The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,4

her life because art is too long and life is too short, and that short stories are, by nature, about life, and that life itself is always found in dialogue and argument.

Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two short stories.

There were two men in the café at the table next to mine. One was younger, one was older. We sat in the same café for only a brief amount of time but we disagreed long enough for me to know there was a story in it.

This story was written in discussion with my friend Kasia, and in celebration of her (and all) tireless articulacy – one of the reasons, in this instance, that a lot more people were able to have that particular drug when they needed it.

So when is the short story like a nymph?

When the echo of it answers back.

the child

I went to Waitrose as usual in my lunchbreak to get the weekly stuff. I left my trolley by the vegetables and went to find bouquet garni for the soup. But when I came back to the vegetables again I couldn’t find my trolley. It seemed to have been moved. In its place was someone else’s shopping trolley, with a child sitting in the little child seat, its fat little legs through the leg-places.

Then I glanced into the trolley in which the child was sitting and saw in there the few things I’d already picked up: the three bags of oranges, the apricots, the organic apples, the folded copy of the Guardian and the tub of Kalamata olives. They were definitely my things. It was definitely my trolley.

The child in it was blond and curly-haired, very fair-skinned and flushed, big-cheeked like a Cupid or a chub-fingered angel on a Christmas card or a child out of an old-fashioned English children’s book, the kind of book where they wear sunhats to stop themselves getting sunstroke all the postwar summer. This child was wearing a little blue tracksuit with a hood and blue shoes and was quite clean, though a little crusty round the nose. Its lips were very pink and perfectly bow-shaped; its eyes were blue and clear and blank. It was an almost embarrassingly beautiful child.

Hello, I said. Where’s your mother?

The child looked at me blankly.

I stood next to the potatoes and waited for a while. There were people shopping all around me. One of them had clearly placed this child in my trolley and when he or she came to push the trolley away I could explain these were my things and we could swap trolleys or whatever and laugh about it and I could get on with my shopping as usual.

I stood for five minutes or so. After five minutes I wheeled the child in the trolley to the Customer Services desk.

I think someone somewhere may be looking for this, I said to the woman behind the desk, who was busy on a computer.

Looking for what, Madam? she said.

I presume you’ve had someone losing their mind over losing him, I said. I think it’s a him. Blue for a boy, etc.

The Customer Services woman was called Marilyn Monroe. It said so on her name-badge.

Quite a name, I said pointing to the badge.

I’m sorry? she said.

Your name, I said. You know. Monroe. Marilyn.

Yes, she said. That’s my name.

She looked at me like I was saying something dangerously foreign-sounding to her.

How exactly can I help you? she said in a singsong voice.

Well, as I say, this child, I said.

What a lovely boy! she said. He’s very like his mum.

Well, I wouldn’t know, I said. He’s not mine.

Oh, she said. She looked offended. But he’s so like you. Aren’t you? Aren’t you, darling? Aren’t you, sweetheart?

She waved the curly red wire attached to her keyring at the child, who watched it swing inches away from his face, nonplussed. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. The child looked nothing like me at all.

No, I said. I went round the corner to get something and when I got back to my trolley he was there, in it.

Oh, she said. She looked very surprised. We’ve had no reports of a missing child, she said.

She pressed some buttons on an intercom thing.

Hello? she said. It’s Marilyn on Customers. Good, thanks, how are you? Anything up there on a missing child? No? Nothing on a child? Missing, or lost? Lady here claims she found one.

She put the intercom down. No, Madam, I’m afraid nobody’s reported any child that’s lost or