The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,34

black stuff they left down the sink then wiped the sink clean and dry with the tea-towel. She went back to bed. She realized she had forgotten to check on him like she always did when she got to the top of the stairs. She got up again. She stood at the crack in the door and saw his head on the pillow in the dark.

She lay in bed with the light off and her eyes wide open because this time, she knew, she’d been robbed.

The boy was in bed. It had been days and days. It was September. His mother had come in to do the curtains for the morning and he had let her open them.

He could see from here a whiteness which was really the side of one of the houses opposite. But it looked like snow. It was snow. It was a wide square of snow the size of a house, snow even though it was summer.

He watched to see if it would melt, because the morning sun was sending a squinted rectangle of yellow through the gaps in the houses on his own side of the street on to the white. But the snow was super-snow, mega-strength multi-snow. No sun could melt it. If you picked it up to mould it into a snowball would it be cold on your hands or warm? A warm snowball. It would be impossible.

The boy was tired. All this thinking of snow was making him tired. But now he was thinking of how you would make a snowball out of warm snow and your bare hands would stay their usual colour and not get cold or red in the process.

The bear was at the bottom of the bed. It was the big bear, the one his father had brought back three years ago, when he’d been abroad for work, away for a long time for the first time. The bear had come from an airport. It was huge. It was nearly the same size as the boy.

He reached out in front of him until it was like his hand was touching the white square he could see through the window. It was snow. He took some of the snow in his hand. Because it was warmed snow it didn’t feel unpleasant to touch. He took his other hand out from under the covers and used both hands to mould the snowball. Then he aimed it at the bear at the bottom of the bed and threw it.

The boy’s arm hurt a little from the throw.

He put it back under the covers.

Next thing he’d do was: he would shift out of the bed when the bear least expected it and sneak up without it noticing and punch the bear right in the mouth. Then he would wrestle it. Though it would fight back hard, he’d beat it. He’d kick it. He’d bite it in the ear. He’d eat the bear. He’d totally beat it completely till it roared that it gave in.

Yesterday if he’d thought he’d wrestle a bear or make a snowball or something like that it would have made his head go the sore empty way, not like snow was a white place on an opposite wall, not like summer snow, but like there was only snow, nothing else, nothing but being in it, everything a sort of snow.

Today he shifted a little out of the covers. He did it quietly so the bear wouldn’t suspect.

He began to feel a little hungry.

He slid a little further out, then a little, careful, more.

writ

I sit my fourteen-year-old self down opposite me at the table in the lounge so that we can have a conversation, because all she’s done so far, the whole time she’s been here in my house, is ignore me, stare balefully at a spot just above my head, or look me in the eye then look away from me as if I’m the most boring person on the planet.

I come home from work today and she’s here again. I don’t ask why, or where she’s been since she was last here. I ask her instead to turn down the television. I ask her again to come and sit down at the table.

She sighs. She finally does as I ask. She pulls out a chair clumsily. It is almost as if she is being clumsy on purpose. She sits down, sighs audibly again.

Last week someone, a girl, a woman I hardly know (now when does a girl become