The First Person And Other Stories Part 3

He said it all very loudly, as if he was saying it not really to me but for the barmaid back behind the bar to hear.

How about I tell you, he said putting his foot up on the low stool nearest me, about what Christmas means to me? Shall I tell you two girls what a really happy Christmas is?

I looked at his foot in its scuffed shoe on the plush of the bar stool. I could see the colour of his socks. They were light brown. Someone had bought him these socks as a present, maybe, or maybe someone had bought them because he was lucky enough to have someone routinely care about his socks. Or, if not, he had gone into a shop and bought them himself. But this was the last thing I wanted to care about, a detail like where someone else's socks had come from. I had been out driving around since about half past four this morning. I had driven into the car park of this pub tonight precisely because I believed there would be n.o.body here I knew, n.o.body here who would bother me, n.o.body here who would ask anything of me, n.o.body here who would want to speak to me about anything, anything at all.

I looked at the man's foot again with the thin line of human skin there between the top of the sock and where the edge of his trouser leg began. I stood up. I got my car keys out of my pocket.

Going somewhere? the man said.

The barmaid was taking packets of peanuts off little hooks above the till, dusting them and putting them back. She turned as I went past.

Won't be much longer, five minutes at the most, she called after me.

I pushed the door open regardless and went out of The Inn.

But I was two new whiskys down, I realized as I slid into the driver's seat. I couldn't drive anywhere, not for a good while. I sat in the car in the lit car park and watched the sign that said The Inn hang motionless beyond the windscreen, which had immediately steamed up with the warmth coming off me. There was no wind tonight. That was why it was so frosty. It was cold out, bitterly cold. It would soon be bleak midwinter.

I put the key in the ignition and pushed the b.u.t.ton which turns the seat-heating on. Cars are great. They are full of things that simply, mechanically, meet people's needs. Inside seat-heating. Adjustable seat levers. Little vanity mirrors in the windscreen shades. Roof that slides right back if you want it to.

I began to try to guess what story the man would have told two virtual strangers in a pub to prove what made a good Christmas. The best Christmas lunch he'd ever eaten. The best present anyone ever gave him. It would be something about his childhood since that was all he'd really wanted to talk about in there, childhood and lost magic, and the coming back of magic at the coldest of times in the back of beyond in the form of a simple frost that catches the light in the dark.

Imagine if we had all been friends in that bar, had been people who really had something to say, had wanted to talk to each other.

Now you, I imagined the barmaid saying to me, perched on one of those too-high stools above me and him, so that leaning down and forking up one of my scampi pieces for herself is a little precarious, but she wavers perfectly, balances perfectly, tucks the scampi into her mouth and we all laugh together at her expertise, including herself.

Your turn, she says. A really happy one, come on.

Well, okay, though happy's not the word I'd have used at the time, I say. I'm about twelve.

I don't mean this to sound rude but you look a bit older than twelve, the man says.

Not now. Obviously. In the story, I say.

Okay, the man says.

Okay, the barmaid says.

And in my neighbourhood there's this new couple that's moved in a couple of streets down, and everybody knows them, everyone knows who they are, I mean, because they're a husband and wife teaching couple, they both teach modern languages at the school the local kids go to, the school I go to.

Not very Christma.s.sy so far, the barmaid (Paula) says.

Give her a chance, the man says. She'll get to it. Some time in the near future.

Christmas past, Christmas present, Christmas near-future, Paula says.

Anyway, the Fenimores, Mr and Mrs Fenimore, I say. Mr Fenimore is really pioneering. He's small and slim, but always looks as if he's setting out on an adventure with an imaginary hiking stick in his hand.

I know the type, Paula says.

He takes over the after-school chess and judo clubs, I say. He starts up an after-school cookery cla.s.s and he takes a lot of flak for being a man who runs a cookery cla.s.s. Mrs Fenimore helps. She always helps. She is always there helping, she's a shy person who smiles a lot, while her husband, whom she looks at with eyes full of a sad, hopeful love, runs the school clubs, and not just those, he forms a neighbourhood wine club where our parents and the other neighbours who don't have kids go to the Fenimores' house to taste wine, Mrs Fenimore puts invitations through everybody's door, smiling shyly if you look out the window and see her on her rounds. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU TO A SPECIAL WINE TASTING. Loads of people go, all the neighbours go, my mother and father go, and they never usually go to anything. They've never done anything like it before. Then everybody talks about how nice the Fenimores are, how much they like the Fenimores' house, car, garden, cutlery, design of plates. Then the Fenimores organize a theatre visit. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU TO EDUCATING RITA AT THE EMPIRE. Everybody goes. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU TO A MULLED WINE EXTRAVAGANZA. JACK AND SHIRLEY FENIMORE INVITE YOU ON A SOLSTICE a.s.sAULT ON BEN WYVIS.

a.s.sault on Ben who? the man (I'll call him Tom) says.

No, I say. Ben Wyvis is a mountain. Ben is a Scottish word for mountain.

Yeah, I know, I know that, Tom says.

You don't know nothing, Paula says. You didn't know what angora was a minute ago.

Anyway, I say. About twenty of us, who've all lived under Ben Wyvis for most of our lives and have never been up it, seven or eight adults and the rest kids my age, some younger, a couple of older ones, get into a minibus the Fenimores hire, because Mr Fenimore's just got his minibus driving licence, and drive to the foot of Ben Wyvis to see how high up it we can get on the Sunday before Christmas, December 21st, a gloriously sunny Sunday, bright and crisp and blue-skied.

And then what happens?

Oh, okay, I get it, it's a game, Tom says. Okay. You get to the top and you have the most fantastic party and you kiss your first boy up a romantic mountain on the shortest day of the year.

The minibus breaks down, Paula says. You never even leave the neighbourhood.

Halfway up the mountain, I say, the sky changes colour from blue to black, and half an hour later it starts to snow. It snows so heavily that seven adults and twelve or thirteen kids get snowed into a s.p.a.ce under a crag on Ben Wyvis. It's before the days of mobile phones. There's no way of letting anyone know where we are. It's freezing. We huddle together, then the adults huddle the kids inside a circle of their bodies. It's afternoon. It gets dark. It doesn't stop snowing. All there is is snow in the dark, and more snow, and dark at the back of it, snow for miles of empty sky, and a lot of swearing from my father, he's dead now, and the man from across the road, he's dead now too, I think, threatening to murder Mr Fenimore, and my mother who'd worn shoes with heels on to go up a mountain in, my mother, she'd never even been on a hike before never mind anywhere near a mountain, cursing herself, and a bit of arguing about who should go for help, and Mrs Fenimore crying, and Mr Fenimore counting heads every five minutes, before he sets off into the white dark to bring help back.

Oh G.o.d, Tom says. Does he die?

It ends happily, Paula says. Doesn't it?

Mr Fenimore is lost on the hill till the next day, when the rescue services pick him up, I say. He's in hospital for a week. We're all already home by then. We all get picked up about an hour later by three men in a helicopter. The father of a girl called Jenny McKenzie, in the year above me at school, has picked up the bad forecast on the radio and phoned the rescue services and told them where we went. They keep four of us in hospital overnight, including me. It's a laugh. We're all fine. But the thing is, we get back to town, back home, and there's no snow anywhere. None. It's all just like normal, grey pavements and tarmac and roofs, like none of it happened.

Then what? Tom says.

What happened about the Fenimores? Paula says.

How was that a happy Christmas? Tom says.

I had no idea what happened to the Fenimores, I realized, sitting there by myself in the warmed-up seat in my car in a near-empty car park miles from home. I could remember her sad face. I could remember his open, nave brow, his forward slant when he walked down the school corridor or up the makings of a path at the foot of the ben. They were only there for that year, maybe. They moved away. The judo club stopped. A home economics teacher took over the cookery club. People stopped talking about them like they were the local joke pretty soon. Where were those people, the hopeful man and his sad helpful love; where were the Fenimores tonight, nearly thirty years later? Were they warm in a house, well into their middle-age? Were they still the Fenimores?

From here in my car I could see the frosty roofs on the village terrace below, down at the bottom of the slope. I looked the other way and saw, through the side window of the pub, the man and the barmaid.

The man had his back to the bar. He was holding a near-empty gla.s.s, staring ahead into s.p.a.ce. The barmaid was leaning on her elbow. She was staring in the opposite direction. They stayed like that, unmoving, like figures in a painting, the whole time I watched.

The barmaid was called Paula. I had no idea what the man's name was. Good, because I didn't want to know. I was just a stranger who ordered supper and didn't eat it. I was long gone, as far as they knew, on the road out of here in the dark.

I put my hand on the ignition key, whisky or no whisky.

But if I went back inside, I could eat. And if I went back inside, if I was simply there, those two people would speak to each other again, they'd be able to, even if I was just sitting reading my paper or eating my supper ignoring them.

I looked down at the roofs of the houses sheened with the fierce frost, like a row of faraway houses in the kind of story we tell ourselves about winter and its chancy gifts.

I opened the car door and got out. I locked it, though I probably didn't need to, and I went back into the pub.

The third person

All short stories long.

This one is about two people who have just gone to bed together for the first time. It's autumn. They met in the summer. Since they met they've been working up to this with a sense of unavoidability; less a courtship, more as if they've found themselves in a very small room, like a box room, a room small enough to feel overcrowded with two people in it, and this room also has a grand piano in it. It doesn't matter where they've been or what they've been doing - meeting each other by chance in the street, walking down the road, going to a cinema, sitting at a table in a pub it's as if they're in a tiny room and in there with them, ma.s.sive, ever-present as an old-fashioned chaperone, awkward and glossy and unmentionable as a coffin, the grand piano. To move at all in this room means having to squeeze into the narrow s.p.a.ce between the wall and the side of the piano. The inside of it, under the lid, is a structure of wires and hammers a bit like the underframe of a bed or a harp that's been laid on its side.

They've done it, they've shrugged themselves out of their shy clothes at last, they've slipped in under the covers of a small double bed, they're holding each other in nothing but skin. One of them even has a quite-bad cold and the other doesn't care. Ah, love. Outside, the trees are quiet. The light is coming down. It's five in the evening. But enough about them. It's spring. It's morning. In the trees the birds are singing like crazy. A woman living in a street of terraced houses, a street on which so many cars are parked that it makes driving the fortnightly refuse-collector truck down it quite difficult, has just hit one of the dustmen who routinely empty the wheelie bins every second Tuesday morning over the head with a garden spade.

The man is on the ground. He's bleeding from the forehead. He is looking bewildered. He holds up his hand and looks at the blood on it. He puts it back up to his forehead again.

The woman is leaning on the spade as if her spade's blade, on the pavement, is a couple of inches into earth and she's simply tidying her garden and has paused to take stock of what work she's done. She looks about sixty. She looks quite well-to-do. She looks too old, too proper, too well-dressed, to have done what she's just done. Round her, round him now, the man's work colleagues off the truck are gathered in a tableau, open-mouthed, between laughter and anger. The driver of the truck is hanging out of the front cabin, one foot on the step, the door swinging open behind him. All the men are wearing the same green council overalls. It's summer. It's evening. The trees are different here. On one of the back streets of a small Mediterranean resort two women are eating at a restaurant whose tables are wooden and rickety. The table they're at shifts its weight between them every time one or other of them cuts something up on her plate. The street is a slope; one of the women is a lot higher up on its slant than the other, even though she's just two feet away.

The women are bright pink from four days of too much sun. The one on the up slope is still exclaiming over the way that tomatoes taste so different here, the way that everything tastes so different here. Everything tastes of sun. The other, on the down slope, is beginning to worry about what she'll do when she gets bored with eating Greek salad, since there's nothing else she likes the look of on this menu but there's no other restaurant in the tiny resort that she likes the look of, not really, and it was touch and go about whether they'd be able to get a table at this one again tonight.

Gypsy children go up and down the street just like on each of the other evenings, but tonight the braying noise of the little squeezeboxes they use for begging is almost drowned out by the Americans. The Americans are off-duty troops. They are sly looking and shy looking, polite looking and hangdog looking and only just school-leaving-age looking; they look so young and so raw that it's really near-criminal. The women have gathered, from overhearing them talk, that they're here en ma.s.se on a working holiday to accustom them to sun and heat before they're shipped to the Gulf. When the women exclaimed to the waiter about the number of people in the restaurant tonight, this is what he told them.

Three ships, many thousand troops, arrive on the resort's outer harbour. So the bars on the outskirts unwrap the big boots this morning and put them on the tables and then everybody knows what is happening, and the big boots go through the town like a fire. And then the soldiers in two or three days go away and the boots are wrapped in the paper again until the next ships.

The waiter shrugged. The women nodded and looked interested. When the waiter went, they made faces at each other to let each other know that neither had understood what he was talking about.

Now a small child is standing next to their table. She is working the tables at this restaurant with a boy of about ten who plays the same perfect Italian-sounding cliche over and over on his child-sized squeezebox. He looks businesslike and disinterested as he holds his hand out at the end of each riff at table after table. The girl standing pressed up against the women's table is dark, very pretty, very young, maybe only five or six years old. She says something they don't understand. The woman on the down slope shakes her head and waves at the girl to go away. The woman on the up slope picks their Rough Guide phrasebook up off the table. She flicks through it. Ya soo, she says while she does. The child smiles. She speaks in shy English. Give me money, the smiling child says. She says it seductively, almost under her breath. The woman has found the page she wants.

Pos se leneh? the woman says.

Money, the child says.

She presses up against the woman's leg and puts her small hand on the woman's arm. The hand is very brown from sun. Poso khronon iseh? the woman says, then tells the other woman, I'm asking her how old she is.

It's when they go to pay the bill that the woman on the up slope will find out that the wad of euros she had, folded deep down in her pocket, isn't in her pocket anymore.

It isn't in any of her other pockets.

Then they'll remember the child backing off and calling to the squeezebox boy, then both disappearing in among the hundreds of off-duty soldiers.

It was a piece of perfect thievery, a piece of artistry so good that the doing of it was invisible. All the way back to the hotel that night the down slope woman, the one who hasn't had her money stolen and who has had to pay for supper, will be annoyed with herself that she has witnessed such a perfect act of thievery and somehow not actually seen it happen. She will berate herself for this not-seeing. She will feel, as they walk back to their hotel, the sheer unfairness of her own life again as the up slope woman, walking next to her, argues on her mobile the whole way back at ten o'clock at night with the 24-hour desk at her travel insurance company. Neither will notice that the bars and pubs they both walk past along the tourist harbourfront are surreal with outsized beer-gla.s.ses, gla.s.ses a foot and a half high; on all their counters, all their outside tables, beer-gla.s.ses shaped like seven-league boots, with see-through straps and buckles and see-through leather flaps sculpted in the gla.s.s they're made of. It's winter. The trees are bare. A woman and a man have gone to see a production of a play at a theatre. He bought the tickets months back, in the summer. She likes this kind of thing. But their time as a couple is nearly up, the man knows, because he has seen how the woman has begun to despise him. He saw it on Sat.u.r.day evening, when he was cutting courgettes into strips for a stir-fry, he saw it cross her face. He feels that the end of their love must be something to do with the way he cuts vegetables. He doesn't know what else to blame. It has made him uneasy in his own kitchen and tonight, when they ate out at a restaurant near the theatre, he could touch nothing green on his plate.

On the stage a woman has disguised herself to go and meet her lover in a wood; her lover has been banished by her father, the king. The woods thicken. The plot goes crazy. She takes what she thinks is a medicine and falls into a sleep so deep that it looks like death. Her new-found friends in the wood put her in a tomb, believing she's dead. They sing a song above the body. The song is about death being a place of no more fear. When he hears this song the man in the audience starts to cry. He can't help it. The song is very moving. She takes his hand. She holds it. He stops crying.

He doesn't dare open his eyes in case the opening of his eyes will mean she will let go of his hand. All round him, in the dark of his own shut eyes and then in the sudden lights-up of the theatre, in the light which comes as suddenly through his shut eyelids as it would were his eyes open, as if eyelids are no protection at all, there's sudden applause. Interval. The play is half over. It's summer. The nights are long and light. Right now it's the brief summer dark of early morning, just before the light comes up. A young woman wakes up next to her new lover and sees someone sitting there in the dark at the end of the bed. It is an old woman moving her hands, knitting. The young woman shakes her lover gently. She doesn't dare say anything out loud in case the old woman is startled. But her lover is fast asleep.

The next day at breakfast she describes the figure to her lover. It sounds like my mother, her lover says. Her lover's mother has apparently been dead for a decade. Was she singing? her lover asks. Yes, the young woman says, she was, she definitely was. What was she singing, the lover asks. I don't know, she says, but it had a bit in it that sounded like this.

She sings a tune, making it up as she goes along. She tries to make it sound like it could be a real tune. It is a mix of the Londonderry Air and a song from a record her own mother used to play when she was small.

No, I don't think I know it, her lover says. Sing it again.

The young woman sings a bit of a tune again but it's not the same as the first time because she can't remember what she's just sung. She sees her lover frowning. She sings a made-up tune again. She tries to make it the kind of tune she imagines the mother of her lover would sing.

No, that's definitely not my mother, her lover says. Her lover puts a cup down on a saucer so decisively that the young woman knows the matter is closed. The young woman is disappointed. She now really wants the figure at the end of the bed to have been the lover's dead mother. What if it was was your mother and she was just singing a tune you don't happen to know? she says. There must be your mother and she was just singing a tune you don't happen to know? she says. There must be some some tunes your mother knew that you don't know. It's summer, but it's cold, really noticeably cold. Tonight it's almost down to freezing. A man in a restaurant is telling his friend about the death of a soldier. The soldier who has died was ten years younger than the man and was a small boy in the same neighbourhood all through the man's adolescence. He died in a roadside incident, is what it says in the papers. The man is holding a copy of a tabloid. Inside on page 5 there is a report about the death of a soldier, but because the soldier's family has asked for privacy, there are no names, though everybody in the neighbourhood knows who the articles in the papers are about. tunes your mother knew that you don't know. It's summer, but it's cold, really noticeably cold. Tonight it's almost down to freezing. A man in a restaurant is telling his friend about the death of a soldier. The soldier who has died was ten years younger than the man and was a small boy in the same neighbourhood all through the man's adolescence. He died in a roadside incident, is what it says in the papers. The man is holding a copy of a tabloid. Inside on page 5 there is a report about the death of a soldier, but because the soldier's family has asked for privacy, there are no names, though everybody in the neighbourhood knows who the articles in the papers are about. He died in the heroic fight, He died in the heroic fight, it says. What heroic fight? the man says. All round them people are talking and laughing. I helped him build a go-cart, the man says. I nailed an old steering-wheel on to it for him and tied wire to the wheels so it would steer. I was seventeen. Then, when he was older, we used to just ignore each other. If we saw each other in the street, I mean. The man's friend shakes his head. It's so weird, he says. It's so. It's. It's spring. It's an early evening in April, the first mild evening of spring. A man is out on his flat roof with a hosepipe, aiming a jet of water at a small black and white cat. When the water hits the cat, the cat jumps in the air and runs a little, and then turns and stops and looks at the man. it says. What heroic fight? the man says. All round them people are talking and laughing. I helped him build a go-cart, the man says. I nailed an old steering-wheel on to it for him and tied wire to the wheels so it would steer. I was seventeen. Then, when he was older, we used to just ignore each other. If we saw each other in the street, I mean. The man's friend shakes his head. It's so weird, he says. It's so. It's. It's spring. It's an early evening in April, the first mild evening of spring. A man is out on his flat roof with a hosepipe, aiming a jet of water at a small black and white cat. When the water hits the cat, the cat jumps in the air and runs a little, and then turns and stops and looks at the man.

Go on, the man shouts. He waves his hand in the air. The cat doesn't move. The man aims the hose again. He hits the cat. The cat jumps in astonishment again, takes a few steps then stops and turns to look back at the man with its wide stupid cat eyes.

Aw, a voice says.

It is quite a high voice.

The man checks all round him at the roofs and gardens of the other houses but he can't see anyone.

Go on, he shouts at the cat again. He stamps on the roof.

When he's chased the cat right down the back lane with the water, the man crosses the roof, gathering in the hose. He climbs in his window and turns to shake the nozzle outside. That's when he sees the small boy, or maybe it's a girl, edging down out of one of the sycamore trees at the back of the houses.

The boy or girl has what looks like a book, or maybe a cardboard packet, under one arm. Biscuits? The man watches him or her negotiate a safe way down from quite high up in the trees, moving the packet from under one arm to under the other, careful from branch to branch until he or she is within reach of the roof of the shed in the garden below. Then the boy or girl slides downwards and out of view.

That night the man can't sleep. He turns in his bed. He sits up.

A child believes I am cruel, he is thinking to himself.

The next morning he is almost late for work, not just because he woke late, but because he goes and stands out on the roof for several minutes then leaves home later than usual. That evening he takes a taxi, but though he's home half an hour early and goes straight out on to the roof, it's raining, and it's noticeably cold, much colder than yesterday.

There's no way a child would climb a tree in such weather. The tree would be too slippery. There'd be no point in sitting in a tree in the rain.

The leaves are nearly out on these trees. It'll soon be summer. The ends of their branches against the grey sky look like they're swollen, or lit, or like they've been painted with luminous paint.

It doesn't look like it will brighten. It doesn't look like anything is going to happen tonight.

He decides he'll wait out there on the roof for a little while longer, just in case.

The third person is another pair of eyes. The third person is a presentiment of G.o.d. The third person is a way to tell the story. The third person is a revitalisation of the dead.

It's a theatre of living people. It's a miniature innocent thief. It's thousands of boots that are made out of gla.s.s. It's a total mystery.

It's a weapon that's shaped like a tool.

It comes out of nowhere. It just happens.

It's a box for the endless music that's there between people, waiting to be played.