There but for The Read online

  I am no way either of those, she says. And your story’s completely pathetic. I’m actually not joining in because I actually don’t know the words of it.

  Making them actually up myself actually, he says. Anyway actually it’s you who started with the actual Eurovision pop, not actually me. There was once a girl twenty years in the future who was totally unable to communicate except by rolling her eyes and saying only the word actually. There. Now. You tell me the first line of your story.

  You tell me the real first line of yours first, she says.

  He has moved to sit closer to her.

  What’s your name? he says.

  Anna, she says.

  Your name is almost Abba, he says.

  This makes her nearly laugh out loud.

  There was once, and there was only once, he says. Once was all there was.

  That’s your beginning? she says. Really?

  He looks away.

  That’s quite good, she says.

  Thanks, he says.

  Except, you say there was once and there was only once, and then with that next line you say it again, so you end up saying the word once three times, which means once doesn’t end up meaning once at all, she says.

  There was once a girl who was too critical for words, he says. Or maybe just critical enough for words. What’s your beginning, then, critic?

  The future’s a foreign country. They do things differently there, she says.

  Yeah, I know, but what’s your beginning? he says.

  Then either he winks at her or he’s got something in his eye.

  It’s, like, from the LP Hartley book, she says. Like a new version. You know. The past is a foreign country. From the book The Go-Between.

  Uh huh, he says. Though I think the original line written by LP Hartley is assonantally better than yours.

  You can go and assonate yourself, she says.

  Well, okay, I will, he says, but it won’t have the same effect as when they assonated Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy.

  This time she does laugh out loud.

  Anyway, he says. Actually. What was it about, your story, anyway actually?

  It’s about this girl who wakes up in the year 2000 after being asleep for twenty years, Anna says. And the catch is: in the year 2000 pretty much everything’s exactly like now, except this. When the girl tries to read words it’s like they’re all printed upside down. She wakes up and she goes to the kitchen and gets out a packet of cereal and it looks exactly the same as a cornflakes packet now. Except she notices that the writing on it is upside down. She can still read it and everything, but it’s a bit weird. She turns it on its head, but that doesn’t work, because the words are printed in the same order as they would be if they were printed the right way up. Then she tries to read the newspaper and she realizes it’s the same—the words are all printed upside down. And then she’s in a panic and she thinks she’s losing her brain, and she goes to get her old copy of her favourite book off the shelf, a book she read twenty years ago, like, now, and it’s The Go-Between by LP Hartley, and she opens it, and its words are all the right way up and everything, and she breathes this big sigh of relief. But then she goes out into town. And the writing on the front of the bus is upside down. And all the shop names are upside down. And no one else thinks it’s a big deal or anything. And then she gets suspicious, and she goes specially to the bookshop she always went to, you know, twenty years ago, in 1980, and she takes a new copy of the same book, The Go-Between, down off the shelf. And sure enough, on the cover the title is upside down, and on the back the summary thing they write about the story is upside down. And she opens it, and every page is printed upside down. And then half a day passes, and by lunchtime she’s used to the words being the wrong way up. Her brain just processes it. And by the end of the story she isn’t even noticing they’re upside down any more.

  She stops speaking. She is suddenly embarrassed, at saying so much out loud, and exhausted too. It is more than she’s said all in one go since she left home.

  Oh, that’s good, the boy is saying. That’s really subversive. Subversive sleeping beauty. I mean how would you wake her? Kissing her won’t do it.

  It isn’t a line; he isn’t being flirtatious. He actually looks pre-occupied.

  He is very witty, and definitely clever; he is probably one of the ones on this trip who are going to Oxford or wherever it is they’re all going. But he doesn’t sound rich or like he goes to a posh school. Also, he has already made her really laugh. She wants to ask whether he knows anything about the people who shaved off the boy’s half-moustache. He doesn’t seem like he’d be the kind to do that sort of thing.

  He is dark-haired, big-nosed. He’d be good-looking if it wasn’t for his nose. He looks the quiet type. Maybe he looks more the quiet type than he actually is. He looks a bit tired this close up. His hair is longish, not too long. He is wearing a blue vest-top. He’s quite broad-chested. His arms and shoulders come out of the vest-top gangly and pale, like he doesn’t fit himself. But the way he moves just then, to flick a little greenfly or something off the leg of his jeans, is both gentle and exact.

  She stops looking at him because he starts looking at her.

  What are you doing? he says then.

  She shrugs, nods at the Timetable on the top of her Tour folder.

  Waiting for whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing next on the list, she says.

  No, I mean, what are you doing with that, he says.

  He is pointing at her head, at her ear. While they’ve been talking she has unbent the paperclip from the Useful Information sheets in the folder and, without really thinking about it, has been poking its end into her ear piercing.

  Oh, she says. Making an earring.

  Out of a paperclip? he says.

  I only brought one earring with me. I mean from home, she says. I don’t want the hole to close up.

  When people do that on TV in dramas, like unravel a hairpin or a paperclip, it’s because they’re going to unpick a lock or something, he says. But then you stuck it into your earlobe. That’s so 1976.

  I’m so. Twentieth century, she says.

  It’s probably still really new wave, to do that in France, he says. No, I mean, probably still really nouvelle vague. Hey, listen. If your second name was Key—

  She looks sideways at him.

  You’d be Anna Key in the UK, he says.

  He is laughing at her now.

  Then she is laughing too, at herself.

  Wish I was in the UK right now, she says.

  Your earrings really mean that much to you? he says. Wow. No, I like it here. I like places of disrupted history that have managed, all the same, to come out of things looking pretty good. I’m enjoying all the tourifications. But you. You’d rather be there than here.

  Anna nods.

  You’re not having a good time, he says.

  Anna looks away from him, looks at the water.

  Well, he says. You could. Just go. Just go home.

  Yeah, right, Anna says. Well, I would if I had my passport. I’d like to at least have the choice.

  Let’s see it, he says.

  What? she says.

  Your passport, he says.

  They took them, Anna says. They took mine. Did they not take yours?

  Come on, he says. Here to help. Show me your passport and I’ll help you cross the border.

  He puts on a stern face, points at the french bread sticking out of her packed lunch bag, holds out his hand.

  You want this? she says.

  Passaporte, he says. I’ve eaten mine.

  You’re being such a tube, she says.

  But she hands him the bread.

  Right, he says. Come on.

  He stands up.

  Where? Anna says.

  Fishing, he says.

  They spend the afternoon throwing bits of bread at the water and watching for the mouths
of the fish to appear, to open and close as if detached from any actual fish-bodies, at the surface. On the way back to Paris, when everybody crowds scrumming for seats on to the bus, he catches the edge of her jacket in his hand when she passes his table. He moves over into the empty seat next to him. She sits down.

  This is Anna Key, he tells the two other people sitting at the table. Anna Key in the UK, and Anna Key when she’s not in the UK too.

  This time on the bus when she gets her book out of her bag, it isn’t because she feels bad. Everybody talks round her all the way back to Paris like she belongs, like she’s never not been there. She even joins in with a couple of the conversations.

  In her room in the hotel, before supper, she sits on the bed and takes the list of prizewinners’ names out of the information folder. There is only one Miles. Miles Garth. Next to his name is the word Reading. It is the place he’s from.

  There was once, and there was only once; once was all there was.

  She wonders if that was really his first line. She wishes she’d asked him how the rest of it went. She tells herself to remember to ask him the next time they speak.

  That evening, when she comes down to dinner in the hotel, some of the same people she sat next to on the bus ride back have kept her a seat. She makes friends with a girl who didn’t seem shy but, she finds, is quite shy, and who, it turns out, is from Newcastle. They both talk about nothing for a while, then nod at each other in the knowledge that they can now safely hang out with one another whenever they need to for the ten days left. Meanwhile the boy, Miles, is across the other side of the hotel dining room, standing chatting at the staff table. She sees, from this distance, how it’s as if there is a kind of agreeableness in the air round him. She watches how he and the people sitting near him at that table all laugh at something someone’s said. She bets herself it was him who said it, the funny thing.

  After dinner she is waiting in the queue for the freaky, creaky old hotel lift with the dangerous metal door when out of nowhere he’s beside her, leaning on her shoulder very lightly.

  I went between, his voice at her ear says.

  Eh? she says.

  I penetrated to the heart of the machine so as to appropriate the machine, he says.

  Eh? she says again.

  Eh is for Abba, he says. B is for Banshees. C is for covert criminal activity.

  He holds something up. It’s a passport. It’s open at the photo page. The photo is of her.

  I penetrated to the heart of the forest, he says, sacrificed myself, and brought back—you.

  He hands her her own passport. He smiles. He nods just once.

  There you are, he says.)

  Now, thirty years later, walking down a road in Greenwich in London with a small girl skipping ahead of her, this is what Anna remembered, all at once, of that gone time: the particular smell, like wood polish, in the house and in the clothes of her old schoolfriend, Douglas; the way that the lift door in a hotel she’d once stayed in, in the city of Paris, on that European tour, wasn’t a real door, was just a gold-coloured concertina-like iron grille through which you could see the concrete between the floors as you went up; a certain raw combination of hope and disaffection; a knowledge as vivid as an actual taste in her mouth, of what the time she’d been alive in had felt like; and clear as anything a voice, and the words: there you are.

  She was walking along a road she didn’t know, carrying two jackets. One was hers. The other was stylish, expensive, covetable, light in the cloth, bulky at the pocket. She put her hand inside the jacket pocket and felt Miles Garth’s mobile and wallet in there.

  In the middle of the night, not long after she’d left her job, she’d sat in front of a Marx Brothers film which happened to be playing on TV. In it Harpo was unexpectedly old. Some violent henchmen who were looking for a diamond necklace hidden in a tin of tuna held the ageing Harpo against the wall and searched him, emptying the pockets of his old coat out into the room behind them. The pockets went unthinkably deep; among all the junk the henchmen pulled out and piled up behind them were a coffee pot, milk jug and sugar bowl, a car tyre, a hurdy-gurdy music box, a sledge, a couple of prosthetic limbs and a small dog which shook itself to get its dignity back before it padded off across the room. A henchman slapped Harpo very hard across the face. Harpo was a genius. He smiled a delighted smile and slapped the henchman back. The real joke was that the henchmen were determined to make Harpo Marx, of all the people in the world, talk. They tried to do this by torturing him. But every horrible thing they did to him seemed only to please him more.

  What what what? the child said. You’re sinking. What are you sinking about?

  They were passing a wall low enough to sit on. Anna put the jackets down on the wall between the two street signs. Crooms Hill. SE10. Burney Street. SE10. Above her head there was a sign saying Our Ladye Star of the Sea Church, with an arrow pointing the way. The old-fashioned spelling of Ladye in modern street sign Helvetica looked like a mistake.

  She sat down next to the jackets. She looked at her watch.

  What I’m sinking, she said, is that we’re not going any further unless you’ve got permission. Are your parents near enough to ask, or have you got a mobile or something?

  We live there, the child said.

  She pointed across the road towards a church.

  In the church? Anna said.

  The child laughed.

  Behind there, she said. Kind of over there and behind.

  How close? Anna said.

  We’ve a mobile but we hardly use it, the child said, because my mum says what is the point of being on a train and shouting down a mobile, I’m on a train, because it makes it like not being on the train at all. She thinks you should be there on a train when you’re on one, therefore not be on a phone instead.

  I’d like to meet your mum, Anna said. She sounds great.

  She is great, the child said nodding. There is a history project in year six on mobiles. Motorola 1990 was the first one. It all happened ten years before I was born.

  Uh huh. And will they be home or are they at work, your parents? Anna said.

  They work at the university, the child said. It’s over there.

  Well, can you run and tell your mum or dad where you are and who you’re with, Anna said, and come back either with your mum, or your dad, or with a note addressed to me saying that it’s okay and that you’ve got permission and that they know you’re safe?

  The child put her hands on the wall, levered herself expertly into the air, let herself expertly fall.

  I can, the child said. Though they trust me. I am not stupid. And your name is the same as mine. So what I tell them is I’m going to the tunnel with Brooke and then to the Observatory to see the Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic Clock.

  Maybe, but listen, my name’s not Brooke, that’s you, Anna said. I’m Anna. Tell them I’m a friend of, of, the man who’s locked himself in the room at the Lees’ house.

  Yeah, but when you first came, the child said, when we were at the Lees’ front door, you said you were called the same as me.

  No I didn’t, Anna said.

  I said, I’m Brooke, the child said, and then you said, what a coincidence, I’m Brooke too.

  No, Anna said. The thing is, when we met on the steps, I didn’t know you were saying the word Brooke, I thought you were saying the word broke. And I’m broke. So I said, me too. It’s a pun.

  Like, broken? the child said.

  No, I meant it in the sense of having no money, Anna said.

  What exactly is a pun therefore? the child said.

  What exactly is a pun there for? Anna said.

  The child thought this was very funny.

  No, she said when she stopped laughing. What I want to know is, what constitutes a pun.

  Constitutes? Anna said. Blimey. Constitutes. Well, um, pun. Well, they’re like if a word means differently from what you expect. Like, take me hearing the wor
d broke when you said the word Brooke. That was a sort of involuntary pun.

  Involuntary, the child said.

  It means it happened without us meaning or choosing it, Anna said.

  I know it means that, the child said. I was just saying it to see how it felt in my mouth to say it.

  She sat beside Anna on the wall, crossing her legs like Anna, looking ahead like Anna.

  Okay, Anna said. So.

  And what is the point of a pun? the child said.

  Um, Anna said.

  And is it like if someone at school says to you, listen you, you’re history? the child said.

  It depends, Anna said. Who said that to you? Like a teacher, for a project or something?

  No, I mean, the child said. Because, obviously, it is a different meaning from me actually being history, when I am not even famous and I am only nine years old and will not be ten till next April, and have therefore not yet had much time to do anything to make me historic. I know that it doesn’t mean that I am like President Obama. I know it means something not good. But it would be good if I knew what it was called, because then I could say, the next time he says it to me, if he says it again, you can just stop using that pun at me right now.

  Anna nodded.

  I see, she said. I don’t think it’s a pun. A pun is more like—say you were at a musical at a theatre and it wasn’t a very exciting musical, and you were a bit bored. Instead of saying there’s no business like show business, you might say there’s no business like slow business.

  The child’s face filled with delight.

  I am going to go to a musical again, probably soon, she said. Show slow. Brooke Broke. I bet you are broke because you are redundant because of the recession, or are you a student or a postgraduate?

  No, I had a job, but I gave it up, Anna said, because the job I had was rubbish.

  Like community service like picking rubbish up on the heath? the child said.

  No, Anna said. In my job I had to make people not matter so much. That was what my job really was, though ostensibly I was there to make people matter.

  Ostensibly, the child said.

  You know what that means? Anna said.

  Yes, but I can’t think what exactly at this exact moment in time, the child said.