Other People by Martin Amis Page A

and the future. But she looked again and saw that Shakespeare's book, for instance, was much newer than Lawrence's, and that couldn't be right. No. Books were about other places.

    Where were they? How far did life stretch? It might go on for ever, or it might just stop dead a few corners away. There was a place across the river called the World's End. For a long while in Mary's mind this was the limit of life. (Similarly she once half-heard from the television that there was fighting in Kentish Town—with machine-guns and tanks. When she discovered that the fighting was actually taking place in Kurdistan, she didn't know how relieved to be about this.) She wondered where the end of the world was and what the world ended with—with mists, high barriers, or just the absence of everything. Would you die if you went there? Often she nauseated herself by sending her mind into the sky, past the bloated nursery-toys of the middle-air, ever upwards into the infinite limey blue. She knew a little about death now. She knew that it happened to other people, to every last one of them. It was a bad thing, obviously, and no one liked it; but no one knew how much it hurt, how long it lasted, whether it was the end of everything or the start of something else. It couldn't be that bad, Mary thought, if people did it all the time.
    With Gavin, with Mrs Botham, and sometimes alone, Mary walked the streets of London, London South, as far up as the River, as far down as the Common, carving a track of familiarity from the grid of ramshackle streets, eviscerated building-sites, and the caged sections of high-wire concrete. You needed to walk through somewhere seven times before it ceased to be frightening. Knowing other people helped, and Mary was getting to know quite a few of them these days. They waved at her as she moved past them in the streets, or talked in her direction when she went to the shops and exchanged money for goods under Mrs Botham's stern-eyed but unsystematic tutelage. Mary invested inordinate emotion in these routine sallies. A courtly particularity from the greengrocer could make her smile all afternoon; an unreturned glance from the milkman could bring the beginnings of tears to her eyes and sink the whole day in mist. At the newsagent's one morning Mary got briefly excited by all the magazines called things like People, Life, Woman and Time. But they weren't what she had hoped for. They were still all about other places instead.
    In shops everyone talked about money. Money had recently done something unforgiveable: no one seemed to be able to forgive money for what it had done. Mary secretly forgave money, however. It appeared to be good stuff to her. She liked the way you could save money as you spent it. Mary developed a good eye for bargains, especially in the supermarket where they openly encouraged you to do this anyway. Mrs Botham was always saying how much money Mary saved her. Pretty good going, she thought, considering that all she ever did was spend it. But Mrs Botham still couldn't find it in her heart to forgive money. She hated money; she really had it in for money. She would repetitively abuse money all day long.
    So on top of all this and one way or another, Mary learned a little about glass, desire, voodoo, peace, lotteries, libraries, labyrinths, revenge, fruit, kings, laughter, despair, drums, difference, castles, change, trials, America, childhood, cement, gas, whales, whirlwinds, rubber, oblivion, uncles, control, autumn, music, enmity, time.

    Life was good, life was interesting. Only one thing worried her, and that was sleep.
    'Good night,' said Gavin, still panting rhythmically from the fifty press-ups he always did last thing.
    'I hope so,' said Mary.
    'You—why do you always say that? I hope so.'
    'Well I do. I hope they're going to be all right. They haven't been good so far.'
    'What, you have nightmares, do you?'
    'Yes, I think that's what I have.'
    She had expected sleep to be ordered and