living. She soon learned that titles were often deceptive. A few of the books were dead—they were empty, there was really nothing inside. But some were alive: they spanned out at you seeming to contain all things, like oracles, like alephs. And when she geared herself to wake early they were still open on the table, well aware of their power, coolly waiting.
One thing the books couldn’t do, though: they couldn’t make her start dreaming again or otherwise subdue her sleep.
Nor did they quite explain how you lived with other people.
All week three things hovered—the thought of Amy and what she had done, the thought of Prince and what he might do, and Alan. Alan was the third thing that hovered. Pallid Alan hovered on the staircase when she left her room each morning. He loitered there like an aimless phantom, condemned always to wait on the wrong side of the doors of the living. You’d think he had been there all night from the way he quavered ‘Morning, Mary’, as if without constant practice his voice was cracking up altogether. He hovered on the steps of the squat, waiting for Mary and shouting down to the deep-sleeping Russ, who valued a few extra minutes in bed more than the elementary breakfast which Alan and Mary usually ate with Charlie, Alfred, Vera, Jeremy and Paris.
Alan hovered behind her at work, using his eyes. He sent his eyes out from the small cubicle to stand guard behind her at the sink, and Mary could feel them smoothing along her back. He hovered outside the cloakroom when it was time to go home, and she felt his force field throughout the evening, in the communal sitting-room where the television played, even when she went out alone into the small garden where you were also welcome provided you took care about other people’s flowers, vegetables, weeds and stinging-nettles. And he hovered last thing at night as Mary climbed her own stretch of stairs, saying the words ‘Good night, Mary’ or ‘Sleep well’ or ‘God bless, Mary’ as if they sealed a day of vain but honourable striving in a cause that would now have to wait until dawn, finding him once more on the stairs again. Alas, poor ghost, thought Mary.
He never did or said anything. It was Russ who was always doing and saying things. Old Mr Garcia was more affectionate and demonstrative than Alan was—and even the languorous Antonio openly favoured her with his yawning caresses. But Alan did nothing. Russ gave her painful tweaks on her bottom, tickled her chin, kissed her throat and licked her ears, and talked obsessively and bewilderingly about his elaborate plans for her, or hers for him.
‘I don’t know when I can fit you in, girl,’ he would say, ‘but it could be soon. I generally make it a rule not to go all the way onna first night. But you know me. Get a couple of Scotches down me and I go all giggly—I’ll be putty in your ands!’
‘Russ,’ Alan would say; but that was all Alan said.
Mary didn’t understand. Perhaps none of it mattered that much anyway. She just hoped that Alan would be all right, that he wouldn’t break anything.
Early on Friday evening Mary was ominously summoned into Norman’s room to receive a call on the pay-telephone. Norman gestured towards the instrument with a flourish that almost bowled him over and then wobbled from the room, closing the door behind him. Mary had watched people use the telephone several times and was pretty confident that she could handle it. The bandy, glistening dumb-bell was heavier than she had expected. But she had expected the call: she knew who this must be.
‘Yes?’ said Mary.
A thin voice started talking. Telephones were clearly less efficient instruments of communication than people let on. For instance, you could hardly hear the other person and they could hardly hear you.
‘I can’t hear. What?’ said Mary.
Then she heard, in an angry whine, ‘I said turn it the other way up.’
Mary blushed, and did as she was told.
‘Boy, you’re a real woman of the world, aren’t you,’ said Prince.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary.
‘Ah forget it. No, actually, you’d better not, come to think of it. Christ.’
‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘It’s the sort of thing I know. Now listen, Mary—did you go there?’
‘Yes, I went there.’
‘Any joy?’
‘No, it was very sad.’
‘It didn’t take you back.’
‘No, I’m still here. It’s all changed there.’
‘What? No, I mean did you have any luck?’
‘Well, I’ve this room now.’
‘Jesus.’ She heard him stifle a snort of laughter. ‘Better pick my words here. Did you remember anything, Mary.’
‘Only the dress.’
‘The address?’
‘No, I didn’t remember anything.’
He paused. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Hell. Hey look, why don’t you come out on the town with me tomorrow night?’
‘Because I don’t want to,’ said Mary.
‘You’re interesting, Mary, I’ll say that for you. I’ll give you that: you’re interesting. I’m afraid I’ve got to insist about this. Tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at work.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘I just want to show you the sights, that’s all.’
‘What sights?’
‘You’ll see. Goodbye, Mary.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Mary.
She rejoined Alan on the front steps. They were watching the children play, or Mary was. Alan was too busy trembling and pulling his hair out to have much attention to spare, Mary reckoned. The boys swirled up and down the road in the patterns determined by their energy, watched by the girls from the thrones of the facing garden walls. Cruelty came easily to the boys and found its salute in the girls also. Mary had once seen tiny, stammering Jeremy flattened up against a car by one of these callous-bodied young champions; Jeremy’s face was sick and smiling as the boy held him and turned, looking to the girls for their worship or their signal.
‘Mary?’ said Alan, when his trembling had subsided.
‘Yes?’ sa
id Mary, and turned to him. She was sorry she was doing all this to Alan. She knew she had given him his new numb-eyed look, his untrustworthy hands, his Jeremy smile. He had given Mary her room and she had given him all this. She had shown him a chaos inside himself which she didn’t understand. It wasn’t fair, and she was sorry.
‘Who was that on the phone?’
‘Just a man I know.’
‘Ah.’ Alan received the remark as if it were a light but expertly stinging rebuke, and one that he moreover richly deserved. ‘Mary?’
‘Yes?’
‘What you like doing best in the evenings?’
‘Reading in my room.’
‘Ah. Good one,’ said Alan. His waved hand suddenly bunched in front of his mouth as, without warning, his laugh convulsed into a cough. ‘No. I meant, you know, weekends, evenings out.’
‘Oh,’ said Mary cautiously.
‘Because I was wondering. Say no and everything if you can’t or something, but. But I was just wondering if you’d come out with me. Tomorrow. Night.’
‘I’m seeing a man tomorrow night,’ said Mary.
Alan took his lower lip between his teeth, raised his eyebrows, and nodded twelve times.
Just then Russ came jogging up the basement steps. When he saw Mary he jerked to a halt, as if he’d never encountered her before. Reaching out an experimental forefinger, he lifted her chin. He kissed her, urging his mouth right into hers so that his lips tickled her teeth. Mary thought that if Russ wanted to do this, it was really quite a pleasant and reassuring thing to do; so she opened her mouth wider and put an arm round the back of his head to steady herself. This went on for a long time. Then Russ withdrew his lips with a sudden pop, eyed her judiciously for several seconds, shook his head with pitying sternness, and moved past her up the steps. Alan wrenched a handful of hair from his crown with a faint whimper and got to his feet. Then he raced off down the road, so fast that even the whirling boys hesitated and stood back catching their breath to watch his speed.