There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [59]
May explained she was just visiting for the afternoon. She wasn’t family or anything.
We accept Mastercard and Visa, the well-dressed woman said.
I think you’ll find there’s been some misunderstanding, May said.
Then the well-dressed woman took May by the arm quite firmly and led her through to Reception, pointing out where the décor had been done up and where it still needed to be done up and telling May how much the wallpapering had cost. At the front desk she took May’s hand cordially, said goodbye, and then as she swept off up the stairs Harbour House’s teenage receptionist had leaned over the desk, had made a face, had lightly touched her own forehead and had let May know that the well-dressed woman was an inmate (her exact word) who believed the place to be a guesthouse she’d run in her old life.
Ever afterwards May had berated herself for not having had the nerve to shout up the stairs after the well-dressed woman that she should sack that insolent receptionist first chance she got.
The longer-term outcome of it, though, was this. May would know she was dead for definite when she no longer remembered to think to herself: I would rather die and go to hell than wake up one day and find myself an inmate in that guesthouse of gone minds, gone things, bad carpets, furniture that needs permission.
For the well-dressed woman had been right about some things. There were things that did have to be settled up in a life. Mastercard, Visa, if only.
There was the rabbit. No amount of Mastercard or Visa would settle the rabbit May’d shot, got first time too, with Philip’s old air rifle.
It was a wild rabbit that had taken to coming to visit the back garden. It wasn’t even as if that rabbit was doing any harm. It sat and nibbled prettily among the flowers.
One day May had seen it there again and, without taking her eye off it, had stood in the kitchen and slipped off her shoes. She had backed away from the window and gone as quietly as she could through the first door, then the next door and into the garage. She’d persuaded the top off the rusty tin where Philip had kept the pellets. She’d cleaned the dust off the gun barrel with her apron and picked a fiddly pellet up and thumbed it into the little hole in the broken-open gun, then again with another, and she’d shut the gun and gone back through the house on quiet stockinged feet to the open kitchen window.
She held it, sighted it, pulled the trigger.
The gun didn’t even kick. It was more a toy than a gun. But all the same the rabbit fell on its side, lay still on its side.
When she got her shoes back on and went out to look at it, it was still alive. She’d hit it in the fleshy part. Its furred back feet were neat one on top of the other. It lay in the soil of the flowerbed by the side of the lawn and it made no noise at all. It was as if it were dead. But when she looked down at it, it looked right back up at her, right at her with its brown eye in its head as if to say: well, you, you can just go and get lost.
You don’t have to worry, Mum, Eleanor had said. They’ve recarpeted, it’s the first thing I asked. They’ve actually recarpeted twice since the time of Mrs. Masters.
She meant well, Eleanor.
But May Young (who had stopped speaking out loud, and the blue of whose own eyes had iced over, the colour of them paler, behind a kind of frost on the day they’d told her, Harbour House when well enough, incontinent, probable onset of mild dementia, danger to self, the kind of looking-after that can’t be done at anyone’s actual home) thought to herself now that the leaving of life, when it came, might well be accompanied by a different seeing, maybe something akin to that rabbit’s seeing.
That’s what the babies did, after all, when they were born. They looked a look at the world as if they could see something that your own eyes couldn’t, or had forgotten how to. That’s what