There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [12]
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.
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—
I am no way either of those, she