by Ali Smith
Then the parcel had come. I had limped to the door and taken it from the postman without hesitation. But as soon as I had taken it I had known there was something wrong with it. It looked like it should have been heavier than it was, but when I had it in my hands it felt unnaturally light. It felt unnatural. There it still was. I wasn’t wrong. It was odd. The writing on it was a crazy person’s writing, scrawled all over the place. It was funny to see the address of our house in that unstable writing. The brown paper was old and soft, sellotaped very stiffly all over, as if it were a kind of shell rather than a parcel. It looked as if it had been going around the postal system for years. But it was postmarked yesterday. I couldn’t make out where from.
I blinked. I was being paranoid. It was a side-effect. It looked nothing more than, nothing worse than, an old-fashioned sci-fi TV programme prop, some pretend-evil creature with a name like molluscopod jerkily sliming across a makeshift landscape to evil synthesizer music chasing the sidekick girl.
I tried to think this, but the parcel defied me. It had been sent. It had been meant for someone.
I picked it up and carried it through to the kitchen and put it on the table, then I had a terrible urge to wash my hands. After this I went back through to the couch and switched on the TV. I watched the quiz where people are given random consonants and vowels and have to make up words. Then I watched another where people are eliminated if they give enough wrong answers. In the ad break I went back through to the kitchen. I had to. It was there on the table, too close to things in the fruit bowl that we would eventually eat.
I broke a banana off the bunch and poked the parcel over a few inches, away from the bowl, right to the edge of the table. I went to put the banana in the bin, holding the end which had touched the parcel well away from me. This was when you arrived home.
Why are you throwing away a perfectly good banana? you asked.
Then you looked at the parcel.
You looked at the writing on the parcel, the name and address. You picked it up and shook it. You shook your head. You looked at me. I shook my head too. You put it back down on the table and we both stepped back. We stared at it for a while. Then you said: it’s something horrible, isn’t it?
I nodded.
What if we just opened it? you said.
Well, it’s something horrible. And it’s not addressed to us, I said.
All through supper it got harder to breathe. I could hardly swallow. I felt dizzier and dizzier. You looked pale, appalled. You sat on the carpet, leaned against the armchair. You didn’t eat; you flicked little bits of jalapeno off your pizza back into the pizza box.
What if, you eventually said, it had arrived here actually open? Split, you know, by accident.
Just split enough so we could see what was actually in it? I said.
Uh huh, you said.
I took the knife through and washed the pizza off it and dried it. You came through to the kitchen. You turned the parcel round on the table and took the knife. You cut right into it.
Christ, you said.
The smell was awful. We both stepped back. Then you took a deep breath, held your breath, unlocked the back door and took the sagging parcel and the knife outside. I heard you cough and I heard the ripping noise the knife made in the side of it. You coughed and then spat. I went out into the garden.
On the path beside the gaping parcel was a pile of filthy rags. The smell was foul.
Look, you said. I think it’s pyjamas.
There was a jacket and a pair of small trousers for a six or seven year old. They were dark blue under the filth, and patterned with soiled and ruined little pictures, a child dressed as a guardsman, a child on a hobby horse, a child in a sports car, a child making a sandcastle.
There was a note. It said, in the same wild ballpoint writing: W H o S A n A U G H t Y B o Y t H E n.
Well, it’s definitely not to either of us then, you said.
Jesus, I said.
Very weird, you said.
Beats me, I said.
Someone’s mother? you said. Or father?
Someone’s lover? I said.
Someone very angry, you said. Or unhappy.
Or a bad joke, I said.
A very bad joke. Or something much worse than a joke, you said.
Over our heads birds sang the evening down. You used the knife to prod the note and the clothes back through the parcel’s mouth. I went to fetch the sellotape.
We came back inside. We locked the door. You washed your hands under the tap. I went to the bathroom to wash mine. I ran the water until it was very hot. Even after using the soap someone brought us from France, the one with the too-strong smell, I couldn’t get the other smell out of my nose.
It was half past two in the morning.
I’m going to bed in a minute, I said.
Me too, you said.
Neither of us moved.
The parcel was outside where we’d left it on the garden path. We were watching an I Love 1980s programme, one we’d watched twice before. We were talking about how it had become possible that there never was a miners’ strike, a war, a rightwing landslide, a massive recession or any huge protest march; instead there were only Rubik’s cubes, Transformers and a puppet TV compere shaped like a rat.
Snoods were 1983, you said. How old were you in 1983?
Seventeen, I said.
Tell me something that actually happened, you said. Something about you that I don’t know, from when you were seventeen and I was sixteen and we lived in different towns and didn’t know yet that each other had even been born.
I thought for a moment.
1983 is the year I was in love with Heyden, I said.
With who? you said.
Natasha Heyden, I said. But she only answered to Heyden.
You never told me about anyone called Natasha Heyden before, you said.
Heyden, I was saying. I haven’t thought about her for years. She was in the year above me at school. There was this story about her and Mrs Brand the maths teacher, Mrs Brand was going round the class asking for answers and she got to Heyden and called her Natasha and Heyden acted like she didn’t hear, so Mrs Brand asked her for the answer again and Heyden still acted like she didn’t hear, looking Mrs Brand in the eye, and this went on for twenty minutes, the whole class watching, Mrs Brand standing over Heyden’s desk hitting it with the flat of her hand saying the name Natasha Natasha Natasha and Heyden looking straight through her. Heyden wasn’t like anybody else. She was terribly beautiful.
What did she look like? you said.
She was small and blonde and kind of wiry, I said. She shot things.
She what? you said.
She had some kind of rifle. She was a really good shot. Their house was out by itself on the edge of town, next to the fields by the ring road; there were a lot of rabbits, birds. I made friends with her little sister Angela so I could hang around their house on a Saturday, she had these sticking-out teeth. Angela hated Heyden shooting things, she used to hide in her bedroom with her stereo turned right up, Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart on repeat, so she couldn’t hear the shots. Every Saturday I would say I needed fresh air or a glass of water or something, and then I would slip out to their back garden knowing Angela would never dare come out and fetch me back.
So all the time I spent anywhere near Heyden was time that Heyden was killing things, or waiting to kill things, or finishing them off, laying out a row of dead things on their lawn. She acted like I wasn’t there. It made me act like I wasn’t there too. I would sit on the back step of their house. She’d be at the end of their garden, she’d lean over the fence then lift the rifle to her head, to her blue eye, and swing the length of it after whatever was flying or running. Most Saturdays I went to their house. Most Saturdays this same thing. Until one Saturday I got there and Angela Heyden answered the front door and took me upstairs.
Usually, Angela Heyden and I at least feigned friendship when I got to their house
; usually we had a cup of coffee or looked at her books or magazines, talked about school or homework or boys or whatever. She had these cards she’d made herself, she said they were future cards. They were just bits of paper, bits of card, they had words written on them and every week she would shuffle them, give them to me to shuffle for myself, then tell me to choose three and turn them over and these would be my words for the future.
What kind of words? you said.
I don’t know, I said. I don’t remember now.
You must remember one, you said. Tell me.
Well I do remember I had the word luxurious once, I said. That was good. I thought it meant I’d be very rich later when I was an adult and was married and had children and a job and was living in the kind of spotless fitted-kitchen house an adult is supposed to live in, doing a jet-set job, wearing suits, having dinner parties for articulate friends and striding across a beige beach with my family and my Dalmatian.
Uncannily like our life, you said.
I had the word astute once, I said, I remember looking it up in the dictionary and being pleased about it. I once got the word fiery. That was good. I was in a mood with my parents all that weekend about nothing, just to prove to myself how fiery I was.
Usually we would do this, or something like this, before I sloped off desperate to watch her beautiful sister killing things. But this particular day, nothing like that. Not a word. Not even a hello. Angela Heyden led me up the stairs. When we got up there she knocked on a door that wasn’t her bedroom door, pushed open the door, pushed me inside and shut the door after me.
Was it Heyden’s room? you said.
Heyden’s room, Heyden’s things, Heyden’s bed, and there was Heyden herself at the window, her back to me and her gun against the wall. Be quiet, she said without turning round. Then she looked round and said, Oh, it’s you. It was the first time she had ever. And then she made me kill the squirrel.
You sat up.
She did what? you said.
She waved me over to the window. It looked down on to their back garden. She pointed to the lawn and told me, hushed, that the cardboard box down there was balanced on a stick and then she showed me a piece of string in her hand, I could see it tightening in the air all the way across the garden. It was attached to the stick.
There’s a mound of food under that box, she said in my ear. I’ve been training squirrels all week for you.
The thought that she’d been doing something, anything, for me made my heart fly up through my body, up it went into the sky and flew up and down like a summer bird.
If Heyden had seen it do that, she’d have shot it, you said.
So she moves along and makes room for me at the window, I said. And, sure enough, this grey squirrel with its brown paws and brown face comes stopping and starting over the lawn and goes straight in, like it’s meant to, under the box and sits down there eating something. Heyden gives the string a tug and the box comes down over it.
Then Heyden hands me the rifle. And I do it. I did it. I shot at the box. I missed. I shot at it again. I shot at it four times. I hit something the fourth time. The box fell in on itself. I think I killed it.
You think you did? you said.
Natasha Heyden grabbing at the gun to reload it, yelling at me for missing then jumping up and down in her room when I hit the box, haring off down the stairs to see if it was dead or alive and me standing at the window, everything in my body shaking and my ears full of the noise I’d just made and Angela’s Total Eclipse of the Heart playing down the corridor. I went down the stairs too. I went out of their front door and up the path and away. I stood for a minute at the end of their road. I was shaking. I was mortified. But I wasn’t mortified about whether I’d killed a squirrel or not; I was mortified that it hadn’t even been able to run away and I’d still missed it, not once or twice but three times.
One way was towards home and the other was towards the fly-over. I couldn’t go home. When I got to the motorway I walked on the hard shoulder. I must have been halfway to the city. It started to really rain. I got picked up by a kind person. A woman stopped and said did I need a lift. Her car was quite new, it smelt new, she draped plastic bags on its back seat for me to sit on so I wouldn’t mark the leatherette. She said I looked terrible and asked what had happened to me. I couldn’t tell her about the actual squirrel or anything, it would have sounded mad. I’m dead, I said. My heart is gone. She laughed. She said I didn’t look in the least dead and wherever it had gone it wouldn’t be gone for long. She made me go home, she u-turned on the motorway to run me there. I can clearly remember the scraping noise the bottom of her car made on the central reservation when she did.
Then what happened? you said.
Nothing, I said. I never went back to Heyden’s house. I heard about her afterwards; apparently she went off to college in Texas or somewhere.
She came back and got some kind of job in career management or maybe party politics, you said. She’s probably in our government now. What happened to the squirrel? Was it dead?
That’s the thing, I said. I never found out. I don’t know.
What about the sister? you said.
I shrugged.
But you were lucky, you said. She was astute, that woman who picked you up in her car.
Yes, I said.
And fiery, that girl with the gun, you said. All that weekend killing. All because you could. How indulgent. How luxurious. How 1980s.
Ah, I see, I said. I get it. The future word thing.
Though actually, you said, it was her all along, the sister, Angela, not the other one, who was fiery if anyone was.
Angela Heyden? No way, I said.
Playing that heartfelt record over and over, so loud, you said. And it’s Angela who was astute in the end. Knowing, finally, the nothing she was to you. Handing you over to her sister like that, so neatly packaged.
Ha ha, I said. But what about luxurious? You missed out luxurious. Was Angela luxurious too?
Yes, you said. She was.
Uh huh? I said.
Well, you said stalling for time. Well, she was, uh, luxurious with you. She gave you a great deal of luxury.
How? I said.
She was clearly in love with you herself, you said. And she gave you all those futures, all those possibilities of what to be. Three whole new future selves every week, she gave you. Until she finally gave up on you. What happened to Angela? I like the sound of her. Much more than her psychopath sister. I wonder where she lives now. I wonder if she’d do me some words. I wouldn’t kill a squirrel for her, but I’d walk along a wet motorway for a girl like that any day.
I punched you in the side, quite hard. You laughed and wrestled me down on the couch and held me so I couldn’t move my arms.
Ouch, I said.
Oh God, you said, backing off. I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you? Is your knee okay?
I had forgotten I was even supposed to be sore. Then it crossed your face and I remembered it myself, the original reason we’d forgotten or remembered anything tonight. The parcel of old bad-smelling cloth was outside our house in the dark.
We both sat up. I took your hand. You looked me in the eye.
What’ll we do with it? you said.
We put it back in the post the next day. Two days later a postman returned it to our address.
We took it to the main post office and told them it wasn’t for us. A woman accepted it through the hatch. She redirected it to the room where the questionable deliveries wait to be processed. After this it was despatched to the centralized depot, a building the size of several aircraft hangars on the outskirts of the city, full of undeliverables.
We took it to the police station. We told the man at the reception desk that it had been open when it arrived and that we had been disturbed by what was in it. The man put the parcel on one side and took down four forms’ worth of details. He told us that people come into the station with dubious packets very often. He wouldn’t tell us e
xactly what happened to parcels like the one we handed in. He said they were dealt with as fully as possible.
We put it in the outside bin. The following Thursday the binmen emptied it into one of the municipal trucks, which churned up the contents of hundreds of bins and delivered them to the landfill on the outskirts, where the parcel still is, under the acceptable statistically monitored municipal layers of waste.
We burned it in the garden incinerator. We stoked up a high-shooting fire with old dried offcuts from the bushes and the trees, then when the fire was at its fastest we threw it in and clamped the lid on. Its particles flew into the air through the chimney, over our heads, over the roofs of the neighbourhood.
We buried it in the garden. Then you remembered a poem where a man buries his anger and his anger grows into a poisonous tree and kills the person he is angry with. For days we worried about what might grow from it. We kept going outside to check. When the weather changed and we went into the garden less, we worried that in years to come, after we were gone, someone might be digging and might find it and open it like we had. Down below the ground it decomposed. Underground creatures ate it and nested in it. Grass grew over the place we buried it and eventually we couldn’t tell exactly where.
We went out to the garden at three in the morning and picked it up off the path. We brought it back into the kitchen. You sliced it open again with the knife. We held our breath so we wouldn’t smell it. I emptied it all, including the note, into the washing machine and shut the door. We put the soap in the drawer and turned the temperature to 90°C. We stayed up while the machine churned through the cycle; it was light outside when we packed them, dried, folded, lightly paper-specked, back into their parcel and sealed up the knife-slice again. You wrote across it with an indelible marker NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS RETURN TO SENDER. We slept for three hours then got up and had breakfast, then we took it, me limping and sore, you bleary and exhausted, to our local post office, the one they are always threatening with closure because of cuts, and dropped it in the post-sack.
