The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,17

and the living is easy. Fish are jumping and the cotton is high.

Then they all look at each other in amazement.

Fidelio looks bewildered.

The gaoler shakes his head.

The conductor’s baton droops.

The orchestra in the pit stops playing. Instruments pause in mid-air.

The girl who was doing the ironing at the beginning is singing too. She’s really good. She shrugs at her father as if she can’t help it, can’t do anything about it. Your daddy’s rich, she sings, and your mammy’s good-looking.

Then a man arrives in a cart pulled by a goat. He stops the cart in the middle of the stage. Everybody crowds round him. He’s black. He’s the only black person on the stage. He looks very poor and at the same time very impressive. When the song finishes he gets out of the cart. He walks across the stage. He’s got a limp. It’s quite a bad limp. He tells them all that he’s looking for Bess. Where is she? He’s heard she’s here. He’s not going to stop looking for her until he finds her. He glances at the gaoler; he regards Fidelio gravely for a moment. He nods to the girl. He approaches a group of prisoners. Is this New York? he says. Is she here?

Yeah, but, you say. Come on. I mean.

But what? I say.

You can’t, you say.

Can’t what? I say.

Culture’s fixed, you say. That’s why it’s culture. That’s how it gets to be art. That’s how it works. That’s why it works. You can’t just change it. You can’t just alter it when you want or because you want. You can’t just revise things for your own pleasure or whatever.

Actually I can do anything I like, I say.

Yeah, but you can’t revise Fidelio, you say. No one can.

Fidelio’s all about revision, I say. Beethoven revised Fidelio several times. Three different versions. Four different overtures.

You know what I mean. No one can just, as it were, interject Porgy into Fidelio, you say.

Oh, as it were, I say.

You don’t say anything. You stare straight out, ahead, through the windscreen.

Okay. I know what you mean, I say.

You start humming faintly, under your own breath.

But I don’t think interject is quite the right word to use there, I say.

I say this because I know there’s nothing that annoys you more than thinking you’ve used a word wrongly. You snort down your nose.

Yes it is, you say.

I don’t think it’s quite the right usage, I say.

It is, you say. Anyway, I didn’t say interject. I said inject.

I lean forward and switch the radio on. I keep pressing the channel button until I hear something I recognize.

It’s fine for you to do that, you say, but if you’re going to, can you at least, before we get out of the car, return it to the channel to which it was originally tuned?

I settle on some channel or other, I’ve no idea what.

Which channel was it on? you say.

Radio 4, I say.

Are you sure? you say.

Or 3, I say.

Which? you say.

I don’t know, I say.

You sigh.

Gilbert O’Sullivan is singing the song about the people who are hurrying to the register office to get married. Very shortly now there’s going to be an answer from you. And one from me. I sing along. You sigh out loud again. The sigh lifts the hair of your fringe slightly from your forehead.

You’re so pretty when you sigh like that.

When we arrive at the car park you reach over to my side of the radio and keep the little button pressed in until the radio hits the voices of a comedy programme where celebrities have one minute exactly to talk about a subject, with no repetitions. If they repeat themselves, they’re penalized. An audience is killing itself laughing.

When you’re sure it’s Radio 4, you switch the radio off.

We are doomed as a couple. We are as categorically doomed as when Clara in Porgy and Bess says: Jake, you ain’t plannin’ to take de Sea Gull to de Blackfish Banks, is you? It’s time for de September storms. No, the Sea Gull, a fictional boat, moored safe and ruined both at once in its own eternal bay, is less doomed than we are. We’re as doomed as the Cutty Sark itself, tall, elegant, real, mundanely gathering the London sky round its masts and making it wondrous, extraordinary, for the people coming up out of the underground train station in the evening, the ship-of-history gracious against the sky for all the people who see it and all the