Ali Smith - There But For The

One year, when it was nearly the day, she told herself she’d speak.

But when he came, she couldn’t say anything.

All she could say was, Are you all right, then, son?

Fine thanks, Mrs. Young, how are you?

What else could he say? What else could they say?

I don’t know how else, I don’t see how else I could have been about it.

There had been nothing to do but put an extra biscuit on the side of his saucer, and tell him they were the luxury biscuits, and make sure he ate it, which he did.

She said all these things not out loud but in the confines of her own head.

For when May thought of her youngest child she saw her pure, fixed in time at the age of ten, no older, and enthralled thin-armed thin-legged on the rug in front of a brand new television watching her favourite programme in colour for the first time. Her favourite programme was full of clean untouched kids, shiny from being born well after the war, and they all lived in a scrapyard full of old British junk and sang see you next week around the pole of an old London bus, and for the first time, a miracle, Jennifer saw the bus was bright red. For the first time the kids in her favourite programme ran about in unbelievable colour. They chased a little dog across a graveyard, they were trying to catch it for a lady in a sports car, and their colours were even more colourful against the graves and so on. The whole room smelled of new TV. Jennifer kept getting up and putting her nose to the place where the sound came out. I’m just smelling what colour smells like.

It was a blessing, thank God and all the angels, that Jennifer got to see colour before she went. Her brother and sister worked as a team for weeks, going through the new Radio Times every Thursday lunchtime at the dinner table and reading out the name of every single programme that had the sloped word Colour printed next to it; for weeks they did this, until May could stand it no longer and made Philip buy the new one, though the black and white one was still fine, went on working for years. But if Princess Anne was going to all the bother of getting married, the least they could do was make sure their children got to see history happen in colour.

All three of her children ran about in May’s head in colour turned up too-high, on a throbbing green lawn bordered with throbbing yellow roses. They ran between the front garden and the back, appearing and disappearing from view like it was they themselves, running about like that, that gave grass and roses colour in the first place. It was a time when the smell of your clean child in your arms was a sort of dream smell, like when lime trees threw their scent ahead of themselves so you walked through it and by the time you reached the tree itself there was no smell left at all.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, though, remember the smell in Patrick’s house when he moved in with Ingrid! He must have no nose on him, Philip said when he and May came home from theirs with their own clothes all strange-smelling from the hippy burning sticks she had smoking away all over the flat. May had had to hang the clothes they’d been wearing out the back windows to air them and get the smell of it out afterwards. Ingrid was mad as a box of jackdaws, believed that God was in her crystals, and she kept them all arranged inside a cabinet. As if God was in a crystal and you should worship a bit of rock.

Well, there’s definitely no God in that church you made us go to for years, Patrick said once.

Well, he was angry they’d been rude to his wife.

And he’d not gone to the church himself, not for years, not since Jennifer. Well, that was definitely understandable. I’d have believed in God if God’d done something about it, Patrick said. But who or what lifted even a finger? Who sees the sparrow fall? Nobody. It just falls. She just went. Nobody saw. There’s nobody there to see.

God is present everywhere, Mrs. Young, the young soft priest who’d just come to the church after the old Canon left, and who didn’t know her from a million, said to her on the church steps. God is in everything.

Well, was God in the way there was no controlling your own bladder, your own bowels, any more?

Oh, it was blasphemous. She’d never get to the afterlife thinking a thought like that.

But was God in the way they told you Harbour House, when well enough so that you knew, by that, that something had made them blind to you? God was nothing more than a rhythm repeating itself in an old stone building. That’s what God was in, if God was in anything.

Was God in the eye of that rabbit?

Well, you, you can just go and get lost.

Well, we’re all just a heap of cut flowers on the ground at the end of the day.

Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking legs! is what Philip used to say.

Well, some go younger than others, it’s true.

Well, I’ve had a much fairer innings than some that should’ve.

Was God in the eye of the January boy, the January man?

It was January now. It had been January for a few weeks.

May Young’s heart gave a start. Then it went twenty to the dozen.

No, it couldn’t be today, Jennifer’s day, because the boy, the man, hadn’t come.

But maybe he didn’t know where she was. Maybe he had gone to the house and knocked on the door and found that no one was there, and had no idea where she was.

Well, he’d ask a neighbour, wouldn’t he.

But what if something was wrong, something had happened to him?

No. If it was the day, she’d know, because he’d be here. He always came, without fail. Though just the once, he sent the postcard. But he always came. And he wasn’t here.

But that girl was here, in the chair.

May levelled her gaze at the girl.

She needed her glasses.

She lifted her hand. The old hand on the bed lifted. She sent it towards the locker top, where the glasses were. But it missed, she knocked the hand into them by mistake, as well as into several get-well cards, and the glasses fell with the cards off the locker on to the floor.

She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.

She lifted her hand. The old hand lifted and waved in the air.

The girl had her eyes shut.

May redirected her hand to the top of the locker. The hand came up against more cards from them all telling her to get well. It knocked them to the side. It found the box of tissues. It got its fingers into the open place, the hole where the tissues come out, and got a good grip on the box and got it over to the bed, there, and got an even better grip on it.

With all she had she made the old hand throw the box at the girl.

It worked! It hit her on the leg. The girl opened her eyes with a jolt and looked to see what had happened. She looked first at her leg and then at the box of tissues on its side at her feet and then at May in the bed.

What? she said.

May took a deep breath into the confines of her head. Then she did it. She opened her mouth. She spoke.

Look at all that hot water, running away like that.

It came out in a gravelly husk. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say at all.

Look at all the what? the girl said.

May tried again.

If someone had done the job right.

If someone had done the job, the girl said.

Wouldn’t be happening.

Nothing’s actually happening, the girl said. There’s no water. I don’t see any water.

May shook her head. The room swung.

They done the job wrong.

Okay, the girl said.

Terrible the waste.

The wrong things were coming out of her mouth by themselves. She shook her head at the girl again.

Okay, the girl said. We’ll sort it.

Where’s the cake?