‘I said—hey, Baldie!’
‘Yes,’ said Alan, tensed down over his desk.
Russ surged up behind Mary, so close that she could feel the pleasant hum of his force field, and, extending one arm artistically, toppled a skeleton of white plates into her sink. Mary turned to him and smiled. Mary had never met anyone quite like Russ before. But then Mary had never met anyone quite like anyone before.
‘Well looky here,’ murmured Russ, applying his fat lips to Mary’s bare neck. In the kitchen she wore her hair up, on old Mrs Garcia’s disdainful advice. Abruptly Russ backed off, dropping his head and raising his arms like someone embarrassed by a round of unwarranted applause.
‘No. No,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t get your hopes up. I’ve caused enough artbreak in my time to know better than that.’ He came forward again, rubbing an erect forefinger behind his ear. ‘You see, girl, I’m not sure you’re good-looking enough for my taste. On the whole, I like um a bit better-looking than you. Oh God, don’t cry, Mary! Oh God, please don’t cry!’ Mary nearly always did want to cry when he told her not to. He said it so seriously. ‘Hang on, though, eh girl? No arm in hoping, is there? You never know your luck, if the weather stays this hot. Here, I’ll tell you something: I wouldn’t mind murdering you. You’re well worth murdering, I’ll give you that.’
Mary didn’t say anything. You didn’t have to. Russ talked about murdering girls quite often, and so casually that Mary was beginning to wonder whether it was such a serious business after all. In Russ’s scale of things, it was better for a girl to be worth murdering than not worth murdering. ‘Not even worth murdering’ was the worst you could possibly say about a girl, and Mary was relieved that she wasn’t thought to be that bad.
Russ wheeled out into the centre of the room. ‘Fuck off, darling,’ he yelled, addressing the air now and deftly removing a comb from the seat of his jeans, ‘you only look like Brigitte Bardot!’ He arched backwards in front of the dusty mirror on the wall—then buckled and jumped away as if invisible hands were snatching at his belt. ‘Leave it out, Sophia,’ he said in hardened warning. He straightened up. ‘Aah!’ He buckled again. He clawed at the phantom that was riding on his back. ‘Aah! Raquel! Will you—get off my—bloody—’ He flipped the phantom over his shoulder and on to the floor, where he gave it a good jabbing with his foot. Mollified, he corrected the shape of his jeans and leant back in front of the mirror again. ‘Gor, all this air,’ he said, patting and teasing it with both hands. ‘Where’s it all come from is what I want to know. You know,’ he said, turning to Mary and wagging the comb at her, ‘you know what’s really crippling me? You know where all my money goes? Onna haircuts! It does, I swear. Cheryl says let it grow but Farrah says she likes it short. What you reckon, Mary?’
‘Russ,’ said Alan.
Russ went on combing his hair. ‘What can I do for you, Baldie?’
‘I’m going to bloody murder you one of these days,’ said Alan in his cracked, uncertain voice. He added nervously, ‘You fat swine.’
‘Oh don’t do that, Al. Don’t murder me, please. Old me up, somebody,’ he drawled, ‘me knees are quaking. Fat? Fat?’ He sprang backwards, his hands flat on his stomach. ‘There’s not an ounce of surplus weight on this superb specimen. If I’m so fat, ow come all these film stars are after me? Eh? Eh? They’re not after you, are they, oh no. You know why? Because baldness disgusts them. That’s why.’
‘Russ,’ said Alan, and shut his eyes.
‘Hang on though, Al, you’ve got a point. My dick. Now my dick is a bit on the fat side. No go on, I admit it. The film stars, they’re always saying to me—Russ baby, I’m crazy bout you Big Boy, but your—’
‘Russ,’ said Alan. ‘What you want. Eh?’
Russ glanced at Alan, who now stood palely in his alcove doorway, and then at the clock above Mary’s head. It was ten to six. ‘Oh yeah,’ said Russ. ‘Old Pedro Paella out there says he wants the invoices in early tonight.’
‘By when?’
‘Before six, I think he said.’
‘Bloody hell Russ,’ said Alan as he ducked back to his desk.
Whistling piercingly and straightening the waistband of his jeans, Russ strolled back to Mary’s side. He fell silent. Slowly he curled an arm round her waist. Nodding to himself, he watched as Mary cleaned a plate, and another, and another. ‘Here, are you still taking me for a drink Saturday night?’ he whispered hoarsely.
Mary nodded.
‘I must have your solemn promise: you’re not going to try and get me drunk or anything, are you. You’re not going to try nothing.’
‘I promise.’
‘That’s my good girl. Here.’ He placed a finger under her chin and swivelled her head round to face his. He looked at her for a long time with a humourless, evaluating frown. ‘You know, maybe you are good-looking enough for me. Maybe I would look good on you. Maybe you are in my class . . .’ He went on staring at her for a few more seconds, then closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re not. You’re not.’
Russ walked out through the blatting swing-doors. Mary got back to her washing-up. Alan worked in quiet frenzy over his desk for nine minutes, then trotted out himself. Soon he returned. Mary didn’t have to look round to know it was Alan. His force field was quite different from Russ’s human heat. It was made up of yearning and apology and vast tentativeness. For a moment she felt the air move behind her, as if Alan now writhed in elaborate gestures, gestures of beckoning and supplication, but she knew it was just his eyes all swarming across her back.
* * *
After fifty hours of her presence Alan has fallen in love with Mary, I’m afraid. I’m sorry to say it, but it’s true. Well, it is. Russ is harder to fathom. His force field gives off more opposition every way. But Alan has fallen. He thinks about Mary all the time. Everything she does hurts his heart.
If you asked him when it happened, he’d say it happened at first sight. At first sight he loved her face, the squashy pinkness of her lips, the volume of her brilliant black hair, the eyes and their flicker of sensitive expectancy. He loved the way she stood nodding with her arms folded, and kept saying yes to old Mr Garcia, and really didn’t mind about all the washing-up. He loved the way she set to work without giving Russ much of her time—he was capering about as usual . . . Alan has fallen. Even the grim psychodrama of hair-loss has become a mere subplot in the heroic poem of his thoughts (Can Mary Love A Completely Bald Man?). He thinks about Mary all the time. Time and Mary are the same thing. She hurts his heart. He fears she may be out of his class: he may be right. Pallid Alan is very, very worried.
And so am I. Love. In love. Falling in love with other people. Are you in love, is it love, are you falling? If you fall, you might take a smash, you might break. Fall, but don’t smash. Don’t break! And don’t listen to the word—just don’t fall for it. Love is only the most you can feel, that’s all love is. Never let anyone tell you that what you feel isn’t love (don’t fall for that one) if it’s the most you can feel. Love is nothing by itself. Love is nothing without you there to feel it.
You know what I wish? I wish Mary knew more about sex. Why? Because it takes time to learn. It’s the one thing you can’t learn without time.
* * *
Mary loved her job.
She loved the way everybody knew everybody else, the familiar acknowledgments of morning and evening, the sense of inclusion and with it the sense of time made lighter, the summer angles of the sun on the wiped dishes.
‘Now here is my Mary,’ old Mr Garcia would say in the cramped cloakroom by the front door. Old Mr Garcia was so bad at talking that he often seemed to say things like ‘Ow are you to die?’ or ‘What has Mary got to sigh’; but he meant her no harm. On the contrary, he would often gently reassure her by stroking her hips and backside or by meditatively massaging her breasts with the palms of his hands. He did this in a stooped, incurious fashion, chuckling contentedly to himself, and Mary always smiled at him most warmly before haste
ning into the low hall of the café.
Old Mrs Garcia would already be busy behind her counter, while languid Antonio was invariably dozing or actually asleep in some shadowed nook he had curled himself up in. Sometimes he slept on a line of chairs or, more candidly, flat out like a child on one of the tables in the back. Today he stood slumped over the pie-warmer, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He looked at her with a sly smile. Mary wondered why Mr Garcia and young Antonio liked looking at her so much. They liked looking at her so much that they even liked looking at her when she was in the lavatory. They had a tiny hole in the wall which both of them used. Mary was intrigued that they should both like looking at her during such unsavoury and generally rather regrettable moments. One day, on consecutive visits, she said hello and addressed them by name. They stopped looking at her then. After that, they didn’t like looking at her at all, not for a while anyway. But they were getting friendlier now, and getting to like looking at her again.
‘Eh Mary, puta tonta—vente a cocina, eh!’ shouted the colourful Mrs Garcia, busy as she was, and Mary hurried eagerly past.
Then she would slide through the slack swing-doors, into her place—and there would be Alan, flinching over the desk in his alcove, and there would be Russ, sprawled in extravagant indolence on his chair by the sink.
‘Morning Mary,’ Alan would lean back and say, peering up at her through his wan lashes, and giving the words equal weight, as if they were interchangeable, a secret shared by only Alan and her.
‘“La Lollo” they call her,’ Russ would then fairly typically begin. ‘I don’t blame them either. She lalolloed me flat last night. “Gina,” I kept saying. “Not again, eh? Do us a favour? Three o’clock I’m due up Park Lane. The Dunaway bitch.” But she wouldn’t listen, not her. No don’t touch me Mary! Not yet!’
At the stroke of eight Russ would slide up from his chair and enter the inner sanctum of the scullery, with its sizzling terrors of rayburn and microwave. Old Mr Garcia stuck his head through the hatch and started calling out the first orders of the day. Mary ferried the slippery plates from Russ’s counter to Mr Garcia’s tray, and took the rubbled returns back to her own waiting sink. Mr Garcia trundled back and forth unsmilingly into the growing rumours of the café. Sometimes he would say, ‘Mary, the bacon toast—you bring it’, or ‘You bring the steak salad, Mary’, or ‘You bring it, Mary—the treacle custard’, and Mary would bring it, straightening her apron and patting her hair before moving out into the café’s noisy limelight. Nearly all her hours were spent over the sink, erasing from white plates the many kinds of blood lost by food. After the breakfast clamour subsided into mid-morning, Russ would come from his cauldron to help her with the drying-up. And after the two-hour panic of lunch even Alan would leave his pads and clips and spikes to stand beside her rolling up his sleeves. That was the pinnacle of Mary’s day, when the three of them were round her sink. Sociable flies weaved their fishing-nets in the air. ‘Jesus, these fucking flies,’ Russ would complain, dancing backwards from the sink and uselessly batting the air. ‘What’s the bloody point of them, that’s what I want to know.’ Mary, who moreover knew several of them by sight, wasn’t worried by flies. She knew what the point of flies was.
How readily the world had spanned out to accommodate her. Really the main thing about life was its superabundance: there was so much of it, and always room for more inside. The girls of the exhausted Hostel, even the ones with jobs or men, suffered bitterly at the hands of boredom. They said that life itself was boring, life was dead. But surely the terror lay the other way, the loosening of the mind at the thought of all that life contained.
And when the present became too populous you could always look to the skies and their more idealized fortunes. There variety itself was abstract. On the way to work in the morning, the sky looked like heaven. On the way back to the Hostel in the evening, the sky looked like hell. At morning the white beings rode the blue vault in yachts and galleons, showing all their sail, or they smugly sunbathed with their arms tucked behind their heads, in heavenly peace and freedom. Later, and obedient to the iconography of evening, they lost their outlines in the hellish cliff face of the west, forming a steep red fault into the chaotic night.
This was on good days, of course. On bad days Mary felt saddened and battered by the thought of the things she might have done in her life—and anyway the clouds came then, and you couldn’t see the creatures at all.
10 Good Elf
One morning Mary carried a trayful of heaped plates to the quartet of incredibly old cabbies who always liked to sit by the window near the door. They were nice to her, these old men, they were nice; not bad going, Mary thought, to be nice after forty years of boxed rage. Also to their credit, she supposed, was the fact that they all still looked like men. Women of this age didn’t look like women. Women of this age looked like men: they had given up the ghosts of their femininity. Perhaps life was just extra hard on women, or perhaps being a man was the more natural state, to which women were obliged to revert in the end, despite all their struggles.
It was a good morning. It was payday. Tonight she would go out drinking with the boys. Something else pleased her even more. The previous afternoon she had finally managed to ask the boys if they had any books she could borrow and read. ‘Books?’ they said in startled unison, and Mary thought she had made a mistake. They went on muttering about it all afternoon—‘books . . . books! . . . books . . .’ But this morning they had come with books, three each, and they said Mary could have them for as long as she liked. Alan had brought her Life at the Top, Kon-Tiki and Management: An Introduction. Russ had brought her Sex in the Cinema, Inside Linda Lovelace and Britt. Tomorrow was Sunday, and she would have time to start reading them.
As Mary did her automatic half-curtsy and began to slide the dishes on to the table, she heard, from behind,
‘Hello, Mary.’
Unable to turn, Mary hesitated. One of the cabbies reached for his plate and said, ‘That’s me, my love.’ Many people called her Mary by now. But she knew who this was.
‘It’s not far enough, Mary,’ he said.
She turned. It was Prince. He was sitting there with his chair leaning backwards against the wall. She noticed again how effortless and alert he was, compared to all these other people, how in control, how in tune, with his newspaper, his cup of coffee, his cigarette.
‘Hello. What’s not far enough?’ said Mary.
‘Me? I didn’t say anything,’ he said.
‘Yes you did. You said it’s not far enough. I heard you.’
‘You’ve got big ears, haven’t you Mary,’ said Prince interestedly.
‘What?’ said Mary, blushing.
‘And you’re nosey too.’
‘Well you’ve got a completely square head.’
‘Don’t be cheeky.’
‘What?’ said Mary, lifting a hand to her face. Her cheek was certainly very warm.
‘You’re all lip, you are.’
‘What?’
‘All mouth.’
‘. . . Well I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t cry, you fathead.’
‘I’ve got a thin head,’ said Mary.
He laughed and said, ‘Oh boy—I’m going to have a lot of fun with you, I really am.’
‘Mary!’ called Mr Garcia. ‘I say bring the poached egg toast!’
Mary was about to hurry away but Prince reached out and took her by the wrist. Mr Garcia saw him then and said quickly,
‘It’s okay. It’s okay, Mary.’
‘Sit down,’ said Prince. ‘Mary, Mary Lamb—that name kills me.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘Who you are—that’s the first thing I want to find out. Who are you? Eh? Eh? Are you Amy Hide?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mary.
‘She was quite a girl, Amy.’
Mary looked down. ‘Oh God, I hope it isn’t true,’ she said.
‘The things she did.’
; ‘I, I want forgiveness.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Yes.’
He laughed again. ‘I can’t get enough of this,’ he said. ‘But let’s be serious for a while. I’m in a hell of a position actually. And so are you. You be straight with me and I’ll be straight with you. Let’s get our story straight. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ said Mary.
‘Now. Some people have been working on the assumption that Amy Hide came to a sticky end.’
‘Did she?’
‘Apparently very sticky, yes. Mind you, she was cruising for a bruising all along. And yet, and yet—here you still are.’
‘If it’s me.’
‘If it’s you.’ He took a piece of paper from the inside pocket of his overcoat. ‘I’ve got something for you, an address.
‘Home, perhaps,’ he said, and stood up. Cigarette smoke came like spectral tusks from his nostrils. ‘Why don’t you go and find out, Mary?’ he said.
Mary looked down at the address—Mr and Mrs Hide and where they lived.
‘Be in touch,’ he said.
Mary watched him amble out into the street. A black car swooped down and he got into it. ‘He knows about me,’ Mary murmured as she walked up the vault of the crowded café.
‘Is the feeling of self-loavin I can’t bear. Inna mornins. Used again. I’m just a bloody pushover, I am. I’m just bloody anybody’s—providing they’re film stars, I’m a cinch. Open me eyes, and there’ll be Mia or Lisa or Bo or Elke, Nastassia, Sigourney, Imogen, or Julie or Tuesday or Cheryl or Meryl. Hah! It’s not my mind they’re after—I know that, mate, don’t worry! Take you now, Mary—’
‘Ah fuck off, Russ,’ drawled Alan. They had both got much worse at talking over the last half-hour.
‘No, come on. This is serious. Mary. You see someone like me, dirty great unk like me, the tight T-shirt and the jeans and all, all the equipment. It says only one thing to you now dunnit? S, E, X. Come on, it does dunnit?’
‘Russ,’ said Alan.