There but for The Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Ali Smith

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, published by the Penguin Group, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., London.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Nanada Music, B.V., c/o Tier Three Music (ASCAP) for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Ding-A-Dong” by Dick Bakker, Will Luikinga, and Eddy Ouwens, copyright © Nada International C.V., administered by Nanada Music, B.V. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Ali.

  There but for the / Ali Smith.

  p. cm.

  eISBN 978-0-307-37998-6

  1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. Personal space—Fiction.

  3. Social interaction—Fiction. 4. Dinners and dining—Fiction.

  5. Greenwich (London, England). 6. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction.

  7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6069.M4213T47 2011 823'.914—dc22 2010051377

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover design by Peter Mendelsund

  First United States Edition

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments and Thanks

  Epigraph

  The fact is

  THERE

  There was once

  BUT

  But (my dear Mark)

  FOR

  For 29 January

  THE

  About the Author

  Also by Ali Smith

  for Jackie Kay

  for Sarah Pickstone

  for Sarah Wood

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS

  I’m indebted for sources of some of the stories about songs in this book to America’s Songs by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (Routledge, 2006). I’m also indebted for information used in the first section to Caroline Moorehead’s Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Chatto and Windus, 2005).

  Thank you, Cherry. Thank you, Lucy.

  Thank you, Xandra, and thank you, Becky.

  Thank you, Sarah and Laurie.

  Thank you, Mary.

  Thank you, Kasia.

  Thank you, Andrew, and thank you, Tracy, and everybody at Wylie’s.

  Thank you, Simon.

  Very special thanks to Kate Thomson.

  Thank you, Jackie.

  Thank you, Sarah.

  The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

  —George Orwell

  For only he who lives his life as a mystery is truly alive.

  —Stefan Zweig

  I hate mystery.

  —Katherine Mansfield

  Of longitudes, what other way have we,

  But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?

  —John Donne

  Every wink of an eye some new grace will be born.

  —William Shakespeare

  The fact is, imagine a man sitting on an exercise bike in a spare room. He’s a pretty ordinary man except that across his eyes and also across his mouth it looks like he’s wearing letterbox flaps. Look closer and his eyes and mouth are both separately covered by little grey rectangles. They’re like the censorship strips that newspapers and magazines would put across people’s eyes in the old days before they could digitally fuzz up or pixellate a face to block the identity of the person whose face it is.

  Sometimes these strips, or bars, or boxes, would also be put across parts of the body which people weren’t supposed to see, as a protective measure for the viewing public. Mostly they were supposed to protect the identity of the person in the picture from being ascertained. But really what they did was make a picture look like something underhand, or seedy, or dodgy, or worse, had happened; they were like a proof of something unspeakable.

  When this man on the bike moves his head the little bars move with him like the blinkers on a horse move when the horse moves its head.

  Standing next to the sitting man so that their heads are level is a small boy. The boy is working at the grey bar over the man’s eyes with a dinner knife.

  Ow, the man says.

  Doing my best, the boy says.

  He is about ten years old. His fringe is long, he is quite long-haired. He is wearing flared jeans embroidered in yellow and purple at the waistband and a blue and red T-shirt with a Snoopy on the front. He forces the thing off the man’s eyes so that it flicks off and up into the air almost comically and hits the floor with a metallic clatter.

  This T-shirt is the first thing the man on the bike sees.

  The Snoopy on it is standing on his hind legs and wearing a rosette on his chest. The rosette says the word hero on it. Above the Snoopy there are more words, in yellow and in the writing that’s always used with the Snoopy characters. They say: it’s hero time.

  I’d totally forgotten about that T-shirt, is the first thing the man says as soon as the boy’s jemmied off the thing that’s been over his mouth.

  Yeah, this one’s good. But you know the orange one that says hug a beagle on it? the boy says.

  The man nods.

  Whenever I wear it, it’s weird, but girls are always really nice to me, the boy says.

  The man laughs a yes. He looks down at his feet, where both the grey rectangles landed. He picks one of them up. He weighs it in his hand. He feels the tender places round his eyes and at the edges of his mouth. He drops it on to the floor again and holds his hand away from himself in the air and flexes it. He looks at the boy’s hands.

  I’d forgotten what my own hands looked like, he says. Look like.

  Okay, so we’ve done that now. So now can I show you? the boy says, do you want to know now?

  The man nods yes.

  Good, the boy says. Okay.

  He takes two blank pieces of paper off the floor. He gives one to the man. He sits on the bed and holds the other piece of paper up.

  So, he says. What you do is. You get a plain A4 sheet of paper and then you fold it in half. No, that way. Lengthways. And make sure the corners are even, so they’re on top exactly.

  Okay, the man says.

  Then unfold it so it’s like a book, the boy says.

  Okay, the man says.

  Then fold one corner, the boy says, the top corner, then fold the other. So it looks like that, like a book but a book with a triangular head. Then fold the folded point towards you down and crease. So it looks like an envelope. Then fold over one corner again so there’s a little tab sticking out at the end. Then the same for the other one. But so that you get a blunt point, not a pointed point. Blunter is better.

  Wait, wait, wait, the man says. Hang on.

  Yes, a little triangle sticking out of the flap, the boy says. Then fold the small triangle back up on top of the flaps. Then fold outwards, not inwards, so that the triangle is on the outside. M
ake sure it’s all even. Then take hold of the top and fold it down to make the first wing. Then flip over and do the same for the other wing. Make sure it’s even or it’ll be out of control.

  The man looks at the plane in his hands. He creases it down, then opens it up. Outside, on its top, it looks like a plain folded piece of paper. Inside, underneath, it is packed tight into itself with surprising neatness like origami, like a small machine.

  The boy holds up his plane and points it towards the far end of the room.

  And that’s the finished article, he says.

  It flies evenly and direct, very nicely, from the boy’s hand right into the corner.

  Actually aerodynamic, the man thinks. Substantial, for a single sheet of paper. It feels much heavier than it did before it was folded. But it isn’t, is it? How can it be?

  Then he aims his own plane at the opposite corner by the door. It follows its flightpath exactly. It is almost insolent, the exactness of it.

  The man laughs out loud. The boy nods and shrugs.

  Simple, the boy says. See?

  was once a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party.

  There was once a woman who had met this man thirty years before, had known him slightly for roughly two weeks in the middle of a summer when they were both seventeen, and hadn’t seen him since, though they’d occasionally, for a few years after, exchanged Christmas cards, that kind of thing.

  Right now the woman, whose name was Anna, was standing outside the locked bedroom door behind which the man, whose name was Miles, theoretically was. She had her arm raised and her hand ready to—to what? Tap? Knock discreetly? This beautiful, perfectly done-out, perfectly dulled house would not stand for noise; every creak was an affront to it, and the woman who owned it, emanating disapproval, was just two feet behind her. But it was her fist she was standing there holding up, like a 1980s cliché of a revolutionary, ready to, well, nothing quiet. Batter. Beat. Pound. Rain blows.

  Strange phrase, to rain blows. Somewhere over the rainblow. She didn’t remember much about him, but they’d never have been friends in the first place if he wasn’t the sort to enjoy a bad pun. Was he, unlike Anna right now, the kind of person who’d know what to say to a shut door if he were standing outside one trying to get someone on the other side to open it? The kind who could turn to that child stretched on her front as far up the staircase as her whole small self would go, the toes of her bare feet on the wood of the downstairs hall floor and her chin in her hands on the fifth step lying there watching, and straight off be making the right kind of joke, what do you call two mushrooms on holiday? Fun guys, straight off be holding forth about things like where a phrase like to rain blows came from in the first place?

  The woman standing behind Anna sighed. She somehow made a sigh sound cavernous. After it the silence was even louder. Anna cleared her throat.

  Miles, she said to the wood of the door. Are you there?

  But the bleat of her voice left her somehow less there herself. Ah, now, see—that’s what it took, the good inappropriateness of that child. Half boy, all girl, she’d elbowed herself up off the staircase, run up the stairs and was about to hammer on the door.

  Bang bang bang.

  Anna felt each thud go through her as if the child were hammering her on the chest.

  Come out come out wherever you are, the child yelled.

  Nothing happened.

  Open sesame, the child yelled.

  She had ducked under Anna’s arm to knock. She looked up at her from under her arm.

  It makes the rock in the side of the mountain open, the child said. They say it in the story, therefore the rock just like opens.

  The child put her mouth to the door and spoke again, this time without shouting.

  Knock knock, she said. Who’s there?

  Who’s there?

  There were several reasons at that particular time in Anna Hardie’s life for her wondering what it meant, herself, to be there.

  One was her job, which she had just given up, in what she and her colleagues laughingly called Senior Liaison, at what she and her colleagues only half-laughingly called the Centre for Temporary Permanence (or, interchangeably, the Centre for Permanent Temporariness).

  Another was that Anna had woken up a couple of weeks ago in the middle of her forties in the middle of the night, from a dream in which she saw her own heart behind its ribcage. It was having great trouble beating because it was heavily crusted over with a caul made of what looked like the stuff we clean out of the corners of our eyes in the mornings when we wake up. She woke up, sat up and put her hand on her heart. Then she got up, went to the bathroom mirror and looked. There she was.

  The phrase reminded her of something Denny at the Evening News, with whom she’d worked on neighbourhood liaison pieces and with whom she’d had a short liaison herself, had told her some time ago, on their second and last lunchtime. He was a sweet man, Denny. He’d stood in front of her in her kitchen, their first time, and presented his penis to her very sweetly, rueful and hopeful both, a little apologetic about his erection and at the same time proud of it; she liked this. She liked him. But two lunchtimes was all it was, and they both knew it. Denny had a wife, her name was Sheila, and their two girls and their boy were at Clemont High. Anna made a pot of tea, put sugar and milk on the tray because she wasn’t sure what he took, carried it upstairs, slid back into the bed. It was a quarter past one. They had just under half an hour left. He’d asked could he smoke. She’d said, okay, since it’s the last lunch. He’d smiled. Then he’d turned over in the bed, lit the cigarette, changed the subject. He’d said did she know he could sum up the last six decades of journalism in six words?

  Go on then, she said.

  I was there. There I was, he said.

  It was a commonplace, he said. By the middle of the twentieth century every important report put it like this: I was there. Nowadays: There I was.

  Soon it would be seven words, Anna said. The new century had already added a seventh word. There I was, guys. She and Denny had laughed, drunk their tea, put their clothes back on and gone back to their different jobs. The last time they’d spoken was some months ago, about how to handle the story with the local kids giving urine to the asylum kids in lemonade bottles to drink.

  In the middle of the night, some months later, holding her own heart, feeling nothing, Anna had looked at herself in the mirror in the bathroom. There she was. It was the there-she-was guise.

  There she was again, then, two evenings ago, sitting in front of her laptop one summer evening with the noise of Wimbledon coming from neighbours’ TVs through the open windows of the houses all around. Wimbledon was on her own TV too. Her own TV’s sound was turned down. It was sunny in London and the Wimbledon grass was still bright green, only a little scuffed. The TV screen flickered away by itself beyond the laptop screen. Pock noises and oohs and ahs, strangely disconnected from their source, accompanied the little noises she was making on her keyboard. It was as if the whole outside world was TV soundtrack. Maybe there was a new psychosis, Tennis Players’ Psychosis (TPP), where you went through life believing that an audience was always watching you, profoundly moved by your every move, reacting round your every reaction, your every momentous moment, with joy / excitement / disappointment / Schadenfreude. Presumably all professional tennis players had something like it, and maybe so to some extent did everybody who still believed in God. But would this mean that people who didn’t have it were somehow less there in the world, or at least differently there, because they felt themselves less observed? We might as well pray to the god of tennis players, she thought. We might as well ask that god as ask any other for world peace, to keep us safe, to bring all the birds that’ve ever died, ever sunk into dust via little mounds of feather and crumbling hollow little bones, back to life
, perch them all on that sill right now, the small ones at the front and the large ones at the back, and have them sing a rousing chorus of Bye Bye Blackbird, which was a song her father used to whistle when she was a little girl, and one she hadn’t heard for many years. No one here to love or understand me. Oh what hard-luck stories they all hand me. Was that it? Something about hard-luck stories, anyway. Just as she was about to look the lyrics up on the net new mail came pinging into her inbox with an electronic little trill.

  The new mail was quite a long email which Anna nearly mistook for the please-transfer-money-to-this-account-because-I-am-dying-and-need-your-help kind. But she paused her finger above delete when something about it caught her eye. It was addressed to her with the correct first name but the wrong surname initial. Dear Anna K. It was both her and not her, the name. More: something about it made her feel super-eighted, instamaticked. It gave her a feeling something like the word summer used to. Most of all it reminded her of an old spinebent copy of a Penguin classic paperback by Kafka, yes, Franz Kafka, which she had read one summer when she was sixteen or seventeen.

  Dear Anna K

  I am writing to you because my husband and I are at the end of my tether and we are hoping to God that you will be able to help us.

  Ten days ago we invited Miles Garth, who I believe you know to dinner here at our house in Greenwich. He is a friend of a friend, we actually hardly know him which is why this situation is so difficult and actually untenable as you can imagine. To cut a long short story Mr. Garth has locked himself in our spare bedroom. I am only relieved the bedroom is ensuite. He will not leave the room. He is not just refusing to unlock the door and go to his own home, wherever that might be. He is refusing to speak to a single soul. It has now been ten days, and our unwanted tenant has only communicated by 1 piece of paper slipped under the bottom of the door. We are slipping flat packs of wafer-paper-thin turkey and ham to him under the said door but are unable to provide him with anything more dimensional because of the size of the space between the said door and the floor. (Our spare room door, in fact all the upstairs doors in our house are believed 18th century although the house itself dates from the 1820s you can understand my concern and the hinges are on the inside side. I have reason to believe he has jammed one of our chairs under the c18th door handle too.).