The First Person

by Ali Smith

  Then what? Tom says.

  What happened about the Fenimores? Paula says.

  How was that a happy Christmas? Tom says.

  I had no idea what happened to the Fenimores, I realized, sitting there by myself in the warmed-up seat in my car in a near-empty car park miles from home. I could remember her sad face. I could remember his open, naïve brow, his forward slant when he walked down the school corridor or up the makings of a path at the foot of the ben. They were only there for that year, maybe. They moved away. The judo club stopped. A home economics teacher took over the cookery club. People stopped talking about them like they were the local joke pretty soon. Where were those people, the hopeful man and his sad helpful love; where were the Fenimores tonight, nearly thirty years later? Were they warm in a house, well into their middle-age? Were they still the Fenimores?

  From here in my car I could see the frosty roofs on the village terrace below, down at the bottom of the slope. I looked the other way and saw, through the side window of the pub, the man and the barmaid.

  The man had his back to the bar. He was holding a near-empty glass, staring ahead into space. The barmaid was leaning on her elbow. She was staring in the opposite direction. They stayed like that, unmoving, like figures in a painting, the whole time I watched.

  The barmaid was called Paula. I had no idea what the man’s name was. Good, because I didn’t want to know. I was just a stranger who ordered supper and didn’t eat it. I was long gone, as far as they knew, on the road out of here in the dark.

  I put my hand on the ignition key, whisky or no whisky.

  But if I went back inside, I could eat. And if I went back inside, if I was simply there, those two people would speak to each other again, they’d be able to, even if I was just sitting reading my paper or eating my supper ignoring them.

  I looked down at the roofs of the houses sheened with the fierce frost, like a row of faraway houses in the kind of story we tell ourselves about winter and its chancy gifts.

  I opened the car door and got out. I locked it, though I probably didn’t need to, and I went back into the pub.

  the third person

  All short stories long.

  This one is about two people who have just gone to bed together for the first time. It’s autumn. They met in the summer. Since they met they’ve been working up to this with a sense of unavoidability; less a courtship, more as if they’ve found themselves in a very small room, like a box room, a room small enough to feel overcrowded with two people in it, and this room also has a grand piano in it. It doesn’t matter where they’ve been or what they’ve been doing - meeting each other by chance in the street, walking down the road, going to a cinema, sitting at a table in a pub – it’s as if they’re in a tiny room and in there with them, massive, ever-present as an old-fashioned chaperone, awkward and glossy and unmentionable as a coffin, the grand piano. To move at all in this room means having to squeeze into the narrow space between the wall and the side of the piano. The inside of it, under the lid, is a structure of wires and hammers a bit like the underframe of a bed or a harp that’s been laid on its side.

  They’ve done it, they’ve shrugged themselves out of their shy clothes at last, they’ve slipped in under the covers of a small double bed, they’re holding each other in nothing but skin. One of them even has a quite-bad cold and the other doesn’t care. Ah, love. Outside, the trees are quiet. The light is coming down. It’s five in the evening. But enough about them. It’s spring. It’s morning. In the trees the birds are singing like crazy. A woman living in a street of terraced houses, a street on which so many cars are parked that it makes driving the fortnightly refuse-collector truck down it quite difficult, has just hit one of the dustmen who routinely empty the wheelie bins every second Tuesday morning over the head with a garden spade.

  The man is on the ground. He’s bleeding from the forehead. He is looking bewildered. He holds up his hand and looks at the blood on it. He puts it back up to his forehead again.

  The woman is leaning on the spade as if her spade’s blade, on the pavement, is a couple of inches into earth and she’s simply tidying her garden and has paused to take stock of what work she’s done. She looks about sixty. She looks quite well-to-do. She looks too old, too proper, too well-dressed, to have done what she’s just done. Round her, round him now, the man’s work colleagues off the truck are gathered in a tableau, open-mouthed, between laughter and anger. The driver of the truck is hanging out of the front cabin, one foot on the step, the door swinging open behind him. All the men are wearing the same green council overalls. It’s summer. It’s evening. The trees are different here. On one of the back streets of a small Mediterranean resort two women are eating at a restaurant whose tables are wooden and rickety. The table they’re at shifts its weight between them every time one or other of them cuts something up on her plate. The street is a slope; one of the women is a lot higher up on its slant than the other, even though she’s just two feet away.

  The women are bright pink from four days of too much sun. The one on the up slope is still exclaiming over the way that tomatoes taste so different here, the way that everything tastes so different here. Everything tastes of sun. The other, on the down slope, is beginning to worry about what she’ll do when she gets bored with eating Greek salad, since there’s nothing else she likes the look of on this menu but there’s no other restaurant in the tiny resort that she likes the look of, not really, and it was touch and go about whether they’d be able to get a table at this one again tonight.

  Gypsy children go up and down the street just like on each of the other evenings, but tonight the braying noise of the little squeezeboxes they use for begging is almost drowned out by the Americans. The Americans are off-duty troops. They are sly looking and shy looking, polite looking and hangdog looking and only just school-leaving-age looking; they look so young and so raw that it’s really near-criminal. The women have gathered, from overhearing them talk, that they’re here en masse on a working holiday to accustom them to sun and heat before they’re shipped to the Gulf. When the women exclaimed to the waiter about the number of people in the restaurant tonight, this is what he told them.

  Three ships, many thousand troops, arrive on the resort’s outer harbour. So the bars on the outskirts unwrap the big boots this morning and put them on the tables and then everybody knows what is happening, and the big boots go through the town like a fire. And then the soldiers in two or three days go away and the boots are wrapped in the paper again until the next ships.

  The waiter shrugged. The women nodded and looked interested. When the waiter went, they made faces at each other to let each other know that neither had understood what he was talking about.

  Now a small child is standing next to their table. She is working the tables at this restaurant with a boy of about ten who plays the same perfect Italian-sounding cliché over and over on his child-sized squeezebox. He looks businesslike and disinterested as he holds his hand out at the end of each riff at table after table. The girl standing pressed up against the women’s table is dark, very pretty, very young, maybe only five or six years old. She says something they don’t understand. The woman on the down slope shakes her head and waves at the girl to go away. The woman on the up slope picks their Rough Guide phrasebook up off the table. She flicks through it. Ya soo, she says while she does. The child smiles. She speaks in shy English. Give me money, the smiling child says. She says it seductively, almost under her breath. The woman has found the page she wants.

  Pos se leneh? the woman says.

  Money, the child says.

  She presses up against the woman’s leg and puts her small hand on the woman’s arm. The hand is very brown from sun. Poso khronon iseh? the woman says, then tells the other woman, I’m asking her how old she is.

  It’s when they go to pay the bill that the woman on the up slope will find out that the wad of euros she had, folded deep down in her pocket, isn’t in her pocket anymore.
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  It isn’t in any of her other pockets.

  Then they’ll remember the child backing off and calling to the squeezebox boy, then both disappearing in among the hundreds of off-duty soldiers.

  It was a piece of perfect thievery, a piece of artistry so good that the doing of it was invisible. All the way back to the hotel that night the down slope woman, the one who hasn’t had her money stolen and who has had to pay for supper, will be annoyed with herself that she has witnessed such a perfect act of thievery and somehow not actually seen it happen. She will berate herself for this not-seeing. She will feel, as they walk back to their hotel, the sheer unfairness of her own life again as the up slope woman, walking next to her, argues on her mobile the whole way back at ten o’clock at night with the 24-hour desk at her travel insurance company. Neither will notice that the bars and pubs they both walk past along the tourist harbourfront are surreal with outsized beer-glasses, glasses a foot and a half high; on all their counters, all their outside tables, beer-glasses shaped like seven-league boots, with see-through straps and buckles and see-through leather flaps sculpted in the glass they’re made of. It’s winter. The trees are bare. A woman and a man have gone to see a production of a play at a theatre. He bought the tickets months back, in the summer. She likes this kind of thing. But their time as a couple is nearly up, the man knows, because he has seen how the woman has begun to despise him. He saw it on Saturday evening, when he was cutting courgettes into strips for a stir-fry, he saw it cross her face. He feels that the end of their love must be something to do with the way he cuts vegetables. He doesn’t know what else to blame. It has made him uneasy in his own kitchen and tonight, when they ate out at a restaurant near the theatre, he could touch nothing green on his plate.

  On the stage a woman has disguised herself to go and meet her lover in a wood; her lover has been banished by her father, the king. The woods thicken. The plot goes crazy. She takes what she thinks is a medicine and falls into a sleep so deep that it looks like death. Her new-found friends in the wood put her in a tomb, believing she’s dead. They sing a song above the body. The song is about death being a place of no more fear. When he hears this song the man in the audience starts to cry. He can’t help it. The song is very moving. She takes his hand. She holds it. He stops crying.

  He doesn’t dare open his eyes in case the opening of his eyes will mean she will let go of his hand. All round him, in the dark of his own shut eyes and then in the sudden lights-up of the theatre, in the light which comes as suddenly through his shut eyelids as it would were his eyes open, as if eyelids are no protection at all, there’s sudden applause. Interval. The play is half over. It’s summer. The nights are long and light. Right now it’s the brief summer dark of early morning, just before the light comes up. A young woman wakes up next to her new lover and sees someone sitting there in the dark at the end of the bed. It is an old woman moving her hands, knitting. The young woman shakes her lover gently. She doesn’t dare say anything out loud in case the old woman is startled. But her lover is fast asleep.

  The next day at breakfast she describes the figure to her lover. It sounds like my mother, her lover says. Her lover’s mother has apparently been dead for a decade. Was she singing? her lover asks. Yes, the young woman says, she was, she definitely was. What was she singing, the lover asks. I don’t know, she says, but it had a bit in it that sounded like this.

  She sings a tune, making it up as she goes along. She tries to make it sound like it could be a real tune. It is a mix of the Londonderry Air and a song from a record her own mother used to play when she was small.

  No, I don’t think I know it, her lover says. Sing it again.

  The young woman sings a bit of a tune again but it’s not the same as the first time because she can’t remember what she’s just sung. She sees her lover frowning. She sings a made-up tune again. She tries to make it the kind of tune she imagines the mother of her lover would sing.

  No, that’s definitely not my mother, her lover says. Her lover puts a cup down on a saucer so decisively that the young woman knows the matter is closed. The young woman is disappointed. She now really wants the figure at the end of the bed to have been the lover’s dead mother. What if it was your mother and she was just singing a tune you don’t happen to know? she says. There must be some tunes your mother knew that you don’t know. It’s summer, but it’s cold, really noticeably cold. Tonight it’s almost down to freezing. A man in a restaurant is telling his friend about the death of a soldier. The soldier who has died was ten years younger than the man and was a small boy in the same neighbourhood all through the man’s adolescence. He died in a roadside incident, is what it says in the papers. The man is holding a copy of a tabloid. Inside on page 5 there is a report about the death of a soldier, but because the soldier’s family has asked for privacy, there are no names, though everybody in the neighbourhood knows who the articles in the papers are about. He died in the heroic fight, it says. What heroic fight? the man says. All round them people are talking and laughing. I helped him build a go-cart, the man says. I nailed an old steering-wheel on to it for him and tied wire to the wheels so it would steer. I was seventeen. Then, when he was older, we used to just ignore each other. If we saw each other in the street, I mean. The man’s friend shakes his head. It’s so weird, he says. It’s so. It’s. It’s spring. It’s an early evening in April, the first mild evening of spring. A man is out on his flat roof with a hosepipe, aiming a jet of water at a small black and white cat. When the water hits the cat, the cat jumps in the air and runs a little, and then turns and stops and looks at the man.

  Go on, the man shouts. He waves his hand in the air. The cat doesn’t move. The man aims the hose again. He hits the cat. The cat jumps in astonishment again, takes a few steps then stops and turns to look back at the man with its wide stupid cat eyes.

  Aw, a voice says.

  It is quite a high voice.

  The man checks all round him at the roofs and gardens of the other houses but he can’t see anyone.

  Go on, he shouts at the cat again. He stamps on the roof.

  When he’s chased the cat right down the back lane with the water, the man crosses the roof, gathering in the hose. He climbs in his window and turns to shake the nozzle outside. That’s when he sees the small boy, or maybe it’s a girl, edging down out of one of the sycamore trees at the back of the houses.

  The boy or girl has what looks like a book, or maybe a cardboard packet, under one arm. Biscuits? The man watches him or her negotiate a safe way down from quite high up in the trees, moving the packet from under one arm to under the other, careful from branch to branch until he or she is within reach of the roof of the shed in the garden below. Then the boy or girl slides downwards and out of view.

  That night the man can’t sleep. He turns in his bed. He sits up.

  A child believes I am cruel, he is thinking to himself.

  The next morning he is almost late for work, not just because he woke late, but because he goes and stands out on the roof for several minutes then leaves home later than usual. That evening he takes a taxi, but though he’s home half an hour early and goes straight out on to the roof, it’s raining, and it’s noticeably cold, much colder than yesterday.

  There’s no way a child would climb a tree in such weather. The tree would be too slippery. There’d be no point in sitting in a tree in the rain.

  The leaves are nearly out on these trees. It’ll soon be summer. The ends of their branches against the grey sky look like they’re swollen, or lit, or like they’ve been painted with luminous paint.

  It doesn’t look like it will brighten. It doesn’t look like anything is going to happen tonight.

  He decides he’ll wait out there on the roof for a little while longer, just in case.

  The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of God. The third person is a way to tell the story. The third person is a revitalisation of the dead.

 
It’s a theatre of living people. It’s a miniature innocent thief. It’s thousands of boots that are made out of glass. It’s a total mystery.

  It’s a weapon that’s shaped like a tool.

  It comes out of nowhere. It just happens.

  It’s a box for the endless music that’s there between people, waiting to be played.

  fidelio and bess

  A young woman is ironing in a kitchen in a prison. But she’s not a prisoner, no. Her father’s the chief gaoler; she just lives here. A young man comes into the kitchen and tells her he’s decided that he and she are going to marry. I’ve chosen you, he says. She is desultory with him. She suggests to the audience that he’s a bit of a fool. Then she sings a song to herself. It’s Fidelio I’ve chosen, it’s Fidelio I’m in love with, she sings. It’s Fidelio who’s in love with me. It’s Fidelio I want to wake up next to every morning.

  Her father comes home. Then, a moment later, so does Fidelio himself, who looks suspiciously like a girl dressed as a boy, and who happens to be wreathed in chains. Not that Fidelio’s a prisoner, no. Apparently the chains have been being repaired by a blacksmith (whom we never see), and Fidelio, the girl’s father’s assistant, has brought the mended chains back to the gaol.

  But it seems that Fidelio isn’t much interested in marrying the boss’s daughter. Fidelio, instead, is unnaturally keen to meet a mysterious prisoner who’s being kept in the deepest, darkest underground cell in the prison. This particular prisoner has been down there for two years and is receiving almost no food or water any more. This is on the prison governor’s orders; the prison governor wants him starved to death. He’s clearly a man who’s done great wrong, Fidelio says, fishing for information – or made great enemies, which is pretty much the same thing, the gaoler says, leaning magnanimously back in his kitchen chair. Money, he says. It’s the answer to everything. The girl looks at Fidelio. Don’t let him see that dying prisoner, the girl says. He couldn’t stand it, he’s just a boy, he’s such a gentle boy. Don’t subject him to such a cruel sight. On the contrary, Fidelio says. Let me see him. I’m brave enough and I’m strong enough.