There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [70]
Her mother comes into the hall. When she sees May her hands fly up to her face.
I’m fine! May says. Me and my bike hit a deer on the road. Fell on my arras.
That gets her upstairs without too much fuss, where she has a look at her elbow and her knee and they’re not too bad.
The next day she’s sore all over and the elbow is giving her gyp.
She walks back along the road and finds the bicycle, in the long grass in the ditch, and it’s fine. She gets back on it. It goes fine, it’s fine.)
He took me to London once, Frank did.
Who? the girl said.
On the Underground trains. The smell of all the dirty wool. I was only small, mind.
Right, the girl said.
I’m all washed up, me.
Seem like you’re doing fine to me, the girl said.
Dog-tired. Been on the late shift.
Fair enough, the girl said.
But it’s nice to be loved. Isn’t it nice to be loved.
Telling me, the girl said and her face went sad.
The eyes of the men after war. Like rabbits in headlights. We all were. All them who never came back. All them going up into the air and then not coming down. A line through the name in the morning, Philip told me. And that was that. Well, we came through, Philip and me. And it was behind us, and we got married, got a family, got a new house, brand new. Never a house there before. Even the mud in the garden. Listen! Brand new mud.
But that girl sitting there in the visitor’s chair wasn’t listening, had a long face on her now. May lifted a hand. An old hand in front of her lifted in the air, wavered, then came down proper hard in a fist on the woollen blanket.
Cheer up, you!
(Jennifer comes into the kitchen. She is fourteen. She has the usual sullen face on. It is a summer evening and May is at the machine.
Jennifer, your shoulders, May says.
Yeah, because I’ll need a straight back when we all die in a nuclear holocaust, Jennifer says.
May presses the pedal down on the floor and guides the material through beneath the needle. Now Jennifer has opened the cupboard, taken the top off a Tupperware box and helped herself to a handful of sultanas. At least she is eating something.
If you’d eaten your tea, May says. I need those for the scones.
Jennifer used to be so perfectly dressed. She used to be a model child. These days she is pale and thin with a miserable long face on her and wears such terrible old scruffy-looking clothes and leaves her hair a mess. May is forever telling her. Cheer up, you! It is her age. Also, she is hanging around with girls who are too old for her, the too-clever girls in the year above her at school, and spending far too much time with that boy, whose hair is too long and whose parents May and Philip don’t know anything about. She is spending too little time thinking about school. You can’t be a translator in Europe, which is where the jobs will be for people doing languages not science, without proper qualifications. She is always going around the place with that boy, and if she’s not with him then she’s on the phone to him. She is fourteen. She is too young to have a boyfriend.
He’s not my boyfriend, is what Jennifer says when May or Philip says this. He’s my friend. I don’t want a boyfriend. He doesn’t want a girlfriend. We’re friends.
She doesn’t say it brightly. She says it darkly. She says everything darkly now, and she used to be so bright when she was a child. Her face has changed, got longer, hollow, as if adulthood has tried her on like a glove that doesn’t quite fit yet, then pulled out of her and left her stretched out of her shape. Her shoulders are round because she never straightens her back. What she doesn’t realize is that she’ll never get on in life walking around with round shoulders.
Jennifer is behind May at the machine now, leaning with her back to the kitchen counter. She is wearing the terrible denim jacket. She swings herself up on to the counter like she did when she was a child.
If you scuff that cupboard, Jennifer, May says without turning round.
She can hear Jennifer’s legs against the