There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [68]
Well, there’s definitely no God in that church you made us go to for years, Patrick said once.
Well, he was angry they’d been rude to his wife.
And he’d not gone to the church himself, not for years, not since Jennifer. Well, that was definitely understandable. I’d have believed in God if God’d done something about it, Patrick said. But who or what lifted even a finger? Who sees the sparrow fall? Nobody. It just falls. She just went. Nobody saw. There’s nobody there to see.
God is present everywhere, Mrs. Young, the young soft priest who’d just come to the church after the old Canon left, and who didn’t know her from a million, said to her on the church steps. God is in everything.
Well, was God in the way there was no controlling your own bladder, your own bowels, any more?
Oh, it was blasphemous. She’d never get to the afterlife thinking a thought like that.
But was God in the way they told you Harbour House, when well enough so that you knew, by that, that something had made them blind to you? God was nothing more than a rhythm repeating itself in an old stone building. That’s what God was in, if God was in anything.
Was God in the eye of that rabbit?
Well, you, you can just go and get lost.
Well, we’re all just a heap of cut flowers on the ground at the end of the day.
Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking legs! is what Philip used to say.
Well, some go younger than others, it’s true.
Well, I’ve had a much fairer innings than some that should’ve.
Was God in the eye of the January boy, the January man?
It was January now. It had been January for a few weeks.
May Young’s heart gave a start. Then it went twenty to the dozen.
No, it couldn’t be today, Jennifer’s day, because the boy, the man, hadn’t come.
But maybe he didn’t know where she was. Maybe he had gone to the house and knocked on the door and found that no one was there, and had no idea where she was.
Well, he’d ask a neighbour, wouldn’t he.
But what if something was wrong, something had happened to him?
No. If it was the day, she’d know, because he’d be here. He always came, without fail. Though just the once, he sent the postcard. But he always came. And he wasn’t here.
But that girl was here, in the chair.
May levelled her gaze at the girl.
She needed her glasses.
She lifted her hand. The old hand on the bed lifted. She sent it towards the locker top, where the glasses were. But it missed, she knocked the hand into them by mistake, as well as into several get-well cards, and the glasses fell with the cards off the locker on to the floor.
She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.
She lifted her hand. The old hand lifted and waved in the air.
The girl had her eyes shut.
May redirected her hand to the top of the locker. The hand came up against more cards from them all telling her to get well. It knocked them to the side. It found the box of tissues. It got its fingers into the open place, the hole where the tissues come out, and got a good grip on the box and got it over to the bed, there, and got an even better grip on it.
With all she had she made the old hand throw the box at the girl.
It worked! It hit her on the leg. The girl opened her eyes with a jolt and looked to see what had happened. She looked first at her leg and then at the box of tissues on its side at her feet and then at May in the bed.
What? she said.
May took a deep breath into the confines of her head. Then she did it. She opened her mouth. She spoke.
Look at all that