Ali Smith - The First Person And Other Stories

the first person and
other stories

ali smith

HAMISH HAMILTON
LONDON

HAMISH HAMILTON CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in Canada by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2009

Originally published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton, 2008

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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.

Publishers note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors 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

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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 Prospects 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 Wylies

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

(swonderful)

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 caf 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 wouldnt 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 theyd be in bed. Then I sighed, and got out my mobile and phoned my friend, with whom I usually go to this caf on Friday mornings.

She knows quite a lot about the short story. Shes spent a lot of her life reading them, writing about them, teaching them, even on occasion writing them. Shes 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 shes 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 Ive 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, shed 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 Id just called, then to mispronounce my friends 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. Its me.

Are you on your mobile? she said. Dont, Ali, its expensive on this system. Ill call you back.

No worries, I said. Its 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.