There but for The (6 page)

When people do that on TV in dramas, like unravel a hairpin or a paperclip, it’s because they’re going to unpick a lock or something, he says. But then you stuck it into your earlobe. That’s so 1976.

I’m so. Twentieth century, she says.

It’s probably still really new wave, to do that in France, he says. No, I mean, probably still really
nouvelle vague.
Hey, listen. If your second name was Key—

She looks sideways at him.

You’d be Anna Key in the UK, he says.

He is laughing at her now.

Then she is laughing too, at herself.

Wish I was in the UK right now, she says.

Your earrings really mean that much to you? he says. Wow. No, I like it here. I like places of disrupted history that have managed, all the same, to come out of things looking pretty good. I’m enjoying all the tourifications. But you. You’d rather be there than here.

Anna nods.

You’re not having a good time, he says.

Anna looks away from him, looks at the water.

Well, he says. You could. Just go. Just go home.

Yeah, right, Anna says. Well, I would if I had my passport. I’d like to at least have the choice.

Let’s see it, he says.

What? she says.

Your passport, he says.

They took them, Anna says. They took mine. Did they not take yours?

Come on, he says. Here to help. Show me your passport and I’ll help you cross the border.

He puts on a stern face, points at the french bread sticking out of her packed lunch bag, holds out his hand.

You want this? she says.

Passaporte, he says. I’ve eaten mine.

You’re being such a tube, she says.

But she hands him the bread.

Right, he says. Come on.

He stands up.

Where? Anna says.

Fishing, he says.

They spend the afternoon throwing bits of bread at the water and watching for the mouths of the fish to appear, to open and close as if detached from any actual fish-bodies, at the surface. On the way back to Paris, when everybody crowds scrumming for seats on to the bus, he catches the edge of her jacket in his hand when she passes his table. He moves over into the empty seat next to him. She sits down.

This is Anna Key, he tells the two other people sitting at the table. Anna Key in the UK, and Anna Key when she’s not in the UK too.

This time on the bus when she gets her book out of her bag, it isn’t because she feels bad. Everybody talks round her all the way back to Paris like she belongs, like she’s never not been there. She even joins in with a couple of the conversations.

In her room in the hotel, before supper, she sits on the bed and takes the list of prizewinners’ names out of the information folder. There is only one Miles. Miles Garth. Next to his name is the word Reading. It is the place he’s from.

There was once, and there was only once; once was all there was.

She wonders if that was really his first line. She wishes she’d asked him how the rest of it went. She tells herself to remember to ask him the next time they speak.

That evening, when she comes down to dinner in the hotel, some of the same people she sat next to on the bus ride back have kept her a seat. She makes friends with a girl who didn’t seem shy but, she finds,
is
quite shy, and who, it turns out, is from Newcastle. They both talk about nothing for a while, then nod at each other in the knowledge that they can now safely hang out with one another whenever they need to for the ten days left. Meanwhile the boy, Miles, is across the other side of the hotel dining room, standing chatting at the staff table. She sees, from this distance, how it’s as if there is a kind of agreeableness in the air round him. She watches how he and the people sitting near him at that table all laugh at something someone’s said. She bets herself it was him who said it, the funny thing.

After dinner she is waiting in the queue for the freaky, creaky old hotel lift with the dangerous metal door when out of nowhere he’s beside her, leaning on her shoulder very lightly.

I went between, his voice at her ear says.

Eh? she says.

I penetrated to the heart of the machine so as to appropriate the machine, he says.

Eh? she says again.

Eh is for Abba, he says. B is for Banshees. C is for covert criminal activity.

He holds something up. It’s a passport. It’s open at the photo page. The photo is of her.

I penetrated to the heart of the forest, he says, sacrificed myself, and brought back—you.

He hands her her own passport. He smiles. He nods just once.

There you are, he says.)

Now, thirty years later, walking down a road in Greenwich in London with a small girl skipping ahead of her, this is what Anna remembered, all at once, of that gone time: the particular smell, like wood polish, in the house and in the clothes of her old schoolfriend, Douglas; the way that the lift door in a hotel she’d once stayed in, in the city of Paris, on that European tour, wasn’t a real door, was just a gold-coloured concertina-like iron grille through which you could see the concrete between the floors as you went up; a certain raw combination of hope and disaffection; a knowledge as vivid as an actual taste in her mouth, of what the time she’d been alive in had felt like; and clear as anything a voice, and the words:
there you are.

She was walking along a road she didn’t know, carrying two jackets. One was hers. The other was stylish, expensive, covetable, light in the cloth, bulky at the pocket. She put her hand inside the jacket pocket and felt Miles Garth’s mobile and wallet in there.

In the middle of the night, not long after she’d left her job, she’d sat in front of a Marx Brothers film which happened to be playing on TV. In it Harpo was unexpectedly old. Some violent henchmen who were looking for a diamond necklace hidden in a tin of tuna held the ageing Harpo against the wall and searched him, emptying the pockets of his old coat out into the room behind them. The pockets went unthinkably deep; among all the junk the henchmen pulled out and piled up behind them were a coffee pot, milk jug and sugar bowl, a car tyre, a hurdy-gurdy music box, a sledge, a couple of prosthetic limbs and a small dog which shook itself to get its dignity back before it padded off across the room. A henchman slapped Harpo very hard across the face. Harpo was a genius. He smiled a delighted smile and slapped the henchman back. The real joke was that the henchmen were determined to make Harpo Marx, of all the people in the world, talk. They tried to do this by torturing him. But every horrible thing they did to him seemed only to please him more.

What what what? the child said. You’re sinking. What are you sinking about?

They were passing a wall low enough to sit on. Anna put the jackets down on the wall between the two street signs. Crooms Hill. SE10. Burney Street. SE10. Above her head there was a sign saying Our Ladye Star of the Sea Church, with an arrow pointing the way. The old-fashioned spelling of Ladye in modern street sign Helvetica looked like a mistake.

She sat down next to the jackets. She looked at her watch.

What I’m sinking, she said, is that we’re not going any further unless you’ve got permission. Are your parents near enough to ask, or have you got a mobile or something?

We live there, the child said.

She pointed across the road towards a church.

In the church? Anna said.

The child laughed.

Behind there, she said. Kind of over there and behind.

How close? Anna said.

We’ve a mobile but we hardly use it, the child said, because my mum says what
is
the point of being on a train and shouting down a mobile, I’m on a train, because it makes it like
not
being on the train at all. She thinks you should
be
there on a train when you’re on one, therefore not be on a phone instead.

I’d like to meet your mum, Anna said. She sounds great.

She is great, the child said nodding. There is a history project in year six on mobiles. Motorola 1990 was the first one. It all happened ten years before I was born.

Uh huh. And will they be home or are they at work, your parents? Anna said.

They work at the university, the child said. It’s over there.

Well, can you run and tell your mum or dad where you are and who you’re with, Anna said, and come back either with your mum, or your dad, or with a note addressed to me saying that it’s okay and that you’ve got permission and that they know you’re safe?

The child put her hands on the wall, levered herself expertly into the air, let herself expertly fall.

I
can,
the child said. Though they trust me. I am not stupid. And your name is the same as mine. So what I tell them is I’m going to the tunnel with Brooke and then to the Observatory to see the Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic Clock.

Maybe, but listen, my name’s not Brooke, that’s you, Anna said. I’m Anna. Tell them I’m a friend of, of, the man who’s locked himself in the room at the Lees’ house.

Yeah, but when you first came, the child said, when we were at the Lees’ front door, you said you were called the same as me.

No I didn’t, Anna said.

I said,
I’m Brooke,
the child said, and then you said,
what a coincidence, I’m Brooke too.

No, Anna said. The thing is, when we met on the steps, I didn’t know you were saying the word Brooke, I thought you were saying the word broke. And I’m broke. So I said, me too. It’s a pun.

Like, broken? the child said.

No, I meant it in the sense of having no money, Anna said.

What exactly is a pun therefore? the child said.

What exactly is a pun
there
for? Anna said.

The child thought this was very funny.

No, she said when she stopped laughing. What I want to know is, what constitutes a pun.

Constitutes? Anna said. Blimey. Constitutes. Well, um, pun. Well, they’re like if a word means differently from what you expect. Like, take me hearing the word broke when you said the word Brooke. That was a sort of involuntary pun.

Involuntary, the child said.

It means it happened without us meaning or choosing it, Anna said.

I know it means that, the child said. I was just saying it to see how it felt in my mouth to say it.

She sat beside Anna on the wall, crossing her legs like Anna, looking ahead like Anna.

Okay, Anna said. So.

And what is the
point
of a pun? the child said.

Um, Anna said.

And is it like if someone at school says to you, listen you, you’re history? the child said.

It depends, Anna said. Who said that to you? Like a teacher, for a project or something?

No, I mean, the child said. Because, obviously, it is a different meaning from me actually
being
history, when I am not even famous and I am only nine years old and will not be ten till next April, and have therefore not yet had much time to do anything to make me historic. I know that it doesn’t mean that I am like President Obama. I know it means something not good. But it would be good if I knew what it was called, because then I could say, the next time he says it to me, if he says it again, you can just stop using that pun at me right now.

Anna nodded.

I see, she said. I don’t think it’s a pun. A pun is more like—say you were at a musical at a theatre and it wasn’t a very exciting musical, and you were a bit bored. Instead of saying there’s no business like show business, you might say there’s no business like
slow
business.

The child’s face filled with delight.

I am going to go to a musical again, probably soon, she said. Show slow. Brooke Broke. I bet you are broke because you are redundant because of the recession, or are you a student or a postgraduate?

No, I had a job, but I gave it up, Anna said, because the job I had was rubbish.

Like community service like picking rubbish up on the heath? the child said.

No, Anna said. In my job I had to make people not matter so much. That was what my job really was, though ostensibly I was there to
make
people matter.

Ostensibly, the child said.

You know what that means? Anna said.

Yes, but I can’t think what exactly at this exact moment in time, the child said.

It means, uh, well, I don’t know how to explain what it means, Anna said. It means what things look like on the outside. Ostensibly my job meant one thing, but really it meant another.

Like lying, the child said. Or like punning?

Well, you tell me, Anna said. This is what my job was. First, I had to get people to talk to me about stuff that had happened to them, which was usually pretty horrible. That’s why they were having to tell me it in the first place, so that I could help them. Then, because there was pressure on me, I had to put pressure on them, to fit these true stories, their whole life stories in some cases, on to just two-thirds of one side of, do you know what A4 is?

A4, like paper? the child said. Or a road that is smaller than a motorway?

Paper, Anna said. So. Because I didn’t like this job, I told the people I worked for that I was going to leave. But they told me how good I was at the job, then they gave me a promotion which meant I made a lot more money. But my new job was to make people redundant, the ones who were doing my old job and weren’t good enough at getting people’s life stories to be less long. So, in the end, I left.

Your job was immortal, the child said.

I think you mean immoral, Anna said. But you might mean immortal.

It’s a pun! the child said.

Such good pun we’re having, Anna said.

The child squealed with laughter.

I’ve got one, I’ve got one, the child said. In a minute we will be going through—the punnel.

Ha ha. Only if you get back with a parent or a note that says we can, Anna said. Go on. I’ll wait here.

Will you? the child said.

Yes, Anna said.

And therefore definitely be here when I get back? the child said.