by Ali Smith
I sit on the floor wrapped in the duvet in the dark.
I ask myself why I didn’t go down and help the woman, or at least check that she didn’t need help. I ask myself why I didn’t just mention it to an usher on my way out. Why did I do that, why did I just walk out of the cinema like that, without a word, even though I knew someone might be having a rough time?
My phone buzzes in my hand. The screen says it’s you.
Did I wake you? you say.
Yes, I lie. I was really deeply asleep. You did.
Sorry, you say.
Fair enough, I say. That makes us equal now.
I remembered something I wanted to tell you, you say.
About the cinema and the exit? I say.
No, about me walking home from town yesterday, you say.
You tell me how you were just walking along the road towards your new place and something hit you on the head, bounced off you and hit the road in front of you. You looked down at it on the pavement. It was a tiny McDonalds milk carton, rocking from side to side. A bus had just passed you. On its top deck was a bunch of adolescent girls. They were giving you the finger out of its back window. Then you watched them pass another pedestrian, a woman walking ahead of you. The girls threw a handful of the same small milk cartons out of the top window at her. Some of them hit her. She saw the girls in the bus giving her the finger. She stopped in the street. She bent down and picked up one of the tiny milk cartons and she threw it back at the bus.
This makes me laugh. You’re laughing too; we’re both laughing into each other’s ears in different rooms, in different houses, in different parts of the city, at four a.m. in the morning.
It’s getting light outside. The birds are waking up. I think about what it would be like to be in the dark and maybe not know what time it is. I tell you about the woman, how she went through the fire doors, and about her stuff left on the seat and under it.
There’s no way out of there, I say. I’m amazed you don’t remember. There was just a locked door, and another locked door next to it.
Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now, you say. Someone will have found her, you say. They’ve probably sorted it now, you say. Regulations will have made them make it a proper exit by now, you say. She’ll have walked through the wall like that man you once told me about, you say.
Like what man? I say.
The man who fell down between the wall and the soundproofing, you say. In the cinema, in your home town, when you were small. You told me that story. It was definitely you who told me. Remember?
No, I say.
Remember, you say. I’d had a really horrible day at work. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, because of the loans. I felt terrible, remember?
I remember you feeling terrible a lot, I say.
Don’t be horrible, you say. I was feeling really bad and you put me to bed and you curled up behind me very close, I was under the covers and you were on top of them, and you told me the story. You said your father had come home from work one day and told it at the dinner table and you’d never forgotten it. You said this man had come into the job centre and told him the story over the counter. And after you told me it I fell asleep, and in the morning I went to work and that was the day I handed in my notice.
I remember you handing in your notice, I say, but I don’t remember any story about any, what was it, soundproofing?
I’ll tell you again, you say. And then, with any luck, you’ll go back to bed and you’ll fall asleep. And so will I.
Yes, but I can’t now, I say. Now that you’ve told me to it’ll make me stay awake all the harder.
We both laugh again. It fills me with hope and sadness both at the same time.
And in the morning, you say, if you’re still worried, you can call the cinema and ask them if anyone claimed the sweater and the bag, and if they say they’ve still got them in Lost Property you can tell them about the woman.
Then you tell me the following story. After you do we hang up and I go back to bed. I rearrange the duvet round me. I put myself inside it. I tell myself as I fall asleep that when I wake up I’m going to call that cinema and threaten to report them if they haven’t made that fire exit a real exit with a proper, easy, simple, push-bar-down way out.
A man is working in a cinema. It’s the 1960s and all the local cinemas are under pressure to adapt to changes. It’s widescreen or nothing. It’s soundproofing and quadrophonic sound or bingo hall.
The man is helping to construct an internal wall parallel to the main wall of the building. The new wall is for soundproofing. It’s made of plasterboard. Because the cinema is a large one, one with a balcony, the new wall is more than seventy feet high and the man is working at the very top of it, screwing it together. In a few more panels’ time it will touch the ceiling.
He leans over the top ridge of it. The wall bends. He loses his footing on the scaffolding and he falls down between the two walls.
Because the walls are only a metre apart he hits and braces himself against one or the other as he falls, which lessens the momentum. He hits the ground with only a few scuffs and bruises and, he finds out later, a broken wrist. He’s not sure whether he broke it in the fall or in the act of making his exit, because as he stands up and dusts himself down, miraculously almost unscathed, he realizes he is trapped between the two walls.
He stands there, sandwiched between them in the dark, for less than a minute. Then he turns to the new wall and kicks it. It doesn’t give. He kicks it again. He kicks and punches and throws himself against it until he makes a hole in the plasterboard. Then he rips his way out. He never knew he was so strong. His workmates, who’ve been running around in front of the internal wall like scared cats, clap him on the back.
But the firm who are converting the cinema sacks him for ‘timewasting’ and ‘ruining cinema property’. He picks up his papers in his less sore hand and leaves the building. He goes to the doctor that afternoon, has himself signed off and has his wrist seen to.
Six weeks later he goes to the job centre to see what there might be for him in the way of similar work.
the second person
You’re something else. You really are.
This is the kind of thing you’d do. Say you were standing outside a music shop. You’d go into that shop and just buy an accordion. You’d buy one that cost hundreds of pounds, one of the really big ones. It would be huge. It would be a pretty substantial thing just to lift or to carry across a room, never mind actually play.
You would buy this accordion precisely because you can’t play the accordion.
You’d go into the shop. You’d go straight to the place they keep the accordions. You’d stand and look at them through the glass of the case. When the assistant, who’d have noticed you as soon as you came in – partly because you look (you always look) like a person of purpose and partly because you happen to be, yes, very eye-catching – came straight over to serve you, you’d point at the one you wanted. The shop probably wouldn’t have that many makes of accordion, maybe just five or six. You’d point at the one whose name you liked the sound of best. You’d like the sound of a name like Stephanelli more than you’d like the sound of a name like Hohner. It would also be the one you liked the look of best, with its frame (if that’s what they’re called) made of light brown wood, a good workaday colour; the other accordion makes in the case would look too lacquered for you, too varnished, less ready for the world.
When the assistant asked you if you’d like to try the Stephanelli before you purchased it, you’d simply hand her your bank card. You’d take the heavy accordion home. You’d sit here on the couch and heave it out of its box and on to your knees. You’d press the button or unhook the leather strap or whatever keeps its pleats shut. You’d let it fall heavily open like a huge single wing. You’d let it fill itself with air like a huge single lung.
But then that thought of the accordion being a bit like a single wing or a single lung would make you une
asy. So this is what you’d do. You’d go back to that shop. And although you can’t really afford it, although you can’t even play one accordion, never mind more than one, and although playing two accordions at once is actually humanly impossible, you would catch the eye of the same assistant and point into the glass case again, at the accordion next to the space left by the one you’ve just bought.
That one too, please, you’d say.
That’s what you’re like.
No it isn’t, you say.
I feel you get annoyed beside me.
That’s nothing like me, you say.
You move beside me on the couch. You move your arm, which has been tucked there between us, against my side, like a reassurance. You pretend you’re doing this because you need to reach for your coffee cup.
I didn’t mean it in a horrible way, I say. I meant it in a nice way.
But you’re sitting forward now, not looking at me, looking away.
What amazes me about you, you say, still looking away, is that after all these years, all the years of dialogue between us, you think you’ve got the right to just decide, like you’re God, who I am and who I’m not and what I’m like and what I’m not and what I’d do and what I wouldn’t. Well, you don’t. Just because you’ve got, you know, a new life and a new love and a whole new day and dawn and dusk and everything new and shiny like in some glorious pop song, it doesn’t make me a fiction you can play with or some well-known old used-up song you can choose not to listen to or choose to keep on repeat in your ears whenever you like just so you can feel better about yourself.
I don’t need to feel better about myself, I say. And I’m not playing with anything. I’m not keeping anything on repeat.
But as I say it I notice there’s something out of place on what was our window ledge. There’s what looks like a piece of wood there I’ve never seen before. It’s new, like the new mirror in the bathroom, the clothes in the kitchen by the washing machine that aren’t really your style, the slight trace in the air of what was our house of the scent of something or someone else.
You’ve got a new life too, I say. You know you have. Don’t. Don’t make this horrible.
I’m not making anything anything, you say. It’s you.
You don’t put your arm back where it was. So I move too. I make it look like I’m moving to be more comfortable, to lean on the far arm of the couch. I look at the place on the couch arm where there’s the old coffee cup ring. It’s been there for years, we made it not long after we bought this couch. Hoovering it didn’t remove it. Working at it with a brush and some kind of cleaning stuff only made the area of plush round it less plush, making it even more obvious. I can’t remember which one of us is responsible for it, which one of us put the cup down that made that mark in the first place. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, but I can’t remember for definite. I trace the ring with my finger, then I trace the square of worn plush round it like a frame.
God, you’re saying next to me now. This is what you’re like.
You say it in a voice like it’s supposed to be my voice, though in reality it’s nothing like my voice.
This is what you’re like, I say. I say it in the mimic voice you’ve just used.
You’ve really changed, you say.
No I haven’t, I say.
You’re so self-righteous now, you say. You’re so unbelievable that if it was you who went into that music shop you just invented for me to be made to look wasteful and whimsical and stupid in –
I never said anything about stupid, I say. Or whimsical.
Yes, you did, you say. You suggested I’m wasteful and whimsical. You suggested, in your story of me buying musical instruments I can’t play, that I’m completely ridiculous and laughable.
No I didn’t, I say. I was actually trying to suggest –
Don’t interrupt me, you say. You always –
No I don’t, I say.
I know what you’d be like in that shop, you say.
I know what it’d be like as soon as you pushed the door open.
What? I say. What then? What exactly? What would I be like?
I know exactly what you’d be like in there, you say.
Go on, I say. Go on, then. I’m longing to hear just exactly what you think of me.
You’d push open the door, you say –
I bet I know, I say. I bet I push open the door and I go really peremptorily to the counter and I ask to see every stringed instrument in the shop, and then I sit at the counter until the assistant brings the first one to me – it’s a guitar, and she puts it down in front of me. And when she goes to get the next one I take a pair of pliers out of my bag. And I take the first string on the guitar and get a grip on it with the sharp bit of the pliers and then I cut it so it snaps. And then I cut the next string. And then I cut the next string. And the next, until I’ve done all the strings and I’m ready for the next guitar. Is that what happens? And then do I cut every string on every stringed thing in the shop? And do I take particular pleasure in cutting the many strings of the pretty harp that was in the window? Is that what happens? Is that what I’m like?
You are looking at me, shocked.
No, you say.
That’s what you’d like to think, though, isn’t it? I say. That’s what you’d like to think about me.
You’re looking at me now with your eyes guarded and hurt. What I was going to say was this, you say. Do you want to know what I was going to say?
No, I say.
You push open the door, you say, and it’s like you’ve entered a Hollywood musical.
Oh, right. I see, I say.
There’s a bright build of soundtrack, you say, and it starts when you push the door open and the bell above the door makes a little pinging sound. And you’re in the place with all the pianos, and there’s a man just sitting there playing the beginnings of a song like Taking a Chance on Love or Almost Like Being in Love or no, no, I know what it is, it’s A Tisket, A Tasket, I Lost My Yellow Basket. And you can’t help it, you lean forward over the piano to speak to the man and you say, did you know that this song was a huge hit for Ella Fitzgerald a mere year before Billie Holiday sang ‘Strange Fruit’? And if you put the two songs together and compare them you get a real picture of race politics and what was acceptable and what was true from that particular time in recent history? Think about it, you say to the man. They’re both all about colour, but one’s about what’s really happening in the world, and the other’s a piece of absurdist nonsense, like a denial that words could ever mean anything, about a girl who loses a yellow basket and doesn’t know where she’ll find it. And guess which one was the huge hit-parade hit and stayed at number one for seventeen weeks?
So I’m a know-all, I say. Right. I see.
And the man smiles at you and keeps playing, you say, and then someone else on another piano joins in behind him in a harmony, and then another person on one of the others, until the whole room is a mess of joyful piano harmony, and you go on into the next room where the violins and so on are for sale, you can still hear the pianos in the background, and then three rather beautiful girls on fiddles pick up the tune too, and it’s romantic, the song has turned into a very romantic version of itself. And you tell the girls as you go past, did you know that there’s actually a much less famous follow-up song where Ella Fitzgerald finds her yellow basket again after all? It’s almost better than the original, well, I prefer it, though it wasn’t such a huge hit at the time. And the pretty violinists nod and smile, and, as if to oblige you, all around you the tune everybody’s suddenly playing is the follow-up tune, the tune you just mentioned, and now the whole shop is resounding with it, the horn department full of people playing trumpets and saxes and clarinets which flash in the lights from the shop ceiling and the noise they make, complementing the pianos and the strings, is as wide as a sky. The trumpet player at the front winks at you and there’s a girl on the sax who winks too. Then you go into the next room and the next room i
s full of children on kazoos, ocarinas, recorders, glockenspiels, chime bars, castanets, they’re all joining in, playing the same tune, in fact anywhere, everywhere you go, up or down the stairs, from department to department people are playing the same happy tune on every single instrument in this shop, it’s like the whole shop is alive, its walls are moving to the rhythm, and the tune builds and builds, only threatening to come to an end, only fading down, as you walk towards the shop door and reach your hand out to open it. Down, down, down goes the tune, but then, just to see what will happen, you let the door-handle go and you take three steps back from the door, and like a joke the music soars out really loud again. And then, on the right rhythm, the perfect final three notes, you open the door, go through the door, shut the door, and the whole thing ends on the single ping of the bell as you close it behind you.
There, you say. That’s what you’re like.
I am on my feet now. I am furious.
So, I say. So I’m a naïve know-all boring unbearable self-dramatist who goes around the world thinking I’m really special, really something, really it? And wherever I go I take it for granted that everything in the whole world is nothing but a cutesy orchestra there to perform for me? Just to please me? As if the whole world can be controlled? As if the whole world’s there just to play my own private soundtrack?
You know I didn’t mean it like that, you say.
You look cowed. I feel suddenly very righteous.
And you think I’m the kind of person who’d maunder on, in a situation where it was totally inappropriate, about how one song is really more important than another song because of politics, yet really, in reality, I’d prefer to wallow about in some kitschy old nonsense that feeds my delusions of grandeur?
Eh? you say.
You look astonished.
That’s how supercilious? That’s how solipsistic? I say.
