The Whole Story and Other Stories

by Ali Smith

  I picked up the biggest log again, swung it up to shoulder height, got my footing and aimed it right at you. But our kitchen windows are double glazed, we had them redone last year when all the wood round the old windows was rotting, and the new glass we’d had put in is reinforced. I didn’t want to look stupid, throwing a log that would just bounce off again. I let the log drop back on to the stones.

  Now it was sleeting from all directions; there were slices of wet sleet stuck all over me, in my hair, on my jumper, down the back of my neck. A splinter of sleet was melting on my face. I wiped it off. I couldn’t really feel my hands any more. I had no gloves or jacket, I had nothing, no money or bank cards or phone. Everything I needed was in the house. I thought of my coat and scarf, hanging so simple and so unhaveable on the hook by the front door. I was freezing. I hugged myself. I couldn’t even go and sit in the car. The car keys were in my coat pocket. All I had was the shed key. In a minute, if I got any colder, I was going to have to go and stand in the shed.

  Then I realized that since I had the key for the shed I probably also had the spare front door key, which we always keep on the same keyring, the keyring that’s got the small world globe on it. I put my hand in my pocket; there it was, the world on the chain and both its keys attached, and in the same fraction of a second (I could see it in the way you turned at the sideboard and stopped with the cup in your hand) the thought that I might have these keys entered your head; at the very same moment that I started for the front of the house I saw out of the corner of my eye the moment of you in mid air darting forward to get there first.

  It was a race. I ran the best I could, but the ground under my feet was slippery. When I reached the front, my heart beating hard and high, I was just in time to hear it, the click of the double lock and you, the winner, triumphant behind the door. You were laughing. It made me want to laugh too. Then the beginning of wanting to laugh made me want to cry.

  There was no way in the world I was going to cry in front of you, even if you were on the other side of a door and couldn’t see me. In the light from the living-room window I worked the spare front door key off the keyring. This was quite hard to do because the ring of the keyring is quite tight and my fingers were so cold I could hardly move them. When I’d finally got it free I lifted the letterbox cover and posted the key through the door. I heard the lightness of it hit the mat. I heard your laughing stop. I let the cover fall shut and I turned my back and went.

  We are in bed with our backs to one another. The wind is howling on the roof and battering at the cardboard taped over the broken window. I can still smell the fire; the smell of it is all through the house, like some ash-scented animal has slunk muskily about, marking its territory in all the rooms.

  We are inches away from each other. I can feel the reach of each inch. In the end I give in and begin.

  Remember the time you didn’t come home all night, I say, the time I hadn’t a clue where you were and I thought you were dead?

  You laugh gently behind me in the dark.

  I’m sorry, you say.

  No, it was good, I say. It was good to see the morning like that. It was the spring, remember?

  Actually, you say, I was just thinking about the time last summer that you fell in love and it wasn’t with me.

  Ah, I say. I laugh. I hope the laugh sounds wry and apologetic.

  No, it was good too, you say, it was really good, you know it was, it was good for both of us. I mean, I know it was good for you, and for me personally, well I found out all sorts of new things.

  Like what? I say.

  I really don’t know, you say.

  No? I say.

  No, I mean that’s what I found out, you say. I found out what it means not to know.

  Like that time we were in the Underground, I say, and the train doors shut and I was still on the platform right behind you and you got on the train and the doors closed before I could get in?

  I remember, you say behind me.

  And we were miming at each other through the doors of the train, I say, and then the train began to move and you were saying something through the glass but I had absolutely no idea what it was you were trying to tell me.

  Embankment, you say. I was telling you Embankment. I wanted us to meet at Embankment.

  But I had no idea what the word could be, I say, there was just your mouth making this shape over and over and I couldn’t hear what it was, then your carriage all lit up going into the dark and all the other carriages going after it with all the people in them, and then just the opening of the tunnel and nothing but the adverts for alcohol and airline companies and below them the rails, always so shining, like the fact that they’re dangerous seems to be something to do with the way they shine, and I was standing there and I couldn’t imagine at all what it was you’d been trying to tell me, I was making the shape of it with my own mouth but the only word I could think of that fitted the shape was the word ombudsman.

  We are both laughing by now. We turn in the warm space we’ve made in the bed. I feel your breath on me in the dark as you say it.

  Ombudsman, you say.

  Ombudsman, for God’s sake, I say. I didn’t even know what it meant. I still don’t. I couldn’t think of any reason why you would ever want to say it to me. So I thought it must be, it has to be, another word. Then I thought that maybe it was the word embarrassment.

  Embarrassment, you say. Yes. Let’s meet at Embarrassment station. I’ll be waiting for you at Embarrassment.

  Because it had been a bit embarrassing, I say, what with the people on the train and on the platform seeing the doors close on us and everything, so it could have been embarrassment. Then I thought that maybe what you’d been telling me was two words, not one. Something like embarrass me, or embrace me. And then there was nobody left on the platform except me, it was all different people waiting for another train, and then their train came in and they got on and people got off and I was still standing there on the platform talking to myself, going embarrass me, no, embrace me, no, employ me, no.

  We laugh towards each other. Then we’re silent again and I have no idea where it is you’ve gone to inside your head. I wonder if you’re thinking of that night you didn’t come home. I think about my other love, then how I’m standing on that platform, the trains coming and going one after the other, the people and the dead air in the Underground shifting round me each time, and each time I’m wondering should I get the next one and go to the next station along the line to see if maybe you’re there waiting for me? But what if I get there and you aren’t? Worse, what if I go somewhere else but you’re on a train on your way back to find me? Perhaps, I think, I should go back to the café we’ve just been in. Or perhaps it would be sensible to go to one of our favourite places, the diner, or the place where all the roads meet and the flower shop is, or the Chinese place, or the restaurant with the rooftop views, and wait for you there. Or if all else fails I could go back to the main station and catch the train home.

  But all I can think to do, and all I really want to do, is close my eyes and sink down till I’m on the ground there on the grimy platform, because all round me for miles is the old cave of the Underground and above and beyond it the city in winter, a city I thought I knew, only now it’s as nondescript as sea and me a stone tossed into it going down to its colourless floor.

  The house creaks round us. I lean against you in the bed. The bed creaks. You lean back hard against me and it fills me with a hope so open that I’m scared to acknowledge it. I can still smell fire and embers; tonight I can smell the season the way it’s usually only possible to at the very first moments of its return, before you’re used to it, when you’ve forgotten its smell, then there it is back in the air and the flow of things shifting and resettling again.

  I put my nose against your skin. You smell of you. You always smell of you, though there are, I know, variations on the scent of you; the summer smell of deep leaves and sweat, the autumn smell of smokiness,
the winter smell of fire and clean worn wool, the spring smell I can’t remember exactly and am waiting to know again.

  You lean down and speak by my ear.

  Embankment me, you say. You say it as quietly as breathing.

  What? I say.

  Embarrass me, you say.

  Okay, I whisper. I will if you embalm me.

  I will, you whisper back. But only if you imbue me. And would you like me to imbue you?

  Yes, I say. Please. Start now.

  The key hit the mat and I stopped laughing.

  I stood by the front door and listened.

  I tried to check through the window. I couldn’t see anything but my own reflection and the reflection of the room behind me. I went round the room switching off all the lamps and then back to the window to try to see through it.

  I went into the kitchen again to get my cup of tea. I stood in the kitchen for a while holding the cup. I came back through the dining room and the living room and went upstairs, where I carried the cup from room to room. I tried to look as if I meant to do this though there was nobody to see whether I did or didn’t; the rooms were all empty. You were out there with no coat. The weather was filthy. I opened the bedroom window. The sleeting had stopped; I looked up and down the road. There was nothing but wet cars parked outside houses.

  I shut the window and locked it. The fact that I was worrying about you when you so clearly weren’t even thinking about me, wherever you were, annoyed me. All round me in the room there was nothing but things. That hairbrush on the dresser was mine but the hairdryer, which we both use, was definitely yours. The dresser was mine; it had belonged to my mother. The bed was ours. The duvet was yours. I went to sit in the bathroom, the room with the least number of things in it. I looked at the empty bath. Its surface has been badly in need of re-enamelling ever since we bought this house.

  I would go downstairs now, I thought as I sat there, and look up bath enamellers in the Yellow Pages and tomorrow I would phone people up for estimates. That was what life was about, keeping things well and running, flowing and in good order, the homefires burning. That was what survival was about, re-enamelling the bath even when other seemingly more important things had reached their end.

  But the Yellow Pages wasn’t in the place where we usually keep it. I couldn’t imagine where it was. I went round and round the downstairs rooms looking for it, because you had taken it from where it’s meant to be kept, where we agreed to always put it after we’d finished using it, you had selfishly taken it and left it somewhere completely impossible for me to find and you had probably done it on purpose, you were always doing things like that, taking things from where they’re supposed to be and leaving them somewhere else. You had taken the Yellow Pages in the full knowledge that I would need it and then you had not just carelessly but completely callously left it somewhere I would never think in a million years to look.

  I got angrier and angrier. I stood in the kitchen. I opened cupboard doors and slammed them closed again. As I left the kitchen, slapping at the light switch with the palm of my hand to conserve energy, I noticed the weak light in the shed window.

  I nearly tripped on a pile of logs you had left right by the back door. I could have done myself an injury if I’d fallen on them, I told myself as I stamped out across the slippery grass.

  You were in the shed. I could see you through the cobwebbed window. I saw as I got closer that you were wearing round your shoulders and over your head the blankets we use for sitting on the grass in the summer. You looked ridiculous. You had one hand out of the blankets holding an old torch in the air. In the wavering battery light of it I saw you were reading a book.

  The shed door was held shut with something, maybe the lawnmower. I pushed against it and it wouldn’t give. I rapped hard on the window.

  What did you do with the Yellow Pages? I shouted.

  I rapped again.

  I need the Yellow Pages, I shouted.

  You turned your head slowly. You settled the blankets round you and turned back to the book as if you’d glanced out of a moving window in a train or a car at something and it had been of no interest to you.

  That’s when it flashed into my head exactly where the Yellow Pages was. It was where it had been for months, randomly open on the back seat of the car; we had fetched it from the house a couple of months ago when you said you’d teach me to drive, because, you’d said, I could sit on it to give myself a little more height in the driver’s seat.

  I was embarrassed. For a moment I considered pretending to forget that I’d remembered where the Yellow Pages was so I could go on self-righteously shouting at you. But the absurdity of even considering this, and then the absurdity of you visibly shivering with cold, wrapped in blankets, reading in the shed and me jumping up and down with cold, shouting at you in the garden in the middle of winter on a pitch-black night made me want to laugh. I almost did. I had to stop myself. I stood in the cold by the spindly tree. You had shown me which pedal was which and explained to me how a clutch worked. You had taken me to the near-empty Homebase car park and let me drive round and round for an hour and you had only been angry once, only for a moment, pulling the handbrake up when I went too close to the only other car in the car park.

  I thought about why I had been so angry earlier. I tried to work myself up about it again but instead I couldn’t help myself, I began to wonder what book it was you were reading and if it was the book we’d left out on the bench in the garden since last August, first out of forgetfulness, then out of laziness, then finally because we were both curious about what would actually happen to a book if we left it outside in the weather. I wondered if it had warped, what it felt like in your hands. It had been out there in heat and cold and wet for months. I wondered if the pages had stuck together so that when you tried to open them the print might transfer to the opposite page and make the book unreadable, so that every time you turned a page you’d have to peel it carefully back.

  Right then the wind rose and I heard the back door slam shut, but I was fine, I had my keys in my pocket. I walked the length of the garden away from the shed, went round to the front door, got my keys out and was about to put the key in the lock and let myself back in when I remembered your doorkey falling so lightly on to the mat.

  I could post my own key through the door. I could go back round to the shed and tell you I was locked out too. Then we could break back in to the house together. We could go back to where this had begun. Maybe once we’d got back in we could even start the fire you’d gone for logs for. In fact I would make a point of fetching the logs in, to show you how I trusted you.

  I imagined myself going down the garden again and telling you through the shed window that we were both locked out and that I needed you. But you might choose not to respond. If that’s what you chose then I’d break back in on my own.

  Or I could just open the door right now and go into the warm, shut the door after me, run a bath, go to bed early and read a book for a while by myself before I fell asleep.

  I stood at the door with the key in my hand and of course I decided yes.

  ali smith

  the whole story and other stories

  Ali Smith is the author of Hotel World, which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. Her first collection of stories, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award. Born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962, Smith now lives in Cambridge, England.

  also by ali smith

  Free Love

  Like

  Other Stories and Other Stories

  Hotel World

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2004

  Copyright © 2003 by Ali Smith

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in p
aperback in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton, the Penguin Group, London, in 2003.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Ali, 1962–

  The whole story and other stories / Ali Smith.

  p. cm.

  Contents: The universal story—Gothic—Being quick—May—

  Paradise—Erosive—The book club—Believe me—Scottish love songs—

  The shortlist season—The heat of the story—The start of things.

  1. Scotland—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6069.M4213W47 2004

  823’.914—dc22

  2003063020

  www.anchorbooks.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-42961-2

  v3.0