Ali Smith - There But For The

You want a cake? the girl said.

You hold it and I’ll cut it. Where’s the plates? Where’s the knife?

The girl put her phone thing down on the chair and went round to May’s locker. She opened the doors and rummaged around. She took out a pair of shoes and put them on the bed. She took out a jar of sweets.

I don’t see any cake. But I found these, she said.

She unscrewed its top. May opened her mouth like a child. The girl unwrapped a red sweet and put it in May’s mouth.

May nodded.

The girl took one too. She took the sweets with her and sat down again on the visitor’s chair. May sucked at the sweet. She nodded at the shoes on the bed.

Bad luck, that.

That was right. That was the first thing she’d said that’d come out right.

The girl got up, picked up the shoes again and put them on the floor under the bed.

I don’t like pink.

The girl listened.

See, we were all supposed to hate her, think her a bad lot. Because she ran away to America. But she had to, for her husband. In the war. Him being an Eytie from the Isle of Capri. And she didn’t run away. That was a lie. She did her songs. She made a fortune. Enough money for a hundred Spitfires, they said! And the head German. The head German.

Like, you mean, Hitler or something? the girl said.

No, no. Weasel, he was. Little weaselly face. She was singing in France. The war effort. He gave the order, he said they were to bomb her hotel. Send a message. But they didn’t get her.

Right, the girl said. In the war, yeah?

Yes, in the war! In Arras.

Is that a place? the girl said.

!

Ha ha!

The girl, amazed, sat in the visitor’s chair and watched May laugh.

(May Winch is home on leave, cycling home in the blackout from the dance and there’s no moon, but it’s okay because she knows where the potholes are, it’s like a game to miss the potholes and it’s a game she’s good at. But she rounds the corner on the stretch between the town and the village just past the crossroads where the signpost used to be and BANG the air itself becomes a wall, and oof she hits it, it all happens fast and slow, off the bike she comes and the bike goes one way and she goes the other, hits the ground side first, arm up to stop her head, then her knee and her thigh hit the road, and it takes her a jiffy to realize she’s cycled into a warm flank, an animal, there, she can hear it go, it’s run off too fast for a cow, must have been a horse, maybe a deer, the feet didn’t sound like a horse, nobody’s horse would be loose on the road like that. She sits herself up, feels her elbow, skinned, wet, bit of bleeding it feels like. She stands up, puts the weight on her knee. Fine.

She’s fine.

She bursts into tears.

She walks the rest of the way home shaking.

It was the dark taking a shape, going solid out of nowhere in front of her. It wasn’t like when the bomb hit the ball-bearing factory next door to the shop and she’d been blown across the room backwards and hit the wall behind her. That had been different. This had come out of nowhere and it had no sound, just the muffled thump of May being hit by the dark. The difference was that she’d just gone headlong with her eyes wide open into it, that she’d done it herself somehow, hit the dark.

When she gets to the fountain she gives her face a wash and dries it on her sleeves. At the front of the house she waits behind the hedge for a bit till she is calm, has sorted her face into the right face, for you need the right face to come into the house, for Frank, at sea, is already presumed, the word is, and has been for eight months.

Her mother comes into the hall. When she sees May her hands fly up to her face.

I’m fine! May says. Me and my bike hit a deer on the road. Fell on my arras.

That gets her upstairs without too much fuss, where she has a look at her elbow and her knee and they’re not too bad.

The next day she’s sore all over and the elbow is giving her gyp.

She walks back along the road and finds the bicycle, in the long grass in the ditch, and it’s fine. She gets back on it. It goes fine, it’s fine.)

He took me to London once, Frank did.

Who? the girl said.

On the Underground trains. The smell of all the dirty wool. I was only small, mind.

Right, the girl said.

I’m all washed up, me.

Seem like you’re doing fine to me, the girl said.

Dog-tired. Been on the late shift.

Fair enough, the girl said.

But it’s nice to be loved. Isn’t it nice to be loved.

Telling me, the girl said and her face went sad.

The eyes of the men after war. Like rabbits in headlights. We all were. All them who never came back. All them going up into the air and then not coming down. A line through the name in the morning, Philip told me. And that was that. Well, we came through, Philip and me. And it was behind us, and we got married, got a family, got a new house, brand new. Never a house there before. Even the mud in the garden. Listen! Brand new mud.

But that girl sitting there in the visitor’s chair wasn’t listening, had a long face on her now. May lifted a hand. An old hand in front of her lifted in the air, wavered, then came down proper hard in a fist on the woollen blanket.

Cheer up, you!

(Jennifer comes into the kitchen. She is fourteen. She has the usual sullen face on. It is a summer evening and May is at the machine.

Jennifer, your shoulders, May says.

Yeah, because I’ll need a straight back when we all die in a nuclear holocaust, Jennifer says.

May presses the pedal down on the floor and guides the material through beneath the needle. Now Jennifer has opened the cupboard, taken the top off a Tupperware box and helped herself to a handful of sultanas. At least she is eating something.

If you’d eaten your tea, May says. I need those for the scones.

Jennifer used to be so perfectly dressed. She used to be a model child. These days she is pale and thin with a miserable long face on her and wears such terrible old scruffy-looking clothes and leaves her hair a mess. May is forever telling her. Cheer up, you! It is her age. Also, she is hanging around with girls who are too old for her, the too-clever girls in the year above her at school, and spending far too much time with that boy, whose hair is too long and whose parents May and Philip don’t know anything about. She is spending too little time thinking about school. You can’t be a translator in Europe, which is where the jobs will be for people doing languages not science, without proper qualifications. She is always going around the place with that boy, and if she’s not with him then she’s on the phone to him. She is fourteen. She is too young to have a boyfriend.

He’s not my boyfriend, is what Jennifer says when May or Philip says this. He’s my friend. I don’t want a boyfriend. He doesn’t want a girlfriend. We’re friends.

She doesn’t say it brightly. She says it darkly. She says everything darkly now, and she used to be so bright when she was a child. Her face has changed, got longer, hollow, as if adulthood has tried her on like a glove that doesn’t quite fit yet, then pulled out of her and left her stretched out of her shape. Her shoulders are round because she never straightens her back. What she doesn’t realize is that she’ll never get on in life walking around with round shoulders.

Jennifer is behind May at the machine now, leaning with her back to the kitchen counter. She is wearing the terrible denim jacket. She swings herself up on to the counter like she did when she was a child.

If you scuff that cupboard, Jennifer, May says without turning round.

She can hear Jennifer’s legs against the doors of the units. She’s after something, that’s for sure. Money? May ignores her. She presses the pedal down and pulls the material through. The cotton reel spins on the top of the machine. She puts the scissors down on the table with a slam and turns the leg of Philip’s new work trousers round under the needle.