There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [20]
The man in the picture on the driving licence was nobody she recognized. He was balding. Even on the rather poor reproduction you could see furrows in the forehead.
But when she saw the reproduction of his signature there on the licence, the little loop on the l in Miles, the slope of the G and the r and the way the t and the h ran together in Garth, she knew him again immediately. Even more, when she saw his handwriting she saw clearly in her head, in the same hand, the address of her own original home, the home of a total stranger now and as long gone and as ever-present to her as her own dead parents.
She was eighteen and home from university and a letter had come. It had said in it that he was playing or singing in a band called The Shakespearos. He had drawn a cartoon of The Pink Panther playing an electric guitar on the back of the envelope.
And—yes!—he had even come to visit her at home once, Miles Garth; she had seen him again, the next year, 1981, was it? He’d come all the way up the country because he was going camping in Ullapool and had been passing through her town and had called in. Her mother had made him a salad, with summer new potatoes, because he didn’t eat meat and they were having mince. At one point she’d left the room. When she’d come back—she remembered it as clearly as if it had happened in a story—she could see him sitting there so English and polite on the couch in the patio. She’d watched him for a moment through the kitchen partition. He didn’t know she was there. He’d been given a cup of tea and he’d felt the base of the cup with his hand and had realized it was wet and that some of the tea had spilled on the tiles by his feet. But because her mother was speaking to him, or her father was talking about something, tomato plants, this is what he did. He unzipped his ankle boot. He did it decorously, without looking down, without stopping listening, and in a way that meant neither of her parents noticed. Then he levered his foot by slight shifts and shakes out of his boot. He put his socked foot down where the tea was spilled, felt for it, and mopped it up with his sole. Then, still without looking down, he felt for the mouth of the boot with his toes and put the foot back into it again. He did this without ever once having looked away from whoever was speaking.
She sat in the future and turned the driving licence over in her hand. Valid till 17-03-32. She flipped it over again to the little bleached photograph. When this furrowed stranger was a boy in a foreign country, he had gone out of his way for her. He’d reinvented her. He’d moved up and made space for her on a bus. In her home he’d been kind to her parents.
Thirty years later that last memory revealed itself clean as a new potato in the soil it’s just been unearthed from.
She wiped her eyes on the sleeve of Miles’s jacket, which let her know she’d been crying, which was something she hadn’t done for quite some time. This knowledge, in turn, made something deep inside her chest crack open and shell off.
Bang bang bang.
Listen to that. Feel that.
That noise was her.
She’d definitely register now in any heartbeat detector shed.
Film that, you cameras. Let’s see how much it’s possible to know about what’s really happening by filming me sitting here today. Go on, prove I was there. Show us what it meant, that I was.
Anna stood up. She faced one of the CCTV cameras. She put her fist in the air.
But then she felt a bit stupid doing it, standing there so alone. She pretended she’d been stretching her arm. She stretched the other one too. Ah. There. That’s better.
She sat down on the wall again.
Imagine the relief there’d be, in just stepping through the door of a spare room, a room that wasn’t anything to do with you, and shutting the door, and that being that.
There’d be a window, wouldn’t there?
Were there any books in there?
What would you do all day?
What would happen if you did just shut a door and stop speaking? Hour after hour after hour of no words. Would you speak to yourself? Would words just stop being useful?