There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [62]
Actually, Jennifer says, something like that would be pretty groovy.
She sits forward. But then she drops her head again.
What now? May says.
Because what if I was doing the jumping at the Fête and I looked up at the seats in the spectator stand for you to see me doing it, Jennifer says muffled against her cardigan.
Uh huh? May says.
And there was no you there, Jennifer says.
May nods.
Tell you what, she says with her mouth against the parting of her girl’s hair. If I spontaneously combust I’ll send my arms and legs by themselves to the park to watch you do it.
Finally she has made Jennifer laugh.
They’ll need a seat each, mind, so that makes four seats. And you can pay out of your pocket money. That’s only fair, May says.
Jennifer is laughing out loud now.
And I’m only letting you go to that Fête in the first place if you’ll hold my hand when we cross the road, May says. And my other hand. And my arm. And my other arm. And my leg. And my other leg.
When Jennifer is properly helpless with laughter May shifts her legs like you do when you’re playing the horsey game with a very small child, the bit where they think they’re going to fall but know all the same that you’ve got them safe.
She catches her youngest at exactly the moment of letting her go.)
May Young eyed the strange girl there in the chair. The nails of both her hands were purple with varnish and far too long for properness. She was pressing the little buttons in the thing in her hand. It was as if the whole world was in thrall to the things. They all had them, used them as readily, as meekly, as May was supposed to take the stuff off the medicine cabinet. They swallowed it, hook and line. It was all supposed to be about how fast things were; they were always on about how fast you could get a message or how fast you could get to speak to someone or get the news or do this or that or get whatever it was they all got on it. And at the same time it was like they were all on drugs, cumbersome like cattle, heads down, not seeing where they were going.
The girl thumbed and fingered away at her own world in her hand like it didn’t matter that she was in May’s hospital room, or in anyone’s hospital room, on earth, in heaven, wherever. It didn’t matter where in or out of the world she was.
Maybe she was on a, what was it, scheme, a school scheme, the things they make them do instead of schoolwork, to visit people in hospital, to go and be visitors for people who got no other visitors.
But May had plenty of visitors. She’d no need for a girl on a school scheme. They were always endlessly coming, May’s visitors, and standing about round the bed. She’d no need for strangers to do it too.
Maybe she was a friend of Patrick’s girls and was doing a good turn for the Girl Guides, visiting an old person and getting a badge.
Maybe it was like when they came round singing to people in the hospital, like with the Christmas carols. Not just Christmas neither, because it was weeks after Christmas now and they’d been round again, they were round not that long ago singing their jolly song, on and on it went, interminable, about I am Jesus and they crucified me, and then they hung me up on a tree, all the details of the blood and the nails. It was January, nowhere near Easter. There was no excuse for it.
She lifted her hand and made to wave the girl away.
I’m not needing visitors, she said with her hand. You’re free to go.
The girl in the chair saw May’s hand move. She looked up from the thing she was holding in her own hand. She reached up to an ear and took the thing in her ear out.
Woke up, then, the girl said.
The girl spoke loudly and clearly.
May glared at her. She leaned forward. She wasn’t some old lady who was always asleep with her mouth open, some old lady who couldn’t hear.
She reached out for the jug and she didn’t miss, she got it, by the handle.
Want me to do that? the girl said.
May looked her a stony look. The girl was clearly some kind of do-gooder, and if not, she was a thief.