by Martin Amis
Alan had left a note on the table. It was all about his hair.
* * *
Poor Alan. Poor ghost.
Suicide is what everyone young thinks they’ll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don’t want to commit themselves in that way. When you’re young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. ‘Old won’t happen to me,’ you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.
How often does suicide cross your mind? Every day? Once a week? Hardly at all any more? It probably depends on how old you are. Old takes nerve but suicide takes far more. It’s a very risky business. Young Alan must have had a lot of nerve up there that afternoon. He was lucky he was young. He wouldn’t have managed it otherwise.
Old is when you see that life is poor but it’s all there is. Death is derisory; it only lasts a second; it’s gone before you know it, so far as we know.
I’ve considered suicide, naturally. Yes, I’ve considered it. Some days I consider nothing else. Of course I can’t consider it seriously until I’ve settled my score with Mary. And besides, I’m getting too old for it now. It’s already too romantic a notion for me: I mean, it isn’t very realistic, is it, suicide?
People are doing it younger and younger—eighteen, fifteen, ten. They gag on life early now. When you’re young: that’s the time for it. Do I wish I’d done it then, back in the good old days when I was young? No, not really. Life is poor but it’s all there is, so far as we know.
* * *
The first thing Mary had to do about Alan’s suicide was make a statement about it, too.
‘It’s just a formality,’ said the shabby policeman whose Sunday they had spoilt, moving hushedly round the room. ‘Course, you’re not obliged to say anything at all, but in my experience . . . it’s usually . . . Actually, this isn’t really my province at all, really.’
Mary sat and stared across the table at Russ’s dipped, soaking face. She had no idea what she was going to say.
‘Now, now let’s see . . .’ said the policeman, tugging on his ear. At first he proposed to transcribe a verbal narrative from each inhabitant of the squat. With a pimpled tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth, he wrote very slowly as Paris and Ray successively drawled and stuttered identical accounts of Alan’s discovery. The policeman looked at his watch. ‘Perhaps I should . . . It’s a pity, really, that there’s so many of you here.’ Then, flusteredly, and trying to ignore Russ’s great wet sniffs (sniffs that managed to drain whole sinusfuls of grief into his reddened throat), he began to deal out scraps of paper and a sprig of biros silently provided by Norman. Mary sat at the long table with Russ, Ray, Paris, Vera, Charlie, Alfred, Wendy and Norman, and with much scratching of heads and flexing of shoulders they hunched down like schoolchildren to their task.
What could Mary possibly say? She was sorry she had broken Alan’s neck; she had never meant to. She wondered whether Alan’s hair was responsible, as he had claimed. But it didn’t seem very likely that your hair could break your neck. It must have been Mary again. I’m sorry, she wrote in her fair hand. I didn’t mean to. I’ll try not to do it again.
But then two old men in uniform came downstairs with a lumpy stretcher. Russ stood up and cracked his pen down on the table. He looked across at Mary with his childish, dismal face.
‘What am I doing?’ he said. ‘I can’t write.’ He pointed with a finger. ‘You did it, didn’t you! He was only twenty-one. You did it, and you don’t even care. Christ!’
Mary went on a journey, a journey that took several days. She rode the tubes, to and fro and round and round in the city’s fuming entrails. She rode the Circle Line until, on this new scale of time and distance, the Circle made her head reel. And it never got her anywhere. She walked the clotted concrete of Piccadilly and Leicester Square. She slept in a room full of other people and the gurgles and gases of bad food. She leaned against a wall where other girls were leaning. Two different men came up and asked her if she was free; she shook her head both times and they went away again. For a while, time turned into a series of boxes. She rode in a van to a place where you had to empty your pockets and your bag and submit to the far-flung presence. They shut her in for the night with a girl who kept weeping and getting up to pee drillingly into the pot beneath her bunk. In the morning they made her undress and a woman examined her: by what right, Mary didn’t know. She rode in a van again. She slept in a white row of other women who yelled and yodelled through the night. ‘O you are hard!’ the woman next to Mary kept saying. ‘O you are . . . oh so unkind.’ Mary knew that already; the woman didn’t have to keep on telling her. They gave her her possessions in a brown envelope and some yellow pills that made the present recede some distance. You could walk in a garden or sit in a green room where lights and faces incessantly flickered. Mary did these things for quite a time. Then Prince came and got her out. They had to let him in, of course. They had to let him in and let him get her out.
‘I’ve got your style at last, Mary,’ he told her in his office. ‘Oh, so you’re smoking now, are you? That’s another new accomplishment of yours?’
Mary puffed on her cigarette. She had perfected this skill over the past few days, under the intent tutelage of various mad men and women. They said it would do her good, especially her nerves. Mary didn’t know about that, but she liked having something to occupy her hands and her mouth—particularly her mouth. She said,
‘I’m sorry.’
‘. . . Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Now everything’s fine.’
‘I tried to be good.’
‘And now you’ve stopped trying? That’s the way a child talks.’
Mary said nothing.
‘I’ve got some news for you,’ he said more quietly. ‘Mr Wrong—he’s recanted.’
‘Mr Wrong?’
‘The author of the confession to your murder. He’s taken it back. He says he didn’t do it now.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well it’s hardly a staggering move from his point of view. He was informed that you were alive and well. So he recanted. Wouldn’t you?’
Mary said nothing.
‘I’ve got to hand it to him. It took quite a time before he was convinced. He was sticking to his story. You don’t often get that.’
‘Don’t you?’ said Mary. He was waiting for her to look up. She looked up.
‘No. You don’t. He said he’d done it all right. He said you asked him to. So he did.’
Tears lined up in Mary’s eyes. She didn’t try to staunch them when they came. Some fell on her lap. One even landed on her cigarette. She heard Prince sigh and stand up. He came towards her waving his white handkerchief.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘He’s not out and about yet—he’s still got time to do. That’s why we waited. We wanted to get him on some other shit . . . What now then, Mary? What’s left? The job’s gone. The squat’s gone too, by the way.’
‘Where? Why has it?’
‘Any trouble at a place like that . . .’ He flapped his hand limply. ‘No, Mary, there’s nowhere you can go now. It looks like you’ve used up all your good luck.’
‘There is. There is somewhere I can go.’ She showed him the piece of paper.
‘Oh you made that connection, did you,’ he said, nodding.
‘He told me I could just ring up and go there any time.’
Prince picked up one of the telephones on his desk and banged it down in front of her. ‘So ring him up.’
Mary called Jamie and Jamie was there. She wasn’t surprised by the relaxed way he said, ‘Yes, sure. Come over.’ Whatever other people had done to Mary, they hadn’t lied to her. As with so much else, they kept most of that for themselves. There was only one person, Mary felt, who was really in the business of lies; and he was sitting opposite her now.
‘But wait,’ said Jamie. ‘What about all your shit?’
Mary blushed. ‘What?’
‘All your stuff
. Can you get it all in a cab or something?’
‘Oh. No, I haven’t got any stuff any more.’
Prince didn’t look up when Mary finished. He was writing something with a steel pen. ‘All fixed?’ he said.
‘Yes.’ Mary looked at him, and with hatred. What did he ever do but tell her lies and make her cry? ‘He’s rich,’ she said randomly.
‘Oh good.’
‘I’m going now,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’ He didn’t look up. He said, ‘Remember, Mary. Beware your own power. No one is powerless.’
‘I’m going now, and I hope I never see you again until my dying day,’ said Mary, and walked out of the room.
18 No Need
‘Now the first thing we’ve got to do,’ said Jamie sternly, ‘is get you drinking and smoking properly. Right. How much do you drink?’
‘You mean alcohol?’
‘Of course I mean alcohol. You mean there’s other stuff?’
‘Once a week,’ said Mary.
‘What? Well, we’ll soon fix that, young lady. Have a drink. We’ll start you on this. The trick is to drink very heavily every lunchtime. It saves a lot of effort in the early evening.’
‘I feel terrible all day if I drink at lunchtime,’ said Jo, who also lived where Jamie lived.
‘So?’ said Jamie.
‘I don’t like feeling terrible all day.’
‘None of us likes it. That’s not the point. You’re not supposed to like it. Now Mary. What about your smoking.’
‘Three or four a day?’ said Mary hopefully.
But Jamie looked at her for a long time and then shook his head sadly. ‘No. That won’t do at all, I’m afraid.’ He turned away, his eyes slightly hooded, and said breezily, ‘I’m up to three-and-a-half packs a day . . .’
‘Really?’ said Mary.
‘Yup. Oh, it was hell at first, I admit. Working your way from two packs to three—that’s what takes real balls. After that it’s quite easy. Now we’ll set you a realistic target, say twenty a day, and then you can build up slowly from there. Okay? It’s simply a question of willpower, that’s all. The thing is: if you want to enough, you can. Believe me. It’s possible Mary!’
‘What’s so clever about killing yourself,’ said Augusta, who also lived where Jamie lived.
‘Now don’t you start. Oh I get it. I’ve got your number. Well check you out. You want to live, don’t you. You want to live.’
Mary sipped her drink and stubbed out her cigarette. At once Jamie rebrimmed her glass and offered her a fresh cigarette, which he lit.
‘That’s it. You can do it, Mary. Now just eat a lot of rich food and don’t take any exercise, and you should pull through this thing okay.’
‘You’re quite manic, Jamie. It’s not funny, you know,’ said Lily, who also lived where Jamie lived.
‘How would you know whether it’s funny?’
‘It doesn’t make me laugh.’
‘But you’re a woman! Women don’t laugh when things are funny. They laugh when they’re feeling well.’
‘Yawn yawn yawn,’ said Lily.
‘Oh what crap,’ said Jo.
‘Give him a Valium, somebody,’ said Augusta.
‘It’s true! Why should you mind? It’s just different for you . . .’ He turned to Mary with his bowed head and hot eyes. ‘Well. I just think, since none of us does anything, and is never going to do anything, we might as well do the other stuff, that’s all.’
‘Oh Mary,’ said Lily. ‘Are you all right for sheets and towels and everything?’
‘Why, has the little man been?’ said Jo.
‘Did he bring back my shirt?’ said Augusta.
‘Which one?’
‘They lost it. You know, the grey silk one with the—’
‘I think,’ said Jamie, climbing unevenly to his feet, ‘I think I might just manage to tear myself away from this conversation.’ He hesitated in the middle of the room. His eyes were burning with boyish eagerness and shame. ‘I, it’s just . . .’
Don’t, thought Mary. It’s all right. There’s no need.
‘That stuff about women not laughing,’ he said, and at once the girls started to sigh and mumble and turn away. ‘If I’d said most women, you’d have all agreed and had a laugh on your sisters. But I mean you, because you never read a book or do anything. That’s why you only laugh when you like someone or feel well.’
‘Boring,’ said Augusta.
‘Boring? Oh, it’s boring, is it. Well in that case, man, I’m just fucking fuckin out. Gimme shelter,’ he said, and stumbled from the room.
‘Don’t listen to him,’ Lily told Mary. ‘He’s impossible when he’s drunk.’
‘That man hates women,’ said Augusta with her eyes closed.
Jo shook her head. ‘No, he just needs to get out and do something.’
It was true that no one in the flat did anything. Well, they did things, but they didn’t do anything. They didn’t do nothing, but they didn’t do anything either. Mary soon worked out why: there was no need to. There was no need.
Mary recognized all three girls from the Sunday when she had come to lunch. She wasn’t surprised to find them living here. She wasn’t surprised to find that someone else was living here too, someone who didn’t do anything either: little Carlos.
In a sense, Carlos was what Lily did. Carlos demanded and received almost full-time priming; he needed Lily’s time all the time there was, and she gave it to him. Carlos was learning to walk, or waiting to walk. His burly, milk-flossed head bore an ever-changing patchwork of angry red bruises; Carlos got these by falling over a lot, especially in the bathroom, where he fell over most. You could hear him moving about in there, chirruping or gurgling interestedly: then there would be a sudden thump or crash, a shocked silence as Carlos marshalled his grief and outrage, and finally his forceful, hacking wail that sent Lily running in, hoping he hadn’t broken anything. Carlos cried about other things too. He always cried to good effect: it always got him what he wanted. When you thought about it, Carlos was really pretty popular, had won quite a few admirers, for somebody who was only one year old. Just think how many friends and followers he would have when he was fifty—or seventy-five!
‘What exactly’s the schedule on Carlos?’ Jamie asked Lily. Jamie spent quite a lot of time playing with Carlos, or just watching him play. ‘He thinks you’re God until he’s three. Then he thinks he wants to climb into the sack with you until he’s twelve. Then he thinks you’re a scumbag until he’s twenty. Then he goes queer or whatever and feels guilty about you until he’s sixty and as old and fucked up as you are. That’s the schedule, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ said Lily, and gathered Carlos in her arms.
Something in Lily’s eyes reminded Mary of the Hostel and its ruined girls. Lily had once been in trouble, but now she was out of it, out of trouble. She had tangled, wispy, weightless fair hair, sad lips, and no challenge in her presence. She also had a man called Bartholomé who worked in the North Sea. Lily thought about Carlos all the time, even when Carlos was asleep or jabbering contentedly in the next room. Lily didn’t do anything, but this was all right. Carlos was what she did.
Jo didn’t do anything but Jo did lots of things. Mary had never met or heard of anyone who did as many things as Jo did. She had ‘money of her own’, which perhaps explained it (everyone else there, including Mary, had money of Jamie’s). She also had shoulders like the back of a sofa, short bobbing brown hair, and a kind of war-hero’s jawline, with ferociously good teeth. She was always doing things, tennis, squash, riding, golf, and driving off to remote, virtually unreachable places at the wheel of her fat and powerful car. In the early evening she roared out hymns under the scalding shower, then marched through in chunky sweater and chunky jeans to superintend dinner with Lily. Later she watched television, knitting at the same time, or threading fish-hooks, or re-stringing tennis rackets, or oiling guns. Then at eleven-thirty sharp she stood up,
stretched, said ‘Well!’ and strode off to bed. Occasionally she went out with her man. Very occasionally her man came round there. Her man was unbelievable, like someone on television. It was Jamie’s often-expressed belief that Jo was really a man herself.
‘She’s a fucking man, that girl,’ he said. ‘Don’t let her fool you—she’s fucked up too. All that scuba-diving and mountaineering and pot-holing and hang-gliding—she just wants to fill the days and not think about anything. Do you think she likes going out with that fucking robot?’
One Sunday night the fuses went. While Mary and Lily held candles, Jamie peered fearfully at the fuse box, which glinted in triumphant recalcitrance from its cave. Jamie kept extending his trembling fingers and snatching them back again at the last moment. Jo marched into the flat with a gun and three dead pheasants swinging from her belt. She shouldered Jamie out of the way and restored light with a single swipe of her hand. Jamie fell over. Lily helped him up. Blinking, and dusting himself down, Jamie said petulantly,
‘Christ, you’re not a girl at all, are you. You’re a bloke! Christ . . . Why don’t you put an e on the end of your name and go the whole hog.’
But Jo just laughed and tramped off to her room. Soon after that she went out again. She had other things to do.
Augusta didn’t do anything either, anything at all, but her life remained a throbbing epic of victories, reverses, strategies, set-backs, affronts, betrayals, campaigns and conspiracies. A social life was the kind of life Augusta had. And a sex life too. She had spiky black hair but her face was dramatically pale, paler even than her teeth, which were themselves very white. Mary saw her naked quite a lot, since she often sat with Augusta in her opulent brothel of a bedroom. Augusta was the same height and weight as Mary; yet she was not only slimmer than Mary but fuller too. Her body had an extraordinary jouncy, gymnastic look, with the narrow muscular back and voluptuous behind, and those conical breasts riding high on the frail ribcage. Augusta also had lots of men.