Ali Smith - There But For The

But his name’s Miles, Mark said.

When the man heard that Mark had been at the original dinner party he got very excited.

Everybody’ll want to know this, he said. It’s like real contact. It’s the one thing. I mean, we even sent him up a laptop in the basket one day, but he sent it back. Untouched. We’re, like, starved, really. You’re, like, one degree of separation.

He went loping off to gather everybody in the camp together to come and hear Mark tell them what it was like to really know Milo. Mark took his chance and headed back towards the passageway between the houses.

Best if you go the other way, the child at his elbow said, because the TV people are at the front of the house now, filming the parking spaces.

Mark waved goodbye to the man. Forty people waved, shouted happy friendly goodbyes.

He asked the child to take him to a cash machine. He withdrew a hundred pounds.

For the treasurer, he said. Or give it to that nice Scottish lady. Keep it safe. Ten for yourself for being the messenger, what do you say?

No thank you, Mr. Palmer, the child said. I’m not needing any money.

The child waved him down the escalator at the DLR.

Regards to your parents, he called up as he went.

Regards to yours too, the child called back.

But

(my dear Mark)

as promised

is very occasionally a preposition but is mostly a conjunction, and the word conjunction, according to my Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, means:

connection

union

combination

simultaneous occurrence in space and timea word that connects sentences, clauses and words one of the aspects of the planets, when two bodies have the same celestial longitude or the same right ascension

A conjunctiva is a [unreadable word] of the front of the eye, covering the external surface of the cornea and the inner side of the eyelid.

A conjuncture is a combination of circumstances, esp one leading to a crisis.

But but?

And and?

(So simple.)

Conjunctions.

And conjunctions?

(So simple.)

The way things connect.

there was no more talking out loud now, and there wouldn’t be neither, not for any money, not for anybody.

May Young was old. You’ll always be “young” now you’ve married me, Philip had whispered in her ear at the altar, June 7, 1947. But she was no fool, she knew exactly how old she was. She knew it was January. She knew it was Thursday. She knew very well who the prime minister was, thank you very much. She knew plenty, no thanks to them. And here she was, in a bed that wasn’t hers, now don’t go getting ideas, she didn’t mean anything funny by it, ha ha. She looked down and saw the thing, plastic bangle-shape thing round her wrist. 13.12.25. No date for the other yet. So there we are, chum. Proof. Still here.

But oh dear Jesus Mary and Joseph, was that thing there really hers, that old woman’s rough raw wrist there, coming out of the end of the sleeve of a nightie May didn’t know? Well, not intimately she didn’t. Imagine not knowing the very clothes you’re in. Finding yourself in pink when you wouldn’t be seen dead in pink. Finding yourself in a colour you’d never’ve said yes to in a million. Not even if you’d been in the dark. Old age doesn’t come its lone: old saying of her long-gone mother up with the angels since October ’64. Well, no, mother, old age didn’t come its lone, for look at this, it brought a whole other person with it, a stranger whose wrists were old, who wore pink when you’d never have chosen pink and anyone who knew the first thing about you would never have put you in pink.

Well, but it was sore enough, that wrist on the bed, to be her own wrist, no stranger’s wrist after all, there where the plastic bit into it. That’s how you knew it was you and nobody else, then, was it, when things were sore? She lifted a hand. Or, an old hand that looked like it belonged to some other body, an old body, lifted, and it nearly did what she asked of it, it wavered, it took its time about it, it felt its way, missed its target, came at it anew, if at first you don’t succeed, and in the end it got one of its raw old red fingers in between the plastic that had her date on it and the skin under it and look! look at that! it was so tight! there was hardly room for a finger between this here and that there.

So it was no wonder it hurt like it did.

She did not say any of this out loud. She said it within the confines of her head.

The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, confines, and the heart. The heart has its reasons. That was a book, the what was it, name of it, the name of the book, the book that lay around the house for years, one of Eleanor’s, it was Eleanor with her airs even when she was a child, liked all that royal and history stuff. It had a picture of the old duchess, the American, on it, the divorcée, some cheap thing. Not the duchess, the book. Though the duchess come to think of it had been a bit of a cheap thing too it was widely thought, and she married the king and he abdicated. They liked the Germans. They were right old German lovers, them two. Not that May had anything against Germans. On the contrary, she had met some when they came to the house on the exchanges with the school and so on when the girls and Patrick were young, and they had been very nice the Germans in reality.

The head has its coffins.

It’s not the coff that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you offin.

!

May made herself laugh with that.

Out loud?

No, it wasn’t out loud. It hadn’t been out loud, any of it. She could tell because of that girl.

What girl?

That girl there, the girl in the room, that girl sitting on the big raised chair the visitors sat in.

Who was she, then, that girl?

She wasn’t family.

She was just some girl.

Even without her glasses May knew she didn’t know her, couldn’t place her face, not in a million.

Well, whoever she was she hadn’t looked up, hadn’t even blinked nor nothing and she would have looked up if May’d been spouting away out loud.

Good.

Though she might, the girl, be wearing one of the things they wear, in their ears, they all wear them now, so they can’t hear anything but themselves and their insides, and even then they can’t hear themselves think. And if she was wearing one of them things she’d not have heard if May spoke or laughed or did anything out loud, so it’d not make any difference whether it was out loud or no.

She was wearing next to no clothes, that girl. She was more skin than clothes.

May turned her head.

Outside the window it was snow.

They were all mad as foxbitten dogs, the girls of today.

It was proper snow, that.

It was real old-fashioned winter outside this room. These last days there was more often snow than birds in the sky out that window.

No one to love me and nowhere to go. Out in the cold cold snow.

May sang this inside the confines of her head in a pretend old crone of a voice.

That made her laugh.

She turned her head back from the window again.

No, she was not dead.

She was not dead yet.

Well, but we’ve all got to go in the end.

Well, but there’s no getting away from it.

Well, what’s for us won’t go by us.

Well, Patrick held out the ten-pound note to me, out of his wallet, and I told him, I said, what would I be needing any money for? I’m on the last day of my holidays.

Well, that was the very last thing I said out loud, and the very last thing I ever will.