by Ali Smith
The shop assistant boy was standing behind her and shoved her in the back.
You, he said. Can’t you read?
There was a sign on the camera display unit which said Customers Are Requested Not To Touch The Equipment. Please Ask A Member Of Staff If You Need Assistance.
Astrid pressed Pause.
Give me three good reasons to do what it says, she said.
Because it says so, the boy said.
Feeble, Astrid said.
Because I say so, the boy said. And because it’s not yours. It’s for sale. If you buy it, you can do what you like with it.
You don’t have to be so dictatorial about it, Astrid said.
Eh? the boy said.
One: the reasons you’ve given me so far are really lame reasons, Astrid said. Two: it’s the display model, isn’t it? That means it’s one of the cameras the company writes off. So you could be a bit nicer to me and let me watch my film on it. It’s not as if I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s not as if I’m doing it any harm. And three: if you shove me in the back again I’m going to report you to the management of this chain store as victimizing a thirteen-year-old girl customer and shoving her in the back, which is actually physical abuse, and I don’t want to report anyone to anything because it’s lame to.
You what? the shop boy said. He looked totally amazed. Then he laughed.
You’re quick for thirteen, he said. You’re too young, if you’re thirteen, for me to ask you out.
Like I’d go even if you did, Astrid said examining the camera.
He was all right. He let her watch her next tape on the shop camera without bothering her or anything. But there was nothing on the tape, just a series of fast-forwarded dark skies going light, one after the other. With each edit into another day the dark crashed down again on the screen. Then it paled into white-ish, though Astrid remembers the days as a deep far blue.
There was no dawn footage of Amber. There was nothing. It was as if Amber had deleted herself, or was never there in the first place and Astrid had just imagined it.
Astrid checked twice more. Then she ejected the tape and closed the side of the camera and went to leave the shop.
Finished so soon? the boy said.
He was a lot older than Astrid, about Magnus’s age.
You’ve left your films, he said. Don’t you want them?
I’ve finished with them, she said.
What’re they of? he asked. Are they of you?
No, she said.
If you give me your mobile number, the boy said, I’ll give you three new tapes free. Go on.
I don’t need tapes, she said.
Everybody needs tapes, he said.
I haven’t got a camera any more, she said.
What about something else then? he said. Batteries. Earphones for your Walkman. Your iPod. What have you got? A Walkman or an iPod?
No thanks, Astrid said.
Well, just give me your number then, the boy said. Go on. I won’t call it till you’re fifteen. I promise. Two years next September your mobile’ll ring and someone’ll say hello, is that the girl with the really blue eyes? Do you remember me? Do you fancy going to the multiplex to see a film with me tonight?
I can’t give you my number, she said.
Why not? the boy called after her out of the open door of the shop. What’s wrong with me?
I don’t have a mobile, Astrid called back.
The boy shouted over the heads of the people in the street. Hey, he shouted. I could get you a good deal on a mobile.
So by the time Astrid remembered to be disappointed about there being nothing much on the tapes, by the time she’d stopped at a shop window further along and tried to ascertain in its reflection how blue her eyes actually were, the disappointment of it wasn’t as strong as it might have been if all this other stuff hadn’t happened when she went to the shop.
Anyway she can remember quite a lot of things without having them on tape. The other day i.e. out of nowhere she suddenly remembered the time she and Amber were walking past a farm or somewhere and the huge dog ran out and barked at them as if it was going to go for them, really snarling, and Amber yelled right at it, stamped right over to it shouting at it and it backed off, it actually stopped barking as if it was surprised and backed away from Amber standing there on the road.
Astrid didn’t even know this was still in her head.
It is hard to remember exactly what Amber looked like. It is annoying that there was footage of that cleaner but none of Amber.
She remembers Amber did something very funny, something that made her laugh and laugh, rolling on the ground, but she can’t remember exactly what it was offhand. She can remember the sensation of laughing. She can remember exactly what it felt like to stand in front of, for example, the local high spirits, making them feel bad because someone had their eye on them, and this is the thing to remember, not what their faces or their clothes were like or where they were standing or how many of them there were. Nobody is ever going to ask her to prove which people in the village they were; that’s someone else’s responsibility, that’s for someone else to do. Her responsibility is different. It is about actually seeing, being there.
Astrid can’t believe, for example, that her mother has just gone off round the world etc. like she has. It is like the opposite of actually being there. It is substandard parenting. It will have consequences. It is substandard responsibility. It is the kind of thing, along with people’s parents breaking up, and grandparents who either die or have Alzheimer’s and come and live with people’s families and are tragic and don’t recognize their faces any more and can’t eat properly on their own etc., that makes people at school have eating disorders or cut themselves, which is something Astrid would never do since it is so unoriginal; there are already three girls Astrid can easily think of who obviously cut themselves and only one of them is particularly intelligent, and there are possibly also another two or three who do it and keep it a bit more secret, and there are also three girls with obvious eating disorders that everybody knows about. So they are all lucky in this house and this family that Astrid isn’t the kind of person to want to do that kind of thing.
Zelda Howe is one of those girls with an obvious eating disorder.
It is amazing how quick you forget, even something you think you know, even something you really want to remember. It is amazing how memory works and won’t work. A face can be just a blank. But like when she remembered about what happened with that dog, sometimes things like faces or memories come into your head on their own and you can see things so clearly that you couldn’t not see them if you tried. It is insane. Astrid can’t really remember what she looked like. She has searched through the holiday photos, but before her mother left she must have censored them for pictures that had Amber in them. Astrid has one of the photos in her pyjama pocket, the one of her and Magnus and their mother and Michael standing at the front door of the substandard house, because it was Amber who took it.
It is interesting the way that this is said about photographs, that a photograph gets taken. It is interesting that it is possible to say that Amber took the photo but that Astrid still has it. Here it is, in her pocket.
Astrid can see Amber taking it right now, if she thinks about it. She stood on the driveway stones with her feet apart and the camera up at her eye and she said: ready? and they all stood, ready.
It is actually quite a good photo of Astrid, which is rare because she is not very photogenic and usually hates photos of herself. Her eyes are very blue in it, it is true. They are a kind of sunlit flash of blue across her face.
She gets it out of her pocket and bends it to see it more clearly in the light from the streetlight. She purposefully makes sure she doesn’t look at her mother in it, just at Magnus, Michael and herself, and you can also see the shape of the door of the house and a bit of the driveway. It is a moment of what Amber literally saw through the tiny camera window. That is amazing to think of i
t like that, like them all fixed like that, standing outside the house like that forever, but really being something no more than a split second long inside Amber’s head. It is amazing that a photograph is forever but is really a kind of proof that nothing is longer than a split second in time.
At that moment forever in the photograph they are all looking at Amber and Amber is looking back at them.
If Astrid thinks of it that way, as something not being seen through her own eyes, then it’s okay to look at her mother.
Her mother looks nice in the photograph. She is smiling. It is a really happy smile.
The smile annoys Astrid more and more. She puts the photo back into her pocket. She stops herself having the feeling of wanting to cry. It isn’t too hard to do this.
When her mother comes back, Astrid is going to go into that branch of Dixons again and see if that boy is still there and if he remembers her like he said he would. She will say she has come in to look at mobile phones. If he asks her out again she will say yes and go out with him. This will really annoy her mother, who has a weird thing about Astrid never growing up to marry a shop assistant. One night this is what Amber told Astrid in her ear in the dark in the bed in the room in the holiday house in Norfolk.
She didn’t like him because when they met he worked in a shop, Amber said.
No way, Astrid said.
Way, actually, Amber said.
She pulled Astrid’s hair, once, sharply.
That was sore, Astrid said.
You deserve worse, Amber said. You’re as disgusting as they are. What would you prefer? I know. He gave up his career as a promising brain surgeon and already well renowned physicist although he was so young. No, I know. He was a computer genius and moved from company to company making lots of money and having a massive effect on the ways people communicated electronically. For instance, first he made a fortune inventing email spam. And then he made a fortune inventing the way that email spam could be blocked from reaching people’s emails. But he soon got bored with the pointlessness and took a job in a shop instead.
What kind of a shop? Astrid said.
An environmentally friendly alternative-consumer natural and fair trade products shop in somewhere in the north called Hebden, Amber said.
Astrid nodded.
He likes the north, Amber said. That’s why you and Magnus have northern names.
Astrid shrugged her shoulders, shy, warm under Amber’s arm.
Actually, no, Amber said. In reality he was born gifted. His talent was a talent for cleaning things. From a very early age he was exceptionally gifted at making things shine. It made him feel good, to make things clean. When he grew up he took a job as a cleaner, which is all he really ever wanted to do. Now he cleans the houses of people all over England, moving from place to place. He makes almost no money. He only just makes ends meet. But he cleans things so beautifully that it makes life better. It makes the things and the life shine.
(Astrid Berenski.)
Don’t believe a word, a single word that woman told any of you, her mother said in the house immediately after, and said it again in the car once, and said it occasionally again in the empty house and as the house filled up with new things.
Your mother’s right, Michael said. I’m afraid it’s true. She was a charlatan and a trickster and a liar. She was the same as a quack doctor selling remedies that don’t work to sick people off the back of a wagon. She was a mountiebank.
Magnus nodded, looked sad.
Only Astrid saw red. She saw, in her head, Amber up on the back of a horse with a mountie’s hat on and the bright red jacket they wear. Amber, on patrol, nodded down to Astrid as the horse clopped past.
It is good that to see red also means to be angry. Imagine everything you saw, red, like you could see in infra-red. When Astrid went back to school in September, the first time Lorna Rose dared to give her the you’re a weirdo look in the middle of that English class, Astrid, instead of ignoring it or freaking out about it, stood up out of her seat and old Miss Himmel looked up from the poetry, it was a poem about the last rabbit left in England and all the people going on a special trip to see it and Miss Himmel said Astrid what are you doing, sit down, and Astrid just kept going, walked along the desks right to where Lorna was sitting and stood in front of her desk looking at her and Lorna was laughing like she was scared, looking like she couldn’t believe it and Astrid stood at her desk and said, low under her breath so only Lorna could hear, I’m watching you. Miss Himmel said Astrid, sit down right now, and Astrid said I’m just telling Lorna something she needs to know, and Miss Himmel said tell whatever it is to Lorna in your own time, not mine or the class’s, unless you want to tell the whole class your business and explain it to us all. Astrid said I don’t mind telling everybody right now, Miss, unless Lorna would rather we kept it private, and Miss Himmel said, well? Lorna? What’s this about? and Lorna said it’s private, Miss, and Miss Himmel said right Astrid, for the last time sit down. Astrid looked at Lorna in the eyes one more time. Then she went back to her seat and sat down and they all got on with the poem and since then they haven’t done anything to her, in fact Lorna Rose and Zelda and Rebecca have all made a kind of almost embarrassing effort at being friendly and Zelda keeps phoning her up at home and telling her the things about her grandfather living with them and how hard it is that he lives there now and how him eating makes her feel permanently preternaturally sick and how guilty she feels that it does.
But the thing is, when Astrid remembers that morning in the class, it all takes place inside her head in a kind of strange film with strange colours, everything bright and distorted, like the colours have had their volume turned up to full too.
Also, the astonishing thing is, she doesn’t need her father’s letters any more. They weren’t proof of anything really. It doesn’t matter that they’re gone. In fact it is a relief not to always have to be thinking about them or wondering what the story is or was. Her father could be anything, and anywhere, is what Amber said.
Afraid or imagine.
It is strange to be thinking about Amber as if she is in the past.
But she is.
But it’s not Amber that’s over, Astrid thinks, looking at the photograph of Michael with his hand on Magnus’s shoulder and both of them laughing, her mother smiling like that with her arm round Astrid, Astrid with her arm round her mother.
It’s finished now. That time’s over. I’m warning you.
(Amber’s car in the drive, Amber starting its engine up. Her mother blocking the doorway of the house. The sound of the car reversing on the stones, the sound of the car wheels going off the stones and on to the road, the dwindling sound of the car. Her mother coming away from the door and going back inside. The empty place in the front drive of the house where Amber’s car, moments ago, was.)
7.31 a.m. on the new digital radio alarm, correct to the millisecond.
The dawn is coming up red. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Red sky at night means that it will be a sunny day the next day. Red sky in the morning means storms, it is an old folklore way of predicting what is coming. It is something else that is amazing to Astrid, that shepherds are traditionally the people who look after the sheep, lying under trees playing their pan pipes in the summer with the sheep all grazing round them and choosing which of their flock get butchered and which don’t, and at school they sing The Lord’s My Shepherd and the readings are all about how God looks after the little children and the lambs, but only some lambs, only the ones who believe in Him, and anyway people eat lamb all the time and it only takes a few months for lambs to become sheep, and butchered.
Peep for sheep. Michael and her mother being kind, playing games from the front seats of the four-wheel drive.
There were sheep in the fields all round the holiday house. They must have been new sheep, bought in from somewhere else after all the foot and mouth pyres.
When Astrid thinks of
the village the weirdest details come into her head like the lamppost next to the field on the road from the house into the village and all the high grasses growing round its base. Why would anyone’s memory want to remember just seeing a lamppost like that?
Astrid doesn’t know.
It is a fact, it is official according to the newspaper, that the world is actually getting darker, that most places are 10 per cent darker than they were for example thirty years ago and some are nearly 30 per cent darker. It is to do with pollution, possibly. Nobody knows. It is like the dawn going backwards, like the dawns on her beginnings tape, but in one very long very slow-motion darkening rewind, the dark coming down by tiny percentages each day in the daylight, so slowly that nobody really notices it.
It is like a curtain coming down in a theatre.
Except that it isn’t the end. How can it be the end of anything? It’s just the beginning. It is the beginning of everything, the beginning of the century and it is definitely Astrid’s century, the twenty-first century, and here she is, here she comes, hurtling through the air into it with a responsibility to heatseek all the disgustingness and the insanity, Asterid Smart the Smart Asteroid hurtling towards the earth getting closer and closer to the moment of impact and wherever her mother is in the world, she could wake up and look out of her hotel room window like Astrid is looking out of her window right now and see something coming down out of the sky like preternatural rain. She will look out of her window and she will maybe see the moment before it smashes a great big hole 10 km wide in front of her and blows all the doorknobs off the doors, blows all the furniture and stuff etc. out of her room and all the rooms and houses anywhere near it, it could come down anywhere, and it will have consequences everywhere, not just America or England, and in that moment her mother will think to herself that what she’s doing is stupid, that all along she should have been watching out, and all along she should have been somewhere else, not there.
Hurtling sounds like a little hurt being, like earthling, like something aliens from another planet would land on earth and call human beings who have been a little bit hurt.