The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,44

born without parents.

Perfect, I say.

And I’ve hundreds of friends but they’re all the kind of people who’ll simply accept your presence in my life without having to have any back story. Lucky, eh? Liberating, eh?

Too good to be true, I say.

It’ll be just as scary for me, meeting your friends, you say. Like, imagine. Imagine going into a really huge, high-windowed, wood-panelled, book-lined library full of really ancient books, thousands and thousands of them. It smells really nice, and everything, of all the old books and all their old pages –

You used the word ancient once and the word old twice there, I say. You’re not perfect after all.

It’s beautiful and everything, you say. But it’s a bit like, I get in there and I look up and I know I’ve not read any of these books. And at any moment I might find I have to sit a really tough examination on all the things all the books in the whole place are about.

Crabbed age and youth, I say.

You look at me. You raise an eyebrow.

It’s a quote, I say. From what we librarians call the library.

It’s only ten years, you say. It’s not that much. Well, fifteen. Ah, I get it. Is this like when we woke up and you turned and looked at me and said I was like a, what was it, the ice-hockey thing?

Puck, I say. I said it was like having Puck in my bed.

Yeah, a puck, you say.

Exactly the same, I say. Same library shelf ballpark. Ice hockey. Puck. Who’d dare mention Ariel after that?

Only mention Persil Non-Bio or I’ll come straight out in a rash, you say, I’m very skin-sensitive.

You say it like a double bluff joke, so laughingly that I find myself wondering again if maybe you’re having me on, you’ve been having me on all along, that really you know exactly who and what and so on, really you know a lot more than I do, about everything, but for some reason you’re pretending you don’t, though I can’t imagine what such a reason would be. You’re the perfect picture of innocence. You lean back in the chair, the chair up on two legs.

You’ll fall, I say.

No way, you say.

You’re looking at the sky. I follow your gaze and see you’re watching the flight of the summer swifts; they’re just back from the south.

Is it them that are the birds that sleep on the wing? you say.

Yes, I say.

Wow, you say. And never land on the ground? And keep flying and flying, and have to have their nests up high so they won’t touch the ground, and have to keep the momentum going?

Yes, I say.

Imagine, you say. Like a song that never ended, like a constant ever-evolving music, like you’d just keep going and keep going with it, even when you’re asleep.

You stand up; you stretch your arms in the air; you arch like a bow ready for an arrow.

Nothing in common, you and me, I say.

Yep. Nothing, you say.

We should just call it a day right now, I say.

Okay, you say.

You stand behind my chair and put your arms round me, then put them in under my shirt, your hands directly on me. You hold me very tight in under my clothes, and if there’s a library anywhere near then someone just removed its roof, the shelves just flooded with sun and all the old books just remembered what it means to be bound in skin and to have a spine.

It’s hopeless, I say.

Totally, you say behind me.

I can feel the silent laugh of you all the way up and down my back.

You’re not the first person who ever made me feel like this, you know, I say.

I’m the first person today, though, you say.

You have peeled the roof off me and turned the whole library into a wood. Every book is a tree. Above the tops of the trees there’s nothing but birds.

How am I supposed to survive this, out here in the wild wood?

The first time I saw you, you were eating an apple, I say. Well, almost the first time.

I remember, you say.

It was a Discovery, I say. You were just eating an apple as if there was nothing else to do in life.

There isn’t, you say.

It is a little later the same day. We are back in bed. We have decided to invent a how-we-met story so that when we do meet each other’s friends, round whatever table in whatever pub or restaurant or suburban