Ali Smith Read online

  the first person

  This, though, is a new you and a new me. In this particular story we are new to each other in the oldest way – well, it’s certainly making me feel a bit on the ancient side. I’m not completely sure the body can take such bright new newness when, like mine, it’s gone well past all the acceptable newnesses, the well-signposted ones, the ones we’re supposed to have: the shiny teens, the know-all twenties, the greenhorn mid-thirties, the sudden shattering astonishments of forty, etcetera. But this. This is unexpected. Today I woke up and you weren’t there. I came down and found the room strangely empty. Then I saw that the dining room table had been dragged outside on to the grass in the sun, and you were sitting at it waiting for me with breakfast ready all round you.

  I don’t know that I’m up to this any more, I say.

  Yawn, you say.

  (You don’t actually yawn, you say the word yawn. Then you look at me across the table and smile. I’m still unused to your smile, and to it being directed at me. Sometimes when you smile at me I have an urge to look over my shoulder to see who it is you’re smiling at.)

  I mean it, I say as I sit down, I’m not sure that there’s much room left in my life for all this. I’m not sure there’s enough patience in me. I’m a bit too, eh, old for it. I’m a bit too old, say, to be meeting anybody’s parents. I’m the age of a parent myself, for God’s sake.

  Who said anything about parents? All I did was move the table and make some coffee, you say.

  I’m definitely too old to have to do all that meeting somebody new’s lifetime haul of dearest friends and so on, I say.

  Okay, you say. Whatever.

  Like going on holiday and finding yourself in a house full of shrieking strangers, I say.

  Well, thanks, you say.

  You know what I mean, I say.

  Okay, so you’re in luck, you say. I don’t have any parents. None at all. I was born without parents.

  Perfect, I say.

  And I’ve hundreds of friends but they’re all the kind of people who’ll simply accept your presence in my life without having to have any back story. Lucky, eh? Liberating, eh?

  Too good to be true, I say.

  It’ll be just as scary for me, meeting your friends, you say. Like, imagine. Imagine going into a really huge, high-windowed, wood-panelled, book-lined library full of really ancient books, thousands and thousands of them. It smells really nice, and everything, of all the old books and all their old pages –

  You used the word ancient once and the word old twice there, I say. You’re not perfect after all.

  It’s beautiful and everything, you say. But it’s a bit like, I get in there and I look up and I know I’ve not read any of these books. And at any moment I might find I have to sit a really tough examination on all the things all the books in the whole place are about.

  Crabbed age and youth, I say.

  You look at me. You raise an eyebrow.

  It’s a quote, I say. From what we librarians call the library.

  It’s only ten years, you say. It’s not that much. Well, fifteen. Ah, I get it. Is this like when we woke up and you turned and looked at me and said I was like a, what was it, the ice-hockey thing?

  Puck, I say. I said it was like having Puck in my bed.

  Yeah, a puck, you say.

  Exactly the same, I say. Same library shelf ballpark. Ice hockey. Puck. Who’d dare mention Ariel after that?

  Only mention Persil Non-Bio or I’ll come straight out in a rash, you say, I’m very skin-sensitive.

  You say it like a double bluff joke, so laughingly that I find myself wondering again if maybe you’re having me on, you’ve been having me on all along, that really you know exactly who and what and so on, really you know a lot more than I do, about everything, but for some reason you’re pretending you don’t, though I can’t imagine what such a reason would be. You’re the perfect picture of innocence. You lean back in the chair, the chair up on two legs.

  You’ll fall, I say.

  No way, you say.

  You’re looking at the sky. I follow your gaze and see you’re watching the flight of the summer swifts; they’re just back from the south.

  Is it them that are the birds that sleep on the wing? you say.

  Yes, I say.

  Wow, you say. And never land on the ground? And keep flying and flying, and have to have their nests up high so they won’t touch the ground, and have to keep the momentum going?

  Yes, I say.

  Imagine, you say. Like a song that never ended, like a constant ever-evolving music, like you’d just keep going and keep going with it, even when you’re asleep.

  You stand up; you stretch your arms in the air; you arch like a bow ready for an arrow.

  Nothing in common, you and me, I say.

  Yep. Nothing, you say.

  We should just call it a day right now, I say.

  Okay, you say.

  You stand behind my chair and put your arms round me, then put them in under my shirt, your hands directly on me. You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there’s a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.

  It’s hopeless, I say.

  Totally, you say behind me.

  I can feel the silent laugh of you all the way up and down my back.

  You’re not the first person who ever made me feel like this, you know, I say.

  I’m the first person today, though, you say.

  You have peeled the roof off me and turned the whole library into a wood. Every book is a tree. Above the tops of the trees there’s nothing but birds.

  How am I supposed to survive this, out here in the wild wood?

  The first time I saw you, you were eating an apple, I say. Well, almost the first time.

  I remember, you say.

  It was a Discovery, I say. You were just eating an apple as if there was nothing else to do in life.

  There isn’t, you say.

  It is a little later the same day. We are back in bed. We have decided to invent a how-we-met story so that when we do meet each other’s friends, round whatever table in whatever pub or restaurant or suburban dining room, we’ll be protected. But the bit about the apple, and me seeing you, for almost the first time, eating the apple, is true.

  It was in Departures, you say.

  How do you mean? I say.

  At the airport, you say. Where you were working at the time. You were wearing a lovely uniform.

  Do they wear uniforms at Departures? I say.

  They do, you say. I mean, you do. A quite nice uniform. I liked it, anyway.

  And you were going round the world, I say. Were you going round the world by yourself?

  I was doing a day trip round the world, you say. I wanted to see whether it was possible to do it in a day. And you were one of the security people working the X-ray machine where people’s hand-luggage and jackets are checked for terrorism. And you asked me to take my jacket off.

  And I saw, when you did, that instead of an arm, you had, like, a, a violin, and where your hand should be was the scrolly piece of wood at the end of a violin -

  And I saw you staring, you say, and I looked at my arm and my hand and said, damn, here we go again.

  And then I asked you to accompany me to the interview room, I say.

  And I said there’s really no need, it’s just that I’m going through some changes, you say. Change is necessary.

  Mutatis mutandis, I say. Mutability. Muton.

  Dressed as lamb, you say.

  Getting at my age again, I say. In my day, things were different.

  Good. Change is good, you say. And then, obviously, I had to take my shoes off for the shoe-checking machine, the special one that X-rays shoes –

  And instead of feet, you had –? I say.

  Hooves, you say. Neat little ones, like the feet of a pony, o
r a donkey, or a goat, or a, what are they called? Deer.

  Don’t call me that, I say, it makes me feel old. And then I escorted you to the interview room and asked you would you assist me in filling out a form.

  Very romantic indeed, you say. Our first meeting was very romantic.

  Name, I say. Address. Age. Nationality. Occupation.

  Occupation: hoofer, you say. I’ve hoofed it all over the world, me. It’s a good life. It’s what keeps me so young-looking. Right. That’s what we’re telling your friends, then. What about mine? What are we going to tell them?

  They’ll want to know about my long and interesting life before I met you, I say.

  You put your head on my chest. You settle in my arms.

  Go on, you say.

  I was in the first flush of a new love, I say. I was having that surge of pure happiness and energy that happens when you’re first in love again. I was whistling the tune of it, walking down a country road whose verges were all grasses and wildflowers, when I found myself alongside an old, old woman with a load of heavy-looking sticks on her back. It was picturesque. It was as if I were in another country.

  The kind of country where there’s no central heating, you say.

  Yes, I say. And I said to her, can I give you a hand? And she stopped and said, are you absolutely sure you want to? And I said yes. And then I looked down at where my left hand had been and saw there was nothing there. I looked up my sleeve. I rolled the sleeve up. My arm ended in a stump at my wrist. I’ve changed my mind, I said to the old woman. I wonder if you’d mind returning my hand to me.

  It was too late, you say.

  Way, way back, the old woman was saying as she walked away out of the story, way back in my own day, I was just like you are now, you know.

  Come back! I yelled. Give me back my hand right now!

  Her voice came back at me over the top of the load of sticks she was carrying.

  It’s terrible, she said. What will you hold your fork with when you sit down to eat in polite company? How will anyone be able to tell that you’re married? How will you ever play the guitar now, or ever again make a clip-clop sound like the hooves of a horse with two halves of a coconut? It’s a tragedy.

  The total fucker, you say.

  You total fucker! I called after her. No I’m not, she called back. I’ve done you a favour. Now when you look in the mirror, you’ll see a whole new person. You should be thanking me, you ungrateful little idiot.

  What did you do? you say.

  I stood and watched her go. I saw the bloody end of my sleeve at the end of my arm and I felt too faint to do anything. So I sat down on a large stone there at the side of the road. I sat in the summer birdsong and the strong scent of sun on cow parsley and I knew I’d have to get myself to a hospital soon. I mean, I’d like to be able to say that I sat there looking at the place where my hand had been and in the absence of just one hand I suddenly understood how imaginary characters might long for bones, I suddenly knew how dead people, if they can feel anything at all, long to be anything other than dead. But all I felt was outrage. All I felt was loss.

  You kiss my breastbone. You reach and take my left hand.

  Careful there, I say.

  You settle your head on my chest again. You give my hand a little shake.

  Your severed hand, however, you say, went on to have a happy and very fulfilled life. Like in all the best B-movies, your hand carried the personal characteristics of its owner with it. It could play sonatas by itself. It could not only ride horses but groom them efficaciously afterwards. It was good at playing poker, nifty at texting and googling, always deep in the pages of a good book. It was always putting itself in a pocket and bringing out change when anyone asked it for money in the street. It was also a renowned gigolo; it wasn’t unusual for your hand to cross town by itself in the middle of the night, leaving one lover sated and happy in that after-love torpor, to please another, who was sitting up right then eagerly waiting to hold your hand. Also, you yourself became famous as a really versatile drummer. You were known the whole world over as Stumpy the Miracle Drummer. That’s how we met. One night by chance I was contracted to play my arms off and hoof it in the very same bar in which you happened to be headlining. That afternoon, at four o’clock, rehearsal time, I came through the door of the bar –

  You were eating an apple, I say.

  It was a Discovery, apparently, you say.

  I know, I say.

  And we saw each other, you say.

  So that’s how we met, I say.

  Yep, you say. Or how about this? How about we’re story-free? How about, there is no story as to how we met?

  (You walked past my door. I was sitting in the doorway reading my emails. I was in a bad mood because the night before I had stayed up late and found myself watching a repeat of a 1970s episode of Tales of the Unexpected; it was one I had seen thirty years ago, in my adolescence and which I’d never forgotten. It was about a teenage girl whose parents have been killed in a car crash. She lives a rather unloved and abandoned life, and after a bad piano lesson with an unpleasant lady piano teacher, she is followed home to her unsympathetic grandmother’s house by a sinister man. Someone is murdering adolescent girls. There are lots of shots of lakes being dredged and policemen with German Shepherd dogs pulling against the leash in long grass. The next time the girl goes out, he’s there again. He follows her again. To escape him she turns for help to a sweet old lady she meets by chance. The sweet old lady seems much more grandmotherly than the girl’s grandmother. So the girl goes with this sweet old lady across a ragged wasteland to a caravan where the sweet old lady says she’ll make her a nice cup of tea. The girl settles down. She feels safe for the first time. Then someone else comes in the caravan door. It’s the creepy man. He’s been in cahoots with the sweet old lady all along. That’s where the story ends.

  Thirty years ago, this thirty-minute story had terrified me. Thirty years on, the same story had made me very angry. It had sacrificed its girl character to a horrible end for the sake of a neat story; I had been arguing with the neatness and foulness and cynicism of it in my head all night. I had woken up still trying to think of alternative endings for the girl in the story, still granting her character a more open road, a kinder shape of things.

  I was in the sun in the doorway, reading my emails. You walked past my door. You nodded hello. You had a case on your back, oblong, longer than your back. I heard you open a door up the road from my house. Then, not long after, I heard someone playing something beautiful on something.

  It was a music I knew in my bones. It caught me out. It changed the air. It came into my house and made the room I was in a completely different place.

  It was you.

  I worked out which door you lived behind. I stood outside it. Something new was making me brave. I knew you were a bit younger than me. I knew I was a bit older than you. I knocked on your door. You answered. You were eating an apple.)

  Ultimate liberation, I say now in my old bed with you in my arms. A story with no story. No adjectives. No beginning or middle or end. Ultimate freedom. Ultimate open sky.

  No ultimates, you say.

  Above our heads through the open dormer window in the slant of the roof of my bedroom: leaves, clouds, blueness, swifts.

  Halfway through the afternoon I go into the back room and find you sitting in a square of sun in the window seat. You’re reading a book. You see me and you lower the book.

  Just trying to catch up a bit, you say. You wink.

  I get it, I say. I’ve finally understood. I’m imagining you. I’m making this all up. You’re not real.

  Ah, you say. But what if it’s me who’s imagining you?

  You’re not the first person to spin me a yarn, I say.

  I’m pre-yarn, me, you say. I’m post-yarn. Yarn.

  You say the word yarn like you said the word yawn this morning. I try not to laugh.

  It is early evening. We’re in bed again. It i
s almost embarrassing, going to bed with someone so many times in the one day.

  You’re not the first person I’ve ever gone to bed with so many times in the one day, I say.

  I hope not, you say.

  You’re not the first person I’ve ever felt new with, I say.

  Won’t be the last, you say.

  You’re not the first person to think he or she could save me, I say.

  I’d never be so presumptuous, me, you say.

  You’re not the first person to squeeze whatever love juice it is you’ve squeezed into my eyes to make me see things so differently, I say.

  Eh? you say.

  Then you make the innocent face you make when you’re pretending to be green.

  You’re not the first person I ever had really good talks like this with, I say.

  I know, you say. Been there, done that. You feel very practized.

  Thank you, I say. And you won’t be the first person to leave me for someone else or something else.

  Well but we’ve a good while before that, with any luck, you say.

  And you’re not the first person to, to, uh, to –, I say.

  To stump you? you say. Well. You’re not the first person who was ever wounded by love. You’re not the first person who ever knocked on my door. You’re not the first person I ever chanced my arm with. You’re not the first person I ever tried to impress with my brilliant performance of not really being impressed with anything. You’re not the first person to make me laugh. You’re not the first person I ever made laugh. You’re not the first person full stop. But you’re the one right now. I’m the one right now. We’re the one right now. That’s enough, yes?

  You’re not the first person to make a speech like that at me, I say.

  Then we’re both laughing hard again in each other’s new arms.

  The day slips away without us noticing. It’s summer dark outside. It’s not long, by the looks of it, till the light will come up again.