First Person and Other Stories

the first person and
other stories

ali smith

HAMISH HAMILTON
LONDON

HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009

Originally published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, 2008

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Copyright © Ali Smith, 2008

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN 978-0-670-06911-8

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available

upon request to the publisher

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data available

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Thank you to the following publications where stories from this collection first appeared:

Prospect, The Brighton Book

The Times, Tales of the Decongested

Carlos, The Scotsman

Secrets, The Guardian

‘Writ’ was first commissioned and published in a limited numbered edition of 200 by The Oundle Press

‘True short story’ was originally written in 2005 in playful response to a speech given by
Prospect’s
deputy editor Alex Linklater on the inauguration of the National Short Story Prize. It was published
by
Prospect
in December 2005 and has been slightly updated for inclusion in this collection

Thank you, Simon

Thank you Andrew, and thank you, Tracy

and everybody at Wylie’s

Thank you, Becky, and thank you, Xandra

Thank you, Kasia

Thank you, Mary

Thank you, Sarah

for Sarah Wood

(I should be so lucky)

for Kasia Boddy

(on the sunny side of the street)

for Nicky Haire

(s’wonderful)

The first person is often the lover who says I never knew anyone like you

The listener is the beloved She whispers Who? Me?

Grace Paley

So many pieces of me! I must hold tight.

Edwin Morgan

True to oneself! Which self?

Katherine Mansfield

Our responsibility begins

with the power to imagine.

Haruki Murakami

There were two men in the café at the table next to mine. One was younger, one was older. They could have been father and son, but there was none of that practised diffidence, none of the cloudy anger that there almost always is between fathers and sons. Maybe they were the result of a parental divorce, the father keen to be a father now that his son was properly into his adulthood, the son keen to be a man in front of his father now that his father was opposite him for at least the length of time of a cup of coffee. No. More likely the older man was the kind of family friend who provides a fathership on summer weekends for the small boy of a divorce-family; a man who knows his responsibility, and now look, the boy had grown up, the man was an older
man, and there was this unsaid understanding between them etc.

I stopped making them up. It felt a bit wrong to. Instead, I listened to what they were saying. They were talking about literature, which happens to be interesting to me, though it wouldn’t interest a lot of people. The younger man was talking about the difference between the novel and the short story. The novel, he was saying, was a flabby old whore.

A flabby old whore! the older man said, looking delighted.

She was serviceable, roomy, warm and familiar, the younger was saying, but really a bit used up, really a bit too slack and loose.

Slack and loose! the older said, laughing.

Whereas the short story, by comparison, was a nimble goddess, a slim nymph. Because so few people had mastered the short story she was still in very good shape.

Very good shape! The older man was smiling from ear to ear at this. He was presumably old enough to remember years in his life, and not so long ago, when it would have been at least a bit dodgy to talk like this. I idly wondered how many of the books in my house were fuckable and how good they’d be in bed. Then I sighed, and got out my mobile and phoned my friend,
with whom I usually go to this café on Friday mornings.

She knows quite a lot about the short story. She’s spent a lot of her life reading them, writing about them, teaching them, even on occasion writing them. She’s read more short stories than most people know (or care to know) exist. I suppose you could call it a lifelong act of love, though she’s not very old, was that morning still in her late thirties. A life-so-far act of love. But already she knew more about the short story and about the people all over the world who write and have written short stories, than anyone I’ve ever met.

She was in hospital, on this particular Friday a couple of years ago now, because a course of chemotherapy had destroyed every single one of her tiny white blood cells and after it had, she’d picked up an infection in a wisdom tooth.

I waited for the automaton voice of the hospital phone system to tell me all about itself, then to recite robotically back to me the number I’d just called, then to mispronounce my friend’s name, which is Kasia, then to tell me exactly how much it was charging me to listen to it tell me all this, and then to tell me how much it would cost to speak to my friend per minute. Then it connected me.

Hi, I said. It’s me.

Are you on your mobile? she said. Don’t, Ali, it’s expensive on this system. I’ll call you back.

No worries, I said. It’s just a quickie. Listen. Is the short story a goddess and a nymph and is the novel an old whore?

Is what what? she said.

An old whore, kind of a Dickensian one, maybe, I said. Like that prostitute who first teaches David Niven how to have sex in that book.

David Niven? she said.

You know, I said. The prostitute he goes to in The Moon’s a Balloon when he’s about fourteen, and she’s really sweet and she initiates him and he loses his virginity, and he’s still wearing his socks, or maybe that’s the prostitute who’s still wearing the socks, I can’t remember, anyway, she’s really sweet to him and then he goes back to see her in later life when she’s an old whore and he’s an internationally famous movie star, and he brings her a lot of presents because he’s such a nice man and never forgets a kindness. And is the short story more like Princess Diana?

The short story like Princess Diana, she said. Right.

I sensed the two men, who were getting ready to leave the café, looking at me curiously. I held up my phone.

I’m just asking my friend what she thinks about your nymph thesis, I said.

Both men looked slightly startled. Then both men left the café without looking back.

I told her about the conversation I’d just overheard.

I was thinking of Diana because she’s a bit nymphy, I suppose, I said. I can’t think of a goddess who’s like a nymph. All the goddesses that come into my head are, like, Kali, or Sheela-Na-Gig. Or Aphrodite, she was pretty tough. All that deer-slaying. Didn’t she slay deer?

Why is the short story like a nymph, Kasia said. Sounds like a dirty joke. Ha.

Okay, I said. Come on then. Why is the short story like a nymph?

I’ll think about it, she said. It’ll give me something to do in here.

Kasia and I have been friends now for just over twenty years, which doesn’t feel at all long, though it sounds quite long. ‘Long’ and ‘short’ are relative. What was long was every single day she was spending in hospital; today was her tenth long day in one of the cancer wards, being injected with a cocktail of antibiotics and waiting for her temperature to come down and her white cell count to go up. When those two tiny personal adjustments happened in the world, then she’d be
allowed to go home. Also, there was a lot of sadness round her in the ward. After ten long days the heaviness of that sadness, which might sound bearably small if you’re not a person who has to think about it or is being forced by circumstance to address it but is close to epic if you are, was considerable.

She phoned me back later that afternoon and left a message on the answerphone. I could hear the clanking hospital and the voices of other people in the ward in the recorded air around her voice.

Okay. Listen to this. It depends what you mean by ‘nymph’. So, depending. A short story is like a nymph because satyrs want to sleep with it all the time. A short story is like a nymph because both like to live on mountains and in groves and by springs and rivers and in valleys and cool grottoes. A short story is like a nymph because it likes to accompany Artemis on her travels. Not very funny yet, I know, but I’m working on it.