There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [21]
Did he want to know what it felt like to not be in the world? Had he closed the door on himself so he would know what it feels like, to be a prisoner? Was it some wanky kind of middle-class game about how we’re all prisoners even though we believe we’re free as a bird, free to cross any shopping mall or airport concourse or fashionably stripped back wooden floor of the upstairs room of a house?
Did he inhabit his cell for the good of the others, like a bee or a monk?
Or was he, say, a smoker and was it all an elaborate ruse to make himself give up?
Then she laughed out loud. Miles Garth, whoever he was, was making her join in all over again.
Yep iep iep iep!
The child was back. The yellow and blue force of her collided, breathless, with Anna still sitting on the wall.
Knock knock, the child said.
Come in, Anna said.
Ha ha!
The child buckled over on the pavement in happy merriment.
Come on, come on, the tunnel! she said. She says we can go!
Where’s the proof? Anna said.
I have it here in my head, the child said.
No, I’ll need something more substantial than that in this wicked day and age, Anna said.
Well, I am allowed to go to the tunnel with you, and that’s a fact, the child said. And my mother says it is a fact. She’s at home right now. She’s writing a paper about how nature says that God is dead.
About what says what? Anna said.
Do you get it? It’s a pun! It’s a pun! the child said. She told me it to tell you. Do you get it? She says it is a really good one, pun I mean.
We’re still not going to any tunnel, Anna said.
Then she asked the child about the window in the room the man had locked himself into.
It’s not just any tunnel, it’s the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, the child said.
She walked Anna back up the street and into the crescent, past all the front doors, then down some steps in an alleyway round the back of the row of houses where, next to their neat little walled-off gardens, there was a parking lot and a patch of grass.
She pointed at the houses.
That one, she said.
Three windows along on the first-floor level there was a nondescript shut window with a slant of blind across the top.
There were other people at the backs of the houses. There was a head-shaven man cleaning a motorbike, and a woman in a slit-skirt business suit taking photos with a BlackBerry. There was a teenage girl, about fifteen, perched on the end of a pile of planks and what looked like market stall scaffolding by the wall. She was listening to an iPod, rolling a cigarette and glancing over every few seconds at the man cleaning the bike. There was a Japanese-looking girl and boy, both about twenty, both dressed very fashionably, sitting on folding chairs outside a little tent. They called hello to the child, who said a polite hello back. The boy was sitting with a dishevelled-looking old man. The girl was doing something with a camera the size of the palm of her hand.
It is a wise man not found anywhere on the world wide web, the Japanese girl told Anna.
It sounded like something you’d find on a slip of paper inside a fortune cookie. Anna nodded a thank you. Maybe the girl meant the dishevelled-looking man. He didn’t look that wise. He looked more homeless. The Japanese boy was sharing hot water he’d boiled on a small gleamingly clean Primus stove with him.
They gave me their umbrellas, the man told Anna. For when it rains. To keep. They’re retractable.
He put his hands in his pockets and brought out a compact umbrella in each hand.
Let it rain, he said.
The child knew the teenage girl over on the planks.