by Ali Smith
My name’s Imogen, Midge says and gets down off his knee.
Our grandmother stands up.
Your grandfather likes to think that all the stories in the world are his to tell, she says.
Just the important ones, our grandfather says. Just the ones that need the telling. Some stories always need telling more than others. Right, Anthea?
Right, Grandad, I say.
Yeah, right, Midge had said. And then you went straight outside and threw a stone at the kitchen window, do you remember that?
She pointed at the window, the one right there in front of us now, with its vase of daffodils and its curtains that she’d gone all the way to Aberdeen to get.
No, I said. I don’t remember that at all. I don’t remember any of it. All I remember is something about Blind Date and there always being toast.
We both stared at the window. It was the same window, but different, obviously, nearly fifteen years different. It didn’t look like it could ever have been broken, or ever have been any different to how it was right now.
Did it break? I said.
Yeah, it broke, she said. Of course it broke. That’s the kind of girl you were. I should have told them to put it into your Pure psychology report. Highly suggestible. Blindly rebellious.
Ha, I said. Hardly. I’m not the suggestible one. I nodded my head towards the front of the house. I mean, who went and bought a motorbike for thousands of pounds because it’s got the word REBEL painted on it? I said.
That’s not why I bought it, Midge said and her neck up to her ears went as red as the bike. It was the right price and the right shape, she said. I didn’t buy it because of any stupid word on it.
I began to feel bad about what I’d said. I felt bad as soon as it came out of my mouth. Words. Look what they can do. Because now maybe she wouldn’t be able to get on that bike in the same innocent way ever again and it would be my fault. I’d maybe ruined her bike for her. I’d definitely annoyed her, I knew by the way she pulled rank on me with such calm, told me I’d better not be late, and told me not to call her Midge at work, especially not in front of Keith. Then she clicked the front door shut behind her with a quietness that was an affront.
I tried to remember which one at Pure Keith was.
They all looked the same, the bosses with their slightly Anglified accents and their trendily close-shaved heads. They all looked far too old for haircuts like that. They all looked nearly bald. They all looked like they were maybe called Keith.
I heard her taking the cover off and folding it neatly, then I heard her get on the bike, start it up and roar out of the drive.
Rebel.
It was raining. I hoped she’d go easy in the rain. I hoped her brakes were good. It had rained every day here since I’d got back, all eight days. Scottish rain’s no myth, it’s real all right. I ain’t got nothing but rain, baby, eight days a week. The rain it raineth every day. When that I was and a little tiny girl, with a hey, ho, the wind and the rain.
Yes, because that was another thing that made Midge furious when we were little tiny girls, that he was always changing the words to things. If you can keep your head when all about you. Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken. If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew. If you can fill the unforgiving minute. With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it. And – which is more – you’ll be a woman, my daughter NO NO NO GRANDAD IT DOESN’T RHYME she used to squeal, she used to stand on the linoleum right there, where the new parquet was now, and shout in a kind of amazing rage, don’t change it! you’re changing it! it isn’t right! it’s wrong! I had forgotten that too. Amazing rage, how sweet the sound. And Midge, can I have that book? You can if you say the magic word, what’s the magic word? Imogen was the magic word. Midge, can I finish your chips? Midge, can I borrow your bike? Midge, will you say it was you who broke it? I will if you say the magic word, what’s the magic word? Something about Midge had changed. Something fundamental. I tried to think what it was. It was right in front of my eyes and yet I couldn’t quite see it.
They’d had a teak coffee table. I remembered now how proud they’d been about it being made of teak. God knows why. Was teak such a big deal? The teak coffee table was long gone. All their things had gone. I had no idea where. The only real sense of the two of them still here came from the way the light fell through the same glass of the front door, and the framed photo Midge’d put on the wall next to where the dinette door used to be.
Dinette. What a word. What a long-gone word, a word sunk to the bottom of the sea. Midge had knocked through the walls of the dinette into the living room to make one huge room. She had had central heating put in. She’d knocked through from the bathroom into the littlest bedroom where I used to sleep on the Saturday nights we stayed here, to make a bigger bathroom; now there was a bath where my single bed had been. She’d tarmacked over the front garden where our grandmother used to have her roses and her pinks. Now Midge’s bike was kept there.
They looked old in the photo, I could see that now. They looked like two old people. Their features were soft. He looked smooth, sweet-faced, almost girlish. She looked strong, clear-boned, like a smiling young man from some Second World War film had climbed inside an older skin. They looked wise. They looked like people who didn’t mind, who were wise to how little time was left. Come in boat number two, your time is up. Five years ago they went on holiday to Devon. They bought a trimaran at a boating shop on a whim, and they sent our father a note. Dear son, gone to see the world, love to the girls, back soon. They sailed off on their whim. They’d never been sailing in their lives.
Wise fools. They’d sent us postcards from the coasts of Spain and Portugal. Then the postcards stopped. Two years ago our father came up north and put up a headstone in the cemetery above their empty plot, the plot they bought before we were born, with their names and a photo on it, the same photo I was looking at now, and the words on the stone under the trees, next to the canal, in among the birdsong and the hundreds of other stones, above the empty square of earth, were ROBERT AND HELEN GUNN BELOVED PARENTS AND GRANDPARENTS LOST AT SEA 2003.
On the backs of the dolphins. Acquainted with the waves.
Then he gave the house to us, if we wanted it. Midge moved in. Now I was here too, thanks to Midge. Now I had a job too, thanks to Midge.
I didn’t particularly want to be thankful to Midge.
But I was home, I had a home here in Inverness, thanks to Midge. Well, thanks to the two of them, full fathom five, seaweed swaying round their unbound bones shifting on the sand of the seabed. Was the seabed dark? Was it cold? Did any light get down there from the sun? They’d been kidnapped by sirens, ensnared by Scylla and Charybdis. Cilla and Charybdis. That was what had got me thinking about Blind Date. That was why I’d remembered what little I hadn’t completely forgotten of those Saturdays, the Saturday toast, the Saturday television. That, and the fixed and fluid features on the wall, of the old, the wise.
I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I’d try to click on me, try to go any deeper when it came to the meaning of ‘I’, I mean deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I’d wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of ‘I’ existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that’s how rootless. And that’s how fragile. And what would poor Anthea do then, poor thing?
I’d sit in a barn. And keep myself warm. And hide my head under my wing, poor thing.
I wondered if Midge would remember that song, about the bird in the
barn and the snow coming. I remembered it as something to do with our mother. I didn’t know if that was a true memory or if I’d just made it up.
I sat down on the kitchen floor. I traced a square in the parquet with my finger. Come on. Get a grip. I should have been on my way to work. I should have been on my way to my next new day at the new Pure. I had a good new job. I would be making good money. It was all good. I was a Creative. That’s what I was. That’s who I was. Anthea Gunn, Pure Creative.
But I stared at my grandparents in their photo, with their arms round each other and their heads together, and I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.
Midge was right. I was going to be late for work. I was late already.
Not Midge. Imogen. (Keith.) (What’s the magic word?)
At least my sister had a Shakespearian name. At least her name meant something. Anthea. For God’s sake.
Weren’t people supposed to get named after gods and goddesses, rivers, places that mattered, the heroines of books or plays, or members of their family who’d gone before them?
I went upstairs and put on the right kind of clothes. I came downstairs. I got my umbrella. I put my jacket on. I stopped and looked in the mirror on my way out the front door. I was twenty-one years old. My hair was light and my eyes were blue. I was Anthea Gunn, named after some girl from the past I’d never seen, a girl on a Saturday evening tv show who always gave things a twirl, who always wore pretty frocks, and whom my mother, when she herself was a little tiny girl, had longed with all her heart to be like when she finally grew up.
I went outside mournful, and I hit pure air. The air was full of birdsong. I went outside expecting rain but it was sunny, it was so suddenly so openly sunny, with so sharp a spring light coming off the river, that I went down the side of the riverbank and sat in among the daffodils.
People went past on the pavement above. They looked down at me like I was mad. A seagull patrolled the railing. It eyed me like I was mad.
Clearly nobody ever went down the riverbank. Clearly nobody was supposed to.
I slid myself down to the water’s edge. I was wearing the wrong kind of shoes to do it. I took them off. The grass was very wet. The soles of my tights went dark with it. I’d be ruining my work clothes.
There was blossom on the surface of the Ness, close to the bank, lapping near my feet, a thin rime of floating petals that had blown off the trees under the cathedral behind me. The river was lined with churches, as if to prove that decent people still believed in things. Maybe they did. Maybe they thought it made a difference, all the ritual marryings and christenings and confirmings and funereals, all the centuries of asking, in their different churches each filled with the same cold air off the mountains and the Firth, for things to reveal themselves as having meaning after all, for some proof the world was held in larger hands than human hands. I’d be happy, myself, I thought as I sat in the wet grass with my hands in the warmth still inside my shoes, just to know that the world was a berry in the beak of a bird, or was nothing more than a slab of sloped grassy turf like this, fished out of cosmic nothingness one beautiful spring morning by some meaningless creature or other. That would do. That would do fine. It would be fine, just to know that for sure.
The river itself was fast and black. It was comforting. It had been here way before any town with its shops, its churches, its restaurants, its houses, its townspeople with all their comings and goings, its boatbuilding, its fishing, its port, its years of wars over who got the money from these, then its shipping of Highland boy soldiers down south for Queen Victoria’s wars, in boats on the brand new canal then all along the lochs in the ice-cut crevasse of the Great Glen.
I could, if I chose, just walk into the river. I could stand up and let myself fall the whole slant of the bank. I could just let the fast old river have me, toss myself in like a stone.
There was a stone by my foot. It was a local stone, a white-ridged stone with a glint of mica through it. I threw it in instead.
The river laughed. I swear it did. It laughed and it changed as I watched. As it changed, it stayed the same. The river was all about time, it was about how little time actually mattered. I looked at my watch. Fuck. I was an hour and a half late. Ha ha! The river laughed at me again.
So I laughed too, and instead of going to work I went into town to hang out at the new shopping centre for a while.
We had all the same shops here now as in every big city. They had all the big brands and all the same labels. That made us, up here, every bit as good as all the big cities all over the country – whatever ‘good’ meant.
But the shopping centre was full of people shopping who looked immensely sad, and the people working in the shops there looked even sadder, and some of them looked mean, looked at me as if I was a threat, as if I might steal things, wandering round not buying anything at half past ten in the morning. So I left the new mall and went to the second-hand bookshop instead.
The second-hand bookshop used to be a church. Now it was a church for books. But there were only so many copies of other people’s given-away books that you could thumb through without getting a bit nauseous. Like that poem I knew, about how you sit and read your way through a book then close the book and put it on the shelf, and maybe, life being so short, you’ll die before you ever open that book again and its pages, the single pages, shut in the book on the shelf, will maybe never see light again, which is why I had to leave the shop, because the man who owned it was looking at me oddly, because I was doing the thing I find myself doing in all bookshops because of that maddening poem – taking a book off a shelf and fanning it open so that each page sees some light, then putting it back on, then taking the next one along off and doing the same, which is very time-consuming, though they don’t seem to mind as much in second-hand shops as they do in Borders and Waterstones etc, where they tend not to like it if you bend or break the spines on new books.
Then I stopped to have a look at the big flat stone cemented into the pavement outside the Town House, the famous stone, the oldest most important stone in town, the oldest proof of itself as a town that the town I grew up in had. It was reputedly the stone the washerwomen used to rest their baskets of clothes on, on their way to and from the river, or the stone they used to scrub their clothes against when they were washing them, I didn’t know which was true, or if either of those was true.
My mobile was going off in my pocket and because, without looking, I knew it would be Pure, and because I thought for a moment of Midge, I decided to be a good girl, whatever good means, and I made for Pure instead, up the hill, past the big billboard, the one that someone had very prettily defaced.
Matchmake.com. Get What You Want. In smaller writing at the bottom, Get What You Want In The First Six Weeks or Get Six Months’ Free Membership.
It was a massive pink poster with little cartoon people drawn on it in couples standing outside little houses, a bit like weather people. They didn’t have faces, they had cartoon blank circles instead, but they were wearing uniforms or outfits and holding things to make it clearer what they were. A nurse (female) and a policeman (male). That was one couple. A sailor (male) and a pole-dancer (female). A teacher (female) and a doctor (male). An executive (male) and an arty-looking person (female). A dustman (male) and a ballet dancer (female). A pirate (male) and a person holding a baby (female). A cook (female) and a truck driver (male). The difference between male and female was breasts and hair.
Underneath the Get What You Want line someone had written, in red paint, in fine calligraphic hand: DON’T BE STUPID. MONEY WON’T BUY IT.
Then, below, in a kind of graffiti signature, the strange word: IPHISOL.
Iphisol.
You’re late, Becky on Reception said as I went pa
st. Careful. They’re looking for you.
I thanked her. I took off my coat and hung it up. I sat down. I switched my computer on. I got Google up. I typed the strange word in and I clicked on Search: the web.
Well done, Anthea, on finally getting in, one of the shaveys said behind me.
In what? I said.
In to work, Anthea, he said. He leaned in over my shoulder. His breath smelt of coffee and badness. I moved my head away. He was holding one of the customised plastic coffee tubs with the clip-on tops. It said Pure on it.
I’m being sarcastic, Anthea, he said.
Right, I said. I wished I could remember his name so I could use it all the time like he was using mine.
Everybody else managed to get here by nine all right, he said. Even the girls doing work experience from the High School. They were on time. Becky on Reception. She was on time. I won’t even bring your sister into this as a comparison, Anthea.
Good of you, I said.
The shavey flinched slightly in case I was daring to answer back.
I’m just wondering what could have caused you not to be able to meet the same standards everybody else manages to meet. Any idea, Anthea?
Your search – iphisol – did not match any documents. Suggestions: Make sure all words are spelled correctly. Try different keywords. Try more general keywords.
I’ve been working quite hard on the concept, I said. But I had to do it off-site. My apologies. I’m really sorry, eh, Brian.
Uh huh, he said. Well, we’re waiting for you. The whole Creatives group has been waiting for you for most of the morning, including Keith. You know the pressure Keith’s under when it comes to time.
Why did you wait? I asked. Why did you not just go ahead? I wouldn’t have minded. I’d not have been offended.
Boardroom two, he said. Five minutes. Okay Anthea?