The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,28

looks like a piece of wood there I’ve never seen before. It’s new, like the new mirror in the bathroom, the clothes in the kitchen by the washing machine that aren’t really your style, the slight trace in the air of what was our house of the scent of something or someone else.

You’ve got a new life too, I say. You know you have. Don’t. Don’t make this horrible.

I’m not making anything anything, you say. It’s you.

You don’t put your arm back where it was. So I move too. I make it look like I’m moving to be more comfortable, to lean on the far arm of the couch. I look at the place on the couch arm where there’s the old coffee cup ring. It’s been there for years, we made it not long after we bought this couch. Hoovering it didn’t remove it. Working at it with a brush and some kind of cleaning stuff only made the area of plush round it less plush, making it even more obvious. I can’t remember which one of us is responsible for it, which one of us put the cup down that made that mark in the first place. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, but I can’t remember for definite. I trace the ring with my finger, then I trace the square of worn plush round it like a frame.

God, you’re saying next to me now. This is what you’re like.

You say it in a voice like it’s supposed to be my voice, though in reality it’s nothing like my voice.

This is what you’re like, I say. I say it in the mimic voice you’ve just used.

You’ve really changed, you say.

No I haven’t, I say.

You’re so self-righteous now, you say. You’re so unbelievable that if it was you who went into that music shop you just invented for me to be made to look wasteful and whimsical and stupid in –

I never said anything about stupid, I say. Or whimsical.

Yes, you did, you say. You suggested I’m wasteful and whimsical. You suggested, in your story of me buying musical instruments I can’t play, that I’m completely ridiculous and laughable.

No I didn’t, I say. I was actually trying to suggest –

Don’t interrupt me, you say. You always –

No I don’t, I say.

I know what you’d be like in that shop, you say.

I know what it’d be like as soon as you pushed the door open.

What? I say. What then? What exactly? What would I be like?

I know exactly what you’d be like in there, you say.

Go on, I say. Go on, then. I’m longing to hear just exactly what you think of me.

You’d push open the door, you say –

I bet I know, I say. I bet I push open the door and I go really peremptorily to the counter and I ask to see every stringed instrument in the shop, and then I sit at the counter until the assistant brings the first one to me – it’s a guitar, and she puts it down in front of me. And when she goes to get the next one I take a pair of pliers out of my bag. And I take the first string on the guitar and get a grip on it with the sharp bit of the pliers and then I cut it so it snaps. And then I cut the next string. And then I cut the next string. And the next, until I’ve done all the strings and I’m ready for the next guitar. Is that what happens? And then do I cut every string on every stringed thing in the shop? And do I take particular pleasure in cutting the many strings of the pretty harp that was in the window? Is that what happens? Is that what I’m like?

You are looking at me, shocked.

No, you say.

That’s what you’d like to think, though, isn’t it? I say. That’s what you’d like to think about me.

You’re looking at me now with your eyes guarded and hurt. What I was going to say was this, you say. Do you want to know what I was going to say?

No, I say.

You push open the door, you say, and it’s like you’ve entered a Hollywood musical.

Oh, right. I see, I say.

There’s a bright build of soundtrack, you say, and it starts when you push the door open and the bell above the door makes a little pinging sound. And you’re in the place with all the pianos, and