Other People

by Martin Amis

  In the end she let her mental notes blur and asked other people the way: if you had time, it was an infallible method of getting to other places. The place where Jamie lived was improbably vast, but then lots of other people probably lived there too. She pressed the right buzzer and, almost immediately, the heavy half-glass door responded by giving a buzz of its own. Mary stood back, hoping that this wasn’t going to prove serious. The door went on buzzing for several seconds in mounting impatience, then broke off exasperatedly. She heard footsteps. A girl with a baby slung over her shoulder appeared in the passage and pulled at the door with a frown.

  The door opened. ‘Has it gone wrong again?’ asked the girl. The baby looked at Mary with open astonishment.

  ‘I hope not,’ said Mary.

  ‘Are you coming to lunch?’

  ‘If that’s all right,’ said Mary.

  The girl turned neutrally and preceded Mary along the passage, the baby’s consternated face bobbing over her shoulder. They shunned the caged lift and climbed the stairs. Mary thought it was a shame that Jamie had a family already. No wonder the baby looked at her with such puzzlement. Halfway up the stairs, Mary heard the sound of many voices through the open door above. She remembered her memory of the time when as someone young she had prepared to enter a room containing other people—and the intimate pink of the dress slipping past her eyes. In some ways other people had worried and excited Mary more then than they did now. So much was already impossible; she knew there was no true limelight you could step into. Mary was aware, and had been aware from the start, that other people spent hardly any time thinking about other people.

  Mary followed the girl and the baby down a long passage to the brink of a tall room full of people and light. And full of couples, Mary quickly sensed. But before the room could confront or absorb her, Jamie’s head appeared through a nearby doorway and he wiggled a finger at her to come inside.

  ‘Hi,’ he whispered, and closed the door behind them. They were in a big kitchen, bigger even than the one at work. And it was clean and light, not kippered and sallowed with that coating of damp dust on everything you touched. Jamie’s fine hair was in disarray, and his eyes contained much agitation and heat. ‘Do you want a Bloody Mary?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s a Bloody?’

  ‘It’s—God you’re strange. You don’t know shit, do you? Here. There’s only one cure for a hangover.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Getting drunk. But Bulgakov says spice helps too, and I believe everything I read. That’s why it’s so spicy. Don’t you like it?’ he asked in an offended voice.

  ‘No, I do.’

  He walked to the circular white table in the centre of the room. Mary noticed that he had a limp. His legs were equally long but one was a lot stiffer than the other and he used it more carefully.

  ‘It’s a summer-thunder one, my hangover. They’re a classy kind to have. I don’t feel ill, just mad. I bet berks don’t feel mad at all, just incredibly ill. And now I’ve got all this horrific food to deal with. Can you cook and everything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘At all?’

  ‘At all.’

  ‘What? You’re a girl, aren’t you?’

  Mary nodded.

  ‘Then what do you think is the point of you if you can’t cook? You must have a pretty high opinion of yourself, young lady. Wait a minute.’ He straightened a trembling finger at her, ‘Can you make beds?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you pee sitting down?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, considerably mollified, ‘I suppose two out of three isn’t bad. Come on, you can give me a hand with this stuff, can’t you. Come on, be a pal.’

  The food that Jamie was unzipping and slapping about was elementary but expensive-looking. It was the kind of food Mary had only seen through glass, looking too artful to eat behind its pitying sheen. Mary helped him as best she could, and her hands were naturally much steadier than his.

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve got a baby,’ she said.

  ‘What? A baby?’ He shook his head. ‘That’s not mine, pal. It’s hers. Babies! . . . babies?’ he muttered, rather in. the way that the boys had muttered ‘Books.’ ‘Not me, pal. I haven’t got no baby. Can’t you tell?’

  ‘No. How can you tell?’ she asked. This was just the sort of thing she had always hoped she would one day be able to tell about other people.

  ‘I’m childish. Childless people always are. Terrifying, isn’t it. Life is full of terrifying tricks like that. I’m getting more and more respect for it.’ He looked up. He came towards her, holding a knife. He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘You know, you look really good.’ He looked down at the red shoes, the white skirt and sweater. ‘Really good.’

  It worked, thought Mary.

  ‘I look terrible,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I don’t know it. You should see what I look like from my end. I look really bad.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Mary. ‘You look good.’

  He placed the side of his cold face on her bare throat and made several strange noises—grateful sobs, they might have been. As if prompted by memory, Mary felt the impulse to put her arms round his shoulders. It was an option. It was one of the things you could do at such moments. But she didn’t do it, and, anyway, he soon moved back to where he was before and started taking lunch more seriously.

  For the next hour Jamie was busy serving food and encouraging people to eat it. Mary sat alone near the window with a plate on her lap. Only one of the people there said anything to her during this time, a billowing, leather-faced man with the loudest voice Mary had ever heard. He stood above her, one leg wriggling or palpitating inside his trousers.

  ‘Are you a great pal of Jamie’s?’ he shouted.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mary.

  ‘Curious set-up he’s got here. What’s he like?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mary. And that was that. But Mary didn’t mind. She had the couples to watch, and it was all very interesting.

  There were fourteen people in the room not including the baby, who was called Carlos. They arranged themselves easefully within the generous ventricles of light. In sudden bursts clockwork Carlos shinnied along the floor on palms and sore kneecaps, the theme of delighted speculation wherever he went. If anything caught his eye he tried to snatch it. All it had to be was a thing, for Carlos to want to snatch it. At several points he came near Mary and stared up with awe. She tried to talk to him but he didn’t respond. He just couldn’t work Mary out.

  The room contained six couples. It took Mary quite a while to make the right connections. Some were easy. One couple held hands practically all the time, even when they were eating. Another couple seemed to pool their nervous intimacy in everything they did; there was a flexible yet constant avenue of collusion between their eyes: Mary could tell that they hadn’t been a couple for very long. The billowing man who had talked to Mary was older than everyone else by the same amount that Carlos was younger; the wild-haired girl he formed a couple with seldom looked his way, and then only to refresh her contempt: Mary could tell that they weren’t going to be a couple for much longer. Other people there often seemed unaligned or mis-attached; but then their lovers loomed up on them inexorably, and they once again submitted to the bitter pact. Jamie didn’t appear to be a part of a couple, but then you never really knew.

  And the room, the flat, the labyrinth: it was like the house of Mr and Mrs Hide, airy and blank with its own superfluity, full of spaces between things. This is different all right, thought Mary. This is new, this is more. All the people here have been specially differentiated; they are all together freely, and seldom have to do things that they aren’t already quite keen on doing. Although varying in many of the ways that people vary, the people here enjoy a brash unanimity about money and time. And they think that this is all right.

  Only scurrying Jamie, and clockwork Carlos, and of course Mary herself, continued to operate on th
eir own uncertainty principles.

  ‘Look at all these people,’ said Jamie excitedly, crouching down on the floor beside her. Mary looked at them all. He coughed and said, ‘I’m drunk again now, thank God, so don’t be surprised by the general lowering of my tone . . . Look at them all. You know what they’ve all got in common?’

  ‘What?’ said Mary.

  ‘They’ve all done it to each other,’ he said, as if referring to a mysterious and distasteful habit of theirs. ‘Everyone I know has done it to everyone I know. You haven’t done it to anyone here, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Mary, who was fairly sure she hadn’t.

  ‘That’s a relief. Actually that’s one of the things I like about you.’ He started to make a regular bobbing motion, originating from somewhere in the region of his bony waist. ‘All the girls here—they’ve all been there. They’ve all done it like that, and then round from the back, and then on their sides with one leg up, and then bent triple with their knees hooked under their elbows. Why do they do it? Women aren’t in it for sex. They used to do it because everyone else did it and they didn’t want to miss out. Now they’re all pushing thirty and terrified because they want husbands and kids same as anybody else. They all want second chances. They all pretend they haven’t been doing it now, though they all keep on doing it. They all think they’re all virgins now. But who wants them all now, eh? Who wants the old fuckbags?’

  Mary decided to try something. She leaned forward and said, ‘I’ve lost my memory.’

  ‘Oh, don’t even talk about it,’ he said, flinching with a hand on his cheek. ‘I get that all the time. And I’m only twenty-nine! I do things twice—I mean letters and things like that. Like an old fuck. I—’

  ‘No. I mean I can’t remember any of the things I’ve done.’

  ‘Me too! I wake up, and for a moment the night before is all there. Then a black hand just swipes it from my head. And it’s all gone for ever. You get some clues sometimes. Like if your stomach hurts you know you must have been laughing a lot. Things like that. I—’

  ‘You don’t understand. I mean—I don’t know who I am. I might be someone else.’

  ‘Right! Right! I mean, half the time I could be anyone as far as I’m concerned. Anyone at all—I don’t mind. There’s just a great blankness about me. I’m just . . . wide open. I—’

  ‘Is everyone here like that?’

  ‘Yeah! Well. No. No, they’re not. This lot, they’re just out of their fucking minds, that’s all.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mary, and turned away to hide her disappointment.

  Now people started to leave. Mary thought at first that they were just going out somewhere; but then it became clear that they were going home, that they lived in other places . . . In confusion Mary announced that she was going home too. Jamie nodded abstractedly and said he might walk with her some of the way if he felt up to it. He would walk with her as far as he could.

  Mary went to the lavatory. She felt strange, slipped, dangling. The flat was shadowy and vast, possibly endless. The high corridor had no light at the end, so any distances might be covered by the granulated air: anything might be happening down those distances. She went where she had been told to go. People were still leaving but by now she couldn’t hear them. She had been heading for the fourth door on her right for quite a long time and still had a fair way to go. What was overwhelming her? At last she reached the door. She knew at once there was someone inside.

  ‘It’s open,’ said a girl’s voice.

  Mary opened the door and stepped forward cautiously. It was a long room, and thickly carpeted—not a bathroom so much as a room with a bath in it. At the far end stood the small muscular girl who belonged to the tall billowing man. She stood in front of the mirror, shaking her electric red hair.

  ‘I’ll only be a minute,’ she said to Mary’s image in the glass.

  Mary came closer. The girl was busy in the mirror, muting the freckled kaleidoscopes of her cheeks and the mulberry aura on the outward edges of her mouth. Mary folded her arms and waited. The girl dropped two canisters into her handbag—a black clam with its jaws open. Suddenly the girl turned her wild face. Mary stepped back, startled by the fear and hatred in her eyes.

  ‘You’re Amy Hide, aren’t you.’

  Mary felt intimate heat come over her. ‘What if I am?’ she said, but with the opposite of challenge in her voice.

  The girl edged past her towards the door. She was clutching her bag tensely, as if Mary were ready to snatch it from her hands. ‘Nothing. But just don’t think I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone. Please . . . Goodbye.’ Mary stood blinking in the rush of air from the slammed door. She got on with the next thing. She lifted the lid and sat on the cold seat. A hand passed upwards across her face. She looked quite old there for a moment, with the knees pressed together under the brim of her skirt, the white pants limply frilling her ankles, the red shoes on tiptoe. ‘You’ve got to stop minding about all that,’ she said. ‘It’ll never go away. You’ve just got to stop minding about all that, that’s all.’

  17 Absent Links

  Jamie walked her halfway home, as far as the park’s misty heart.

  ‘Do you mind if we hold hands?’ he asked. He was calm again now.

  ‘No,’ said Mary.

  ‘You can cope? It’s not too embarrassing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh good. I like it. It’s one of the few things I can still do with girls that doesn’t embarrass me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. It makes me feel innocent, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But you’re upset and I’m hungover again and there’s no need to talk.’

  They walked on. Holding hands with Jamie bore no resemblance to holding hands with Alan. Mary wondered why. True, Jamie’s hand was warm, dry and supple, which made a change from cold, twitchy and damp; but there was more to it than that. Perhaps, like so much else, it was all a question of age. Alan was twenty-one, Jamie was twenty-nine, Mary was somewhere in between. With Alan she always felt that she was leading or being led, as if she were the mother and he were the child, alternately lagging or pressing on ahead. But Jamie moved at the right pace, the even pace, despite or maybe because of his poor stiff leg . . . Other people soon noticed the difference. Not so many of them looked at her and those that did looked at her in better ways. Men looked at her covertly, with ruefulness rather than hostile levity. Women apparently didn’t need to look at her at all now, except at her clothes, and again in semi-professional scrutiny rather than in challenge or triumph. As for the old, they beheld her with outright benignity, evidently cheered, bucked, braced by her very existence. What had she done to deserve all this? One particularly old old man came to a faltering, musing halt in front of them and stood there becalmed, his motors idling, as they walked past. Through his clamped smile came a woozy tremolo, a high nasal wobble, like a forgotten hum.

  Jamie laughed.

  Mary said lightly, ‘You’ll be like that in time.’

  ‘That’s why I’m laughing now,’ he said. ‘I won’t be laughing then. If I make it, that is. Where do you live?’

  ‘In a squat,’ she said.

  ‘Mm, I thought so, something like that. It’s not much, is it? Not much? Listen, there’s plenty of room where I am. People are always staying there. This isn’t a number or anything I’m giving you,’ he said, writing out a number on a piece of paper and giving it to her. ‘I mean it’s not a pass or anything,’ he said, passing it to her. ‘I’m past all that. I’m just saying you can come and stay at my place any time.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Do you want some more money?’

  ‘No, I’ve got enough.’

  ‘Sure? Okay then.’

  They parted at the pondside. Jamie seemed to have no more idea than Mary about how people in their position should say goodbye. Eventually he just squeezed her arm and walked off. She looked round once and saw his long hunched figure, hands in p
ockets, about to move beyond her sight. Then he looked round too and gave a sharp wave, walking backwards.

  The grass was getting darker. Traffic moved with Sunday freedom down the straight road beyond the distant railings that girded the park. Obedient to the remote lunar action and its silent tempests of light, the days were closing in, the days were huddling up. Mary had already heard talk of winter. On cold evenings people spoke of it with resignation and sometimes a stoical dread. There was no fixed date for its arrival and everyone had different theories about when it would come. Mary wasn’t too worried. Winter was sure to be very interesting.

  Mary was starting to feel better about Alan already. She speculated. It could be that the point of love was to surround all people on earth with a circle, a circle which was often broken in places but constantly tried to be complete. She would always be one of the people who joined arms to protect Alan, and she hoped he would always be one of the people out on the line surrounding her—imperfect though it would always be, with broken chains and absent links everywhere, and many hands with no hands to hold. That had to be right. She resolved to go up to his room straight away and tell Alan this, to see if he would say yes.

  In the play street only a few children lingered now. Hardly visible, they called and beckoned to each other like receding ghosts. Soon they would be safe and having tea behind other people’s windows. Mary hurried up the steps, suddenly cold in her white sweater and skirt.

  She came into Alan’s room without pausing to knock. It was silent and empty in the dusk. ‘Alan?’ she said. On the table in front of the window some papers shimmered listlessly in the last of the light. As Mary turned to leave she saw Alan standing in the corner with his face to the wall. Why would he be doing that? ‘Alan, I’ve—’, she began, moving towards him. Then she saw that it wasn’t Alan. How could it be? It was someone much taller than Alan. She hesitated. Perhaps Alan was standing on something. Why would he be doing that? She moved closer. Was he standing on his bed, or on that chair? The bed was too far away and the chair had fallen over. Mary reached up and touched Alan’s shoulder. He turned. But not in the way that people usually turn. Round his neck was the cord of his dressing-gown.