The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,10

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 nobody here I knew, nobody here who would bother me, nobody here who would ask anything of me, nobody 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 button 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 Christmassy 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