The First Person and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  So I was sitting at the back of a room not even really listening properly anymore, and I heard a voice. It was from somewhere up ahead of me. It was a girl’s voice and it was directly asking the person giving the seminar and the chair of the seminar a question about the American writer Carson McCullers.

  Because it seems to me that McCullers is obviously very relevant at all levels in this discussion, the voice said.

  The person and the chair of the meeting both looked a bit shocked that anyone had said anything out loud. The chair cleared his throat.

  I found myself leaning forward. I hadn’t heard anyone speak like this, with such an open and carefree display of knowledge and forthrightness, for a couple of years. More: earlier that day I had been talking with an undergraduate student who had been unable to find anyone in the whole of Cambridge University English Department to supervize her dissertation on McCullers. It seemed nobody eligible to teach had read her.

  Anyway, I venture to say you’ll find McCullers not at all of the same stature, the person giving the paper on Literature After Henry James said.

  Well, the thing is, I disagree, the voice said.

  I laughed out loud. It was a noise never heard in such a room; heads turned to see who was making such an unlikely noise. The new girl carried on politely asking questions which no one answered. She mentioned, I remember, how McCullers had been fond of a maxim: nothing human is alien to me.

  At the end of the seminar I ran after that girl. I stopped her in the street. It was winter. She was wearing a red coat.

  She told me her name. I heard myself tell her mine.

  Franz Kafka says that the short story is a cage in search of a bird. (Kafka’s been dead for eighty-four years, but I can still say Kafka says. That’s just one of the ways art deals with our mortality.)

  Tzvetan Todorov says that the thing about a short story is that it’s so short it doesn’t allow us the time to forget that it’s only literature and not actually life.

  Nadine Gordimer says short stories are absolutely about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.

  Elizabeth Bowen says the short story has the advantage over the novel of a special kind of concentration, and that it creates narrative every time absolutely on its own terms.

  Eudora Welty says that short stories often problematize their own best interests and that this is what makes them interesting.

  Henry James says that the short story, being so condensed, can give a particularized perspective on both complexity and continuity.

  Jorge Luis Borges says that short stories can be the perfect form for novelists too lazy to write anything longer than fifteen pages.

  Ernest Hemingway says that short stories are made by their own change and movement, and that even when a story seems static and you can’t make out any movement in it at all it is probably changing and moving regardless, just unseen by you.

  William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people’s lives.

  Walter Benjamin says that short stories are stronger than the real, lived moment, because they can go on releasing the real, lived moment after the real, lived moment is dead.

  Cynthia Ozick says that the difference between a short story and a novel is that the novel is a book whose journey, if it’s a good working novel, actually alters a reader, whereas a short story is more like the talismanic gift given to the protagonist of a fairy tale – something complete, powerful, whose power may not yet be understood, which can be held in the hands or tucked into the pocket and taken through the forest on the dark journey.

  Grace Paley says that she chose to write only short stories in her life because art is too long and life is too short, and that short stories are, by nature, about life, and that life itself is always found in dialogue and argument.

  Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two short stories.

  There were two men in the café at the table next to mine. One was younger, one was older. We sat in the same café for only a brief amount of time but we disagreed long enough for me to know there was a story in it.

  This story was written in discussion with my friend Kasia, and in celebration of her (and all) tireless articulacy – one of the reasons, in this instance, that a lot more people were able to have that particular drug when they needed it.

  So when is the short story like a nymph?

  When the echo of it answers back.

  the child

  I went to Waitrose as usual in my lunchbreak to get the weekly stuff. I left my trolley by the vegetables and went to find bouquet garni for the soup. But when I came back to the vegetables again I couldn’t find my trolley. It seemed to have been moved. In its place was someone else’s shopping trolley, with a child sitting in the little child seat, its fat little legs through the leg-places.

  Then I glanced into the trolley in which the child was sitting and saw in there the few things I’d already picked up: the three bags of oranges, the apricots, the organic apples, the folded copy of the Guardian and the tub of Kalamata olives. They were definitely my things. It was definitely my trolley.

  The child in it was blond and curly-haired, very fair-skinned and flushed, big-cheeked like a Cupid or a chub-fingered angel on a Christmas card or a child out of an old-fashioned English children’s book, the kind of book where they wear sunhats to stop themselves getting sunstroke all the postwar summer. This child was wearing a little blue tracksuit with a hood and blue shoes and was quite clean, though a little crusty round the nose. Its lips were very pink and perfectly bow-shaped; its eyes were blue and clear and blank. It was an almost embarrassingly beautiful child.

  Hello, I said. Where’s your mother?

  The child looked at me blankly.

  I stood next to the potatoes and waited for a while. There were people shopping all around me. One of them had clearly placed this child in my trolley and when he or she came to push the trolley away I could explain these were my things and we could swap trolleys or whatever and laugh about it and I could get on with my shopping as usual.

  I stood for five minutes or so. After five minutes I wheeled the child in the trolley to the Customer Services desk.

  I think someone somewhere may be looking for this, I said to the woman behind the desk, who was busy on a computer.

  Looking for what, Madam? she said.

  I presume you’ve had someone losing their mind over losing him, I said. I think it’s a him. Blue for a boy, etc.

  The Customer Services woman was called Marilyn Monroe. It said so on her name-badge.

  Quite a name, I said pointing to the badge.

  I’m sorry? she said.

  Your name, I said. You know. Monroe. Marilyn.

  Yes, she said. That’s my name.

  She looked at me like I was saying something dangerously foreign-sounding to her.

  How exactly can I help you? she said in a singsong voice.

  Well, as I say, this child, I said.

  What a lovely boy! she said. He’s very like his mum.

  Well, I wouldn’t know, I said. He’s not mine.

  Oh, she said. She looked offended. But he’s so like you. Aren’t you? Aren’t you, darling? Aren’t you, sweetheart?

  She waved the curly red wire attached to her keyring at the child, who watched it swing inches away from his face, nonplussed. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. The child looked nothing like me at all.

  No, I said. I went round the corner to get something and when I got back to my trolley he was there, in it.

  Oh, she said. She looked very surprised. We’ve had no reports of a missing child, she said.

  She pressed some buttons on an intercom thing.

  Hello? she said. It’s Marilyn on Customers. Good, thanks, how are you? Anything up there on a missing child? No? Nothing on a child? Missi
ng, or lost? Lady here claims she found one.

  She put the intercom down. No, Madam, I’m afraid nobody’s reported any child that’s lost or missing, she said.

  A small crowd had gathered behind us. He’s adorable, one woman said. Is he your first?

  He’s not mine, I said.

  How old is he? another said.

  I don’t know, I said.

  You don’t? she said. She looked shocked.

  Aw, he’s lovely, an old man, who seemed rather too poor a person to be shopping in Waitrose, said. He got a fifty pence piece out of his pocket, held it up to me and said: Here you are. A piece of silver for good luck.

  He tucked it into the child’s shoe.

  I wouldn’t do that, Marilyn Monroe said. He’ll get it out of there and swallow it and choke on it.

  He’ll never get it out of there, the old man said. Will you? You’re a lovely boy. He’s a lovely boy, he is. What’s your name? What’s his name? I bet you’re like your dad. Is he like his dad, is he?

  I’ve no idea, I said.

  No idea! the old man said. Such a lovely boy! What a thing for his mum to say!

  No, I said. Really. He’s nothing to do with me, he’s not mine. I just found him in my trolley when I came back with the –

  At this point the child sitting in the trolley looked at me, raised his little fat arms in the air and said, straight at me: Mammuum.

  Everybody around me in the little circle of baby admirers looked at me. Some of them looked knowing and sly. One or two nodded at each other.

  The child did it again. It reached its arms up, almost as if to pull itself up out of the trolley seat and lunge straight at me through the air.

  Mummaam, it said.

  The woman called Marilyn Monroe picked up her intercom again and spoke into it. Meanwhile the child had started to cry. It screamed and bawled. It shouted its word for mother at me over and over again and shook the trolley with its shouting.

  Give him your car keys, a lady said. They love to play with car keys.

  Bewildered, I gave the child my keys. It threw them to the ground and screamed all the more.

  Lift him out, a woman in a Chanel suit said. He just wants a little cuddle.

  It’s not my child, I explained again. I’ve never seen it before in my life.

  Here, she said.

  She pulled the child out of the wire basket of the trolley seat, holding it at arm’s length so her little suit wouldn’t get smeared. It screamed even more as its legs came out of the wire seat; its face got redder and redder and the whole shop resounded with the screaming. (I was embarrassed. I felt peculiarly responsible. I’m so sorry, I said to the people round me.) The Chanel woman shoved the child hard into my arms. Immediately it put its arms around me and quietened to fretful cooing.

  Jesus Christ, I said because I had never felt so powerful in all my life.

  The crowd round us made knowing noises. See? a woman said. I nodded. There, the old man said. That’ll always do it. You don’t need to be scared, love. Such a pretty child, a passing woman said. The first three years are a nightmare, another said, wheeling her trolley past me towards the fine wines. Yes, Marilyn Monroe was saying into the intercom. Claiming it wasn’t. Hers. But I think it’s all right now. Isn’t it Madam? All right now? Madam?

  Yes, I said through a mouthful of the child’s blond hair.

  Go on home, love, the old man said. Give him his supper and he’ll be right as rain.

  Teething, a woman ten years younger than me said. She shook her head; she was a veteran. It can drive you crazy, she said, but it’s not forever. Don’t worry. Go home now and have a nice cup of herb tea and it’ll all settle down, he’ll be asleep as soon as you know it.

  Yes, I said. Thanks very much. What a day.

  A couple of women gave me encouraging smiles; one patted me on the arm. The old man patted me on the back, squeezed the child’s foot inside its shoe. Fifty pence, he said. That used to be ten shillings. Long before your time, little soldier. Used to buy a week’s worth of food, ten shillings did. In the old days, eh? Ah well, some things change and some others never do. Eh? Eh, Mum?

  Yes. Ha ha. Don’t I know it, I said, shaking my head.

  I carried the child out into the car park. It weighed a ton.

  I thought about leaving it right there in the carpark behind the recycling bins, where it couldn’t do too much damage to itself and someone would easily find it before it starved or anything. But I knew that if I did that the people in the store would remember me and track me down after all the fuss we’d just had. So I laid it on the back seat of the car, buckled it in with one of the seatbelts and the blanket off the back window, and got in the front. I started the engine.

  I would drive it out of town to one of the villages, I decided, and leave it there, on a doorstep or outside a shop or something, when no one was looking, where someone else would report it found and its real parents or whoever had lost it would be able to claim it back. I would have to leave it somewhere without being seen, though, so no one would think I was abandoning it.

  Or I could simply take it straight to the police. But then I would be further implicated. Maybe the police would think I had stolen the child, especially now that I had left the supermarket openly carrying it as if it were mine after all.

  I looked at my watch. I was already late for work.

  I cruised out past the garden centre and towards the motorway and decided I’d turn left at the first signpost and deposit it in the first quiet, safe, vaguely-peopled place I found then race back into town. I stayed in the inside lane and watched for village signs.

  You’re a really rubbish driver, a voice said from the back of the car. I could do better than that, and I can’t even drive. Are you for instance representative of all women drivers or is it just you among all women who’s so rubbish at driving?

  It was the child speaking. But it spoke with so surprisingly charming a little voice that it made me want to laugh, a voice as young and clear as a series of ringing bells arranged into a pretty melody. It said the complicated words, representative and for instance, with an innocence that sounded ancient, centuries old, and at the same time as if it had only just discovered their meaning and was trying out their usage and I was privileged to be present when it did.

  I slewed the car over to the side of the motorway, switched the engine off and leaned over the front seat into the back. The child still lay there helpless, rolled up in the tartan blanket, held in place by the seatbelt. It didn’t look old enough to be able to speak. It looked barely a year old.

  It’s terrible. Asylum seekers and foreigners come here and take all our jobs and all our benefits, it said preternaturally, sweetly. They should all be sent back to where they come from.

  There was a slight endearing lisp on the s sounds in the words asylum and seekers and foreigners and jobs and benefits and sent.

  What? I said.

  Can’t you hear? Cloth in your ears? it said. The real terrorists are people who aren’t properly English. They will sneak into football stadiums and blow up innocent Christian people supporting innocent English teams.

  The words slipped out of its ruby-red mouth. I could just see the glint of its little coming teeth.

  It said: The pound is our rightful heritage. We deserve our heritage. Women shouldn’t work if they’re going to have babies. Women shouldn’t work at all. It’s not the natural order of things. And as for gay weddings. Don’t make me laugh.

  Then it laughed, blondly, beautifully, as if only for me. Its big blue eyes were open and looking straight up at me as if I were the most delightful thing it had ever seen.

  I was enchanted. I laughed back.

  From nowhere a black cloud crossed the sun over its face, it screwed up its eyes and kicked its legs, waved its one free arm around outside the blanket, its hand clenched in a tiny fist, and began to bawl and wail.

  It’s hungry, I thought and my hand went down to my shirt and before I knew w
hat I was doing I was unbuttoning, getting myself out, and planning how to ensure the child’s later enrolment in one of the area’s better secondary schools.

  I turned the car around and headed for home. I had decided to keep the beautiful child. I would feed it. I would love it. The neighbours would be amazed that I had hidden a pregnancy from them so well, and everyone would agree that the child was the most beautiful child ever to grace our street. My father would dandle the child on his knee. About time too, he’d say. I thought you were never going to make me a grandfather. Now I can die happy.

  The beautiful child’s melodious voice, in its pure RP pronunciation, the pronunciation of a child who has already been to an excellent public school and learned how exactly to speak, broke in on my dream.

  Why do women wear white on their wedding day? it asked from the back of the car.

  What do you mean? I said.

  Why do women wear white on their wedding day? it said again.

  Because white signifies purity, I said. Because it signifies –

  To match the stove and the fridge when they get home, the child interrupted. An Englishman, an Irishman, a Chineseman and a Jew are all in an aeroplane flying over the Atlantic.

  What? I said.

  What’s the difference between a pussy and a cunt? the child said in its innocent pealing voice.

  Language! please! I said.

  I bought my mother-in-law a chair, but she refused to plug it in, the child said. I wouldn’t say my mother-in-law is fat, but we had to stop buying her Malcolm X t-shirts because helicopters kept trying to land on her.

  I hadn’t heard a fat mother-in-law joke for more than twenty years. I laughed. I couldn’t not.

  Why did they send premenstrual women into the desert to fight the Iraqis? Because they can retain water for four days. What do you call an Iraqi with a paper bag over his head?

  Right, I said. That’s it. That’s as far as I go.

  I braked the car and stopped dead on the inside lane. Cars squealed and roared past us with their drivers leaning on their horns. I switched on the hazard lights. The child sighed.