by Ali Smith
The place goes crazy with whistles and cat-calls. The chap sitting in front of May has turned to watch the parade go past up the aisle. Then his eye falls on May and her friends sitting there. He’s in Air Force uniform, he’s young. He’s not bad-looking. He’s with a girl but even though he is he still has a good look at all three of them and it’s May that catches his eye.
His girlfriend looks none-too-pleased.
The film starts up again but not in the right place. The audience shouts and boos then settles down to the story anyway, a load of silliness about the prince of a made-up country giving up his kingdom to have a love affair with a barmaid who’s a good singer. Gracie starts singing again and goodness knows what comes over May. It’s as if she can’t help herself. She knows she’s about to do it, and she knows she’s doing it only so as to annoy the snooty girlfriend. No other reason. No other time in her life so far has she ever been so bold and bad as she’s about to be right now when Gracie does it, hits that high note, and May starts up a howl, making it sound as much like that little dog sounded as she can.
It’s a split second before the roar of laughter shakes the whole place. Then everyone joins in. Soon the place is nothing but howling and yelping and laughter. May’s friends are black-affronted. The girl in front is black-affronted. But the chap in front has turned again and had a long look, in the brightness that comes off Gracie on the screen, at May, who sits in silence at the centre of all the noise and roaring and whistling, smiles her pretty smile, then winks her pretty eye with all the knowing she has, at the silhouette of the boy who, she’ll find out two nights later when she puts on her best dress, the blue and white one with the African trees and gazelles on it, and he’s waiting there for her outside the Palace with the tickets for This Happy Breed already bought in his hand, is Philip Young, halfway through ten days’ leave.)
There’s an old song in May’s head for some reason now. Sally, Sally, pride of our alley. That was what was her name, Gracie, Gracie Fields. And that was the thing about Gracie Fields, she defied belief, and then she showed you you’d been wrong ever to doubt her. You never believed she’d be able to hit that high a note. You could sense the note that was coming, the note that was meant to come, and you’d think to yourself there’s just no way she’ll ever reach that high, there’s no way anyone could. And then she’d go and hit a note so much higher than the one you’d expected, like a whole ladder of notes higher, and you’d be left scoured like a clean sink by the highness of it. She was a classy one. She could sing like the women in the operas can. And she was funny too. There was the song she sang about the fly that washed its legs in a jug of beer and dried itself on a man’s moustache, it was the fly’s birthday in the song, and it took its lady friend to the Grand Hotel for a birthday treat. Oh, it was a funny one. There was a song about a clock that fell in love with a wristwatch and the wristwatch told him he was fast.
Sally, Sally up the alley, and there was Walter, Walter, lead me to the altar and I’ll show you where I’m tattooed. We had fun, that was the difference between then and now. That was the intimate all right. I don’t think I ever saw their father with his clothes completely off, and I don’t think he saw me neither with mine, but we had the intimate all right, and we had fun. I don’t see that there’s so much fun in it, what I see of it now, May said in the confines of her head, not out loud, looking at that girl sitting there with the skirt that was barely worth the wearing. The girl was gloomy-looking now, for the alarm in the ceiling had defeated her. She picked at her purple nails. She got her little machine out again and picked at something on it. Oh they all think they’re the first to discover it, they all thought, they were all convinced nobody’d known about it till they did, nobody could possibly know about it but them, with their flower-power, their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we’d had was winter, all we’d had was rations. Just very good at keeping it quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age.
There was Patrick, when it happened to him, coming home all doe-eyed and staring into mid-air over his sausages, then always in the shower and trailing the smell of that godawful aftershave all down the stairs, and going and standing breaking the rose off the stem out in the garden when he thought I wasn’t watching, tucking the bloom inside his leather jacket for some girl and off he went to town, and Eleanor I knew about because she came home from college that time and she gave me such a warm cuddle, and it wasn’t like her to take me in her arms like that, and I had a secret look at her and she had a shine to her so I knew immediately, and I was pleased for her, not that we could say any of it out loud, and not that I dared tell her father.
Not Jennifer, though.
Though what about him, that boy, that boy all along, the boy May couldn’t look in the eye.
Even with all the years of that boy coming to see her and growing into a man before her eyes, she could still see the boy in him.
But him turning up at the door every year couldn’t help but mean another year had passed that May’s own girl hadn’t had.
The first year the knock had come at the door May hadn’t let him in. The next year he did it again, same boy. That time May did let him in. She gave him a cup of tea. He always brought something. Chocolates, flowers, bulbs for the ground. Once he brought a little china figurine of a chaffinch. He’d noticed, maybe, how she liked them of birds, from the ones already in the cabinet. After he’d gone May had put it on the ledge at the back of the Hoover cupboard where she wouldn’t have to look at it. Loyal as January. When he first came he had long hair, and a look about him of that boy who’d been in the film about Oliver, the artful one, not the little prissy one. They sat opposite each other, May and the boy, every year. He grew up, like her girl would have, before her eyes. One year he missed the day, but he sent a card from Canada written on in neat handwriting. Sorry I can’t be there, kind of thing. It was the kind of postcard a man would choose, not pretty at all. On the front it said Toronto, above a colour photo of people walking in sleet, a snowy street of shops. Shops were the same the world over. But he’d paid for it so it would arrive at the house on the exact right date. It was nice of him.
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 o
f 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?
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.