There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [11]
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,