Free Other People by Martin Amis Page A

lay panting in the parched gutter. Ants weaved up from the cracks and over the planes of the uneven pavement. The fat white creatures of the sky loved it on days like this. They were all there. Not one of them had been left behind.
    Mary was looking for a job. She didn't know whether you found them by moving or by staying still. Where were they? Who gave them away? She had all this time to sell, but didn't know who might want to buy it. She thought about the jobs she had seen other people doing, and the special kinds of time they had to sell. They were all the masters of their conspiratorial skills. The grocer with his lumpy racks, the adroit swivel of his paper bag, the jerking, centipedic apparatus that dealt him money: but he had food to sell (layered like ammunition in a cave), as well as time. The bus-conductor, clambering through the day with his expert handholds, yelling news about his progress, unravelling his costly paper from the machine beside his moneybag: but as well as time he had the bus he shared with the man in front, and the travel they sold. Who paid the roadsweeper for his buckled back, the gladiatorial dustmen with their poles and shields, the policeman and his lucrative swagger? They all got paid by someone. It was only tramps who chose to waste their valuable time... When she walked the streets Mary often looked up at the spangled canyons and saw with a sense of glazed exclusion the people up there behind the high windows, all intent about the sky's business.

    Mary had lunch because lunch was what everybody had at that time. In the afternoons you could stay in the common-room so long as you stayed quiet. Girls wrote letters hunched over the table, or knitted things, or sat watching dust move. The day was already getting to them, reducing them to themselves, prying at their emptinesses ... You could read the books in the cupboard if you put them back. Mary read them all. The girls in the books in the cupboard were taunting parodies of the girls condemned to read them. Will Alexandra marry elderly Lord Brett or the young but unreliable Sir Julian? When Bettina goes to stay at Farnsworth, all the Boyd-Partingtons except Jeremy treat her shabbily until she saves little Oliver from drowning and turns out to be an heiress after all. Lonely lodges, postillions, horses ridden to death, forests, vows, tears, kisses, broken hearts, rowing-boats in the moonlight, happiness ever after. Like many stories, they ended when marriage came; but they couldn't make you care. They made you sure of something that other books made you only indifferently suspect: that stories were lies, imagined for money, time sold.
    Then at evening the girls gathered here and on the stairs and in their rooms. The talk was all about good luck and how they had never been given any. The talk was low. If only I hadn't, if they just didn't, if it only would. Some of them had been given babies by men and then had them taken away again by somebody else. They talked all the time about these babies who had passed through their hands, and about how, if they ever got them back or were given another one, they would treat them properly this time and never neglect them or have fights with them again. Some girls kept having fights with their men, and always losing. They bore the marks. Why would a man fight a woman? wondered Mary. He would always win; he wasn't fighting—he was just doing harm, doing damage. The girls talked about the men they had fought, some with fear and great hatred, some with languor, some with haggard wistfulness for this inconvenient but at least unmistakable form of attention, as if a black eye were a valued emblem among the spoken-for. Some were prostitutes, or were trying to be. Most of them weren't very good at it, apparently. They were prepared to offer their bodies to men for a certain price; but the men never thought the price was worth it. So they offered their bodies for nothing instead. Mary watched them closely, these