The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,40

it’s definitely not to either of us then, you said.

Jesus, I said.

Very weird, you said.

Beats me, I said.

Someone’s mother? you said. Or father?

Someone’s lover? I said.

Someone very angry, you said. Or unhappy.

Or a bad joke, I said.

A very bad joke. Or something much worse than a joke, you said.

Over our heads birds sang the evening down. You used the knife to prod the note and the clothes back through the parcel’s mouth. I went to fetch the sellotape.

We came back inside. We locked the door. You washed your hands under the tap. I went to the bathroom to wash mine. I ran the water until it was very hot. Even after using the soap someone brought us from France, the one with the too-strong smell, I couldn’t get the other smell out of my nose.

It was half past two in the morning.

I’m going to bed in a minute, I said.

Me too, you said.

Neither of us moved.

The parcel was outside where we’d left it on the garden path. We were watching an I Love 1980s programme, one we’d watched twice before. We were talking about how it had become possible that there never was a miners’ strike, a war, a rightwing landslide, a massive recession or any huge protest march; instead there were only Rubik’s cubes, Transformers and a puppet TV compere shaped like a rat.

Snoods were 1983, you said. How old were you in 1983?

Seventeen, I said.

Tell me something that actually happened, you said. Something about you that I don’t know, from when you were seventeen and I was sixteen and we lived in different towns and didn’t know yet that each other had even been born.

I thought for a moment.

1983 is the year I was in love with Heyden, I said.

With who? you said.

Natasha Heyden, I said. But she only answered to Heyden.

You never told me about anyone called Natasha Heyden before, you said.

Heyden, I was saying. I haven’t thought about her for years. She was in the year above me at school. There was this story about her and Mrs Brand the maths teacher, Mrs Brand was going round the class asking for answers and she got to Heyden and called her Natasha and Heyden acted like she didn’t hear, so Mrs Brand asked her for the answer again and Heyden still acted like she didn’t hear, looking Mrs Brand in the eye, and this went on for twenty minutes, the whole class watching, Mrs Brand standing over Heyden’s desk hitting it with the flat of her hand saying the name Natasha Natasha Natasha and Heyden looking straight through her. Heyden wasn’t like anybody else. She was terribly beautiful.

What did she look like? you said.

She was small and blonde and kind of wiry, I said. She shot things.

She what? you said.

She had some kind of rifle. She was a really good shot. Their house was out by itself on the edge of town, next to the fields by the ring road; there were a lot of rabbits, birds. I made friends with her little sister Angela so I could hang around their house on a Saturday, she had these sticking-out teeth. Angela hated Heyden shooting things, she used to hide in her bedroom with her stereo turned right up, Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart on repeat, so she couldn’t hear the shots. Every Saturday I would say I needed fresh air or a glass of water or something, and then I would slip out to their back garden knowing Angela would never dare come out and fetch me back.

So all the time I spent anywhere near Heyden was time that Heyden was killing things, or waiting to kill things, or finishing them off, laying out a row of dead things on their lawn. She acted like I wasn’t there. It made me act like I wasn’t there too. I would sit on the back step of their house. She’d be at the end of their garden, she’d lean over the fence then lift the rifle to her head, to her blue eye, and swing the length of it after whatever was flying or running. Most Saturdays I went to their house. Most Saturdays this same thing. Until one Saturday I got there and Angela Heyden answered the front door and took me upstairs.

Usually, Angela Heyden and I at least feigned friendship when I got to their house; usually we had a cup of coffee or looked at her books or magazines, talked about school or homework