Other People

by Martin Amis

  ‘That bit. From there to there,’ he said, pointing. ‘This guy really wants to fuck the daughter,’ he murmured thickly, ‘but he’s got to fuck the mother instead.’

  Mary narrowed her eyes.

  And so I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I cantered through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.

  Mary read it but she didn’t laugh or smile. She could see it was funny, she could see all its delight. But she didn’t laugh or smile. She turned to Jamie, invigorated by the expressionlessness of her own face.

  He frowned and straightened up. Hurt showed in his hot eyes. ‘I suppose you have to read the whole thing,’ he said, and looked away.

  Mary went to her room. In a sense she was appalled by what she had done. But it was no help being appalled. She would do the same thing again. What helped? Something did: the knowledge that she had a power. She decided she had better use it, since it was the only power at her disposal. And of course it was the power to make feel bad.

  That day Mary could feel life losing its edge, and she was pleased. She looked at life and urged it to interest her, to perform some convulsion that would render it interesting. But of course life stayed inert, and she thought the less of it for that. She knew why, but this was no help, not to women. She was a woman and it was no help. She knew that it was no help, for instance, to know that she went a little mad for five days every month. She still went a little mad, five days, every month. She knew when it was she went a little mad, and knew when to expect it. But, boy, she didn’t know she was a little mad while she was a little mad. Just think: if you’re a woman you go a little mad for several years when the real age comes. Will I know it then? she wondered. Oh man . . . Women are the other people, yes we are. We’re deep-divers, every one. You face the surface tempest where you can thrash and shout, but we swim underwater all our lives.

  Mary made Jamie feel bad by feeling bad herself. She concentrated on this feeling and it struck her with its purity. After a few days it seemed obvious, just, even admirable. God, Mary feels bad. Do you see how bad she’s feeling? Mary condensed the world and its present into a settled haze above her head. She glowed with it, her new power. It was true, it was true; how could something be as intense as this and also false? If Jamie addressed a casual remark to her, she stared at him for several seconds and then turned away, her disdain so palpable and definitive that there was no need to disclose it with her eyes. If they crossed in the passage, Mary would halt and stand her ground, daring him to travel through her force field. One day as she left the sitting-room she heard Jamie say to Lily,

  ‘Christ. What the fuck’s the matter with Mary?’

  Mary felt a rush of exultation at this open tribute to her power. She went back and stood in the doorway.

  ‘Is she having her period or something?’ he said. He looked up and saw her, with terror.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ he said, writhing on the sofa and waving his hands in the air.

  Mary went back to her room and sat on the bed staring at a point of air midway between the wall and herself for several hours without blinking. That was good too, and she started doing it on a regular basis. Her sorties into the sitting-room became unpredictable and dramatic. She liked to sit near Jamie and send her aura out to probe his peace. The girls avoided talking to her. Even Augusta stayed upwind of Mary now: Augusta knew that the diadem had been wrested from her hands. Jamie began going out in the evenings, something she knew he hated doing. That was good, good. She would still be here tracking him, beaming him with her power.

  One Saturday night Mary and Jamie were alone together in the flat. Mary was having a good session of making Jamie feel bad by sitting on the sofa and staring palely out of the window, careful not to blink. Repeatedly she hugged her bathrobe to her as if she was cold. She wasn’t cold. Jamie churned about with a book in the armchair opposite. By this stage in the evening it hardly occurred to Mary what she was feeling bad about or what feeling bad about it would achieve. Feeling bad was the main thing. So it gave her an uneasy jolt when Jamie threw down his book, drank deeply from his glass, and turned her way with his arms folded.

  ‘Okay, Mary. What is all this shit?’

  ‘All what?’ she said simply, her face quite open.

  ‘All this tragedy-queen stuff. It’s like Tristan und Isolde here every fucking night. What’s going on?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she said, remembering herself.

  Jamie sighed and closed his eyes. Feebly he drummed his shoes on the floor. He stood up and walked sidlingly across the room towards her. He sat down on the cushion’s edge.

  ‘Now don’t play dumb. You walk around here with a face like a kicked butt, trying to heavy me over all the time, as if it’s all my fault. It’s only you vain, good-looking types who ever try this sort of stuff. If you were some poor dog with frizzy hair and spots, d’you think you’d be working this one on me? I just don’t need it.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Forget it. I know the type, I know the type.’ He looked away, squeezing his forehead as if in pain.

  ‘. . . Have you got a headache?’

  ‘Of course I’ve got a headache! So what? Everyone’s got a headache.’

  Mary took his hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Listen . . . Darling. I’m just—out of it. I’m not in that line any more. I’m not in futures any more. I’m not up to you heavy dames. I’m just wide open. You’ll chomp me up and poop me out before I know it.’ He turned to face her. ‘Now what are you looking so pleased about? You don’t understand what I’m saying, do you? Let me put it this way.’

  ‘Kiss my breasts,’ said Mary.

  ‘What? Hey now look . . .’

  ‘Oh please, kiss my breasts.’

  ‘. . . I’m no good at all this, I warn you,’ he mumbled after a few moments. But she could hardly hear him now.

  ‘Quiet,’ she said. ‘Oh thank God. Quiet, quiet.’

  Mary woke up slowly. Before she opened her eyes a memory had time to settle and slip past. Memories happened to her quite a lot these days, but always as analogies of mood rather than deliveries of hard information; and they all seemed to antedate the crucial things in her life. Mary remembered what it was like to wake up as a schoolgirl on weekend mornings, when you coped with the subtle luxury of drowsing in bed while teasing all the time that was suddenly yours.

  She opened her eyes. Yes, the eagerness, the rending had gone. She turned her head. She had never felt more radiant with generosity and relief. What she saw made her close her eyes again. What she saw wasn’t much, just Jamie, naked under his trenchcoat, smoking an early cigarette and staring at the completely grey, the emphatically neutral wash of the window-pane, his face quite numb with remorse.

  20 Deeper Water

  Now the tranquillized days came and Mary needed them.

  The weather turned. ‘It’s turned. I knew it would,’ Jamie said to her that morning. The weather turned bad, as a matter of mere faceless routine; and it was determined to stay that way.

  The balcony puddles pinged with their space invaders from the sky, helplessly reflecting this new war of the worlds. The row of damp-plug houses opposite provided good radar for the rain: you could always see how much was falling and at what angle. It was not the voluptuous rain of the hot months. It was thin needling rain, white-mouthed and unsmiling in its task. And it went on for days without getting tired and without wanting to do anything else instead. Jamie would stand seriously in front of the window for long stretches now, holding a drink and a cigarette, while behind him Carlos beat the floor with his palms and Lily and Mary gazed at the walls or at their men. ‘It’s insulting, this weather,
’ he said. ‘That’s what it is. It’s a fucking insult. It’s like a kick in the arse. You . . . it makes you keep on having to wish it away.’

  Mary went out in it, past the porous houses, stalwart and dreary in the wet, to the rained-under commerce of the junctions and shops. You could say one thing for rain: unlike so much else these days, it was clearly in endless supply. They were never going to run out of it. People shopped with wintry panic, buying anything they could get a hand to. They shouldered and snatched among the stalls, at the drenched vegetables and the sopping, sobbing fruit. Like the holds of ships in tempest, the shop floors swilled with the wellington-wet detritus of the streets, each chime of the door bringing deeper water, umbrellas working like pistons, squelching galoshes and sweating polythene, all under the gaze of the looted shelves. Things were running out, everything was running out, things to buy and money to buy them with. But the rain would not run out. It was part of the air now, long-established in its element. Rain would never dry up. Mary went out in it for a long time and came back as soaked as grass. They made her change her clothes and have a hot bath. Even Carlos was shocked.

  At night she lay in bed for hours waiting for Jamie to stumble in. He would sink naked on to the sheets and kiss her good night with a final decorous grunt. But it never was good night. To begin with he used to ask her whether she was asleep or not. But now he never bothered, because now he knew. He embraced her with elderly formality or lay like a plank in the far twilight zone of the bed. Mary didn’t mind which. She simply waited until he was about to go to sleep and then started crying. Every night. Crying was a good idea, as Carlos knew: it always got you what you wanted. And she cried beautifully—not too loud, and with a sweetly harrowing catch at the end of each breath, like the soft yelp at the peak of a sneeze, bringing to the weeper’s tragedy a pang of the sneezer’s comedy. Mary was good at crying. It always worked when she did it.

  ‘Oh don’t, please don’t,’ he would say.

  Jamie rolled over with a moan and started kissing her face. As he did so Mary imagined that her face must be rather delicious, with all that salt and wet on her hot cheeks. The taste inside her mouth was better than the taste inside his, at least to begin with. But after a while the taste inside their mouths was the same . . . It all went in stages. It wasn’t a fight or a single act, a single convulsion, in the way that Trev and Alan had performed it. It felt like a process of allaying, of shoring up something—against what, Mary didn’t know. Just time, perhaps.

  He had the talent, or the memory of a talent—for talent was surely what it was. He remembered quite a lot about how you did this dance of extremity, this stretched dance. He could chug and bob and glide, he could advance and sustain. Mary would sometimes open her eyes and see his dipped head or his tautened throat; there was something flexed and askance about Jamie at such moments, as if a disobedient motion within him secretly churned to soundless music. And afterwards he smoked cigarettes in silence and stared at the dark ceiling for a long time. He could remember what you did, but he couldn’t remember what you did it for. And Mary couldn’t remember either.

  Afterwards the rain intensified, like nails being hammered into the roof, and the seven winds started up. The seven winds swooped round the shuttered house, in frantic quest of an opening, a way to the inside. You could hear them trying window after window, throwing their combined force against any weakness. And when a wind found a window it would call the others and they would all charge screaming through the gap to bullock and plunder round the high rooms until someone got up and locked them out again. Then they went and tried somewhere else. Last thing, just before dawn, you could often hear thunder, high in the heavens at first, then in crazed asteroids across the rooftops, until finally it split through the lower air and crackled like an ambulance along the empty streets.

  Prince telephoned.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked.

  Mary raised her chin a few inches. ‘I’m very happy,’ she said.

  ‘Oh you’re very happy, are you. You’re very happy. I’m glad to hear that. You sound terrible.’

  Mary closed her eyes. Prince wasn’t about to worry her.

  ‘Anyway, it’s happened,’ he went on. ‘He’s out.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Mr Wrong. He’s out and about. He’s done his time. Even as I speak, he’s lumbering hungrily through the streets.’

  ‘Is he,’ said Mary. This wasn’t interesting. This wasn’t about to worry her.

  ‘He said something about coming to get you, whatever that means. But I can tell you’re not finding this very gripping. Don’t worry, we’ll be keeping an eye on him. I’ll see you soon no doubt . . . Goodbye, Mary.’

  Mary dropped the receiver into place and moved towards the window. She lit a cigarette.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘Prince,’ she said.

  ‘The Prince of what?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s a policeman.’

  ‘A pig? Really?’ said Jamie, pleased. ‘You know a pig?’

  ‘I knew him a long time ago. He just keeps in touch.’

  ‘Well check you out. A pig called Prince. I thought only berks’ dogs were called Prince. Pigs’ dogs too, I suppose. Pigdogs. No, I suppose it makes sense. Do you want a drink or anything?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  Raindrops fell to their deaths against the window-pane, tirelessly, in endless series. Mary saw her face in the beaded glass, and the other face, quietly waiting.

  * * *

  These are the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Pride, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Sloth.

  These are the seven deadly sins: venality, paranoia, insecurity, excess, carnality, contempt, boredom.

  * * *

  Soon Jamie and Mary would be alone.

  Christmas was coming, and there were things to do. Christmas was coming, and everyone else was getting out of the way.

  Jo went to Switzerland to ski with her man. Two grinning rakehells came to take Augusta off to a country house—Augusta, still very high-minded about the yellowing badge on her eye. Lily and Carlos were going to stay with Bartholomé, up in the North Sea. Jamie and Mary put them into a taxi and waved goodbye. When they got back inside the flat, alone together at last, Mary immediately felt different about everything. She had expected the flat to seem larger, but in fact it seemed smaller. She was glad to see them go, she had to admit. Now she would have Jamie all to herself. Without really thinking about what she was doing, Mary cut the cord of the telephone, just to make sure.

  ‘Now you’ll have to cope with all the shit,’ said Jamie later, lifting himself off the sofa and working his hands into his pockets for all the crushed notes he kept there. ‘Take lots of money.’ He looked out of the window, where of course it was still raining patiently. ‘God, it’s so lucky that we’ve got all this money. I mean, where would we be if I didn’t have all this money?’

  ‘I know,’ said Mary.

  ‘Don’t worry about what food you get. I don’t care what I eat, really. Christ, Christmas scares me. I’m not one of these people who hate Christmas. Christmas hates me. Everyone drinks a lot then, though, and that’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘How long will it last?’

  ‘Ten days . . . Mary?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You must promise not to cry too much, while we’re alone like this. Okay?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I mean, you can cry a reasonable amount, of course. But not too much. Okay?’

  ‘I promise,’ said Mary.

  Mary shopped among the blood-boltered marble, inspecting murdered chickens. She walked the terraces of the vegetable stalls, watched by the scarred toothless louts who swung like lewd monkeys from their wooden supports. She presided over the icy offal of the fishmongers’ slabs, where the bug-eyed prawns all faced the same direction, as imploring as the Faithful. She started finding playing-cards in the street. She started collecting them. Today she found the Ace of Hearts.
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  Often she made Jamie come too by feeling bad at him until he said yes. But he wheeled around between the sloping stalls or stood outside shops theatrically tapping his foot, in an agony of hate and boredom. He purchased clanking bagfuls of drink and snarled in the wet wind. How dare he, thought Mary.

  ‘They’re all fucking mad out there,’ he said sorrowfully when they returned. But Mary wasn’t listening. Mary was wondering about the flat. How small it had become. And it used to be so large.

  The compact kitchen was her new world. Her face shone in the steel rings of heat. She put a murdered chicken in the oven and watched its wizened skin until it went as brown as the chicken Lily made. She took it out. It was warm enough to eat. Jamie sat slumped over the table as she served it up. Jamie stared at the chicken for a long time.

  ‘It’s like Keats’s last cough,’ he murmured.

  ‘What?’ said Mary.

  ‘I mean, chicken isn’t usually like this. Is it. I mean, is it. I don’t know what the exact difference is, but it’s not usually like this. It doesn’t usually have all these . . . red guys in it, now does it. Does it . . . It’s no use you looking at me like that,’ he said.

  But it was. It was quite a lot of use. He ate nearly all of it. Mary watched him with satisfaction and pride as she munched mechanically on. Pretty purple juice ran down her chin.

  Together they endeavoured to abolish the idea of diurnal time, time as a way of keeping life distinct, time as a device to stop night and day happening at the same time. Noon would find Jamie and Mary, refreshed by several hours of hard drinking, about to settle down to their midday meal. When Jamie had eaten as much as he could, which wasn’t very much any more, Mary would urge him into the shadows of the dark and helpless bedroom, over the tundra of paper tissues from all the crying she needed to do, and in between the sheets, where she fondly prepared him for the performance of his daily duty. Then they slept, deeply, often for as much as six or seven hours, a whole night’s rest filtered through the hours of the dangling afternoon. At evening they rose like ghosts, like weary vampires, to begin the long night’s work. The nights were long, but not too long for Mary and Jamie. They were always up to them. They were always still there when dawn arrived, heavy, slow, but still there, ready for the morning haul. During their first few nights, Mary waited until Jamie was fuddled by drink and drugs and then talked to him for hours about why he had never done anything with his life and about the fact that he was secretly queer and mad. But they didn’t talk much any more. They didn’t need to. They were so close.