There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [22]
Oh yeah, the girl said, you’re Anna K. They’re so waiting for you. She’s in a state because you didn’t get him out of there this morning.
She put the earphone back in.
Anna mimed taking an earphone out of her own ear. The girl blinked. Then she did as Anna asked.
Thanks, Anna said. Will you do me a favour and tell your dad I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, and that I wish them both all the best?
You mean, me talk to them about something? the girl said.
I don’t mind how it’s conveyed, the actual message, Anna said.
The girl put the earphone back in her ear, got her phone out and started texting.
The child jumped up and down. She took Anna’s hand and pulled like a dog on a leash.
Which window? Anna asked the child again. Then she went over past the Japanese girl, who was filming the backs of the houses. She got as close to the house as she could get, right up against its back fence. She leaned over it, put her head through the head-sized gap between the rows of razor wire. She brought her arms carefully through.
She cupped her hands round her mouth and she shouted up between the coils of blade.
Miles. It’s me. I’m here.
There was once, and there was only once. Once was all there was, even though it was the year 2000 and it was the future and they were an advanced race wearing silver space suits (for that classic 60s “Apollo” look) and driving around in point-nosed cars exactly like the ones that featured twenty years before on TV shows like the one called Tomorrow’s World. Even so, even here, now, in the future, there was no getting away from that faraway nostalgic look in everybody’s eyes.
It was very annoying, the boy thought.
The boy was a paragon of modernity. He had the expensive shoes with the rocket-jet-propellers coming out of the heels that made it possible to fly to the record shop, to which, had it been twenty years ago, he’d have had to walk. He had his special injection packets lined up in the fridge-freezer for cancer and heart disease and flu and the common cold and pretty much everything that could go wrong with you. He had the extra limb that everybody could now have if they wanted (he’d chosen to have his new limb protrude from his forehead. This was so he could hold a book when he was tucked up in bed and turn its pages without untucking his hands, which were keeping warm under the covers—innocently under the covers. He was a good clean boy. Though he wasn’t a saint. And anyway now, obviously, all pubescent sexual desires and urges were taken care of with 25mg per night of Junior Calmit, which you could buy at any good chemist’s, and was made by Shake n’ Vac, who had done a manufacturing about-turn shortly after floors became self-cleaning).
In short, he had every mod con.
But he looked at his mother, who’d been married to his father for all those years, and all he saw in her eyes was a curly-haired eighteen-year-old called Albert, which wasn’t his father’s name, and who’d once, when she was sixteen and on holiday in the Isle of Man, whistled a tune every time he passed underneath her chalet window all that summer fortnight to let her know he was there and he was waiting for her.
He looked at his father, and all he saw in his eyes was a double image of a dark and deep and still pool in the river near where his father had grown up; it was back before the rivers were ruined, and in both those pools and both those eyes there was a silver fish the length of his father’s arm, and his father, aged twelve, who’d sat night after night waiting to catch that fish, was, God damn it, still sitting in the long grass at the side of that non-existent river right now in the far future.
He tried the eyes of some people he knew less well. He looked at their next-door neighbour. She had been hit by a bicycle when she was a young woman back in the ancient 1970s and her leg had been shattered, and even though she had a perfectly good new leg now all there was in her eyes was the fast flash of an afternoon of dancing at the