There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [60]
If the beginning was like that, chances were the end would be like that too.
Well, I’m in for it now, whatever it is.
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound.
Well, I wish, though, I really wish I hadn’t done that thing to that rabbit.
Out loud? No. That girl who was in the room, whoever she was, hadn’t moved. She didn’t even glance up from her phone she was looking at or whatever the thing they all have in their hands and press the buttons on was. That was them these days, spending all their time looking up things on the intimate. The great-grandchildren, even, and them hardly past babies, spent their time on the intimate. It was all the intimate, and answerphones and things you had to speak at rather than to. Nobody there.
Don’t just say nobody there all the time when you phone, Mum, Eleanor said one day. Say, hello, it’s me, then leave your message. It’s distressing for us, it’s distressing for the kids, it’s distressing pressing the answerphone message button and hearing you on there, I mean seven times yesterday, and each time saying nothing but the thing’s not working or nobody there. It’s creepy, Mum. And the thing is working. Leave a message, like a normal person.
I say nobody there because when I phone up there’s nobody there, May had said.
We are here, Eleanor said. We’re just choosing not to answer the phone.
This beggared belief. What were phones for?
Why would anybody have a phone and then choose not to answer it? May had said.
Touché. That got her. Touché Turtle away! That was a turtle that used to be on TV, a cartoon with a French hat on like a musketeer that they used to watch, and Jennifer used to wear her old Wrens cap and play at being the turtle in the garden.
It’s always Jennifer, was what Eleanor said once. She was angry. She was crying. This was years ago, ten years ago. May had made Eleanor cry by remembering something incorrectly. Eleanor was forty-five. She should have known better by then, a mother herself, with grown children herself, dear God and all the angels, than to have been standing crying at the sideboard about what got remembered and what got forgotten.
I know it was awful, Mum. I know how awful it was. But that time it was me. It wasn’t her, it was me. It was me you painted with the paintbrush and the calamine. Nothing ever bit her. It was me who was always bitten. You said it was because I tasted so sweet. That’s what you said at the time. Nothing ever bit her. It was always me who got bitten. I still get bitten. I still do. I’m still the one who gets bitten.
It was possible May had misremembered on purpose to annoy Eleanor. It was possible she knew exactly which child it had been, bare-backed, folded into herself like a paperclip on the little bed in the girls’ room with the bites coming up red all over her shoulderblades and the tops of her arms, flinching away from the cold of the lotion on the bristles of the painting-by-numbers paintbrush.
That girl there on the chair looked to be about the age of Jennifer. She looked about the age.
Jennifer’s dates: 4.4.63, 29.1.79.
They’d been watching an Alf Garnett film the night before on the TV. It had been quite a sad film for something supposed to be funny. Till Death Us Do Part. It was the film-length version of the TV programme. It was one of life’s cruel ironies, is what Philip had said after, that that’s what they’d been watching that night. January, taker of children into the ground. When she was two months shy of sixteen Jennifer’s heart had had a problem in it that nobody knew about.
Such elegant narrow feet, she’d had. Like her father’s feet. His feet, too, were narrow, that’s where she’d got it from. Philip had had unexpectedly girlish feet, pretty feet.
Well, feet in the end all went the same way, six feet down, ha, and that was life.
You had to count your blessings, Philip always said. He always said it when he was disappointed. It was how you knew he was disappointed.
Well, it was all right for him. At least he had the words for it. May had spent the