There but for The Read online

  It means, uh, well, I don’t know how to explain what it means, Anna said. It means what things look like on the outside. Ostensibly my job meant one thing, but really it meant another.

  Like lying, the child said. Or like punning?

  Well, you tell me, Anna said. This is what my job was. First, I had to get people to talk to me about stuff that had happened to them, which was usually pretty horrible. That’s why they were having to tell me it in the first place, so that I could help them. Then, because there was pressure on me, I had to put pressure on them, to fit these true stories, their whole life stories in some cases, on to just two-thirds of one side of, do you know what A4 is?

  A4, like paper? the child said. Or a road that is smaller than a motorway?

  Paper, Anna said. So. Because I didn’t like this job, I told the people I worked for that I was going to leave. But they told me how good I was at the job, then they gave me a promotion which meant I made a lot more money. But my new job was to make people redundant, the ones who were doing my old job and weren’t good enough at getting people’s life stories to be less long. So, in the end, I left.

  Your job was immortal, the child said.

  I think you mean immoral, Anna said. But you might mean immortal.

  It’s a pun! the child said.

  Such good pun we’re having, Anna said.

  The child squealed with laughter.

  I’ve got one, I’ve got one, the child said. In a minute we will be going through—the punnel.

  Ha ha. Only if you get back with a parent or a note that says we can, Anna said. Go on. I’ll wait here.

  Will you? the child said.

  Yes, Anna said.

  And therefore definitely be here when I get back? the child said.

  Therefore, yes, Anna said. Careful crossing the road.

  Okay. See you, the child said.

  The history child. She skipped off across the road, down the street opposite and round the corner. Anna watched her disappear. Then she wondered to herself. Did that child really just skip across that road? Did I imagine it? Have I just made up an idyll of childhood to make myself feel better, because that’s the kind of thing a child would do in an imagined idyll, skip rather than run?

  She thought of all the children, literally thousands of them, the same age as that child, crossing the world by themselves right now.

  She told herself, let it go.

  She told herself she was no longer responsible.

  She leaned back in the sunlight. She looked up. The summer sky was blue and full of swifts, lucky birds, world-travellers born with the knowledge hardwired into their nervous systems, by nature, of the routes they were about to fly over terrain they’d not yet even seen. The trees in the distance were lifting and waving their leaves, making the light and the dark of summer. These restless, thrashing new summers, the windy summers, the global-warming summers, were grey and sticky and flyblown, not like the summers she remembered from childhood, summers sweet and complete and enclosed, each held like a story already told, like a set of Chinese boxes holding all its predecessors all the way back to the first ever box, the first ever perfect summer, there inside it.

  Ding-a dong, listen to it. Maybe it’s a bigot. Imagine remembering that after all these years. She should get in touch with Doug, send a Christmas card this year, ask him if he remembered it too. Where was Doug these days? She wondered if his parents were still living there, where they used to live. Then she wondered if his parents were still living.

  Ding-a dong every hour, when you pick a flower. A world before Interim Dispersal Measures and Significant Knowledge Transfer. A time before weapons sales initiatives were called things like Peace. Words, words, words. Freedom. Identity. Security. Democracy. Human Rights. Deny your bin its rights.

  She shook her head, because her head had started to hurt. The word redundant, which she’d heard in the mouth of that preternaturally articulate child, was beating inside her head. It made her think of a tablecloth, a placemat. It was a cheesecloth tablecloth and it had places on it where the food which had been spilled on it hadn’t washed fully out, had stained permanently. The tablemat, between her knife and fork, had a brown surround and an illustration of huntsmen on horseback jumping a hedge. This is where she was, at the dining-room table at dinnertime, and she was a small child and it was the day her mother had come home from her work at the Telephone Exchange and told them all that she was to be “made redundant” by Grace.

  Who was this Grace, who could upend dinnertime, bring her mother to the verge of tears and her father to such paleness? Anna had wanted to know. But Grace wasn’t a person at all. Grace was a system—Group Routing And Changing Equipment—which meant that there would be less need for telephone operators, which was the thing her mother had always been, because people would from now on be able to dial abroad direct and would be put through automatically.

  Anna sat on a wall in Greenwich nearly forty years later in the summer of the year 2009 and looked down at her shoes. They were trainers, and they were scuffed, and Genevieve Lee had looked at them in something like horror when Anna went up her clean stairs in them. Imagine if people decided at birth never ever to throw away any of the shoes they wore over the whole course of a life, and had a special cupboard where they kept all these old shoes they’d walked about the world in. What would there be in such a shoe museum, when you opened its doors? Row upon row, perfectly preserved, the exact shapes we took at certain points in our lives? Or row upon row, rack upon rack, of nothing but old soiled leather, old stale smell?

  There was person after person, sitting in front of Anna, still in Anna’s head. They were from all over the world. They arrived by air, by sea, by lorry, in car boots, on foot. If they tried to enter the country invisibly their heartbeats could be detected (like the thirteen Afghanis and the two Iranians hidden in the lorryload of lightbulbs had been) by the special new detector sheds of which the Agency was very proud, and the brand new probes that could detect whether someone was breathing where he or she shouldn’t be.

  A lot of the people Anna had seen had trouble speaking, either because of translation problems, or because a rain of blows had made them distrust words. Or both. Translation was sometimes itself a little rain of blows. How could what had happened to them be possible in one language, never mind be able to be retold in another?

  In any language, it was almost always about what home was.

  Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, what one man could remember of seeing his mother’s head being used by the border guards as a football. (This man was finally judged not credible.) Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, about the rooms one woman passed in the corridor, in which she could hear other people also being tortured, on her way to and from being tortured herself for seven months, daily, on different parts of her body by electric shock applied by the use of two small live electric wires which came out of the wall, like electric wires do, behind the chair she was made to sit in each time. For instance, hearing the voices of others being tortured was not as salient as being tortured yourself. The shock that came not from being tortured but from realizing that the wires were the exact same simple domestic wires that everybody who had electricity had in his or her house was not as salient either. (This woman had been pending judgement when Anna shifted career position.) Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, which was easy in this case, what the woman who had been a university professor said, it is like my chest stops and the words will not, just will not, who had proved unable to finish that sentence and say what it was that the words wouldn’t do, and about whom it was decided by Anna’s superiors that she couldn’t possibly be as clever as her summary indicated, being so demonstrably inarticulate. (This woman was finally judged not credible.)

  You are really good at this, the area head had told her. You have exactly the right kind of absent presence. Best of all, your reports are 95
% word-length perfect.

  Somewhere over the rainblow.

  Anna Hardie was no longer responsible for the word-lengths which resulted in truth, credibility or redundancy.

  She was out of there.

  What would it be like, to be crouched, hidden, for thousands of miles in a dark lorry full of lightbulbs? Everything round you, to the sides of you, towering above you, would be light and fragile, cardboard and glass, and you would know, too, that each of the thousands of bulbs in the truck, heading blindly for a lightsocket somewhere, was held more secure, padded up in its box inside a box inside a box, and on its way to a surer destination, than you.

  You would know yourself to be worth less than a lightbulb.

  She put Miles Garth’s jacket over her head like she’d seen the tennis player do with the towel. It was hot in there, but momentarily soothing.

  Then, after that moment, she felt stupid. She wondered if she looked, to passers-by, like someone in a special kind of deep purdah, or like an old-fashioned nun whose headdress thing was on the wrong way round, or like a mad person. You could only really put a jacket over your head if you were with friends and it looked like a jolly jape.

  She wiped the sweat off her face into the silk lining of the jacket, then came back out into the world. Greenwich was full of people and nobody was looking at her; nobody had even noticed her putting a jacket over her head. But probably a CCTV somewhere had made a note of it.

  To be noticed is to be loved. Who was it who’d said that, again? A novelist from the last century. Anna could spot, without even trying, three CCTV camera points from where she was sitting. She waved at the closest of the three, across the road on the wall of a derelict-looking office building. Hello. How like a brand new, insane sort of narcissism it would have seemed, this mad filming of ourselves all the time, had we had a preview of it even just twenty or thirty years ago. What a paranoid, jealousy-maddened love affair just walking down any street in a British city in 2009 resembled.

  The inside of that jacket had smelled nice.

  There was no sign yet of the child.

  She checked her mobile. It was ten to three. She held it in her hand, weighed it, felt its lightness. Imagine. This phone. A historical object.

  She took Miles’s mobile out of the jacket pocket. It wouldn’t switch on. Its battery would be dead. She put her hand back in and felt for the wallet. Vera Pelle, Made In Italy. Three credit cards, two debit cards, Royal Bank. An AA card with his name on it and the word Roadside. Six first-class stamps. A membership card for the Tate. Three twenty-pound notes.

  The man in the picture on the driving licence was nobody she recognized. He was balding. Even on the rather poor reproduction you could see furrows in the forehead.

  But when she saw the reproduction of his signature there on the licence, the little loop on the l in Miles, the slope of the G and the r and the way the t and the h ran together in Garth, she knew him again immediately. Even more, when she saw his handwriting she saw clearly in her head, in the same hand, the address of her own original home, the home of a total stranger now and as long gone and as ever-present to her as her own dead parents.

  She was eighteen and home from university and a letter had come. It had said in it that he was playing or singing in a band called The Shakespearos. He had drawn a cartoon of The Pink Panther playing an electric guitar on the back of the envelope.

  And—yes!—he had even come to visit her at home once, Miles Garth; she had seen him again, the next year, 1981, was it? He’d come all the way up the country because he was going camping in Ullapool and had been passing through her town and had called in. Her mother had made him a salad, with summer new potatoes, because he didn’t eat meat and they were having mince. At one point she’d left the room. When she’d come back—she remembered it as clearly as if it had happened in a story—she could see him sitting there so English and polite on the couch in the patio. She’d watched him for a moment through the kitchen partition. He didn’t know she was there. He’d been given a cup of tea and he’d felt the base of the cup with his hand and had realized it was wet and that some of the tea had spilled on the tiles by his feet. But because her mother was speaking to him, or her father was talking about something, tomato plants, this is what he did. He unzipped his ankle boot. He did it decorously, without looking down, without stopping listening, and in a way that meant neither of her parents noticed. Then he levered his foot by slight shifts and shakes out of his boot. He put his socked foot down where the tea was spilled, felt for it, and mopped it up with his sole. Then, still without looking down, he felt for the mouth of the boot with his toes and put the foot back into it again. He did this without ever once having looked away from whoever was speaking.

  She sat in the future and turned the driving licence over in her hand. Valid till 17-03-32. She flipped it over again to the little bleached photograph. When this furrowed stranger was a boy in a foreign country, he had gone out of his way for her. He’d reinvented her. He’d moved up and made space for her on a bus. In her home he’d been kind to her parents.

  Thirty years later that last memory revealed itself clean as a new potato in the soil it’s just been unearthed from.

  She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of Miles’s jacket, which let her know she’d been crying, which was something she hadn’t done for quite some time. This knowledge, in turn, made something deep inside her chest crack open and shell off.

  Bang bang bang.

  Listen to that. Feel that.

  That noise was her.

  She’d definitely register now in any heartbeat detector shed.

  Film that, you cameras. Let’s see how much it’s possible to know about what’s really happening by filming me sitting here today. Go on, prove I was there. Show us what it meant, that I was.

  Anna stood up. She faced one of the CCTV cameras. She put her fist in the air.

  But then she felt a bit stupid doing it, standing there so alone. She pretended she’d been stretching her arm. She stretched the other one too. Ah. There. That’s better.

  She sat down on the wall again.

  Imagine the relief there’d be, in just stepping through the door of a spare room, a room that wasn’t anything to do with you, and shutting the door, and that being that.

  There’d be a window, wouldn’t there?

  Were there any books in there?

  What would you do all day?

  What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful? Would you lose language altogether? Or would words mean more, would they start to mean in every direction, all somersault and assault, like a thuggery of fireworks? Would they proliferate, like untended plantlife? Would the inside of your head overgrow with every word that has ever come into it, every word that has ever silently taken seed or fallen dormant? Would your own silence make other things noisier? Would all the things you’d ever forgotten, all layered there inside you, come bouldering up and avalanche you?

  Did he want to know what it felt like to not be in the world? Had he closed the door on himself so he would know what it feels like, to be a prisoner? Was it some wanky kind of middle-class game about how we’re all prisoners even though we believe we’re free as a bird, free to cross any shopping mall or airport concourse or fashionably stripped back wooden floor of the upstairs room of a house?

  Did he inhabit his cell for the good of the others, like a bee or a monk?

  Or was he, say, a smoker and was it all an elaborate ruse to make himself give up?

  Then she laughed out loud. Miles Garth, whoever he was, was making her join in all over again.

  Yep iep iep iep!

  The child was back. The yellow and blue force of her collided, breathless, with Anna still sitting on the wall.

  Knock knock, the child said.

  Come in, Anna said.

  Ha ha!

&
nbsp; The child buckled over on the pavement in happy merriment.

  Come on, come on, the tunnel! she said. She says we can go!

  Where’s the proof? Anna said.

  I have it here in my head, the child said.

  No, I’ll need something more substantial than that in this wicked day and age, Anna said.

  Well, I am allowed to go to the tunnel with you, and that’s a fact, the child said. And my mother says it is a fact. She’s at home right now. She’s writing a paper about how nature says that God is dead.

  About what says what? Anna said.

  Do you get it? It’s a pun! It’s a pun! the child said. She told me it to tell you. Do you get it? She says it is a really good one, pun I mean.

  We’re still not going to any tunnel, Anna said.

  Then she asked the child about the window in the room the man had locked himself into.

  It’s not just any tunnel, it’s the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, the child said.

  She walked Anna back up the street and into the crescent, past all the front doors, then down some steps in an alleyway round the back of the row of houses where, next to their neat little walled-off gardens, there was a parking lot and a patch of grass.

  She pointed at the houses.

  That one, she said.

  Three windows along on the first-floor level there was a nondescript shut window with a slant of blind across the top.

  There were other people at the backs of the houses. There was a head-shaven man cleaning a motorbike, and a woman in a slit-skirt business suit taking photos with a BlackBerry. There was a teenage girl, about fifteen, perched on the end of a pile of planks and what looked like market stall scaffolding by the wall. She was listening to an iPod, rolling a cigarette and glancing over every few seconds at the man cleaning the bike. There was a Japanese-looking girl and boy, both about twenty, both dressed very fashionably, sitting on folding chairs outside a little tent. They called hello to the child, who said a polite hello back. The boy was sitting with a dishevelled-looking old man. The girl was doing something with a camera the size of the palm of her hand.