The First Person

by Ali Smith

  The boy’s arm hurt a little from the throw.

  He put it back under the covers.

  Next thing he’d do was: he would shift out of the bed when the bear least expected it and sneak up without it noticing and punch the bear right in the mouth. Then he would wrestle it. Though it would fight back hard, he’d beat it. He’d kick it. He’d bite it in the ear. He’d eat the bear. He’d totally beat it completely till it roared that it gave in.

  Yesterday if he’d thought he’d wrestle a bear or make a snowball or something like that it would have made his head go the sore empty way, not like snow was a white place on an opposite wall, not like summer snow, but like there was only snow, nothing else, nothing but being in it, everything a sort of snow.

  Today he shifted a little out of the covers. He did it quietly so the bear wouldn’t suspect.

  He began to feel a little hungry.

  He slid a little further out, then a little, careful, more.

  writ

  I sit my fourteen-year-old self down opposite me at the table in the lounge so that we can have a conversation, because all she’s done so far, the whole time she’s been here in my house, is ignore me, stare balefully at a spot just above my head, or look me in the eye then look away from me as if I’m the most boring person on the planet.

  I come home from work today and she’s here again. I don’t ask why, or where she’s been since she was last here. I ask her instead to turn down the television. I ask her again to come and sit down at the table.

  She sighs. She finally does as I ask. She pulls out a chair clumsily. It is almost as if she is being clumsy on purpose. She sits down, sighs audibly again.

  Last week someone, a girl, a woman I hardly know (now when does a girl become a woman? when exactly do we stop being girls?) turned towards me as we walked along a busy street, backed me expertly up against the wall of a builder’s restoration of a row of old shops in the middle of London in broad daylight, and kissed me. The kiss, out of nowhere, took me by surprise. When I got home that night my fourteen-year-old self was roaming about in my house knocking into things, wild-eyed and unpredictable as a blunt-nosed foal.

  It is shocking to see yourself as you haven’t been for nearly thirty years. It is also a bit embarrassing, having yourself around, watching your every move as if watching your every move is the last thing that could possibly interest anyone.

  What do you reckon to the house, then? I say. Do you like it?

  She barely glances round her. She shrugs.

  Would you like some coffee? I ask.

  She does it again, the insolent look-then-look-away. She makes insolence a thing of beauty. For a moment how good she is at it actually makes me proud and I nod.

  You go girl, I say.

  She looks at me as if I’m insane.

  Where? she says.

  Ha, I say. No, you go girl is a phrase, like a cliché. It’s from music. It means good on you, too right, that kind of thing. It’s American. It’s borrowed from black culture. It’s from later. I mean, you’re too young for it.

  She makes a tch noise, almost non-existent.

  I put the mug of coffee down on the table for her. She picks it up.

  Use the coaster, I say.

  She is looking at what’s in the mug in horror.

  No, because I need it to have milk in it, she says and her accent is so where I’m from and so unadulterated that hearing her say more than four words in a row makes my chest hurt inside.

  I’ve no milk, I say. I forgot you took it with milk.

  Also it’s, like, the too-strong kind, she says. It’s a bit too strong for me.

  She says it quite apologetically.

  It’s all I’ve got in, I say.

  I like the instant kinds of it, she says. The other kinds taste too much.

  Yes, but instants are full of freezing agents, I say. They do all sorts of damage to your synapses –

  By the time I’ve got to the word freezing and agents in this sentence her eyes have gone blank again. She pushes the cup away and put her head in her hands. I feel suddenly forlorn. I want to say: look, aren’t you amazed I ever even managed to buy a house? Don’t you like how full of books it is? You like books. You don’t have to pretend you’re not clever to me. I know you are. I’d have loved the idea of a house full of books like this when I was your age.

  Was I really going to say that: when I was your age? Would I really have found myself saying that appalling phrase out loud?

  There are quite a few things, though, that I do want to say to her. Concerning our mother for instance, I want to say something like : don’t worry, she’ll be okay. It’s a bad time now that’s all. She doesn’t die until you’re more than twice the age you are now.

  But I can’t say that, can I?

  I want to say: your exams come out fine all the way down the line. You’ll do all right at university. You’ll have a really good time. Don’t worry that you don’t get off with that boy who smells of the linoleum at Crombie Halls of Residence in the first week. You don’t have to get off with someone in Freshers’ Week, it’s not necessary, it’s not important.

  I want to tell her who to trust and who not to trust; who her real good friends are and who’s going to fuck her over; who to sleep with, and who definitely not to. Definitely say yes to this person, it’s one of the best things that’s going to happen to you. And don’t be alarmed, I want to say, when you find yourself liking girls as well as boys. It’s okay. It’s good. It works out very well. Don’t even bother yourself worrying about it, not for a single afternoon, not for a single hour in a single afternoon. Don’t, by the way, vote Labour in 1997; it’s like a vote for the Tories. No, really. And when you’re twenty-two and you go for the sales job in the middle of Edinburgh and you’re backing the Citroen down the road where the Greyfriars Bobby statue is, don’t back it so far, just go careful on the clutch, don’t panic, because what happens when you panic is you totally collapse the back mudguard against the wall of the pub there and anyway there’s no point in you even going for a job like that, I mean you get into the room and they’re all wearing their power-suits and you’re wearing your jeans, so just, you know, know yourself a bit better, that’s all I’m saying.

  But I look at her sitting there, thin and insolent and complete, and I can’t say any of it. It’d be terrible to proffer a friend she hasn’t met yet who then turns out not to be a friend, or a left wing government that turns out not to be. Terrible to tell her, now, about a crushed mudguard one afternoon in 1984. It’s somehow terrible even to suggest she’ll go to university.

  You need to eat more, I say instead.

  She puts the end of her hair in her mouth. She takes it out and holds it up and fans it out, examines the wet hair for split ends.

  Aw, don’t do that, I say, it’s disgusting.

  She rolls her eyes.

  She is spotty round the mouth and in the crevices down the side of her nose, of course she is, with a skin that I now know to call combination dry and greasy. I could tell her how to deal with it. Her middle parting makes her hair look flat and makes her look more cowed than she is. There’s a constellation of acne on her forehead beneath it. I could tell her how to deal with that too.

  I go and stand at the window and look out. That kiss up against the building site fills the inside of my head again as if someone had opened a lid at the top of my skull, poured in a jug of warm water mixed with flower food, then arranged a bunch of spring flowers – cheerfulness, daffodils – using me as the vase. But the light is coming down, February, early dusk, and the common is still patchy with snow. I know, now, though I didn’t know it when I bought this house, that the common is actually a common burial ground; it’s where they buried most of this city’s thousands of plague-dead centuries ago. Beneath the feet of the dogwalkers and the people coming back from the supermarket, under the grass and the going snow, under the mound where the paths all come together, are all the final shapes their lives took, al
l the bare bones. Above them the black of the common, and above it the sky the deep blue it goes just before dark. It’s a clear night. The stars’ll be out later. It’ll be beautiful, all the stars and planets spread in their winter-spring alignments above the common. Are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright. Cause I only have eyes. Art Garfunkel, it was. The song coming into my head gives me an idea.

  What’s number one right now? I say. In the top twenty?

  Figaro by Brotherhood of Man she says. It’s appalling.

  They’re appalling, I say.

  It’s music for, like, infants, she says.

  And that song Angelo, I say.

  I hate that song, she says. It’s crap.

  It’s such a steal from the Abba song Fernando, I say. You just have to think about it and it’s so obvious.

  Yeah, she says. It is. It’s like really a steal. They just took the idea Abba had and they wrote it into a so much less good song.

  Her voice, for the first time since she’s been here, sounds almost enthusiastic. I don’t turn round. I rack my brains to remember something she’ll like.

  I sing: Hey you with the pretty face. Welcome to the human race.

  I really really like the way the piano they use in Mr Blue Sky has an electronic voice and you think it might even be the voice the sky has, if the sky had a voice, she says. I actually really really like that whole idea of an electric light orchestra because of the idea of, like, light-orchestral kind of thing, and then on top of that the idea that it’s electric and that it’s nothing but an electric light, like one you switch on and off.

  It is the most she’s said so far, the whole time she’s been in the house.

  Like a whole orchestra at the flick of a switch, I say.

  A whole huge orchestra inside one lightbulb, she says. It’s really clever to do that like with just writing some words together, it’s really good the words doing all that by themselves. I really like it. Do you know that thing about the phrase written water?

  No, I say.

  That thing about the historic poet John Keats Miss Aberdeen in English told us today, she says.

  The tragic pop star of the Romantic period, I say. Did Miss Aberdeen not say that?

  Yeah, but when he died, my fourteen-year-old self says, like, before he died, the poet John Keats, right, apparently he said to someone, put it on my gravestone that here lies a poet whose name is written water. Not written down, but written water. Water that was written on. I think that’s really beautiful. Here lies a poet whose name was written water.

  One, I say. Not a poet. It says on the stone, here lies one.

  Well, same thing, she says.

  And it’s writ in water, I say. It’s three words, not two.

  No, it’s written, like one word, she says.

  It isn’t, I say. It’s writ. Then in. Then water.

  Yeah, but writ isn’t a word, she says.

  It is a word, actually, I say.

  Yeah, like half a word, my fourteen-year-old self says. It doesn’t mean anything.

  It’s a real whole word by itself, I say. You can find it in any dictionary. It’s changed its meaning over time and at the same time it’s kept its meaning. We just don’t use the word exactly like that, in that form, any more these days.

  I can hear her kicking at the bar under the table.

  Don’t do that, I say.

  She stops it. She goes silent again. I look out over the darkening grass. I don’t have to look round to know what she’s doing, still swinging her leg under the table behind me but just above the bar, just expertly missing it every time.

  He did die unbelievably young, you know, Keats, I say.

  No he didn’t, she says. He was twenty-five or something.

  A joy forever, I say. Its loveliness increases. I can’t remember what comes after nothingness. God. I used to know that poem off by heart.

  We did a poem by him, she says.

  Which one? I say.

  The one about looking in an old book, she says. And oh yeah, I forgot. Because when I got into school this morning, it was really appalling because the art teacher made me take off my clothes. In front of everyone.

  I turn round.

  He what? I say.

  Not he, she says. Miss MacKintosh. Weirdo.

  Don’t call Miss MacKintosh that, I say. Miss MacKintosh is really nice.

  She’s a weirdo from Weirdoland, she says.

  No she isn’t, I say.

  Like, she said to me you’ve to take off the soaking wet things and put them on the radiator and you can wear my coat. I had to sit in her coat the whole way through double period art. My hands were freezing. I had to put them in the pockets a couple of times. My tights were ripped though, from the stones on the way down on the Landscaping. Then Laura Wise from 3B said she wasn’t cold and gave me hers. She saw it happen. She said John McLintock was spazzodelic.

  Wait a minute, I say. First, I don’t think you should use that word. And second. What stones? Soaking wet, why exactly?

  That boy John McLintock pushed me down the Landscaping, she says.

  I remember the Landscaping; we used to hang around the Landscaping a lot. I don’t remember anything about this, though. We used to pass the Landscaping every day on the way to school then home again. It was the green slope at the back of the houses where they kept what was left of the original wasteground they built the two estates on. Presumably there was some planning prohibition and that was why they couldn’t cover the whole thing with houses; instead they pulled up the trees and grassed over the stubby bushes all the way to the new car park. The Landscaping was quite steep, if I remember rightly.

  A boy was pushing people off it? I say.

  Just me, she says. He only pushed me off it. Nobody else. There were loads of us.

  And you were on top of the Landscaping because? I say.

  Because of the new snow, she says.

  Let me get this right, I say. He pushed –

  It was slippy, she says.

  She covers her face. She’s smiling under her hands, still sitting at the table with the cold coffee in front of her, swinging her leg underneath the table just above its bar. I realize I don’t know whether she’s smiling because a boy pushed her down a hill, because a girl picked her up at the bottom of it or because an art teacher I know she’s got a crush on asked her to take off her clothes.

  Then I realize it’s because of all three. I remember my hands in the warm pockets of the adult coat.

  It moves me. She can see this on my face and she gets annoyed again. Her smile disappears. She scowls.

  Written is so much better than writ, she says.

  It might be better but it isn’t what it actually says on the gravestone, I say.

  Weirdo, she says.

  Don’t be rude, I say.

  From Weirdoland, she says almost under her breath.

  She gives me the quick look and then, with perfect timing, the artful look away.

  Completely night now out beyond my house and only six o’clock in the evening. All the streetlights are on. All the cars in the city beyond are nosing their ways home or their ways away from home, making the noise traffic makes in the distance. Closer to home, out on the unlit common, under a sky that promises frost, someone invisible to us is rattling across one of the nearby paths on a bike, shouting and shouting. I love you, he shouts, or she shouts, hard to tell which, and then calls out what sounds like a name in the dark, shouted into the starry air above all the thousands of old dead, and then the words I love you again, and then again the name.

  My fourteen-year-old self looks towards the window and so do I.

  You hear that? we both say at once.

  astute fiery luxurious

  A parcel arrived. It looked really creepy. There was nobody in the house but me. I phoned you. You were still at work and very busy.

  Uh huh, what now? you said.

  A weird parcel came, I said. It’s got our hous
e number on it and the correct postcode and everything, but it’s not addressed to us and I didn’t notice until after the postie had gone.

  I told you the name on the parcel. You said you’d never heard of him or her.

  Me neither, I said.

  It’s just a misdelivery, you said. We’ll put it back in the post tomorrow. Look, I’m busy. I’ve got to go. Are the pills working? Are you still sore?

  A bit, I said.

  Have a sleep on the couch, you said.

  I can’t, I said. I am less than one person in a hundred and the pills are keeping me awake.

  Go and watch daytime TV, then, you said. It’s your prerogative. You’re signed off.

  I can’t, I said. I am less than one person in a hundred and the pills are making me sleepy. Plus I am now unable to operate machinery.

  I’ll bring supper, you said laughing. Listen, I’ve got to go.

  You hung up. The laughing had made me feel a bit better. But when I went back into the front room the parcel was still there.

  Last week we were in the supermarket and saw they were selling Swingball. I hadn’t played it for twenty years and got nostalgic about how good I used to be at it. We bought it, stuck its metal stick in the lawn and played it. The next day I kept hearing a crackling noise, first when I was on my bike, then whenever I went up or down stairs. The noise was coming from under the skin of my left knee. Then the knee got sore, then the leg. Then I woke in the middle of the night unable to move anything from the shoulders down without it hurting. For the past three days I had been taking anti-inflammatories and lying on the couch monitoring myself for any of the fifty-nine side effects the leaflet warned were to varying degrees possible (including stomach pain, dizziness, changes in blood pressure, swollen legs, feet, face, lips, tongue or all of these, indigestion, heartburn, nausea, diarrhoea, headache, itchy skin, abdominal bloating, constipation, chest pain, vomiting, ringing in ears, weight gain, vertigo, depression, blurred vision, hair loss, serious kidney problems, inability to sleep, sleepiness, paranoia, hallucinatory episodes, and heart failure). So far I had possibly had two or three of them. But I wasn’t sure if my ankles and feet had always been that shape, or whether I was imagining the high airy humming in my ears, like a faraway sea. Was I depressed? I had been getting up off the couch every few hours and checking myself in the mirror for weight gain.