Ali Smith: There But For The

Tunnel? the child said.

Should you not be in school? Anna said.

Nope, the child said. Closed early. Swine flu. You talk in a really funny accent.

Thanks, Anna said.

I like it, the child said. I don’t dislike it.

A long time ago I was Scottish, Anna said.

Been there, the child said. Done that. I mean, I liked it there, man. I didn’t dislike it. Therefore, I’d go again. There was a great number of trees in it.

She handed Anna something. It was a piece of pencil, the pencil Genevieve Lee had broken in two, back in the lounge. The child held up the other piece.

Thanks, Anna said. But you got the end with the point. That’s not fair.

Yeah, but you are an adult and can afford to buy a sharpener at, like, a stationer’s, or in a supermarket, the child said skipping ahead and talking to the rhythm of her own skipping. Or just take, a sharpener, and put it in, your pocket if, you wanted it, and therefore then, you wouldn’t have, to pay at all, because you know, pencils should always, come with sharpeners, because what use, is pencils without, a sharpener? We should all, be able to, help ourselves to, free sharpeners.

Now that’s what I call anarchy, Anna said.

And that’s when she remembered.

(Europe. Land of InterRail. Place known as Abroad. Visited by Cliff Richard and some boys and girls twenty years ago on their double decker bus, though right now, at the very start of the 1980s, Cliff Richard is singing about a girl who’s missing, has maybe been murdered, used to room on the second floor, left no forwarding address, left nothing but a name on a payphone wall.

Europe. Place of the Grand Tour for fifty British teenagers from up and down the country — of which Anna is the one from furthest north and the only Scottish one — who’ve each won a place in a publicity event organized by a British bank by writing a short story or an essay of not more than 2000 words about Britain In The Year 2000, which is twenty years from now.

1980. Year that Anna Hardie, a prizewinning writer about what life will be like in twenty years’ time, unbends the leg of a paperclip and threads it through one of her ears in Versailles, France, infecting the ear, giving herself a slight fever and having to start a course of antibiotics three days and a couple of countries later, in Brunnen, Switzerland, where the views of the mountains and the lakes, and of the mountains in the lakes, are stunning.

But first: London, Paris, Versailles. The fifty prizewinning writers about the future are on their fourth day. On day two every-one woke up to find that he or she was now one of

the party-people, or

the weirdo swots, or

the total outsiders.

Already Anna has been goosed, for the first time in her life, by a seventeen-year-old weirdo swot (who, in twenty years’ time, will have become an internationally renowned Professor of Theoretical Physics). At the time of it happening she has no idea that this is what’s happening; the inexplicable pain between her buttock and her thigh and the red-haired blushing boy-man with bad eczema behind her seem in no way related, though later in the fortnight she will see him stand close to the back of one of the other girls and see the other girl leap in the air away from him, and then she will understand. Already the nastier of the party-people have got another of the weirdo swots drunk by spiking his drink at supper in the Paris hotel, have held him down drunk in one of the bedrooms and have shaved off one half of his little RAF-war-hero moustache. He is wandering lopsidedly about in the summer haze at Versailles Palace today, a single-winged recording angel. Why would he not just shave the whole thing off? she wonders. Is it so that the people who did it to him will be made to face their meanness every time they see him? Or because he doesn’t want to lose the half he’s got so he can reconstruct the other exactly? Anna doesn’t know. She hasn’t spoken to him. (She has hardly spoken to anyone.) She knows his name is Peter, and that he had announced to everybody at the Medieval Banquet on day one in London that he was especially looking forward to Versailles, to seeing the historic mirror room where the peace treaty was signed at the end of the First World War. Ironic, the thought of him seeing his own war-wound in every one of those huge tarnished mirrors.

Anna is one of the total outsiders.

This is because she is the only Scot on the tour and all forty-nine of the others are loudmouthed scary confident articulate English people. (It might also be because she had food poisoning after the Medieval Banquet and spent a lot of the first evening of initial group formation by herself, in the hotel room in their hotel in Bayswater, throwing up.)

Right now she is sitting tearing little bits off the french stick that came with the packed lunch and putting them into her mouth. She is at the side of a huge lake with an elaborate fountain in the middle of it. Are its gold horses struggling like that, their hooves and mouths and manes all panic, because they’re scared that they’ll sink to oblivion, or because coming back to the surface after being down in the deep is so terrifying?

There are eleven days, including today, left.

Today is only partially over.

Roughly one-third of today is over.

What if the bus the fifty future-writers are all crossing Europe in crashes on this tour and they all die and she never gets home again?

If she had her passport she could go home. She could just go back to the hotel in Paris, pick up her bag and go. She could leave a note at reception saying somebody at home is ill, or that she’s had a bad dream about the family and because her dreams are so strong and intuitive she has decided she’d better return home immediately even though nobody has phoned for her or anything. No. That’s pathetic, and regardless of pathos and regardless of dreams, all the passports are in the safe-keeping of Barbara, the Bank’s Accountant, one of the five accompanying staff members (ten future-writers per staff member, presumably). Anna tries to imagine her passport, rubberbanded to a wedge of the other forty-nine passports, probably alphabetically, somewhere safe, maybe in a safe, the hotel safe. Or does Barbara the Accountant carry them everywhere with her in that briefcase? Anna in her passport photo — taken in the photobooth at the post office at home, at the beginning of June, and never did a photobooth seem so blessed, so lucky, even its little curtain enviable, just in being back there in that place called home — is wearing a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt; she is dark-eyed, she looks stern, disaffected, miserable and you better not dare ask why, and this is the self that has to last her in the world until she is the ancient age of twenty-seven, when she will be a totally different person, when everything will be different, life will be easy, will make sense, will all have fallen into place.

She is wearing the same T-shirt today. She can see herself and the masky face of Siouxsie undulating in the posh French water.

She had not known she was this shy.

She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

She and the roommate she has been allocated, whose name is Dawn and who is pleasant enough to Anna but is definitely one of the party-people, have nothing to say to each other.

She hasn’t said more than eleven words to anyone for twenty-four hours, and they weren’t even all full words.

(G’night.

G’morning.

Hi.

S’this free?

Yeah.

Thanks.

Bye.)

Look at the blue of the sky above her. Look at the dark of the sky in the surface of that lake. Look at the gold of those fixed, lashing horses. This is paradise. This is success. It said so in the papers which reported that she was the most northerly winner of a place on this tour. So she will be good. She will write it on a postcard and send it home to her parents who are so proud of her. It is amazing here. I am so lucky. We eat in hotels every night. I saw the Eiffel Tower, and a really beautiful church. Today is Versailles. It is like paradise also you can hire a boat and go rowing, ho ho, bye for now love Anna xox She will write what she really wants to say on the postcards she sends to her best friend from school, Douglas, and she will send one from every place the tour visits. No, they will be wittier than that, they will be all song lyrics pretending to be conversational. If she puts her mind to it she will be able to think of a lyric line which will translate as: I am the only fucking Scot, the only fucking person from anything like home, on this tour and everybody else is English and they just don’t get it. Dear Douglas. Could this be the plastic age? Just buying some reflections of my own sweet self. Meltdown expected. Anna xox. PS, they don’t want your name, just your number.