There but for The Read online

  From France to Germany Genevieve Lee had been passing a pencil she’d picked up off the little table next to her from one hand to the other. By Italy she had started tapping the table with the pencil.

  So, Anna said. I had a look through my photos after your message came, but I don’t have many, only twelve, I obviously only took one spool, and there’s only one photo with Miles Garth in it. I mean, I know it’s him, I can look at the photo and be sure it’s him, but you can’t see his face, he’s looking down in it so you can only see the top of his head. There’s a group photo, of all of us, they took one outside the bank before we left. It’s too far away to see anyone very clearly, but he’s there, at the back. He was tall.

  I already know he’s tall, Genevieve Lee said. I already know what he looks like.

  I remember he tied little bits of french bread on to bits of denim thread he pulled off the frayed ends of his jeans, Anna said, and we used these to try to catch the goldfish in a lake at Versailles. That’s what he’s looking down at in the photo. He’s tying a knot round the bread. And—that’s all.

  That’s all? Genevieve Lee said.

  Anna shrugged.

  Genevieve Lee snapped the pencil she was holding in two. Then she looked down at the pieces of pencil she held in each hand in surprise. She laid the bits of pencil down neatly together on the table.

  That’s when they’d gone upstairs.

  That’s when Anna had stood with her fist up ready to—to what, exactly?

  Miles. Are you there?

  Silence.

  Then—bang bang bang—the child, hammering on the door.

  Tell him who you are, for God sake, Genevieve Lee hissed at Anna then.

  Miles, it’s Anna Hardie, Anna said.

  (Nothing.)

  From Barclays Bank European Grand Tour 1980, she said.

  (Silence.)

  Tell him about when you fished for the goldfish with the bread and that, the child said.

  Miles, I think the Lees would really like you to open the door and leave the room, Anna said.

  (Silence.)

  I think the Lees would like their house back, she said.

  (Nothing.)

  Tell him it’s you. Tell him it’s Anna K, Genevieve whispered.

  Anna looked at her own fist still stupidly raised. She rested it against the wood of the door. She lowered it. She turned to Genevieve Lee.

  Sorry, she said.

  She shrugged.

  Genevieve Lee nodded. She made a tiny precise gesture with her hand to indicate that Anna was now to go downstairs again.

  At the foot of the stairs the two women stood, nothing left to say. Anna looked through the door at the lounge. It was like a contemporary chic lounge in a theatre performance would be. She looked at the geometric arrangement of logs next to the fireplace. She looked at the ceiling, at the huge beam of wood which ran all the way from the back of the lounge and above her head into the hall.

  An amazing piece of, uh, wood, Anna said.

  Genevieve Lee explained it was believed to be a piece of a ship which had fought at Trafalgar, and it was why the lounge had never been renovated and extended. As she explained all this, she visibly calmed. She opened the front door, held it open. The day’s heat came into the cold old hall.

  Though we’ll be upgrading to Blackheath, she said, soon as the market picks up sufficiently. Eric will be home at three. I know he’d like to talk to you.

  You mean, you want me to come back here again at three? Anna said on the doorstep.

  If you would be so kind, Genevieve Lee said. Just after would be ideal. Ten past.

  The thing is, Anna said, if I go now I can catch the less expensive train home, but if I stay it’ll cost me twice as much.

  We appreciate it, Genevieve Lee said. It’s very kind. Thanks very much indeed.

  She went to shut the door.

  Just one thing, Anna said.

  Genevieve Lee paused the half-closed door.

  It’s the Anna K thing, Anna said.

  I’m sorry? Genevieve Lee said.

  In the email. Dear Anna K. And again, up there, Anna said. You called me Anna K. It’s not my name. My name’s Anna H. Hardie.

  Genevieve held up her hand. She backed into the hall. She came back with a black jacket. She took a mobile phone out of its inside pocket and held it up.

  It’s in the memory, she said.

  Then she dropped the phone into the jacket pocket again and threw the jacket through the door straight at Anna so that Anna couldn’t not catch it. She spoke sweetly.

  You are now responsible, she said. When this is all over I do not want, and will not accept, I’m making it clear right now, any accusations about usage of any bank or credit cards which happen to have been left in a jacket which happened to be left in my house.

  Then she shut the door, click. Anna stood on the doorstep.

  Eric and Gen. Gen and Eric. Jesus. She’d invite them to her own special annual dinner party, the one she annually gave for generics. Who knew what was going on between Genevieve Lee and Miles Garth, or Eric Lee and Miles Garth, or their daughter, or whoever, and Miles Garth? Who cared? Who cared whether Miles Garth had invented the perfect rent-free way in a recession to be regularly fed, at least for a while? Who cared why he’d chosen to shut himself in a hateful room in a hateful place? She was going home. Well, to what passed, for her, for home right now.

  She turned on her heel on the pavement in the direction of the station.

  The child was at her side, skipping.

  Tunnel? the child said.

  Should you not be in school? Anna said.

  Nope, the child said. Closed early. Swine flu. You talk in a really funny accent.

  Thanks, Anna said.

  I like it, the child said. I don’t dislike it.

  A long time ago I was Scottish, Anna said.

  Been there, the child said. Done that. I mean, I liked it there, man. I didn’t dislike it. Therefore, I’d go again. There was a great number of trees in it.

  She handed Anna something. It was a piece of pencil, the pencil Genevieve Lee had broken in two, back in the lounge. The child held up the other piece.

  Thanks, Anna said. But you got the end with the point. That’s not fair.

  Yeah, but you are an adult and can afford to buy a sharpener at, like, a stationer’s, or in a supermarket, the child said skipping ahead and talking to the rhythm of her own skipping. Or just take, a sharpener, and put it in, your pocket if, you wanted it, and therefore then, you wouldn’t have, to pay at all, because you know, pencils should always, come with sharpeners, because what use, is pencils without, a sharpener? We should all, be able to, help ourselves to, free sharpeners.

  Now that’s what I call anarchy, Anna said.

  And that’s when she remembered.

  (Europe. Land of InterRail. Place known as Abroad. Visited by Cliff Richard and some boys and girls twenty years ago on their double decker bus, though right now, at the very start of the 1980s, Cliff Richard is singing about a girl who’s missing, has maybe been murdered, used to room on the second floor, left no forwarding address, left nothing but a name on a payphone wall.

  Europe. Place of the Grand Tour for fifty British teenagers from up and down the country—of which Anna is the one from furthest north and the only Scottish one—who’ve each won a place in a publicity event organized by a British bank by writing a short story or an essay of not more than 2000 words about Britain In The Year 2000, which is twenty years from now.

  1980. Year that Anna Hardie, a prizewinning writer about what life will be like in twenty years’ time, unbends the leg of a paperclip and threads it through one of her ears in Versailles, France, infecting the ear, giving herself a slight fever and having to start a course of antibiotics three days and a couple of countries later, in Brunnen, Switzerland, where the views of the mountains and the lakes, and of the mountains in the lakes, are stunni
ng.

  But first: London, Paris, Versailles. The fifty prizewinning writers about the future are on their fourth day. On day two every-one woke up to find that he or she was now one of

  the party-people, or

  the weirdo swots, or

  the total outsiders.

  Already Anna has been goosed, for the first time in her life, by a seventeen-year-old weirdo swot (who, in twenty years’ time, will have become an internationally renowned Professor of Theoretical Physics). At the time of it happening she has no idea that this is what’s happening; the inexplicable pain between her buttock and her thigh and the red-haired blushing boy-man with bad eczema behind her seem in no way related, though later in the fortnight she will see him stand close to the back of one of the other girls and see the other girl leap in the air away from him, and then she will understand. Already the nastier of the party-people have got another of the weirdo swots drunk by spiking his drink at supper in the Paris hotel, have held him down drunk in one of the bedrooms and have shaved off one half of his little RAF-war-hero moustache. He is wandering lopsidedly about in the summer haze at Versailles Palace today, a single-winged recording angel. Why would he not just shave the whole thing off? she wonders. Is it so that the people who did it to him will be made to face their meanness every time they see him? Or because he doesn’t want to lose the half he’s got so he can reconstruct the other exactly? Anna doesn’t know. She hasn’t spoken to him. (She has hardly spoken to anyone.) She knows his name is Peter, and that he had announced to everybody at the Medieval Banquet on day one in London that he was especially looking forward to Versailles, to seeing the historic mirror room where the peace treaty was signed at the end of the First World War. Ironic, the thought of him seeing his own war-wound in every one of those huge tarnished mirrors.

  Anna is one of the total outsiders.

  This is because she is the only Scot on the tour and all forty-nine of the others are loudmouthed scary confident articulate English people. (It might also be because she had food poisoning after the Medieval Banquet and spent a lot of the first evening of initial group formation by herself, in the hotel room in their hotel in Bayswater, throwing up.)

  Right now she is sitting tearing little bits off the french stick that came with the packed lunch and putting them into her mouth. She is at the side of a huge lake with an elaborate fountain in the middle of it. Are its gold horses struggling like that, their hooves and mouths and manes all panic, because they’re scared that they’ll sink to oblivion, or because coming back to the surface after being down in the deep is so terrifying?

  There are eleven days, including today, left.

  Today is only partially over.

  Roughly one-third of today is over.

  What if the bus the fifty future-writers are all crossing Europe in crashes on this tour and they all die and she never gets home again?

  If she had her passport she could go home. She could just go back to the hotel in Paris, pick up her bag and go. She could leave a note at reception saying somebody at home is ill, or that she’s had a bad dream about the family and because her dreams are so strong and intuitive she has decided she’d better return home immediately even though nobody has phoned for her or anything. No. That’s pathetic, and regardless of pathos and regardless of dreams, all the passports are in the safe-keeping of Barbara, the Bank’s Accountant, one of the five accompanying staff members (ten future-writers per staff member, presumably). Anna tries to imagine her passport, rubberbanded to a wedge of the other forty-nine passports, probably alphabetically, somewhere safe, maybe in a safe, the hotel safe. Or does Barbara the Accountant carry them everywhere with her in that briefcase? Anna in her passport photo—taken in the photobooth at the post office at home, at the beginning of June, and never did a photobooth seem so blessed, so lucky, even its little curtain enviable, just in being back there in that place called home—is wearing a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt; she is dark-eyed, she looks stern, disaffected, miserable and you better not dare ask why, and this is the self that has to last her in the world until she is the ancient age of twenty-seven, when she will be a totally different person, when everything will be different, life will be easy, will make sense, will all have fallen into place.

  She is wearing the same T-shirt today. She can see herself and the masky face of Siouxsie undulating in the posh French water.

  She had not known she was this shy.

  She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.

  She and the roommate she has been allocated, whose name is Dawn and who is pleasant enough to Anna but is definitely one of the party-people, have nothing to say to each other.

  She hasn’t said more than eleven words to anyone for twenty-four hours, and they weren’t even all full words.

  (G’night.

  G’morning.

  Hi.

  S’this free?

  Yeah.

  Thanks.

  Bye.)

  Look at the blue of the sky above her. Look at the dark of the sky in the surface of that lake. Look at the gold of those fixed, lashing horses. This is paradise. This is success. It said so in the papers which reported that she was the most northerly winner of a place on this tour. So she will be good. She will write it on a postcard and send it home to her parents who are so proud of her. It is amazing here. I am so lucky. We eat in hotels every night. I saw the Eiffel Tower, and a really beautiful church. Today is Versailles. It is like paradise also you can hire a boat and go rowing, ho ho, bye for now love Anna xox She will write what she really wants to say on the postcards she sends to her best friend from school, Douglas, and she will send one from every place the tour visits. No, they will be wittier than that, they will be all song lyrics pretending to be conversational. If she puts her mind to it she will be able to think of a lyric line which will translate as: I am the only fucking Scot, the only fucking person from anything like home, on this tour and everybody else is English and they just don’t get it. Dear Douglas. Could this be the plastic age? Just buying some reflections of my own sweet self. Meltdown expected. Anna xox. PS, they don’t want your name, just your number.

  No, she will be even wittier, she will choose specifically Eurovision hits. Ding-a dong every hour, when you pick a flower. She will find a picture of the belltower of that big church and send it on that. Douglas will think that’s really funny. Ding-a dong, listen to it. Maybe it’s a bigot. Even when your lover is gone gone gone, sing ding dang dong.

  Along from her at the lakeside there is a gangly boy. He’s one of the tour group. Yes, he’s definitely from the group; he’s got the blue folder next to him on the grass. She’s seen him, she remembers now; he’s one of the popular ones. Is he one of the nasty popular ones or one of the less nasty? And has she been humming that tune out loud, the Eurovision one she was just thinking about? She must have been, because that boy has started to whistle it, and he can’t have been thinking of that completely random song, which is years old, and a private joke between her and Douglas, at the exact same moment as she thought of it.

  He starts whistling something else. It’s the Abba song about I have a dream. He doesn’t look the Abba type.

  He sings the lines about how if you see the wonder of a fairytale you’ll be fine in the future. He has a quite good voice. He’s singing quite loud, loud enough for her to be able to hear him clearly. In fact it’s almost as if he’s singing for her.

  Then, next, does he really sing this?

  I believe in Engels.

  That’s unbelievably witty, if that’s what he’s just sung and she hasn’t misheard. That’s the kind of thing only a really good friend of hers would have known to do to get her attention.

  Then the boy speaks, and it is to her.

  Come on, he says.

  He seems to want her to sing.

  She gives him her most withering look.

  You’re joking, she says.r />
  I only joke about really serious things, he says. Come on. Something good in everything you see.

  Don’t know it, she says.

  You do, he says.

  I don’t, actually, she says.

  You do, actually, he says, because Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them. In twenty years’ time Abba songs will still be being sung, probably even more than they’re being sung now.

  Is that what you wrote your Britain in the year 2000 thing about, then? she says. The Generation Maimed In The Brain By Abba?

  Maybe, he says.

  No way, she says.

  What was yours, then? he says.

  I asked first, she says.

  Here’s how mine starts, he says. There was once a girl in a dated-looking punk T-shirt—

  It is not dated-looking! Anna says.

  —sitting by the side of the water at a French historical palace—

  Very funny, Anna says.

  She was very funny, he says. Or was she? Nobody knew, nobody ever found out, because she was so determined to keep herself to herself. If only she’d joined in with the Abba song Miles was singing by the water at Versailles that day, then everything would have been, as if by magic, all right. Unfortunately, something stubborn, which had taken hold in her constitution at a very early age—

  I’m not stubborn, she says.

  Unfortunately, something supercilious, which had taken hold in her constitution—, he says.

  I’m not that either, she says, whatever it is. There’s just no way I’m going to be caught dead singing Abba.

  I’d never sing Abba, he says. I’m not singing Abba, I’m singing revolution. Unfortunately, something conservative, small c and big C, had taken hold in—