The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,43

parcels like the one we handed in. He said they were dealt with as fully as possible.

We put it in the outside bin. The following Thursday the binmen emptied it into one of the municipal trucks, which churned up the contents of hundreds of bins and delivered them to the landfill on the outskirts, where the parcel still is, under the acceptable statistically monitored municipal layers of waste.

We burned it in the garden incinerator. We stoked up a high-shooting fire with old dried offcuts from the bushes and the trees, then when the fire was at its fastest we threw it in and clamped the lid on. Its particles flew into the air through the chimney, over our heads, over the roofs of the neighbourhood.

We buried it in the garden. Then you remembered a poem where a man buries his anger and his anger grows into a poisonous tree and kills the person he is angry with. For days we worried about what might grow from it. We kept going outside to check. When the weather changed and we went into the garden less, we worried that in years to come, after we were gone, someone might be digging and might find it and open it like we had. Down below the ground it decomposed. Underground creatures ate it and nested in it. Grass grew over the place we buried it and eventually we couldn’t tell exactly where.

We went out to the garden at three in the morning and picked it up off the path. We brought it back into the kitchen. You sliced it open again with the knife. We held our breath so we wouldn’t smell it. I emptied it all, including the note, into the washing machine and shut the door. We put the soap in the drawer and turned the temperature to 90°C. We stayed up while the machine churned through the cycle; it was light outside when we packed them, dried, folded, lightly paper-specked, back into their parcel and sealed up the knife-slice again. You wrote across it with an indelible marker NOT KNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS RETURN TO SENDER. We slept for three hours then got up and had breakfast, then we took it, me limping and sore, you bleary and exhausted, to our local post office, the one they are always threatening with closure because of cuts, and dropped it in the post-sack.

the first person

This, though, is a new you and a new me. In this particular story we are new to each other in the oldest way – well, it’s certainly making me feel a bit on the ancient side. I’m not completely sure the body can take such bright new newness when, like mine, it’s gone well past all the acceptable newnesses, the well-signposted ones, the ones we’re supposed to have: the shiny teens, the know-all twenties, the greenhorn mid-thirties, the sudden shattering astonishments of forty, etcetera. But this. This is unexpected. Today I woke up and you weren’t there. I came down and found the room strangely empty. Then I saw that the dining room table had been dragged outside on to the grass in the sun, and you were sitting at it waiting for me with breakfast ready all round you.

I don’t know that I’m up to this any more, I say.

Yawn, you say.

(You don’t actually yawn, you say the word yawn. Then you look at me across the table and smile. I’m still unused to your smile, and to it being directed at me. Sometimes when you smile at me I have an urge to look over my shoulder to see who it is you’re smiling at.)

I mean it, I say as I sit down, I’m not sure that there’s much room left in my life for all this. I’m not sure there’s enough patience in me. I’m a bit too, eh, old for it. I’m a bit too old, say, to be meeting anybody’s parents. I’m the age of a parent myself, for God’s sake.

Who said anything about parents? All I did was move the table and make some coffee, you say.

I’m definitely too old to have to do all that meeting somebody new’s lifetime haul of dearest friends and so on, I say.

Okay, you say. Whatever.

Like going on holiday and finding yourself in a house full of shrieking strangers, I say.

Well, thanks, you say.

You know what I mean, I say.

Okay, so you’re in luck, you say. I don’t have any parents. None at all. I was