The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,23

taken languages and history, she’d taken geography and science.

When I got home my mother had cut down the hedge at the end of the garden, which meant there was nothing between our garden and the train-line. There was no fence at the end of the garden at all any more. There was no sign of the dog.

Look, my mother said. Now we can see so much further.

Now the people on the platform can see right into our house, I said. The train people won’t be pleased with you doing that.

She sat down on the grass among the strands of hedge.

You used to be so much more of an independent thinker, she said to me.

I’m running out of clean clothes, I said. I’ve almost nothing left to wear that doesn’t need to be washed. I don’t know how to work the machine. Neither does Dad.

You’ll manage, she said.

She sighed. She looked up. She said, Look at that!

I looked, but it was only a blackbird in a tree. I sighed too.

What’s for tea? I said.

You’re like me, she said. You’re tenacious.

I’m nothing like you, I said.

I turned and went back towards the house to phone my father.

You’ll be all right, she called after me.

No I won’t, I shouted back over my own shoulder.

no exit

I’m in bed. It’s three a.m. I’m wide awake. I turn on to my side. I turn on to my back again. Earlier tonight I was at the cinema watching a film and I saw the woman who’d been sitting a couple of seats along from me get up midway through it and go down the stairs in the dark. She pushed the bar down on the fire exit door, the one over on the left hand side of the big screen. The door swung shut behind her, and I knew, because I know a little about the building, that she’d gone out through the illegal fire exit, the one that actually leads nowhere. Behind that door is nothing but a flight of stairs downwards and two locked doors.

I looked around me at all the other people watching the film. It was a new British film about the relationship between the East and the West.

Right then on the screen a man with a moustache was threatening a spiky-haired man with a kitchen knife.

I looked down at the fire exit doors again. The sign above was lit up, with the word EXIT on it and the small green shape of a running man. But the doors were shut, and it was as if nobody had ever gone through them.

I wondered if anyone else sitting here with me knew there was no way out of there, and no way back through after the doors had sealed shut on you. I wondered whether it was only me in the whole audience who knew. I told myself that if she wasn’t back in her seat at the end of the film, I’d tell whoever it was she’d come to the cinema with that I’d seen where she went. We would go down the stairs and open the door and she’d probably be standing there patiently on the other side of it waiting for someone to let her back into the auditorium.

I couldn’t concentrate on the film.

Maybe the woman had thought it was the way to the toilet. Or, more hopefully, maybe she worked at the cinema. Probably she’d gone in there on purpose. Probably she had a key to one of the locked doors in there.

The film ended with nothing in its plot resolved. The lights came up. The cinema emptied. I went, too, with everybody else, and as I did I saw that a sweater was still on the seat she’d been sitting in and a bag was still there tucked under it. But I went up the stairs to the proper exit. I walked straight past the ushers without telling them. They’d probably work it out for themselves when they found the bag and the sweater. They’d know to go down to the exit door and check.

But here I am now, awake in the middle of the night and asking myself whether she’s still in there, on the other side of that door.

I know a story about that fire exit down there, you’d told me once in the cinema.

It was back before we knew each other very well, one of the first times we went to that cinema. The film we’d come to see had ended. The credits were rolling, huge