There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [69]
It came out in a gravelly husk. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to say at all.
Look at all the what? the girl said.
May tried again.
If someone had done the job right.
If someone had done the job, the girl said.
Wouldn’t be happening.
Nothing’s actually happening, the girl said. There’s no water. I don’t see any water.
May shook her head. The room swung.
They done the job wrong.
Okay, the girl said.
Terrible the waste.
The wrong things were coming out of her mouth by themselves. She shook her head at the girl again.
Okay, the girl said. We’ll sort it.
Where’s the cake?
You want a cake? the girl said.
You hold it and I’ll cut it. Where’s the plates? Where’s the knife?
The girl put her phone thing down on the chair and went round to May’s locker. She opened the doors and rummaged around. She took out a pair of shoes and put them on the bed. She took out a jar of sweets.
I don’t see any cake. But I found these, she said.
She unscrewed its top. May opened her mouth like a child. The girl unwrapped a red sweet and put it in May’s mouth.
May nodded.
The girl took one too. She took the sweets with her and sat down again on the visitor’s chair. May sucked at the sweet. She nodded at the shoes on the bed.
Bad luck, that.
That was right. That was the first thing she’d said that’d come out right.
The girl got up, picked up the shoes again and put them on the floor under the bed.
I don’t like pink.
The girl listened.
See, we were all supposed to hate her, think her a bad lot. Because she ran away to America. But she had to, for her husband. In the war. Him being an Eytie from the Isle of Capri. And she didn’t run away. That was a lie. She did her songs. She made a fortune. Enough money for a hundred Spitfires, they said! And the head German. The head German.
Like, you mean, Hitler or something? the girl said.
No, no. Weasel, he was. Little weaselly face. She was singing in France. The war effort. He gave the order, he said they were to bomb her hotel. Send a message. But they didn’t get her.
Right, the girl said. In the war, yeah?
Yes, in the war! In Arras.
Is that a place? the girl said.
!
Ha ha!
The girl, amazed, sat in the visitor’s chair and watched May laugh.
(May Winch is home on leave, cycling home in the blackout from the dance and there’s no moon, but it’s okay because she knows where the potholes are, it’s like a game to miss the potholes and it’s a game she’s good at. But she rounds the corner on the stretch between the town and the village just past the crossroads where the signpost used to be and BANG the air itself becomes a wall, and oof she hits it, it all happens fast and slow, off the bike she comes and the bike goes one way and she goes the other, hits the ground side first, arm up to stop her head, then her knee and her thigh hit the road, and it takes her a jiffy to realize she’s cycled into a warm flank, an animal, there, she can hear it go, it’s run off too fast for a cow, must have been a horse, maybe a deer, the feet didn’t sound like a horse, nobody’s horse would be loose on the road like that. She sits herself up, feels her elbow, skinned, wet, bit of bleeding it feels like. She stands up, puts the weight on her knee. Fine.
She’s fine.
She bursts into tears.
She walks the rest of the way home shaking.
It was the dark taking a shape, going solid out of nowhere in front of her. It wasn’t like when the bomb hit the ball-bearing factory next door to the shop and she’d been blown across the room backwards and hit the wall behind her. That had been different. This had come out of nowhere and it had no sound, just the muffled thump of May being hit by the dark. The difference was that she’d just gone headlong with her eyes wide open into it, that she’d done it herself somehow, hit the dark.
When she gets to the fountain she gives her face a wash and dries it on her sleeves. At the front of the house she waits behind the hedge for a bit till she is calm, has sorted her face into the right face, for you need the right face to come into the house,