Other People by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page B

know what queers are like.
    Soon, Mary will know too. She will learn fast here, I'm sure. The Bothams were just what she needed. She isn't alarmed by them and, more importantly, they aren't alarmed by her.
    Mrs Botham is in fact alone in her conviction that Mary is an amnesiac—hence her constant spearheading of this unpopular view. Gavin, who spends more time with her than the others, has vaguely formed the opinion that she must be somehow retarded: Mary had the mind, he thought, of an unusually bright, curious and systematic twelve-year-old (she would be very clever when she grew up, he often found himself thinking). Mr Botham, finally, and for various potent reasons of his own, is secretly under the apprehension that Mary is quite normal in every respect. Granted, Mr Botham is something of an enigma. A lot of people—neighbours and so on, Mary, perhaps you yourself—assume that he must be a man of spectacularly low intelligence. How else has he managed to live with an alcoholic for thirty years? The answer is that Mr Botham himself has been an alcoholic for twenty-nine of them. That's why he has stuck to Mrs Botham's side during all these years when she's been drunk all the time: he's been drunk all the time.
    But Mary will gain ground fast now. If you ever make a film of her sinister mystery, you'll need lots of progress-music to help underscore her renovation at the Bothams' hands ... Ironically, she enjoys certain advantages over other people. Not yet stretched by time, her perceptions are without seriality: they are multiform, instantaneous and random, like the present itself. She can do some things that you can't do. Glance sideways down an unknown street and what do you see: an aggregate of shapes, figures and light, and the presence or absence of movement? Mary sees a window and a face behind it, the grid of the paving-stones and the rake of the drainpipes, the way the distribution of the shadows answers to the skyscape above. When you look at your palm you see its five or six central grooves and their major tributaries, but Mary sees the numberless scratched contours and knows each of them as well as you know the crenellations of your own teeth. She knows how many times she has looked at her hands—a hundred and thirteen at the left, ninety-seven at the right. She can compare a veil of smoke sliding out of a doorway with a particular flourish of the blanket as she strips her bed. This makes a kind of sense to her. When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable.
    Mary always knows what time it is without having to look. And yet she knows hardly anything about time or other people.
    • • •
    But she was gaining ground fast now.
    She got to know her body and its hilly topography—the seven rivers, the four forests, the atonal music of her insides. By watching Mr Botham, who did it often and expressively, she learned to blow her nose. Her body ceased to surprise her. Even the first glimpse of lunar blood left her unharrowed. Mrs Botham talked constantly about these things and Mary was prepared for almost any disaster. (Mrs Botham was obsessed by her grisly torments during what she ominously called 'the Change'. The Change didn't sound worth having to Mary and she hoped it wouldn't get round to her for a long time to come.) She told Mrs Botham about the blood, and Mrs Botham, in her unembarrassable way, told Mary what she had to do about it. It seemed an ingenious solution. On the whole, yes, Mary was quite pleased with her body. Gavin himself, who was a body-culture expert, announced that she had a good one, apart from her triceps. Conversely Mary didn't think that Gavin's body was all it was built up to be— Gavin, with his dumb-bells, his twanging chest-flexers and his stinking singlets. But she assumed he must know what he was talking about. There were many really bad bodies round where they lived, with bits missing or added, or twisted or stretched. So Mary was pleased with hers; and it was