There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [15]
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