There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [2]
There was once a woman who had met this man thirty years before, had known him slightly for roughly two weeks in the middle of a summer when they were both seventeen, and hadn’t seen him since, though they’d occasionally, for a few years after, exchanged Christmas cards, that kind of thing.
Right now the woman, whose name was Anna, was standing outside the locked bedroom door behind which the man, whose name was Miles, theoretically was. She had her arm raised and her hand ready to—to what? Tap? Knock discreetly? This beautiful, perfectly done-out, perfectly dulled house would not stand for noise; every creak was an affront to it, and the woman who owned it, emanating disapproval, was just two feet behind her. But it was her fist she was standing there holding up, like a 1980s cliché of a revolutionary, ready to, well, nothing quiet. Batter. Beat. Pound. Rain blows.
Strange phrase, to rain blows. Somewhere over the rainblow. She didn’t remember much about him, but they’d never have been friends in the first place if he wasn’t the sort to enjoy a bad pun. Was he, unlike Anna right now, the kind of person who’d know what to say to a shut door if he were standing outside one trying to get someone on the other side to open it? The kind who could turn to that child stretched on her front as far up the staircase as her whole small self would go, the toes of her bare feet on the wood of the downstairs hall floor and her chin in her hands on the fifth step lying there watching, and straight off be making the right kind of joke, what do you call two mushrooms on holiday? Fun guys, straight off be holding forth about things like where a phrase like to rain blows came from in the first place?
The woman standing behind Anna sighed. She somehow made a sigh sound cavernous. After it the silence was even louder. Anna cleared her throat.
Miles, she said to the wood of the door. Are you there?
But the bleat of her voice left her somehow less there herself. Ah, now, see—that’s what it took, the good inappropriateness of that child. Half boy, all girl, she’d elbowed herself up off the staircase, run up the stairs and was about to hammer on the door.
Bang bang bang.
Anna felt each thud go through her as if the child were hammering her on the chest.
Come out come out wherever you are, the child yelled.
Nothing happened.
Open sesame, the child yelled.
She had ducked under Anna’s arm to knock. She looked up at her from under her arm.
It makes the rock in the side of the mountain open, the child said. They say it in the story, therefore the rock just like opens.
The child put her mouth to the door and spoke again, this time without shouting.
Knock knock, she said. Who’s there?
Who’s there?
There were several reasons at that particular time in Anna Hardie’s life for her wondering what it meant, herself, to be there.
One was her job, which she had just given up, in what she and her colleagues laughingly called Senior Liaison, at what she and her colleagues only half-laughingly called the Centre for Temporary Permanence (or, interchangeably, the Centre for Permanent Temporariness).
Another was that Anna had woken up a couple of weeks ago in the middle of her forties in the middle of the night, from a dream in which she saw her own heart behind its ribcage. It was having great trouble beating because it was heavily crusted over with a caul made of what looked like the stuff we clean out of the corners of our eyes in the mornings when we wake up. She woke up, sat up and put her hand on her heart. Then she got up, went to the bathroom mirror and looked. There she was.
The phrase reminded her of something Denny at the Evening News, with whom she’d worked on neighbourhood liaison pieces and with whom she’d had a short liaison herself, had told her some time ago, on their second and last lunchtime. He was a sweet man, Denny. He’d stood in front of her in her kitchen, their first time, and presented his penis to her very sweetly, rueful and hopeful both,