Ali Smith - Girl Meets Boy

Midge, my sweet fierce cynical heart, our grandfather says. You’re going to have to learn the kind of hope that makes things history. Otherwise there’ll be no good hope for your own grand truths and no good truths for your own grandchildren.

My name’s Imogen, Midge says and gets down off his knee.

Our grandmother stands up.

Your grandfather likes to think that all the stories in the world are his to tell, she says.

Just the important ones, our grandfather says. Just the ones that need the telling. Some stories always need telling more than others. Right, Anthea?

Right, Grandad, I say.

Yeah, right, Midge had said. And then you went straight outside and threw a stone at the kitchen window, do you remember that?

She pointed at the window, the one right there in front of us now, with its vase of daffodils and its curtains that she’d gone all the way to Aberdeen to get.

No, I said. I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember any of it. All I remember is something about Blind Date and there always being toast.

We both stared at the window. It was the same window, but different, obviously, nearly fifteen years different. It didn’t look like it could ever have been broken, or ever have been any different to how it was right now.

Did it break? I said.

Yeah, it broke, she said. Of course it broke. That’s the kind of girl you were. I should have told them to put it into your Pure psychology report. Highly suggestible. Blindly rebellious.

Ha, I said. Hardly. I’m not the suggestible one. I nodded my head towards the front of the house. I mean, who went and bought a motorbike for thousands of pounds because it’s got the word REBEL painted on it? I said.

That’s not why I bought it, Midge said and her neck up to her ears went as red as the bike. It was the right price and the right shape, she said. I didn’t buy it because of any stupid word on it.

I began to feel bad about what I’d said. I felt bad as soon as it came out of my mouth. Words. Look what they can do. Because now maybe she wouldn’t be able to get on that bike in the same innocent way ever again and it would be my fault. I’d maybe ruined her bike for her. I’d definitely annoyed her, I knew by the way she pulled rank on me with such calm, told me I’d better not be late, and told me not to call her Midge at work, especially not in front of Keith. Then she clicked the front door shut behind her with a quietness that was an affront.

I tried to remember which one at Pure Keith was. They all looked the same, the bosses with their slightly Anglified accents and their trendily close-shaved heads. They all looked far too old for haircuts like that. They all looked nearly bald. They all looked like they were maybe called Keith.

I heard her taking the cover off and folding it neatly, then I heard her get on the bike, start it up and roar out of the drive.

Rebel.

It was raining. I hoped she’d go easy in the rain. I hoped her brakes were good. It had rained every day here since I’d got back, all eight days. Scottish rain’s no myth, it’s real all right. I ain’t got nothing but rain, baby, eight days a week. The rain it raineth every day. When that I was and a little tiny girl, with a hey, ho, the wind and the rain.

Yes, because that was another thing that made Midge furious when we were little tiny girls, that he was always changing the words to things. If you can keep your head when all about you. Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken. If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew. If you can fill the unforgiving minute. With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it. And — which is more — you’ll be a woman, my daughter NO NO NO GRANDAD IT DOESN’T RHYME she used to squeal, she used to stand on the linoleum right there, where the new parquet was now, and shout in a kind of amazing rage, don’t change it! you’re changing it! it isn’t right! it’s wrong! I had forgotten that too. Amazing rage, how sweet the sound. And Midge, can I have that book? You can if you say the magic word, what’s the magic word? Imogen was the magic word. Midge, can I finish your chips? Midge, can I borrow your bike? Midge, will you say it was you who broke it? I will if you say the magic word, what’s the magic word? Something about Midge had changed. Something fundamental. I tried to think what it was. It was right in front of my eyes and yet I couldn’t quite see it.

They’d had a teak coffee table. I remembered now how proud they’d been about it being made of teak. God knows why. Was teak such a big deal? The teak coffee table was long gone. All their things had gone. I had no idea where. The only real sense of the two of them still here came from the way the light fell through the same glass of the front door, and the framed photo Midge’d put on the wall next to where the dinette door used to be.

Dinette. What a word. What a long-gone word, a word sunk to the bottom of the sea. Midge had knocked through the walls of the dinette into the living room to make one huge room. She had had central heating put in. She’d knocked through from the bathroom into the littlest bedroom where I used to sleep on the Saturday nights we stayed here, to make a bigger bathroom; now there was a bath where my single bed had been. She’d tarmacked over the front garden where our grandmother used to have her roses and her pinks. Now Midge’s bike was kept there.

They looked old in the photo, I could see that now. They looked like two old people. Their features were soft. He looked smooth, sweet-faced, almost girlish. She looked strong, clear-boned, like a smiling young man from some Second World War film had climbed inside an older skin. They looked wise. They looked like people who didn’t mind, who were wise to how little time was left. Come in boat number two, your time is up. Five years ago they went on holiday to Devon. They bought a trimaran at a boating shop on a whim, and they sent our father a note. Dear son, gone to see the world, love to the girls, back soon. They sailed off on their whim. They’d never been sailing in their lives.

Wise fools. They’d sent us postcards from the coasts of Spain and Portugal. Then the postcards stopped. Two years ago our father came up north and put up a headstone in the cemetery above their empty plot, the plot they bought before we were born, with their names and a photo on it, the same photo I was looking at now, and the words on the stone under the trees, next to the canal, in among the birdsong and the hundreds of other stones, above the empty square of earth, were ROBERT AND HELEN GUNN BELOVED PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS LOST AT SEA 2003.

On the backs of the dolphins. Acquainted with the waves.

Then he gave the house to us, if we wanted it. Midge moved in. Now I was here too, thanks to Midge. Now I had a job too, thanks to Midge.

I didn’t particularly want to be thankful to Midge.

But I was home, I had a home here in Inverness, thanks to Midge. Well, thanks to the two of them , full fathom five, seaweed swaying round their unbound bones shifting on the sand of the seabed. Was the seabed dark? Was it cold? Did any light get down there from the sun? They’d been kidnapped by sirens, ensnared by Scylla and Charybdis. Cilla and Charybdis. That was what had got me thinking about Blind Date. That was why I’d remembered what little I hadn’t completely forgotten of those Saturdays, the Saturday toast, the Saturday television. That, and the fixed and fluid features on the wall, of the old, the wise.

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper when it came to the meaning of ‘I’, I mean deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of ‘I’ existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile. And what would poor Anthea do then, poor thing?