Other People

by Martin Amis

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Oh well done.’

  Mary said, ‘You know I’m living in a squat now. I suppose you’ll disapprove of that too.’

  ‘Me? Not really. Some squats are nice. Some are even legal. People are serious about living together. Whoops,’ he said, as the car in front seemed about to wobble free from its tracks.

  ‘It’s—’

  ‘I know where it is.’

  The car sniffed its way up the play street. Now all the children were sleeping. The garden walls looked frozen in the moon’s light, the ghostly court where the young girls sat and watched.

  ‘Mary—two things.’ Prince got out of the car so quickly that when Mary opened her door his hand was already there, outstretched and waiting. He straightened her up and said,

  ‘The photographs on the mantelpiece in your old room. Think about them. Try to—see if you can’t follow yourself back a little way. Your past is still out there. Somebody has to deal with it.’ He paused and turned his head up to the sky. ‘Look,’ he said.

  Spanned out to mist, to white smoke, a lone lost white creature, separated from its flock, curled like a genie round the silver fire of the half-moon. It didn’t look worried; it looked pleased to be left alone to its night game.

  ‘They’re not alive, you know,’ said Prince. ‘They’re just clouds, air, gas.’

  His breath came near her lips for an instant—that median breath—then passed across her cheek. She was walking towards the steps when she heard the door slam and the car start up again.

  Mary climbed through the sleeping house. She could be quite silent when she wanted to be. She glided up through the house to the room she loved. Her stairs were there. All things are alive, even these seven stairs, she thought. Everything is alive, everything has something to be said for it.

  She paused on the last step. She knew beyond doubt that there was someone in her room, someone waiting behind the door. Never stop now, she thought, and pushed the door open. Someone was sitting in the dark. It was Alan. He didn’t even dare take his hands from his face. His arms were as stiff and brittle as thin wood. He couldn’t stop crying. Mary undressed. She got into bed and told him to come too. He came. He wanted to get inside her—but not to hurt her, as Trev had wanted to do. Alan only wanted to hide there for a while. She let him in, she helped him in. It was all over after a minute. Mary just hoped he wouldn’t break anything. But she thought he probably had.

  * * *

  Is there life after death? Well, is there?

  If there is, it will probably be hell. (If there is, it will probably be murder.)

  If there is, it will probably be very like life, because only in life is there variety. There will have to be many versions of death, to answer all the versions of life.

  There will have to be a hell for each of us, a hell for you and a hell for me. Don’t you think? And we will all have to suffer it alone.

  14 Sadly Waiting

  Alan and Mary . . . ‘Alan and Mary’. Alan and Mary—as a team. Well, how would you rate their chances? Personally (and it’s just my opinion), I don’t think this hook-up is a good idea for either of them, not really. Love is blind, you might point out. But where can the blind lead the blind? Down blind alleys, down unknown paths, with faces shuddering. And then there are other people to consider too.

  Russ, for instance, is terribly angry. Alan is in terrible trouble with him about this. Here’s a secret that will help explain why. Until very recently Russ was in the habit of spending three or four nights a week in the bed of thieving, unemployable Vera down in the basement (this is actually the extent of his connection with stars of stage and screen). But last night he strolled in there as usual—to find the glistening Paris staked out complacently on her bed, coolly reading the New Standard. The next thing he knows, Alan and Mary are coming down to breakfast hand in hand.

  Well, a major rethink seemed inevitable; and once he started thinking, fresh doubts assailed him on every score. As an illiterate, Russ is covertly very impressed by many of Alan’s attributes. Many things about Alan fill him with almost boundless admiration. That’s why she likes him: because he can read and write so well. Furthermore, following an unpleasant remark of Vera’s, Russ has begun to entertain radical and sweeping doubts about the size of his penis. Perhaps little Alan packs a whopper (after all, you never know who’ll get them)? All this Russ believes during his dark nights of the soul, his skunk hours. Choirs of betrayal serenade his every thought, and in the black night he broods on revenge.

  ‘Well at least Alan will be all right for a while,’ I hear you murmur. But he won’t be. Alan thinks that other stuff was bad. He thinks that other stuff was as bad as stuff could get. He’s wrong. You wait.

  * * *

  ‘Do you want to go down first?’ he asked her the next morning.

  Mary turned over. Alan was sitting on the brink of the bed, his legs placed together, fully dressed. The night had changed him very little. All his facial colour appeared to have seeped into the whites of his eyes: the red they held was more brilliant than their blue. His mouth still rippled drily along its parting line. Mary sat up and Alan turned away quickly.

  ‘Why should I want to do that?’ said Mary.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, and finally there was a tremor of furtive triumph in the contours of his face. ‘I mean, do you want everyone to know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘About us.’

  ‘What about us?’

  ‘I really love you, you know, Mary.’

  ‘What does that mean exactly?’

  ‘It—I’d die for you, on my mother’s life I would.’

  ‘I see. But you don’t have to die for me, do you?’

  ‘No, but I would.’

  ‘But you don’t have to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what does it mean?’

  ‘I’d do anything for you,’ he croaked, and took a tug at his hair. ‘Look, I’ll go down now so that they won’t know.’

  But they soon found out. They found out because all through that Sunday Alan was either staring palely into her face from close quarters or actually holding her hand (his hand was cold and wet, too, and he always kept moving it, either wiggling a finger or buffing her knuckle with his thumb). Mary was bewildered further by the immediate effect these attentions had on other people. An awful hushed twinkliness started emanating from Norman and Charlie, and a set-smiled, clear-eyed disdain from Wendy and Alfred. Ray and little Jeremy at least seemed quite indifferent to the matter; but there was a palpable coarseness and loss of distance in the looks and laughter of Vera and Paris. And Russ simply gazed at her all day with an expression of disgusted incredulity on his face.

  Mary, feeling intensely confused, took her earliest opportunity to plead with Alan to forget whatever had happened and go back to how things had been before. Alan said he would do anything for her, apart from that. ‘Go on—ask me. Anything,’ he said. But Mary couldn’t think of anything she wanted him to do for her, apart from that. He shed tears when she relented. Mary began to wonder what she had got herself into.

  Take Wednesday evening.

  With a blanket between herself and the moist grass, Mary was sitting in the late sun of the garden, reading a book. She was reading Lady and Lapdog and Other Stories and being told some curious things about women. It had been an averagely turbulent afternoon at the café. When Alan’s back was turned Russ ran into his office and came dancing out again brandishing some secret pamphlets that Alan kept in a drawer. They were called things like Hair Transplants: The Facts, How To Save Your Hair and, more brutally, Going Bald? Alan was dizzy about it all afternoon. Later he said to her tremulously, with a bad-stomach grin on his face,

  ‘Mary. You know Russ? Guess what. He can’t even read and write.’

  Alan suddenly didn’t look as pleased as he thought he was going to be about imparting this information.

  ‘Poor Russ,’ said Mary.

  Mary
read on in the waning light. She turned a page. Every now and then her dark fringe was lifted by a stray salvo of wind. She leaned forward and scratched her bare ankle with a careless fingernail. She turned a page: the turning paper threw light on her eyes as she lifted her chin calmly to face the next oblong of print. Her eyes did not wander. But she knew Alan’s face was watching her from behind the sitting-room window, a pale fish in its pond.

  Now. Mary knew that Alan would soon make his bid to join her. She knew he knew he shouldn’t try it: clearly she didn’t want him there, and he would just subtly augment her pity and her weariness. But he would have to try it, his mind made up by love. If he didn’t do it quickly, then Russ would do it instead. By some random dispensation, Russ seemed to be able to do more or less as he pleased with Mary, in public too, without the slightest forethought or constraint. Twice now she had spent whole evenings on his lap. It was comfortable there, she had to admit, and Alan didn’t appear to mind. He looked the other way and concentrated on his hair. He never said anything about it.

  Through the corner of her eye, where the eye joins the brain and its radar, Mary saw Alan begin his wheel towards the garden steps. She turned the page. He reappeared on the shallow wooden balcony and looked up at the sky, as if simply savouring the shrewd evening air. He looked as though he might try to seal his nonchalance with a whistle. He did. God, what a bleat it was. She turned the page. His raised leg dangled above the top step—but then he heard the familiar jinking bustle behind him. Russ! The whistle was his great mistake! He moved aside and looked at the flowers while Russ jogged down the steps.

  ‘There you are, my flower,’ said Russ.

  Mary put down her book. It was no use trying to read with Russ there. He liked playing instead, pinching and tickling mostly. They played for about twenty minutes. Mary laughed a lot as she rolled about with her legs in the air—Russ was very funny, she had to admit. Afterwards he led her by the hand up the steps. Alan was still on the balcony, watching the flowers. As Mary passed him he turned to her and audibly wrenched a fistful of hair from his head. He looked down in astonishment: an entire pigtail bristled in his palm. He looked up at Mary. They both thought: he can’t do that many more times. He’s only got about three or four of those left.

  Mary followed Russ into the sitting-room. She felt very sorry for Alan and wished he could stop worrying about his hair.

  After the staggered suppers, after the television had run its course and all the other people had dispersed in ones and twos, Russ, Mary and Alan stayed up late in the communal sitting-room.

  Mary was on Russ’s lap. She didn’t really know what she was supposed to do about this or whether it mattered. Russ just took her and put her there. Alan had tried it once, but the experiment had not been a success. He put her on his legs rather than his lap, and almost immediately his knees started trembling with such violence that it made Mary’s voice quaver when she spoke. She got up and went and sat on Russ’s lap. It was more comfortable there. Russ worked you properly into the enclave of his body and fastened his arms securely round your waist.

  ‘Why do you bother with that fucking little wreck?’ Russ asked her, wagging his head towards Alan, who smiled.

  Mary shrugged. There was nothing she could say. The evenings always ended like this now. It made her uneasy and she didn’t know why. But the boys seemed to enjoy it. Russ kissed her ear with a pop. She put an arm round his shoulders, to be more comfortable.

  ‘You me babe,’ Russ whispered loudly, ‘we could go to the stars. We could make sweet-sweet music. Mm-hmm . . . I mean, look at him.’

  ‘Come on, Russ,’ said Alan shyly.

  ‘He’s gunna be bald as an egg in about—half an hour. Hah! I got more air on me left armpit than he’s got on his whole bonce! Look at the chest on me.’ Russ breathed in deeply. Mary felt his chest for something to do. ‘See? Now look at fuckin Alan!’

  ‘Come on, Russ,’ said Alan, shrugging modestly.

  ‘Look at him . . . Did you ever see such a fuckin little spaz in all your life. What’s he like inna cot, eh Mary? Fuckin pathetic, I bet. What’s he do, eh? Eh? Shoe-horns it in, quick sneeze-job, then wipes it onna pillow? Eh? Eh? Hah! Now with me, what I do is, first I—’

  ‘Come on, Mary,’ said Alan.

  He was standing before her with his arm outstretched. Mary took his hand—to stop it shaking, apart from anything else. She got up and went with him towards the door.

  ‘Sweet dreams, Baldie. Stay in one piece, my love,’ Russ called after them, and for a long time they could hear his bitter laughter skirling up the stairs.

  Mary lay naked in her bed, waiting for Alan. He preferred to ready himself downstairs for the final stage of his daily ordeal. In a few minutes he would make his entrance. Then he would untie and slip off his oddly hirsute dressing-gown and come forward in a crouch to join her in between the sheets. Then he would do what he needed to do.

  Clearly this was giving him no more pleasure than it gave her. Few aspects of life on earth made as little sense to Mary as all this did. She and Alan had tried the two things—sleeping apart and sleeping together—and neither was any good. Perhaps they could go back, or move on, to sleeping apart again. Perhaps, if she had to sleep with anyone, she could sleep with Russ, who looked as though he would mind doing it less. She had presented these alternatives to Alan, and he had seemed very much against them. He said he would do anything she asked of him but not those two things, although those two things were the only things she had ever asked of him. What she really wanted was to go back to the old way. She could then read a book at night and sleep far more comfortably. Russ would perhaps revert to how he was before, and she might lose this unwanted power she had over Alan, the power to make feel bad. Surely he couldn’t bear this much longer. Surely he couldn’t love her that much.

  Alan came into the room. He tried to whisper a secretive ‘Hi’, but it just sounded like a parched gasp escaping from the back of his throat. With movements that were hurried and yet took quite a long time, he disentangled himself from his dressing-gown, seeming towards the end to be fighting off the hairy, clinging thing. He dropped it on the chair and crept low towards her through the dark.

  His chest was damp but his mouth was completely dry. Alan was always getting things wrong like that. His body smelled of atrophied anti-perspirant, his mouth of toothpaste and the remains of a powerful, wide-spectrum mouthwash. There was an acrid sponginess about him at such moments, with his moist scalp and his shimmering hands. Poor ghost, thought Mary. She lay crucified as his clamped mouth kissed her lips. His hanging, creaturely part was just a soggy presence against her thigh, neither limp nor hard, sadly waiting. Sadness, that’s what this is, thought Mary. He rose above her starfished body. Oh my God, he’s dying, she thought, he’s streaming everywhere, he’s melting away.

  It never lasted long and soon he slept, or he tried. He wasn’t very good at that either. For many hours Mary lay awake and listened to his dream talk, the words not forming properly but managing to say quite a lot about his confusion and sadness at being alive among all these other people.

  This was a turbulent and tiring time for Mary; but nothing really happened. She brought many feelings to bear on her night out with Prince, from defiance to numb surrender. But she didn’t know what to do about it—except try to be good, and she was doing that, she was trying. The phantom of the past wasn’t about to go away, so Mary just worked on getting used to it, getting not to mind about it so much. She lived the huff-and-puff step by step, along with everybody else. She was waiting. Time was waiting. Then one Sunday her next move became clear.

  It was the day they went to the local swimming-pool: Mary, Alan, Russ, Ray, Paris, Vera, Alfred, Wendy and Jeremy. Mary was nervous about the scheme to begin with, particularly about what she should wear, but Wendy reassured her. Wendy had become a good friend to Mary, explaining to her, for instance, about contraception. Mary thought for some reason that only people in books had babies. But Wendy had
a baby, didn’t she? Mary thought about what she had risked—having a baby, Alan’s baby. Ay! And to think that the act of pain or sadness was also the act that peopled the world.

  ‘Can you swim, Mary?’ asked Wendy as they splashed their way down the tunnel with Jeremy and Vera, heading for the booming echoes of the pool.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mary, pleased with her hired costume. Mary looked good in black.

  ‘What you mean, you don’t know?’ said Vera.

  ‘I mean, I may have forgotten how,’ said Mary in confusion, stepping out into the high arena.

  ‘Come down the shallow end then,’ said Wendy.

  ‘I think I’ll just sit down first,’ said Mary.

  Mary didn’t know where to turn. Never had the brazen present thronged so mightily. Look, look, look, look at this, look at that, look at him, look at her, all in such liquid lucidity. The water sent out ribboned oceans along the high walls. The raw, tangled, stinging forms thrashed and leapt in chaos, ignited by the light . . . Black Ray flashed past, thumped both feet on the pool’s corky edge, and climbed in a failing arc through the air to topple as his arms pierced the water. His face and shoulders shot up again and he yelled at Paris, who bounded up the leaning gangplank, clutched his knees to his chest, and scattered the water with his atomic splash. Even Alan, looking no older than Jeremy in furry grey trunks, ran past waving and dived with his legs spread into the deep end. Jeremy himself stood tensed on the poolside, eight fingers in his mouth, watching his father trying to drown his mother. Wendy seemed to have plenty of appetite for the deed, yodelling lasciviously after each fresh attempt, until Alfred tired and flopped back gratefully into the shallows, where Paris now strode about with Vera on his shoulders.

  Do I dare go in? she thought, feeling a great eagerness tearing at her. She watched Alan help lift a thrashing Jeremy into the shallow end. Even Alan seemed at freedom in this glazed and glassy element.

  ‘Look at those mad coons.’