There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [23]
He looked in the eyes of the neighbour who lived on the other side. This man’s eyes were terrifying because there was nothing in them but swastikas, and the images at the back of his eyes were, the boy decided, a place he himself would never choose to look again.
He couldn’t look in his grandmother’s eyes, because she had died and been buried without the necessary inbuilt computing system they’d launched in the year 1990 so that you could access the inner photo albums of the departed and leaf through them—just like, in the past, you’d have done if you’d gone to their house and a relative had handed you the album.
No one had yet solved the way of communicating with the dead. But when they did solve it, the boy thought, what would be the point anyway? All the dead would ever probably say, no matter what you asked them, would be, “Ah! once!”
The boy had known a girl who had died. She had been in the same year as him in the Young School. They’d sat together at the same Project Table; he had done Extinct Mammals (tigers and otters) and she had done The Old English Sycamore (the name, once, for a tree). Last year the girl had gone to bed one night and the next morning nobody had been able to wake her up.
It was a total mystery.
There weren’t many mysteries left.
Most of all the boy wanted to look into that girl Jennifer’s live eyes and see what was in them. There was no other girl’s eyes he wanted to look in, which was annoying and irrational. There would have been no point, obviously, in looking in her dead eyes, even if he could. They would just say, “ah, once,” etcetera.
But before she had died she had been young, like him, and not yet been onced by life.
Today the boy was taking his grandfather, who was a morose old man and didn’t get out much, up in a Pensionglide. They went up the public launcher on the side of the hill. Pensioners’ free airspace was from 10am till 12 noon, when less traffic used the skyway. There was a pretty good tailwind, and the Pensionglide went like a dream. His grandfather was in the back seat and the boy was in front, staring out at the blue of the sky and the stream of other pensioners going back and fore on the horizons of the turn of the century.
“Grandad,” the boy said, looking ahead into the eyes of the sky itself. “You are meant to be old and wise, and I need badly to talk to someone older and wiser than me, but I’m afraid to look into your eyes in case I see the same old story I keep seeing in everybody’s eyes.”
Then he realized the old man behind him was laughing. The old man was laughing so hard in the back of the Pensionglide that the little plane began to rock dangerously from side to side.
But he wasn’t laughing at what the boy had said, because he couldn’t hear what the boy had said; the boy’s words had been blown away in the wind (and anyway the old man wasn’t connected to his HearHelp).
“They forgot to give me my Senior Calmit, boy!” he shouted. “I never took my Senior Calmit! They forgot to give it me! I feel FANTASTIC. I haven’t felt this good in YEARS. Look!”
His grandfather pointed down at his own lap in the cockpit. He looked back at his grandson with his face full of delight.
“Christ! I wish your grandmother were alive today. I wish she were here right here and right now, son! I’d hold her on my knee and I’d sing her such a fine old love song!”
When they landed, and after his grandfather had badly but very energetically demonstrated a dance by the early film star Fred Astaire, flinging his walking stick from hand to hand and up into the air in front of a crowd of cheering pensioners on the runway, the boy returned his grandfather to the Old School gate to sign him back in. As they drew near, his grandfather grew morose again and began to shake.
“Please don’t grass on me,” his grandfather said. “They’ll double-dose me if they find out.”
Grass on me was old-speak for tell tales or betray.
“Grandad, they probably already