Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith [33]
I say it out loud.
I feel like we should always be meeting each other off trains, that’s if we’re not actually on the same train travelling together. Or am I saying too much out loud? I say.
You’re saying it too quietly, he says. I wish you’d shout it.
It’s raining quite heavily when we make love again and afterwards I can hear the rhythmic drip, heavy and steady, from the place above the window where the drainpipe is blocked. The rhythm of it goes against, and at the same time makes a kind of sense of, the randomness of the rain happening all round it.
I never knew how much I liked rain till now.
When Paul goes downstairs to make coffee I remember myself. I go to the bathroom. I catch sight of my own face in the little mirror.
I go through to Anthea’s room where the big mirror is. I sit on the edge of her bed and I make myself look hard at myself.
I am a lot less than an 8 now.
(I can see bones here, here, here, here and here.)
(Is that good?)
Back in my own room I see my clothes on the chair. I remember the empty clothes on that memorial, made to look soft, but made of metal.
(I have thought for a long time that the way my clothes hang on me is more important than me inside them.)
I hear Paul moving about in the bathroom. He turns on the shower.
He turns everything in the world on, not just me. Ha ha.
I like the idea of Paul in my shower. The shower, for some reason, has been where I’ve done my thinking and my asking since I was teenage. I’ve been standing those few minutes in the shower every day for God knows how long now, talking to nothing like we used to do when we were small, Anthea and I, and knelt by the sides of our beds.
(Please make me the correct size. The correct shape. The right kind of daughter. The right kind of sister. Someone who isn’t fazed or sad. Someone whose family has held together, not fallen apart. Someone who simply feels better. Please make things better. THIS MUST CHANGE.)
I get up. I call the police station.
The man on the desk is unbelievably informal.
Oh aye, he says. Now, is it one of the message girls or boys or whatever, or one of the seven dwarves that you’re after? Which one would you like? We’ve got Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Bashful, Sleepy, Eye-fist, and another one whose name I’d have to look up for you.
I’d like to talk to my sister, Anthea Gunn, please, I say. And that’s enough flippancy about their tag from you.
About their what, now? he says.
Years from now, I say, you and the Inverness Constabulary will be nothing but a list of dry dusty names locked in an old computer memory stick. But the message girls, the message boys. They’ll be legend.
Uh huh, he says. Well, if you’d like to hang up your phone now, Ms Gunn, I’ll have your wee sister call you back in a jiffy.
(I consider making a formal complaint, while I wait for the phone to go. I am the only person permitted to make fun of my sister.)
Where’ve you been? she says when I answer.
Anthea, do you really think you’ll change the world a single jot by calling yourself by a funny name and doing what you’ve been doing? You really think you’ll make a single bit of difference to all the unfair things and all the suffering and all the injustice and all the hardship with a few words?
Yes, she says.
Okay. Good, I say.
Good? she says. Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you really furious with me?
No, I say.
No? she says. Are you lying?
But I think you’re going to have to get a bit better at dodging the police, I say.
Yeah, she says. Well. We’re working on it.
You and the girl with the little wings coming out of her heels, I say.
Are you being rude about Robin? she says. Because if you are, I’ll make fun of your motorbike again.
Ha ha, I say. You can borrow one of my crash helmets if you want. But you might not want to, since there’s no wings on it like there are on Robin’s helmet.
Eh? she says.
It’s a reference, I say. To a source.
Eh? she says.
Don’t say eh, say pardon or excuse me. I mean like Mercury.
Like what? she says.
Mercury, I