I would go downstairs now, I thought as I sat there, and look up bath enamellers in the Yellow Pages and tomorrow I would phone people up for estimates. That was what life was about, keeping things well and running, flowing and in good order, the homefires burning. That was what survival was about, re-enamelling the bath even when other seemingly more important things had reached their end.
But the Yellow Pages wasn’t in the place where we usually keep it. I couldn’t imagine where it was. I went round and round the downstairs rooms looking for it, because you had taken it from where it’s meant to be kept, where we agreed to always put it after we’d finished using it, you had selfishly taken it and left it somewhere completely impossible for me to find and you had probably done it on purpose, you were always doing things like that, taking things from where they’re supposed to be and leaving them somewhere else. You had taken the Yellow Pages in the full knowledge that I would need it and then you had not just carelessly but completely callously left it somewhere I would never think in a million years to look.
I got angrier and angrier. I stood in the kitchen. I opened cupboard doors and slammed them closed again. As I left the kitchen, slapping at the light switch with the palm of my hand to conserve energy, I noticed the weak light in the shed window.
I nearly tripped on a pile of logs you had left right by the back door. I could have done myself an injury if I’d fallen on them, I told myself as I stamped out across the slippery grass.
You were in the shed. I could see you through the cobwebbed window. I saw as I got closer that you were wearing round your shoulders and over your head the blankets we use for sitting on the grass in the summer. You looked ridiculous. You had one hand out of the blankets holding an old torch in the air. In the wavering battery light of it I saw you were reading a book.
The shed door was held shut with something, maybe the lawnmower. I pushed against it and it wouldn’t give. I rapped hard on the window.
What did you do with the Yellow Pages? I shouted.
I rapped again.
I need the Yellow Pages, I shouted.
You turned your head slowly. You settled the blankets round you and turned back to the book as if you’d glanced out of a moving window in a train or a car at something and it had been of no interest to you.
That’s when it flashed into my head exactly where the Yellow Pages was. It was where it had been for months, randomly open on the back seat of the car; we had fetched it from the house a couple of months ago when you said you’d teach me to drive, because, you’d said, I could sit on it to give myself a little more height in the driver’s seat.
I was embarrassed. For a moment I considered pretending to forget that I’d remembered where the Yellow Pages was so I could go on self-righteously shouting at you. But the absurdity of even considering this, and then the absurdity of you visibly shivering with cold, wrapped in blankets, reading in the shed and me jumping up and down with cold, shouting at you in the garden in the middle of winter on a pitch-black night made me want to laugh. I almost did. I had to stop myself. I stood in the cold by the spindly tree. You had shown me which pedal was which and explained to me how a clutch worked. You had taken me to the near-empty Homebase car park and let me drive round and round for an hour and you had only been angry once, only for a moment, pulling the handbrake up when I went too close to the only other car in the car park.
I thought about why I had been so angry earlier. I tried to work myself up about it again but instead I couldn’t help myself, I began to wonder what book it was you were reading and if it was the book we’d left out on the bench in the garden since last August, first out of forgetfulness, then out of laziness, then finally because we were both curious about what would actually happen to a book if we left it outside in the weather. I wondered if it had warped, what it felt like in your hands. It had been out there in heat and cold and wet for months. I wondered if the pages had stuck together so that when you tried to open them the print might transfer to the opposite page and make the book unreadable, so that every time you turned a page you’d have to peel it carefully back.
Right then the wind rose and I heard the back door slam shut, but I was fine, I had my keys in my pocket. I walked the length of the garden away from the shed, went round to the front door, got my keys out and was about to put the key in the lock and let myself back in when I remembered your doorkey falling so lightly on to the mat.
I could post my own key through the door. I could go back round to the shed and tell you I was locked out too. Then we could break back in to the house together. We could go back to where this had begun. Maybe once we’d got back in we could even start the fire you’d gone for logs for. In fact I would make a point of fetching the logs in, to show you how I trusted you.
I imagined myself going down the garden again and telling you through the shed window that we were both locked out and that I needed you. But you might choose not to respond. If that’s what you chose then I’d break back in on my own.
Or I could just open the door right now and go into the warm, shut the door after me, run a bath, go to bed early and read a book for a while by myself before I fell asleep.
I stood at the door with the key in my hand and of course I decided yes.
ali smith
the whole story and other stories
Ali Smith is the author of
Hotel World
, which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. Her first collection of stories,
Free Love
, won the Saltire First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award. Born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962, Smith now lives in Cambridge, England.
also by ali smith
Free Love
Like
Other Stories and Other Stories
Hotel World
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2004
Copyright
©
2003 by Ali Smith
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in paperback in the United Kingdom by Hamish Hamilton, the Penguin Group, London, in 2003.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Ali, 1962–
The whole story and other stories / Ali Smith.
p. cm.
Contents: The universal story—Gothic—Being quick—May—
Paradise—Erosive—The book club—Believe me—Scottish love songs—
The shortlist season—The heat of the story—The start of things.
1. Scotland—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6069.M4213W47 2004
823’.914—dc22
2003063020
eISBN: 978-0-307-42961-2
v3.0