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  ‘Now that’s a bit more bloody like it,’ said Sharon. It was Mary’s turn. ‘Go on then,’ said Sharon, ‘down the hatch.’ Mary opened her mouth and poured.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Sharon a few minutes later. ‘What the hell’s the matter with you? You must be in a shocking state, my girl. Nice little drop of brandy and you cough yourself inside out. I mean, it’s not natural, is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary.

  Sharon drank. ‘It’s all very well being sorry. You spilt half of it!’ Sharon drank. ‘I mean, brandy’s supposed to do you good.’ Sharon drank.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary.

  Sharon dropped the dead bottle to the ground. She stared at Mary sharply. ‘I’m not an alcoholic, you know.’

  Mary stared back. Oh yes you are, she thought. Oh I bet you are.

  * * *

  Sharon is an alcoholic, of course (among many other accomplishments) . . . Alcoholics: you know what they’re like, don’t you. Certainly you do. Chances are, you know one or two personally, or you know someone who does. Think about it. How many do you know? There are an awful lot of drunks about these days. It wouldn’t really surprise me if you turned out to be one yourself. Are you?

  Drunks are people who can’t stay sober. They would rather be drunk. They can’t bear being themselves. They have a point. It is harder being yourself than it is being drunk.

  Drunks aren’t themselves: they’re drunks. They aren’t like other people, though they used to be before they started being drunks. People are various: drunks aren’t.

  When drunk, drunks all think, feel and behave in exactly the same way. When sober, drunks just think about drink, all the time. They do. That’s what they’re thinking about. If you ever wonder what they’re thinking about when they’re not being drunk, that’s what they’re thinking about: being drunk.

  Most of them know some things about why they can’t bear being themselves, and some of them know a lot. But they all think they know things that other drunks don’t know, and they think they are special. They are wrong about that. They aren’t special: they’re drunks, and all drunks know the same things. It seems sadder and more interesting from their end. It is, too, in a sense. They all have their reasons, and some of their reasons are good. I don’t blame anybody for being one.

  It’s my theory that everybody would be a drunk if they could bear to get that way. We’d all feel so much better if we were drunk all the time. But it’s very hard going, getting to be a drunk. Only drunks seem to be able to manage it.

  I’m forever having to cope with these rather puzzling and regrettable people. You’ll be running into a few more of them too. But all under my control, of course, all under my protection and control.

  * * *

  Sharon was telling Mary why she liked a few drinks every now and then—it was because of her nerves, she explained, together with her partiality to a good time—when without much warning the buildings dropped back to reveal a great breezy rift in the stacked and staggered city. Only a few arched, magical streets had been selected to ride this swathe of air. It made Mary’s body hum; she would have turned and tried to run again but Sharon urged her on, unterrified. As they walked up the wide entrance to the sky Mary looked downwards and saw that the turbid tract beneath them was in fact alive, boiling, throwing bits of itself restlessly in the air, as if to catch the screaming birds that swerved and hovered just above its surface, taunting, enraged.

  ‘It’s too big,’ said Mary.

  ‘Pardon? I love the river. Go quietly, sweet Thames. We’re going to the other side,’ she explained, nodding towards the hulked structures gaping like battlements on the far shore. ‘We’re going home first, then I’m taking you up the pub.’

  Mary wondered what these places would be like as she speeded up and followed Sharon south.

  ‘We’re home!’ shouted Sharon.

  Mary stood behind her in the cuboid vestibule. So this was what it was like on the inside: they were home. Everything was padded or reinforced, and it was hotter than she had thought it would be.

  Immediately a half-glass door flew open further up the passage. A man who combined the attributes of being very small and very big peered out, let his head jerk back in consternation, then came bowling down the passage towards them.

  ‘No you don’t, my girl,’ he said rumblingly. ‘Come on—out, out, out!’

  ‘Ah come on, don’t be so mean,’ cried Sharon as the man began to crowd her back towards Mary and the door.

  ‘You don’t belong here!’

  ‘But this is my bloody home.’

  Although Sharon was far more redoubtable than the man with whom she clumsily grappled, it was clear that all strength and stubbornness were melting from her face. Sharon looked like somebody who had yet to do all the things that Sharon had done. We’re going to get put outside again, thought Mary—no question. But then Sharon’s features twisted back through their layer of time, and as if in response her shoulders performed a similar convulsion, causing the little round man to give a harsh shout and lie down very quickly on the floor.

  ‘See? See?’ he said.

  ‘Oh Dad, get off, I didn’t touch you!’ As she leant over him, with every appearance of solicitude, a leg shot out from beneath her and suddenly the two of them had formed a thrashing tangle at Mary’s feet.

  ‘Mother!’ he yelled. ‘Lord help me somebody!’

  ‘What’s happening now,’ said a voice full of exhausted compliance. A woman appeared at the doorway and limped speedily into the light. ‘Murdering her own father now, is she? I see,’ she said in the same tone.

  A pudgy hand slithered free of the panting combatants on the floor. The new arrival took the opportunity of stomping on it with her right foot. Her shoe, Mary noticed, was grotesquely enlarged, sporting a brick-like extension on its sole—perhaps for this very purpose.

  ‘That’s my hand you’re treading on, Mother,’ the man pointed out. ‘Get her by the hair.’

  ‘Bloody Ada. Give us a hand then,’ the woman said to Mary. ‘Gavin! Gavin!’

  Before Mary had time to comply with such a doubtful request, Gavin strolled down the stairs and sighingly extricated the people below. Mary watched this spirited reunion with a feeling of provisional panic. (She knew the streets were full of traps and pits and nets . . . ) It made no sense to her, but perhaps it did to them.

  So it proved.

  Very soon Sharon and her Mum and Dad were squabbling companionably in the comfort of the lounge, a cramped inner chamber whose prisms were much too various for Mary to begin to break them down with her eyes. Time passed—lots of it passed. Far from demanding an explanation of her presence, or ignoring her altogether, Mr and Mrs Botham appealed constantly to Mary for corroboration and support in their cheerful denunciations of their daughter. Mary didn’t know why she was expected to know anything that they didn’t know already. And although she was quite reassured by the way they kept calling her Mary, she couldn’t help wondering what they wanted from her or what they were using her for. I must be pretty amazing, she thought, a girl with bare feet who has lost her mind. But they didn’t seem to think so at all. Either this was because they were related in some way (a fact indignantly emphasized with phrases like ‘his own daughter’ and ‘her own father’ and ‘your own mother’), or else everybody was even queerer than Sharon had let on.

  Yet how dismal if this was all there was. She wouldn’t admit that it could be so. Gavin sat beside her. Throughout he had been marked by his own air of cool exemption, and he was without that aura, that drift of lost time. Mary was particularly impressed by his eyes. Apart from their abundance of colour and light, they seemed to know things that nobody else’s eyes had so far known. They knew things not contained here.

  He turned to her and said, ‘Are you one of them too?’

  ‘One of what?’ said Mary.

  ‘Another lush-artist.’ His eyes flicked towards the other three. ‘They’re at
it all the time,’ he said. ‘They never know what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘. . . Know what’s going on?’

  ‘Now if you’ll excuse us,’ said Sharon loudly, ‘I think what my friend Mary would like is a nice hot bath.’

  ‘Yes of course she would, the poor little thing,’ said Mrs Botham. ‘However did she get like that?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sharon, ‘she just had a little accident.’

  As soon as they were safely locked in with the bathroom’s porcelain and steel, Sharon threw open a cupboard and started rummaging inside it. She did this with the same edge of frenzy that she had shown when looking for money in Mary’s bag. And sure enough she met with the same reward.

  ‘Now you’re talking,’ said Sharon, uncapping a brown bottle and drinking from it freely.

  ‘Gavin—what’s he like?’

  ‘Gavin? You can forget him. He’s queer. Can’t you tell? You see all that shit on his eyes?’

  ‘Yes I see,’ said Mary, giving up hope for the time being.

  ‘God he’s handsome though. Now my girl. We don’t really want a proper bath, do we. Do we? We’ll just give you a nice stand-up wash, you know, just do your underarms and your love-pot. Mind your legs. Because they’ll be opening soon, won’t they?’ she added ominously. ‘Pull it over your head. That’s it. Now let’s have a little think. You can have my white boots for a start. What size are you? And Mum’s red crimplene’ll be nice on you. Bit mini on you, mind, but there’s no harm in that, is there? Eh? Sorry, does that tickle? I’m awful, I am. I am, I know. Lift up your arms. Mm, you can have my white polo-neck, show off your little titties. You’ll knock them dead, girl.’ She went away but she soon came back again. ‘You know, Mary—sit down there. You know, Mary, I’ll be surprised if we aren’t a couple of bob to the good by the time tonight’s over. Oof! They’re a bit loose, but there it is. I know Whitey will do his nut when he sees you—if he’s there of course. He’ll jump on you like a kangaroo. No, just slip into it. You don’t want any knicks or anything, this time of year. I don’t believe I’ve got a clean pair myself. Still, they won’t mind that, will they. Eh? Eh? Let’s just tuck it in. I tell you, they’ll think it’s Christmas when you walk in there. Right. Let’s have a look at you.’

  Sharon swung open the cupboard door again and Mary saw herself. She turned away quickly.

  ‘What’s the matter? Go on, look. Enjoy . . . That’s it. Don’t say I don’t look after you. You look a real cracker, you do. A real dish. I tell you, when we get you down the pub, they’re going to eat you alive.’

  It hadn’t been easy getting into the house, and it wasn’t easy getting out again.

  Sharon told Mary to be prepared to leave in a hurry. When they came down the stairs Mr Botham was already standing by the front door, his arms folded.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, young lady,’ he said. ‘You’re stopping home.’

  A half-hearted scuffle took place, and Mrs Botham limped down the passage to make her scandalized contribution. Mr Botham vowed that Sharon would not go through that door unless she stepped over his dead body. She went through it anyway, and Mary went with her.

  ‘Don’t go, Mary, for the love of God,’ cried Mrs Botham. ‘Don’t go with her! You’ll regret it . . .’

  Mary was pretty sure Mrs Botham was right. It all confirmed her suspicions about houses and homes. They were hard to get into; and once you were inside, it probably wasn’t a good idea to go out again.

  4 Bad Language

  The pub was a public house, one of those rare places where people could go without being asked. Appropriate care had therefore been taken to make things as hard on the senses as possible—or else everybody would come here, or else none of them would ever leave. There was a stale, malty, sawdust heat, and an elusive device to hurt the ears; the wall of sound came and went at you very cleverly, with deceptively brief intervals, never giving you time to rearrange your thoughts. Everything clamoured for exchange—the multi-coloured glass banked up high over its trench, the boxy machines with their clicking trapdoors, their conditions and demands. Even the air stung the eyes and made them cry. It had been full in there for quite a time but no one was ever turned away. In the tall and endlessly proliferating room people formed in laps and circles of power and exclusivity, sometimes opening to let another in and sometimes closing to let another out. They were all playing with what Mary knew to be fire.

  ‘Of course, I’m not a nymphomaniac or anything like that, you know,’ Sharon assured her, looking towards the door. ‘I think that’s such a silly word, don’t you? . . . Where are they? I mean, I just like a good time.’

  Time—she needed more and more of it as time went by. Sharon was known, valued and believed in here: she had credit. A few minutes of coy pleading at the bar secured her a Stingo every time. Mary was given one too, a fizzy black liquid so candidly hostile to the palate that after a few cautious sips she put it back on the table and left it alone. But Sharon couldn’t get enough of it; she seemed to like the way it slowed her down, and closed her eyes off behind their layer of time.

  ‘It puts me in the mood,’ she said. ‘No harm in that, is there? Jolly good luck to you, that’s what I say.’

  Mary found Sharon’s remarks more compelling than might be supposed. Harm, luck and time were precisely the sort of things she was keen to know more about. Sharon’s references to them were of course too intimate to be of much help, but they told Mary that language was out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and used by her. Each word she recognized gave her the sense of being restored, minutely solidified, as if damaged tissue were being welded back on to her like honey-cells. Even now she knew that language would stand for or even contain some order, an order that could not possibly subsist in anything she had come across so far—that shadow driving across a colourless wall, cars queueing in their tracks, the haphazard murmur of the air which gave pain when you tried to follow it with your mind . . . Reading might well hold the key to any order the world disclosed, Mary felt; and she was keen to exercise this new skill of hers. There wasn’t much to read in the public house. Only a few stark announcements of exchangeability, and one or two things like ‘YOU don’t have to be MAD to work here—but it HELPS!’ and ‘ALL RIGHT, so you’re difficult. WITH a little effort, you could be IMPOSSIBLE!’

  ‘Fuck. Whoops!’ said Sharon. ‘Beg pardon. Gone on my dress. Don’t usually use bad language. We all do it though, don’t we. We do, don’t we.’

  Sharon went to the bar again. She was gone quite a long time, but she came back without a new Stingo. She sat down heavily. ‘Fuck,’ she repeated. After a while, and with an expression of dignified appraisal, she began to contemplate Mary’s unattended glass. Her hand moved across the table. ‘I don’t know why it’s so dead in here,’ she said.

  Mary looked briefly round the room and listened to it. She wondered why people kept using that word fuck and its cognates quite so often. It wasn’t like all the other words, although the people who used it pretended that it was. And they used it so often that the air seemed to quack. In the centre of the room two men were pushing one another while several onlookers shouted encouragingly. But you could hardly hear them anyway. Mary thought: If this is what it’s like when it’s dead, what’s it going to be like when it’s alive?

  ‘I mean, but with some blokes,’ Sharon went on sadly, ‘well—it’s like electricity, isn’t it? Bigger than both of you, you know. I get that electricity thing with quite a few blokes. With most blokes, actually. Just lucky, I suppose. I—’ A harsh shout jumped from between Sharon’s lips. She had clamped a hand over her mouth, but just a second too late. ‘Ooh . . . Excuse me. I mean, I just like a good time. No harm in it. But they’re buggers sometimes, aren’t they Mary? The trouble is, and I’ve been with an awful lot of blokes, is that if you go with a lot of them they give you these diseases. You’re supposed to stop then. My trouble is—I can’
t! Why should I? I mean I’m a healthy young girl!’ Tears began to run unhindered down her cheeks. Mary wondered whether other people often just melted like this. Sharon sniffed and said, ‘When I was little I was going to be a nun when I grew up. My mum said I’d look lovely in a nun’s veil. I can, I mean it’s still—never too late, is it Mary? It’s never too late to change. And then you have all those years of happiness to look forward to, don’t you? Father Hoolihan was the only man who ever really understood me. I’m going to go and—There they are! Yoo-hoo, Jock! Jock, we’re over here!’

  Two men joined them, and Mary saw that she was in quite serious trouble. For one thing, it was instantly clear that Sharon was no longer on her side, if indeed she had ever been. Sharon had brought her as far as she was going to bring her, and now Mary was on her own again. Sharon wasn’t on Mary’s side any more. Sharon was on the other side.

  Not that the men weren’t sufficiently alarming in their own right. Lumpy Jock was tall and slow and much too big. His black hair was coated with wet light. Even though he said little, his mouth remained open at all times, the tongue idling on the lower teeth. It was hard to tell how much danger Jock contained. His companion, who went by the name of Trev, was an altogether more effective-looking unit. He was small and hard, packed tight into his clothes; he gave off a freckled, caramel sheen all over his body, a sheen just like his smell; and his hair was dirty orange with a nimbus of yellow where it caught the light. Trev was much closer to Mary than Jock was, and seemed intent on getting closer still. They both had an air of defiant self-neglect. And all their eyes were like Sharon’s eyes.