Other People

by Martin Amis

  At midnight Mary worked in the chaotic kitchen. The tiny room had a hot yellow glare like the blaze of ripe butter. She cooked in colours. One meal consisted of haddock, chicken-skin (astutely preserved by Mary from the previous day), and swede darkened with the blood of beetroots; another of liver, grapes, kidney-beans and the outer leaves of artichokes. She cooked everything until it was the right colour. She cooked with her bare hands, hands stained with juice and blood and the liquid-like patches of burn-scars as multi-wrinkled as Chinese cabbage. She thought it amazing how competent she was in here, how firm in all her decisions, considering how little practice she had had and how cramped the kitchen and the flat had suddenly become.

  She stopped washing things. She stopped washing dishes, surfaces, clothes, even those cusped parts of herself that seemed to need washing more often than the other parts did. She took grim pleasure from the salty exhalations, the damp-dry textures of her body. She smelled wholesomely of the food she cooked; she could identify the smell of several different meals issuing from her all at once. She would never run out of clothes because Augusta, Jo and Lily had left lots of theirs behind in case she needed them. She made Jamie wear a dress of Augusta’s. He didn’t want to at first—but the dress was quite comfortable, he had to admit. She turned up the heat, and made sure all the windows stayed closed. Jamie sometimes hovered hopefully by the balcony; but Mary shook her head with a firm but gentle smile, and he shrugged and moved away. One night she was sitting by the fire eating an apple. She noticed a squirt of blood on the ridgy white pulp. She went over to where Jamie was lying slackly on the sofa. She kissed him on the lips. He resisted at first, but he didn’t have enough strength to struggle for long. She worked her mouth into his, knowing that this would bring them even closer together than before. And of course she prized the malty, creaturely tang that issued from between her legs. That was him too, after all, his tissue, his sacrament, his fault. And when the lunar blood came she let it flow.

  In the dead of night Mary’s face glowed above the red circles of heat. It was their last meal and she was determined that his food should be the right colour. She cooked him brains and tripe, and veal heated just a little so as not to spoil its light tan. She was determined that his food should be the right colour. She bore the tray into the sitting-room. Jamie got up from the floor and sat down facing her on the armchair. The flat was so small now that they were forced to eat like this, with their plates on their laps and their knees touching. It didn’t matter: they were so close. Mary ate quickly, unstoppably. As she chewed she told him her story—everything, about her death, her new life, her murderer, and her redeemer who would be coming to get her one day soon. When she had finished Jamie lowered himself to the floor again. And he hadn’t touched his food! Mary stood over him for a long time. She could not control her face or the extraordinary sounds that came from her mouth. These sounds would have frightened her very much if it hadn’t been Mary who was making them. It was lucky Mary was making them. She wouldn’t want to have to deal with anyone who could make sounds like these. Some time later she was in the bathroom, standing before the mirror in thick darkness, listening to laughter. The instant she threw the switch a face reared out of the glass, in exultation, in relief, in terror. She had done it. She had torn through the glass and come back from the other side. She had found her again. She was herself at last.

  Part Three

  21 Without Fear

  Finally the weather started to turn again.

  For several days now a tunnel of piercing blue had been visible here and there in the lumpy grey canopy of the sky. It changed its position from time to time, widened invitingly and then narrowed out, went away entirely for a whole afternoon, until one morning it replaced the sky itself with a spotless dome of pure ringing distance. You thought: So it’s been like that up there all the time. It’s just the clouds that get in the way. Now only aeroplanes lanced the spicy sky, beaming out of the cold sun-haze in the morning and, at dusk, trailing salt as they headed without fear into the mild hell-flames of the west.

  Amy Hide stood in the square garden. She wore wellingtons, jeans and a man’s blue sweater. She was watching rubbish burn. She folded her arms and glanced down the walled path towards the road. The kitchen door creaked; she turned to see David, the neighbours’ cat, sliding nonchalantly into the house. She looked up at the sky. She began to hum vaguely as the fire crackled out its leaning tower of smoke.

  ‘It won’t last, Amy,’ said a voice. ‘It won’t hold.’

  Amy turned, smiling and shielding her eyes.

  ‘You mark my words.’

  ‘But Mrs Smythe. You always say that. How do you know it won’t last?’

  Mrs Smythe was leaning heavily on the scalloped fence that separated the two gardens. Only her large formless face was visible, and her two dangling, suppliant hands.

  ‘They said,’ said Mrs Smythe. ‘On the TV. There’s a cold front coming.’

  ‘Why do you believe them now? You didn’t believe them when they said there was a warm front coming.’

  ‘Well you just mark my words, young Amy. Take a bit of advice from someone older and wiser than yourself.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see. How’s Mr Smythe?’

  ‘Oh, mustn’t complain. He has his good days and his bad days, let’s put it like that.’

  ‘God, what’s the time?’ said Amy. ‘I’d better hurry or they’ll be shut. Is there anything I can get you, Mrs Smythe?’

  ‘You are good, Amy. But I’ve been down myself today . . . He’s very punctual, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amy, ‘he is.’

  ‘You must worry about him sometimes though.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Amy, ‘I do.’

  An hour later Amy surveyed the ordinary sitting-room. Reflexively she started tidying up, not that there was much to be kept tidy. She put the daily newspaper into the wooden wallet of the magazine rack, and bent down to remove a squiggle of thread from the grey hair-cord carpet. She made herself comfortable on the sofa, tucking her legs up in the way she had come to like. Every now and then she glanced up from her book, and out across the quiet road at the toytown houses opposite. When she heard the car she looked away and went on reading. She didn’t want him to think that she spent the whole day waiting for his return. Nor did she ever.

  The door opened and Prince strolled into the room. He dropped his briefcase on the armchair and quickly unbuttoned his overcoat.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How was your day?’

  ‘Hi. Very nice. How was yours?’

  ‘Oh, usual stuff. City Hall. But there was some good human interest in the afternoon.’

  ‘Do you want a drink? What happened?’

  ‘You bet. The way people . . .’ He stretched, yawning vigorously. ‘The ways people can think up of behaving badly. They’re like bloody artists, some of them. How was your day?’

  ‘Nice. Very nice. The weather . . .’

  ‘Tell me about it in incredible detail.’

  So she told him about it, in detail. She did this every evening. She used to wonder how the routine rhythms and quotidian readjustments of her new life could hold any interest for Prince—Prince, who came home hot and tousled from the hard human action. But she enjoyed telling him about it all and he seemed to enjoy hearing it too. He never let her leave anything out.

  ‘How are you feeling these days?’ he then asked her.

  She blushed, but her voice was steady. ‘I’m very grateful. I can’t stay for ever though, can I. You’ll tell me when it’s time for me to go.’

  ‘No, stay!’ he said. He stood up and turned his back on her. ‘Stick around,’ he said more quietly, running his eyes along the banked shelf of records. ‘It’s nice to have a woman in the house, as they say. Now who would we like to hear from?’

  Amy said, ‘I thought I’d make an omelette or something later on.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ said Prince.

  At eleven o’clock Amy said good night and we
nt upstairs. She stood before the mirror in the sane bathroom. With cleansing lotion and cotton wool she removed the light arrangements of rouge and mascara from her face. She looked good: she looked both older and younger than before, more substantial. Now she gazed into her own eyes without fear; she knew who she was, and didn’t mind much more than other people minded. Her right temple and the soft chin still bore the tenacious discolorations of bruising. Amy didn’t blame Jo for them. Amy didn’t blame Jo for the skilful and virile beating she had given her—in the flat, on New Year’s Day. It was an intelligible thing to have done. Jamie was going to be all right. He was in an expensive clinic called The Hermitage. She wanted to see him but no one thought this was a good idea. No one thought this was good thinking. Amy knew she would see him one day, and would tell him she was sorry without giving fear. She brushed her teeth, then went across the landing to her room.

  Amy’s room contained a bed, a table, a chair, and not much else. Prince of course had a bigger and more complicated room, next door to hers. In many ways Amy’s room resembled her attic at the squat, and she liked it very much. But she liked it in an appropriate way. She knew that it was in no sense hers. The window neatly framed the black sky and its hunter’s moon. Looking out, she could hear the faint creaking of the young trees and the discreet surge of an occasional car in the neighbouring streets. That was all. But she saw and heard all that she longed to see and hear. She took off her clothes and put on her white nightdress. She wrote in her diary for a few minutes, then said her prayers—yes she did, down on her knees at the side of the bed.

  22 Old Flame

  She lived in a remote arcadia, a pleasant, fallen world. Dogs and cats moved among the people on terms of perfect equality; the slow cars veered for them in the right-angled streets. The place was called a dormitory town. It had baubelled hedges, and grass was shared out scrupulously, often in patches no bigger than paving-stones. This was where the earners of London came back exhaustedly to sleep in lines, while on the far side of the planet other people rose like a crew to man the workings of the world. Prince had shown her round the thought-out precincts, the considered mezzanines. There was one of everything. You wouldn’t ever need to go further than this—though of course they sometimes did, like other people everywhere.

  He gave her a certain amount of money each week, for housekeeping, and Amy had always liked testing money against the buyable world. Money, of course, was still in everyone’s bad books; in shops and coffee-bars people talked bitterly about money and its misdeeds. But Amy had a lot of time for money and thought that people seriously undervalued it. Money was more versatile than people let on. Money could spend and money could buy. Also you could save money while you spent it. Finally, it was nice spending money and it was nice not spending it—and of how many things could you say that? Money seemed to work out much better here than it did before, when she had had so little and when she had had so much.

  Prince got up at seven every morning without fail. Amy got up then too, partly for his company and partly for her share of the delicious breakfasts he made. Prince was always pleasantly irascible in the mornings; his vague anger was a rhetorical style directed outwards at the world. With calm relish he read out extracts from the newspaper that the boy brought—accounts of greed, spite and folly—and commented on them in that complicitous way he had of making the good seem bad and the bad seem good. Then he drove off just as it was getting light, to join the queue for London. Amy did the washing-up and readied herself to deal with the day.

  In the evenings they sat and read and listened to music. Amy did most of the reading and Prince did most of the listening. Prince listened to music with his green eyes closed, the formidable, gourdlike face thickened out towards the jaws. Sometimes they watched television together. ‘Let’s watch television for a while,’ he would say. He never wanted to watch anything in particular. ‘When I want to watch television,’ he said, ‘I just want to watch television.’ Occasionally they watched Michael Shane, who was still out there, still out on the burning zones, in jeeps, helicopters, canoes, in sweltering prison-yards, adobe huts, bullet-sizzled bunkers—in all the places where the world was on fire.

  One night Amy hesitated and said, ‘He’s an old flame of mine, you know.’

  ‘Mm, I know,’ said Prince coolly. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it. That little wimp?’ He turned to her and nodded several times in amused appraisal. ‘Boy, I bet old Amy made short work of him. I bet she didn’t waste much time feeding his . . . feeding him through the wringer.’

  Amy laughed shamefacedly and said, ‘He told me that after Amy he thought he was going queer—that’s what he said.’

  ‘Actually he was right. He did go queer and never went—Whoops,’ said Prince as his glass nearly skidded from his hand. ‘I nearly spilt it,’ he said.

  ‘What were you going to say?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Talking of old flames, your Mr Wrong seems to be keeping a low profile these days,’ he said, returning his gaze to the screen.

  ‘Really?’ said Amy.

  ‘Perhaps he’s gone straight.’

  ‘Not before time.’

  He turned to her with his knowing smile, the smile that knew things.

  ‘I’m not afraid,’ she said. ‘I think I’d know what to do this time round.’

  ‘Good for you, Amy,’ he said.

  That night she went to bed a little too early. As she got undressed and looked out of the window she heard from downstairs the deceptively brash opening of a piano concerto which she had grown particularly attached to over the past weeks. Hurriedly she put on her nightdress. She felt sure that Prince wouldn’t mind if she came and listened with him for a while. The music settled as she walked barefoot down the padded staircase and opened the door. She saw Prince before he saw her. He stood in front of the window, his head erect, his arms tensed and raised, conducting the night air.

  He turned suddenly, almost losing his balance. For a moment he seemed without bearings, unformidable, his hands still stretched out in supplication, or helplessness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Amy.

  ‘No that’s all right,’ he said, steadying himself. He smiled foolishly and held her eye. He’s in awe of me too, she realized suddenly. She walked into the room and sat on the sofa with her legs tucked up. He stood before the fire. She closed her eyes and he closed his, head solemnly bowed, and they listened to the music together.

  Later Amy got up from her knees and climbed into bed. Through the window she could see the moon, perched alone on the very tip of the night. The silvered tinge against the navy-blue sky contained tiny particles of rose among its inaudible storms of light. If tenderness had a colour, then that was the colour of tenderness. With her cheek on the pillow, Amy’s thoughts began to loosen. She felt a gentle impatience for each successive moment, not the tearing eagerness but the half-anxious certainty of a mother at the school gates, waiting for her child to emerge from the crowd. She felt that Prince was watching her. She felt what it was like to be young. She felt that the moon and her own prayers and thoughts were living things that shared her room and carefully presided over the contours of her sleep. She wasn’t sure whether this was love. She thought that everyone’s heart must hurt slightly when they began to feel all right about themselves.

  23 Last Things

  ‘I’m going away for a while,’ he said to her at breakfast the next day.

  Amy wasn’t alarmed or even surprised. In a way she was pleased. She knew that this was a salute to something in her, and that she wouldn’t disappoint him.

  ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I’ll be all right,’ she said.

  They finished breakfast in silence. She walked out with him to the car.

  ‘Something will happen while I’m gone,’ he said. ‘Something pleasant.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘You wait. Something nice. And don’t worry about Mr Wrong. I’ll be keeping
an eye on him.’

  ‘A green eye,’ she said.

  She gave him her hand. He raised it to his lips, then pressed it against his cheek.

  ‘I’ll call you from time to time,’ he said. ‘Take care.’

  Unterrified, she lived her life, waiting for Prince and waiting for the thing to happen while he was gone. She was glad to have all this time to experiment with her happiness alone. He telephoned quite regularly, checking in from the mysterious human action he attended. He asked whether the thing had happened yet, and Amy said it hadn’t.

  Then something did happen. Amy wasn’t sure whether it was the thing Prince meant. She thought not, on the whole, because it wasn’t pleasant, it wasn’t nice. Late on Sunday afternoon Amy was browsing over the bookcase in the sitting-room. Now what would he like me to read? she wondered. There were some hefty textbooks on the top shelf, among them The Anatomy of Melancholy. She worked the book out by its spine. It was heavier than she expected, and the dead weight made her hand drop down through the air. The pages windmilled, and something slipped out and wafted like a leaf to the floor.

  It was an old photograph, oddly moist and limp to the touch; and the scene it showed immediately disturbed the eye. Seven men stood on a raised platform. The five men on the right were pale, top-hatted, with the sanctified air of aldermen or city fathers. Their faces were minutely averted from the camera’s gaze; they looked clogged, qualmish, as if they were secretly trying not to be sick. The seventh man, on the far left, wore a black hood. The angled noose in his gloved hand hovered like a halo above the head of the sixth man, who alone held the camera’s eye. His thin face was taut and unshaven, and there was something desperate and triumphant in his stare, almost a snigger of complicity in this terrible act he had goaded the world into. It was as if he were the punisher and they the punished—the nauseous city fathers and the hooded man who did not dare to show his face. Amy looked into the murderer’s eyes. Poor bored idiot, she thought. She was about to replace the photograph and the book when she saw that something had been written on the back, just two words. They said: ‘You wait’. Prince had written them. This saddened her and she didn’t know why. She got to her feet and the doorbell rang.