First Person and Other Stories (11 page)

She opened her eyes, looked into her shoulder bag, took something out and held it up.

I could carry him down, the boy’s mother said.

Oh no, we don’t actually need him actually bodily in the room with us, Karen Pretty said.

She unwrapped a little wooden box from inside a swatch of red silk.

I charge fifty pounds per reading, she said. But I intend not to charge you, Harriet, for today’s session. The guides have asked me not to.

The Girl Guides? the boy’s mother thought. She imagined them all in the uniforms of her own childhood, standing in a blue line all shaking their heads at Karen Pretty.

They say you will remember this kindness and repay my kindness amply in the future with your own kindness, Karen Pretty said.

No, if you don’t mind I’d much prefer to –, the boy’s mother said.

He is carrying pain, Karen Pretty suddenly said. His spirit is very strong. Is he a headstrong kind of a boy?

Well, no, the boy’s mother said.

Yes, that’s right, Karen Pretty said.

Karen Pretty and the boy’s mother sat in silence for half a minute or so. It felt like a very long time. It was long enough to feel embarrassing. Then Karen Pretty put her hand out and presented a worn pack of cards to the boy’s mother.

Your mother is going to shuffle them for you, Anthony, she said to the fireplace.

The boy’s mother blushed. She shuffled the cards and handed them back to Karen Pretty who turned one up, then the next, then the next, and laid them beside each other on her knees.

A struggle for position will end in improvement, she said pointing at the boy on top of a hill with a stick, fighting off a lot of people below him with sticks. A difficult journey to a calmer place, she said pointing at the boat full of swords in the water. A reawakening, she said pointing to the family climbing out of a grave beneath a giant set of wings. I am not going to charge you the usual £50 for this reading, she said gathering the cards and putting the pack together again.

The boy’s mother insisted. She gave Karen Pretty two folded twenties and a ten. Karen Pretty took the money and put it down on the carpet by the chair leg. She called a taxi firm on her mobile. The two women sat in silence while they waited. Karen Pretty smiled a sweet smile at the boy’s mother and shrugged her eyebrows high into her forehead. She sighed. She hummed a tune. She was patient as if patience was a part of her remit.

Peace to you, Harriet, she said when the taxi drew up outside the house.

She leaned on her crutches to get to her feet. The boy’s mother watched her back herself on to the seat of the taxi and watched the taxi drive away. She looked round the room, in which there was more than a trace of Karen Pretty’s perfume. She opened the window. She put the dining room chair back in the dining room. She went to the kitchen and came back with a wet cloth. She wiped the chair down. Then, in the sitting room, she kicked the folded money across the carpet until it disappeared under the sofa.

She went upstairs to check. He was asleep. His short out-breaths made her own breathing hurt.

That night, though she’d already undressed and got into bed, she made herself get up again and come downstairs. In the kitchen over the sink, she struck a safety match and set the two twenty pound notes and the ten alight together and held them so they burned all the way to her hand. She flushed the black stuff they left down the sink then wiped the sink clean and dry with the tea-towel. She went back to bed. She realized she had forgotten to check on him like she always did when she got to the top of the stairs. She got up again. She stood at the crack in the door and saw his head on the pillow in the dark.

She lay in bed with the light off and her eyes
wide open because this time, she knew, she’d been robbed.

The boy was in bed. It had been days and days. It was September. His mother had come in to do the curtains for the morning and he had let her open them.

He could see from here a whiteness which was really the side of one of the houses opposite. But it looked like snow. It was snow. It was a wide square of snow the size of a house, snow even though it was summer.

He watched to see if it would melt, because the morning sun was sending a squinted rectangle of yellow through the gaps in the houses on his own side of the street on to the white. But the snow was super-snow, mega-strength multi-snow. No sun could melt it. If you picked it up to mould it into a snowball would it be cold on your hands or warm? A warm snowball. It would be impossible.

The boy was tired. All this thinking of snow was making him tired. But now he was thinking of how you would make a snowball out of warm snow and your bare hands would stay their usual colour and not get cold or red in the process.

The bear was at the bottom of the bed. It was the big bear, the one his father had brought back
three years ago, when he’d been abroad for work, away for a long time for the first time. The bear had come from an airport. It was huge. It was nearly the same size as the boy.

He reached out in front of him until it was like his hand was touching the white square he could see through the window. It was snow. He took some of the snow in his hand. Because it was warmed snow it didn’t feel unpleasant to touch. He took his other hand out from under the covers and used both hands to mould the snowball. Then he aimed it at the bear at the bottom of the bed and threw it.

The boy’s arm hurt a little from the throw.

He put it back under the covers.

Next thing he’d do was: he would shift out of the bed when the bear least expected it and sneak up without it noticing and punch the bear right in the mouth. Then he would wrestle it. Though it would fight back hard, he’d beat it. He’d kick it. He’d bite it in the ear. He’d eat the bear. He’d totally beat it completely till it roared that it gave in.

Yesterday if he’d thought he’d wrestle a bear or make a snowball or something like that it would have made his head go the sore empty way, not like snow was a white place on an opposite wall, not like summer snow, but like there was only
snow, nothing else, nothing but being in it, everything a sort of snow.

Today he shifted a little out of the covers. He did it quietly so the bear wouldn’t suspect.

He began to feel a little hungry.

He slid a little further out, then a little, careful, more.

I sit my fourteen-year-old self down opposite me at the table in the lounge so that we can have a conversation, because all she’s done so far, the whole time she’s been here in my house, is ignore me, stare balefully at a spot just above my head, or look me in the eye then look away from me as if I’m the most boring person on the planet.

I come home from work today and she’s here again. I don’t ask why, or where she’s been since she was last here. I ask her instead to turn down the television. I ask her again to come and sit down at the table.

She sighs. She finally does as I ask. She pulls out a chair clumsily. It is almost as if she is being clumsy on purpose. She sits down, sighs audibly again.

Last week someone, a girl, a woman I hardly know (now when does a girl become a woman? when exactly do we stop being girls?) turned towards me as we walked along a busy street, backed me expertly up against the wall of a builder’s restoration of a row of old shops in the middle of London in broad daylight, and kissed me. The kiss, out of nowhere, took me by surprise. When I got home that night my fourteen-year-old self was roaming about in my house knocking into things, wild-eyed and unpredictable as a blunt-nosed foal.

It is shocking to see yourself as you haven’t been for nearly thirty years. It is also a bit embarrassing, having yourself around, watching your every move as if watching your every move is the last thing that could possibly interest anyone.

What do you reckon to the house, then? I say. Do you like it?

She barely glances round her. She shrugs.

Would you like some coffee? I ask.

She does it again, the insolent look-then-look-away. She makes insolence a thing of beauty. For a moment how good she is at it actually makes me proud and I nod.

You go girl, I say.

She looks at me as if I’m insane.

Where? she says.

Ha, I say. No,
you go girl
is a phrase, like a cliché. It’s from music. It means good on you, too right, that kind of thing. It’s American. It’s borrowed from black culture. It’s from later. I mean, you’re too young for it.

She makes a tch noise, almost non-existent.

I put the mug of coffee down on the table for her. She picks it up.

Use the coaster, I say.

She is looking at what’s in the mug in horror.

No, because I need it to have milk in it, she says and her accent is so where I’m from and so unadulterated that hearing her say more than four words in a row makes my chest hurt inside.

I’ve no milk, I say. I forgot you took it with milk.

Also it’s, like, the too-strong kind, she says. It’s a bit too strong for me.

She says it quite apologetically.

It’s all I’ve got in, I say.

I like the instant kinds of it, she says. The other kinds taste too much.

Yes, but instants are full of freezing agents, I say. They do all sorts of damage to your synapses –

By the time I’ve got to the word freezing and agents in this sentence her eyes have gone blank again. She pushes the cup away and put her head in her hands. I feel suddenly forlorn. I want to
say: look, aren’t you amazed I ever even managed to buy a house? Don’t you like how full of books it is? You like books. You don’t have to pretend you’re not clever to me. I know you are. I’d have loved the idea of a house full of books like this when I was your age.

Was I really going to say that: when I was your age? Would I really have found myself saying that appalling phrase out loud?

There are quite a few things, though, that I do want to say to her. Concerning our mother for instance, I want to say something like : don’t worry, she’ll be okay. It’s a bad time now that’s all. She doesn’t die until you’re more than twice the age you are now.

But I can’t say that, can I?

I want to say: your exams come out fine all the way down the line. You’ll do all right at university. You’ll have a really good time. Don’t worry that you don’t get off with that boy who smells of the linoleum at Crombie Halls of Residence in the first week. You don’t have to get off with someone in Freshers’ Week, it’s not necessary, it’s not important.

I want to tell her who to trust and who not to trust; who her real good friends are and who’s going to fuck her over; who to sleep with, and who definitely not to. Definitely say yes to this
person, it’s one of the best things that’s going to happen to you. And don’t be alarmed, I want to say, when you find yourself liking girls as well as boys. It’s okay. It’s good. It works out very well. Don’t even bother yourself worrying about it, not for a single afternoon, not for a single hour in a single afternoon. Don’t, by the way, vote Labour in 1997; it’s like a vote for the Tories. No, really. And when you’re twenty-two and you go for the sales job in the middle of Edinburgh and you’re backing the Citroen down the road where the Greyfriars Bobby statue is, don’t back it so far, just go careful on the clutch, don’t panic, because what happens when you panic is you totally collapse the back mudguard against the wall of the pub there and anyway there’s no point in you even going for a job like that, I mean you get into the room and they’re all wearing their power-suits and you’re wearing your jeans, so just, you know, know yourself a bit better, that’s all I’m saying.

But I look at her sitting there, thin and insolent and complete, and I can’t say any of it. It’d be terrible to proffer a friend she hasn’t met yet who then turns out not to be a friend, or a left wing government that turns out not to be. Terrible to tell her, now, about a crushed mudguard one afternoon in 1984. It’s somehow terrible even to suggest she’ll go to university.

You need to eat more, I say instead.

She puts the end of her hair in her mouth. She takes it out and holds it up and fans it out, examines the wet hair for split ends.

Aw, don’t do that, I say, it’s disgusting.

She rolls her eyes.

She is spotty round the mouth and in the crevices down the side of her nose, of course she is, with a skin that I now know to call combination dry and greasy. I could tell her how to deal with it. Her middle parting makes her hair look flat and makes her look more cowed than she is. There’s a constellation of acne on her forehead beneath it. I could tell her how to deal with that too.

I go and stand at the window and look out. That kiss up against the building site fills the inside of my head again as if someone had opened a lid at the top of my skull, poured in a jug of warm water mixed with flower food, then arranged a bunch of spring flowers – cheerfulness, daffodils – using me as the vase. But the light is coming down, February, early dusk, and the common is still patchy with snow. I know, now, though I didn’t know it when I bought this house, that the common is actually a common burial ground; it’s where they buried most of this city’s thousands of plague-dead centuries ago. Beneath
the feet of the dogwalkers and the people coming back from the supermarket, under the grass and the going snow, under the mound where the paths all come together, are all the final shapes their lives took, all the bare bones. Above them the black of the common, and above it the sky the deep blue it goes just before dark. It’s a clear night. The stars’ll be out later. It’ll be beautiful, all the stars and planets spread in their winter-spring alignments above the common. Are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright. Cause I only have eyes. Art Garfunkel, it was. The song coming into my head gives me an idea.

What’s number one right now? I say. In the top twenty?

Figaro by Brotherhood of Man she says. It’s appalling.