There but for The

by Ali Smith

  Well, but it was sore enough, that wrist on the bed, to be her own wrist, no stranger’s wrist after all, there where the plastic bit into it. That’s how you knew it was you and nobody else, then, was it, when things were sore? She lifted a hand. Or, an old hand that looked like it belonged to some other body, an old body, lifted, and it nearly did what she asked of it, it wavered, it took its time about it, it felt its way, missed its target, came at it anew, if at first you don’t succeed, and in the end it got one of its raw old red fingers in between the plastic that had her date on it and the skin under it and look! look at that! it was so tight! there was hardly room for a finger between this here and that there.

  So it was no wonder it hurt like it did.

  She did not say any of this out loud. She said it within the confines of her head.

  The head has its confines. The head’s got those all right, confines, and the heart. The heart has its reasons. That was a book, the what was it, name of it, the name of the book, the book that lay around the house for years, one of Eleanor’s, it was Eleanor with her airs even when she was a child, liked all that royal and history stuff. It had a picture of the old duchess, the American, on it, the divorcée, some cheap thing. Not the duchess, the book. Though the duchess come to think of it had been a bit of a cheap thing too it was widely thought, and she married the king and he abdicated. They liked the Germans. They were right old German lovers, them two. Not that May had anything against Germans. On the contrary, she had met some when they came to the house on the exchanges with the school and so on when the girls and Patrick were young, and they had been very nice the Germans in reality.

  The head has its coffins.

  It’s not the coff that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you offin.

  !

  May made herself laugh with that.

  Out loud?

  No, it wasn’t out loud. It hadn’t been out loud, any of it. She could tell because of that girl.

  What girl?

  That girl there, the girl in the room, that girl sitting on the big raised chair the visitors sat in.

  Who was she, then, that girl?

  She wasn’t family.

  She was just some girl.

  Even without her glasses May knew she didn’t know her, couldn’t place her face, not in a million.

  Well, whoever she was she hadn’t looked up, hadn’t even blinked nor nothing and she would have looked up if May’d been spouting away out loud.

  Good.

  Though she might, the girl, be wearing one of the things they wear, in their ears, they all wear them now, so they can’t hear anything but themselves and their insides, and even then they can’t hear themselves think. And if she was wearing one of them things she’d not have heard if May spoke or laughed or did anything out loud, so it’d not make any difference whether it was out loud or no.

  She was wearing next to no clothes, that girl. She was more skin than clothes.

  May turned her head.

  Outside the window it was snow.

  They were all mad as foxbitten dogs, the girls of today.

  It was proper snow, that.

  It was real old-fashioned winter outside this room. These last days there was more often snow than birds in the sky out that window.

  No one to love me and nowhere to go. Out in the cold cold snow.

  May sang this inside the confines of her head in a pretend old crone of a voice.

  That made her laugh.

  She turned her head back from the window again.

  No, she was not dead.

  She was not dead yet.

  Well, but we’ve all got to go in the end.

  Well, but there’s no getting away from it.

  Well, what’s for us won’t go by us.

  Well, Patrick held out the ten-pound note to me, out of his wallet, and I told him, I said, what would I be needing any money for? I’m on the last day of my holidays.

  Well, that was the very last thing I said out loud, and the very last thing I ever will.

  Well, these are my days of grace. And you don’t get many of them.

  Well, wish me luck as you wave me goodbye. No, not goodbye. Cheerio. The long cheerio. Not goodbye, May, Philip said when he was in here himself in this very pickle, and she’d been up doing the visiting and was about to get on her way home to pick up some things, pyjamas, clean things. Never goodbye, eh?

  Philip was small against the pillows in the bed, and the man in the bed next to him couldn’t pass motions, whined away in a high pitch behind his curtain while he tried; he was in real bad pain it sounded like. There was a chap the other side of Philip so thin he looked like a skeleton already. Across the ward there was a man who looked perfectly well. He was the illest of them all with something happening in his brain. Philip rested against his pillows and raised his eyebrows at her like a comedian. Then he reached up his hand to his mouth and his eyes and his nose to make sure his face was decent for her. He never liked to affront. He was a clean man. An awful lot of women ended up unlucky in their men.

  May Violet Young (née Winch) (F) (84) (widow, husband dec. 20.7.99) admitted to IC 6/09 with general collapse / delirium / high fever / UTI, passed for rehabilitation 7/09 to Wd 7 then 8/09 down to Wd 5 (Geriatric) (slated for closure in 2/10 as per new NHS guidelines whereby future chronic-convalescence elderly: reallocation to community / family care). Post 7 months UTI MRSA cycle: advisory meeting with NOK allocated “palliative care only” (though Mrs. Young was not aware this decision had been made for her, by her son Patrick Young, by her daughter Eleanor Bland, contact details for both on file, and by the sharp-nosed jumped-up peremptory little fellow who was the doctor, five foot five at the most, that was all, but whose mere appearance on the ward could make the nurses, the male ones too, scuttle about like a hutch of frighted chickens you could hear all the way down the ward.

  Not that he scared May Young, she could see right through the likes of him, funny little chap who, in the very way he slammed his hand against the little plastic thing on the door with the stuff in it which gave out the antiseptic, made May Young want to say, at his disappearing back, in her most calm voice, foul words the like of which she had never said in her life, never even thought in her life, hadn’t even known till then that she even knew existed).

  Which was all proof, which all went to show, that May Violet Young (May Winch as was, till she married Philip that June day in ’47, the river outside the church they got married in bright the length of itself with sunlight, and even the ruins themselves you could call the word beautiful then, with the grass growing and all the wild flowers nobody’d expected putting their pretty heads up all over the city) was not dead yet. She could prove for sure she was not dead yet because there, sweaty in the old claw of an old hand, whose old hand? her old hand, her own, go on, open it, proof: the balled-up tissue which held what she’d managed to get out of her mouth of the stuff they gave her to make her forget to remember the day, the month, the prime minister, make her drop her bowl with the custard in it, stuff which she had not swallowed, would not swallow, which she’d held under her tongue when the nurse, Irish-Liverpool, always a cheery word, gave her, and if it wasn’t Irish-Liverpool it was Derek the male nurse, lovely boy from the Caribbean, with May nodding and sending them on their way with a friendly eye.

  May was also not dead yet because she had seen the future, and their future would not, while she had life in her, be her future.

  Not Harbour House.

  Well, she’d rather die, was the long and the short of it.

  For in Harbour House (and even the very name was a lie, not even the ghost of a harbour anywhere near the place) she had, some years ago, visited a poor old lady. The poor old lady had been Mrs. Masters, and she was what you’d call a real lady, well-to-do, a long-time loyal client of Reading Flooring and Carpeting right from when Philip opened the business in ’52. Philip had sold to her and through her to her fri
ends too, for decades, the woven wool and rayon and nylon lines, the latex backing lines, linoleum lines, variegated yarn, the Danish, the short twist pile, deep pile, the cut pile lines, right up to the time of the hardwood and laminate. Thanks to Mrs. Masters, Philip had floored the quality’s houses for years. Quality always brought quality with it. And Mrs. Masters was a fine clever lady, had been in Intelligence in the war.

  May had sat in the Lounge of Harbour House with Mrs. Masters. She knew it was the Lounge because there was a sign, the kind you buy in Woolworths, stuck on the wall. It was cheap gold plastic and it said the word Lounge.

  She had held Mrs. Masters’s hand and had looked down as Mrs. Masters dozed, at the old lady’s feet in their clean slippers on the carpeting of Harbour House.

  The carpeting was an affront to those slippers. The carpeting was inadequate. It was patchy. It was none-too-clean.

  In May’s other hand she had a brochure she’d picked up at the front door. The brochure said that prospective Residents of Harbour House were positively encouraged to bring one or two small mementoes with them when they came, and that the occasional (small) item of furniture was also permitted on request.

  Someone, just then, had put a hand on May’s arm. May had looked up. A woman, not very old, maybe in her late forties and wearing a nice scarf, cashmere, asked her in quite a frank way if she wouldn’t mind settling up.

  May explained she was just visiting for the afternoon. She wasn’t family or anything.

  We accept Mastercard and Visa, the well-dressed woman said.

  I think you’ll find there’s been some misunderstanding, May said.

  Then the well-dressed woman took May by the arm quite firmly and led her through to Reception, pointing out where the décor had been done up and where it still needed to be done up and telling May how much the wallpapering had cost. At the front desk she took May’s hand cordially, said goodbye, and then as she swept off up the stairs Harbour House’s teenage receptionist had leaned over the desk, had made a face, had lightly touched her own forehead and had let May know that the well-dressed woman was an inmate (her exact word) who believed the place to be a guesthouse she’d run in her old life.

  Ever afterwards May had berated herself for not having had the nerve to shout up the stairs after the well-dressed woman that she should sack that insolent receptionist first chance she got.

  The longer-term outcome of it, though, was this. May would know she was dead for definite when she no longer remembered to think to herself: I would rather die and go to hell than wake up one day and find myself an inmate in that guesthouse of gone minds, gone things, bad carpets, furniture that needs permission.

  For the well-dressed woman had been right about some things. There were things that did have to be settled up in a life. Mastercard, Visa, if only.

  There was the rabbit. No amount of Mastercard or Visa would settle the rabbit May’d shot, got first time too, with Philip’s old air rifle.

  It was a wild rabbit that had taken to coming to visit the back garden. It wasn’t even as if that rabbit was doing any harm. It sat and nibbled prettily among the flowers.

  One day May had seen it there again and, without taking her eye off it, had stood in the kitchen and slipped off her shoes. She had backed away from the window and gone as quietly as she could through the first door, then the next door and into the garage. She’d persuaded the top off the rusty tin where Philip had kept the pellets. She’d cleaned the dust off the gun barrel with her apron and picked a fiddly pellet up and thumbed it into the little hole in the broken-open gun, then again with another, and she’d shut the gun and gone back through the house on quiet stockinged feet to the open kitchen window.

  She held it, sighted it, pulled the trigger.

  The gun didn’t even kick. It was more a toy than a gun. But all the same the rabbit fell on its side, lay still on its side.

  When she got her shoes back on and went out to look at it, it was still alive. She’d hit it in the fleshy part. Its furred back feet were neat one on top of the other. It lay in the soil of the flowerbed by the side of the lawn and it made no noise at all. It was as if it were dead. But when she looked down at it, it looked right back up at her, right at her with its brown eye in its head as if to say: well, you, you can just go and get lost.

  You don’t have to worry, Mum, Eleanor had said. They’ve recarpeted, it’s the first thing I asked. They’ve actually recarpeted twice since the time of Mrs. Masters.

  She meant well, Eleanor.

  But May Young (who had stopped speaking out loud, and the blue of whose own eyes had iced over, the colour of them paler, behind a kind of frost on the day they’d told her, Harbour House when well enough, incontinent, probable onset of mild dementia, danger to self, the kind of looking-after that can’t be done at anyone’s actual home) thought to herself now that the leaving of life, when it came, might well be accompanied by a different seeing, maybe something akin to that rabbit’s seeing.

  That’s what the babies did, after all, when they were born. They looked a look at the world as if they could see something that your own eyes couldn’t, or had forgotten how to. That’s what all three of them, Eleanor, Patrick, Jennifer, had done.

  If the beginning was like that, chances were the end would be like that too.

  Well, I’m in for it now, whatever it is.

  Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.

  Well, I wish, though, I really wish I hadn’t done that thing to that rabbit.

  Out loud? No. That girl who was in the room, whoever she was, hadn’t moved. She didn’t even glance up from her phone she was looking at or whatever the thing they all have in their hands and press the buttons on was. That was them these days, spending all their time looking up things on the intimate. The great-grandchildren, even, and them hardly past babies, spent their time on the intimate. It was all the intimate, and answerphones and things you had to speak at rather than to. Nobody there.

  Don’t just say nobody there all the time when you phone, Mum, Eleanor said one day. Say, hello, it’s me, then leave your message. It’s distressing for us, it’s distressing for the kids, it’s distressing pressing the answerphone message button and hearing you on there, I mean seven times yesterday, and each time saying nothing but the thing’s not working or nobody there. It’s creepy, Mum. And the thing is working. Leave a message, like a normal person.

  I say nobody there because when I phone up there’s nobody there, May had said.

  We are here, Eleanor said. We’re just choosing not to answer the phone.

  This beggared belief. What were phones for?

  Why would anybody have a phone and then choose not to answer it? May had said.

  Touché. That got her. Touché Turtle away! That was a turtle that used to be on TV, a cartoon with a French hat on like a musketeer that they used to watch, and Jennifer used to wear her old Wrens cap and play at being the turtle in the garden.

  It’s always Jennifer, was what Eleanor said once. She was angry. She was crying. This was years ago, ten years ago. May had made Eleanor cry by remembering something incorrectly. Eleanor was forty-five. She should have known better by then, a mother herself, with grown children herself, dear God and all the angels, than to have been standing crying at the sideboard about what got remembered and what got forgotten.

  I know it was awful, Mum. I know how awful it was. But that time it was me. It wasn’t her, it was me. It was me you painted with the paintbrush and the calamine. Nothing ever bit her. It was me who was always bitten. You said it was because I tasted so sweet. That’s what you said at the time. Nothing ever bit her. It was always me who got bitten. I still get bitten. I still do. I’m still the one who gets bitten.

  It was possible May had misremembered on purpose to annoy Eleanor. It was possible she knew exactly which child it had been, bare-backed, folded into herself like a paperclip on the little bed in the girls’ room with the bites coming up red all o
ver her shoulderblades and the tops of her arms, flinching away from the cold of the lotion on the bristles of the painting-by-numbers paintbrush.

  That girl there on the chair looked to be about the age of Jennifer. She looked about the age.

  Jennifer’s dates: 4.4.63, 29.1.79.

  They’d been watching an Alf Garnett film the night before on the TV. It had been quite a sad film for something supposed to be funny. Till Death Us Do Part. It was the film-length version of the TV programme. It was one of life’s cruel ironies, is what Philip had said after, that that’s what they’d been watching that night. January, taker of children into the ground. When she was two months shy of sixteen Jennifer’s heart had had a problem in it that nobody knew about.

  Such elegant narrow feet, she’d had. Like her father’s feet. His feet, too, were narrow, that’s where she’d got it from. Philip had had unexpectedly girlish feet, pretty feet.

  Well, feet in the end all went the same way, six feet down, ha, and that was life.

  You had to count your blessings, Philip always said. He always said it when he was disappointed. It was how you knew he was disappointed.

  Well, it was all right for him. At least he had the words for it. May had spent the years considering the sharpness and smallness and perfection of the fingernails on the hands, the toenails on the feet of every grandchild born, with a sadness she did not have words for.

  (Jennifer comes into the kitchen. She is eight years old and very angry. She is holding a book she’s found in the pile of books on the table in the upstairs toilet. On the front it has a picture of a man on fire, his arms and legs stretched out inside what looks like a wheel of flames.

  It is the most unfair thing I have ever heard of in not just the whole world, but the whole world and all the surrounding planets, Jennifer says.

  She has been reading about people who burst into flames. The whole book is about people who suddenly burn to death there and then in their living rooms or wherever for no reason. Sometimes their legs and arms survive them and someone comes home and finds them in a pile on the carpet, nothing left of the main parts of their bodies but little heaps of ash.