The First Person and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  Everybody on stage looks to Porgy, the cripple. He looks to Bess, who shrugs, then nods.

  Porgy nods too. He opens his door wider.

  the history of history

  My mother was sitting on the top stair with her arm round the neck of the dog, whose front paws were up on her knees. She was reading a Georgette Heyer book. There was no tea on. There was no sign of anything to do with tea in the kitchen. My father would be home in an hour.

  I stood at the foot of the stairs for a while. The dog looked down at me, wagged her tail. My mother turned a page and yawned. I slung my schoolbag strap round the knob of the banister, opened the bag, took my books and pencil case out and went through to the living room. I had homework for tomorrow. Write a newspaper report of the death of Mary Queen of Scots. Translate pages 31 – 33 of La Symphonie Pastoral by André Gide. I hated La Symphonie Pastorale.

  It was a load of sentimental rubbish about a blind girl. I called my father at his work from the living room phone. I lifted the receiver carefully so the hall phone wouldn’t make the little ting that would give away that someone was on the other phone.

  You’ll need to bring chips, I said.

  I can hear you, my mother called down the stairs. If you’re telling him to bring chips, tell him I want a haddock.

  She wants a haddock, I said.

  Couldn’t you put something in the oven? my father said. We’ve had chips three times this week.

  Actually I can’t put something in the oven because there’s nothing in the house, I said over by the door, loud enough for her to hear me.

  There’s people in the house, not nothing, my mother called down. And there’s a dog. That’s not nothing, people and a dog.

  I can’t hear you, I said to my father. She’s shouting stuff.

  I hung up and went back to the table and wrote up what we’d taken notes on in double history.

  A hush came over the crowd as the doomed queen was led to the place of execution. She was dressed in black satin and velvet and she undressed, saying, ‘I have never put off my clothes before in front of such a company.’ Underneath her clothes she was wearing red underclothes, and her handmaidens then put long red sleeves on her arms and pinned them to her underclothes. She smiled and prayed and said goodbye to those who had served her all her life. There was much crying in the room. Her handmaidens fastened a white cloth across her eyes and she stumbled forward to lay her head on the block. In fact she also put her hands on the block, but luckily someone noticed at the last minute or these would also have been cut off as well as her head. Then the executioner tried to cut her head off, but the first time he missed and only cut her head a bit open. The execution was properly executed the second time and when the executioner held her head up it fell out of his hands and all that was left in his hands was a wig, and the beautiful queen was revealed to everybody as an old lady with very short grey hair. Legend has it that her lips were still moving many minutes after her head was cut off and that her little dog, which was of the breed of Skye Terrier, hid in among her skirts and then curled itself round the place between her shoulders where her head had been, and then it later died as well, of sorrow.

  It was only a first draft. The idea was that we were meant to make it as much like a real newspaper report as possible. I went through it again and decided what was important and what wasn’t, if it was for a newspaper, and gave it suitable headings and columns.

  VERY FASHIONABLE

  The doomed queen was led to the place of execution. A hush came over the crowd when it saw her. She was dressed very fashionably in black satin and velvet. Many ladies nodded at her fashion taste.

  EMBARRASSING

  The crowd held its breath while she took off nearly all her clothes. All the people there could nearly see what she would look like with no clothes on. It was embarras-sing. She was wearing bright red underwear. Goodbye! she said to everyone. She smiled a queenly smile. The crowd burst into tears. She was the People’s Queen. Her hand-maidens fixed a white cloth on her eyes.

  WEARING A WIG

  When she came forward to the block, she stumbled. The crowd all went oooh! aaah! After two swipes of the axe, she was unfortunately dead. The executioner picked up her head. That’s when it was revealed to everyone that she had grey hair and wore a wig and was not at all as beautiful as people had thought, but much older in actuality.

  NOBLE BREED

  Legend has it that she spoke for a long time after being dead, though nobody has reported what it was she actually said. We at the DAILY NEWS believe she probably said ‘I am dead. Do not grieve for me. Please make sure my dog is fed properly after my demise.’

  Her dog, a Skye Terrier, which is a noble breed, would not leave her side even when she was dead. Then it would not leave the place where her head once was. Then it died too. And that was the sad end of the noble breed herself, the Scottish queen of Scots, and also of her dog.

  I heard something clattering on the stairs.

  Christ almighty I hate these fucking books, my mother was shouting. They’re full of shit. I’m never going to read a single one of these again in my life.

  She must have thrown the book down the stairs. That must have been what had made the clattering noise. Either that or she’d thrown the dog.

  I had never heard her use language like that before.

  I very much disapproved.

  My mother’s gone mad, I told my friend Sandra the next day at school.

  Mine too, Sandra said. All she does is make things and put them in Tupperware boxes in the freezer. It’s because the people next door got a freezer and then my dad got us one, a really huge one in the garage and it’s like she can’t bear to think of it having any space left in it so she’s busy freezing things.

  No, I mean really mad, I said, not just normal mad. She won’t cook anything. She says I’m to call her by her real name.

  What’s she mean, real name? Sandra said.

  Margaret, I said. She keeps saying that’s the name she was born with. She won’t answer to anything other than that anymore. I mean, I can’t call her, like, Margaret. I can’t say, I’ll be back at ten, Margaret, I’m going out with Roddy. I can’t say, I’m home, Margaret, when I get home after school. It sounds stupid.

  Yeah, Sandra said. Right.

  She laughed a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh, like I’d told her a joke she didn’t understand.

  It started last month, I said. She began to say things like, I’m a person, and all that kind of thing. Then she was just, like, watching TV a couple of weeks ago, that programme The Good Life, it was something about the posh one singing in a choir. And she stood up and said, I am no longer your wife, to my dad, and I am no longer your mother, to me. Then she went out in the car and we didn’t know where she’d gone, and when she came back it was two in the morning and we thought it would be okay, but the next day she was still saying the stuff.

  Oh, Sandra said.

  Sandra was my best friend, but she was walking a little further away from me. She was listening but she was looking not at me but at the ground, as though something baffling was walking two feet ahead of her.

  Worst fucking thing is, she’s started swearing now, I said.

  But it was as if I’d told my best friend I was gay, or something astonishing like that, and made her feel embarrassed because of me. Oh yeah, by the way, she said. I can’t walk home at four o’clock today. I’ve got to go to town with my mum.

  If it was me, imagine, I’d be having to go to town with someone called Margaret, I said. I’d be saying, I can’t walk home with you because I’ve got to go to town with Margaret. And you’d be like, who’s Margaret?

  Yeah, she said. Ha ha.

  What’s your mum’s real name anyway? I said.

  Eh, it’s Shona, she said. Bye.

  Imagine that, I called after her. Imagine you’re going into town with Shona, not your mother at all.

  She went round the corner out of earshot without looking bac
k. We went our separate ways to our separate classes; I’d taken languages and history, she’d taken geography and science.

  When I got home my mother had cut down the hedge at the end of the garden, which meant there was nothing between our garden and the train-line. There was no fence at the end of the garden at all any more. There was no sign of the dog.

  Look, my mother said. Now we can see so much further.

  Now the people on the platform can see right into our house, I said. The train people won’t be pleased with you doing that.

  She sat down on the grass among the strands of hedge.

  You used to be so much more of an independent thinker, she said to me.

  I’m running out of clean clothes, I said. I’ve almost nothing left to wear that doesn’t need to be washed. I don’t know how to work the machine. Neither does Dad.

  You’ll manage, she said.

  She sighed. She looked up. She said, Look at that!

  I looked, but it was only a blackbird in a tree. I sighed too.

  What’s for tea? I said.

  You’re like me, she said. You’re tenacious.

  I’m nothing like you, I said.

  I turned and went back towards the house to phone my father.

  You’ll be all right, she called after me.

  No I won’t, I shouted back over my own shoulder.

  no exit

  I’m in bed. It’s three a.m. I’m wide awake. I turn on to my side. I turn on to my back again. Earlier tonight I was at the cinema watching a film and I saw the woman who’d been sitting a couple of seats along from me get up midway through it and go down the stairs in the dark. She pushed the bar down on the fire exit door, the one over on the left hand side of the big screen. The door swung shut behind her, and I knew, because I know a little about the building, that she’d gone out through the illegal fire exit, the one that actually leads nowhere. Behind that door is nothing but a flight of stairs downwards and two locked doors.

  I looked around me at all the other people watching the film. It was a new British film about the relationship between the East and the West.

  Right then on the screen a man with a moustache was threatening a spiky-haired man with a kitchen knife.

  I looked down at the fire exit doors again. The sign above was lit up, with the word EXIT on it and the small green shape of a running man. But the doors were shut, and it was as if nobody had ever gone through them.

  I wondered if anyone else sitting here with me knew there was no way out of there, and no way back through after the doors had sealed shut on you. I wondered whether it was only me in the whole audience who knew. I told myself that if she wasn’t back in her seat at the end of the film, I’d tell whoever it was she’d come to the cinema with that I’d seen where she went. We would go down the stairs and open the door and she’d probably be standing there patiently on the other side of it waiting for someone to let her back into the auditorium.

  I couldn’t concentrate on the film.

  Maybe the woman had thought it was the way to the toilet. Or, more hopefully, maybe she worked at the cinema. Probably she’d gone in there on purpose. Probably she had a key to one of the locked doors in there.

  The film ended with nothing in its plot resolved. The lights came up. The cinema emptied. I went, too, with everybody else, and as I did I saw that a sweater was still on the seat she’d been sitting in and a bag was still there tucked under it. But I went up the stairs to the proper exit. I walked straight past the ushers without telling them. They’d probably work it out for themselves when they found the bag and the sweater. They’d know to go down to the exit door and check.

  But here I am now, awake in the middle of the night and asking myself whether she’s still in there, on the other side of that door.

  I know a story about that fire exit down there, you’d told me once in the cinema.

  It was back before we knew each other very well, one of the first times we went to that cinema. The film we’d come to see had ended. The credits were rolling, huge above our heads. We stood up. You stretched and pointed and as you yawned I saw the clean wet insides of your mouth, and your tongue unfurling.

  It’s really illegal, you said through the yawn. It shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t know how they got away with it with the fire regulations people.

  The cinema had been converted into a new cinema from an old cinema. Its downstairs was now a pub which claimed to sell the cheapest beer in Britain; there were often people throwing up outside this pub. Above it was the new cinema, three screens tucked into the skeleton of the upper half of the old cinema, which meant that the new cinema always smelt of fried food and sometimes the noise from the pub would shimmer through the soundtrack of whatever film you were watching. That night we had seen a film with Ralph Fiennes in it, something vaguely Russian. Eugene Onegin maybe. Was Liv Tyler in it? There were balalaikas on the soundtrack, or maybe I’m mixing that up with Dr Zhivago. I lie in bed now and try to remember. I can’t really recall anything that happened in it, other than that there were love letters and a lot of fur and snow.

  Come on, you’d said. I’ll show you.

  Nobody even noticed what we were doing. The doors were heavy, sheets of red painted metal. You leaned on the bar to open one side, then knelt down, took your newspaper out of your bag, chose one of its thinnest sections, folded it in two and shoved it under the near-closed door. This jammed it open just a crack – not quite open, not quite closed.

  There beyond the fire door the plushness of the cinema simply stopped. The stairs were concrete. They smelt of disinfectant. The bulbs in the staircase ceiling were bare. We went down two flights of stairs and came to a door. It was locked. It looked like it hadn’t been used for a very long time. There was another door just along from it. It had no outside handle. I pushed against it. It wouldn’t give.

  You told me how you’d been given a tour of the cinema when it first opened by a friend of yours who was the manager of the cinema bar. This, he’d told you, was where he’d come with one of the young girl ushers, looking for three crates of bottled fruit juice which had been delivered via a back door, at least that’s what he’d told her, as the fire exit door had swung closed on its own weight behind them and they went down the stairs and backed each other up against the walls. They’d had sex a few times. Then they’d found that mobile phone signals didn’t work in there and they’d begun to panic. They’d run back upstairs and banged on the locked doors. They’d shouted, but they couldn’t hear anything in there from the cinema, and even the noise from the noisiest pub in town wasn’t coming through those thick bare brick walls.

  They were there for a day and a half, you told me as we stood looking up at the bare steps, until a cleaning lady looking for somewhere for a sly smoke opened the fire door and found them both sitting there in separate corners with their arms round themselves, freezing cold on the concrete. It was winter, you explained.

  That’s when I had started to panic too, that the Arts and Books section you’d folded a couple of minutes ago wouldn’t be substantial enough to hold the door against its own weight and that when we got back up the stairs it would have shut itself of its own accord, leaving us behind metal several inches thick with no way to open it, which is exactly when you’d pushed me back against the breeze-blocks and kissed me gently, then harder, on the mouth. I think of it now and something inside me acts like a film cliché, as if my insides are a hollow guitar, and just the disembodied thought of the movement of your hands can do anything it likes, once, then again, then again, to the strings of it.

  Hello? you say. What?

  You sound a bit groggy.

  It’s me, I say.

  It’s half past three in the morning, you say.

  I was just wondering how you are, I say.

  You can’t do this, you say. It isn’t fair. It’s unreasonable. We agreed not to behave like this. We promised.

  I just need to ask you this thing, I say.

  Ch
rist, you say. I was asleep. I’ve got to get up in three hours.

  I couldn’t sleep, I say.

  Bombs? Terrorists? London in flames? End of the world? Rough day at work? you say.

  Well, you know that fire exit at the new cinema, I say.

  The what? you say.

  The fire exit that’s not an exit, I say.

  Not a what? you say.

  What I was wondering, I say, is whether or not, if you were trapped in there, well, not you, I mean one, someone, anyone, if someone was trapped in there and the door had shut and everybody’d gone home, do you think there’d still be any lights on in there?

  Eh, you say.

  Do you think there’s a general lighting panel in that cinema where all the lights, including the ones in the back corridors and stairs, get switched off last thing? I say. I mean, what if someone was trapped in there and nobody knew she or he was there? I mean, would he or she be standing waiting for someone to come and look for him or her, and then suddenly the lights would just flick off and that’d be it, dark in there till someone somewhere came in the next day and switched all the lights in the building on again?

  Yes, but what kind of a fire exit has no way out? you say.

  Or do you think the lights are always on in there, I say, like emergency lighting, regardless of the cinema being open or closed?

  It sounds illegal to me, you say. Where is this?

  Don’t you remember? I say.

  The thing is, you don’t. You don’t remember anything about it, or about showing me it, or about you folding your magazine to keep the door open. You don’t remember us calling it the fire excite on the way home. You don’t remember anything.

  Go back to bed, you say. Phone me in the morning. Phone me on my lunchbreak. Go to sleep now. It’s the middle of the night. I’ll call you tomorrow. Good night.