The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,15

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 your mother and she was just singing a tune you don’t happen to know? she says. There must be 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. 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.

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