The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,46

see a whole new person. You should be thanking me, you ungrateful little idiot.

What did you do? you say.

I stood and watched her go. I saw the bloody end of my sleeve at the end of my arm and I felt too faint to do anything. So I sat down on a large stone there at the side of the road. I sat in the summer birdsong and the strong scent of sun on cow parsley and I knew I’d have to get myself to a hospital soon. I mean, I’d like to be able to say that I sat there looking at the place where my hand had been and in the absence of just one hand I suddenly understood how imaginary characters might long for bones, I suddenly knew how dead people, if they can feel anything at all, long to be anything other than dead. But all I felt was outrage. All I felt was loss.

You kiss my breastbone. You reach and take my left hand.

Careful there, I say.

You settle your head on my chest again. You give my hand a little shake.

Your severed hand, however, you say, went on to have a happy and very fulfilled life. Like in all the best B-movies, your hand carried the personal characteristics of its owner with it. It could play sonatas by itself. It could not only ride horses but groom them efficaciously afterwards. It was good at playing poker, nifty at texting and googling, always deep in the pages of a good book. It was always putting itself in a pocket and bringing out change when anyone asked it for money in the street. It was also a renowned gigolo; it wasn’t unusual for your hand to cross town by itself in the middle of the night, leaving one lover sated and happy in that after-love torpor, to please another, who was sitting up right then eagerly waiting to hold your hand. Also, you yourself became famous as a really versatile drummer. You were known the whole world over as Stumpy the Miracle Drummer. That’s how we met. One night by chance I was contracted to play my arms off and hoof it in the very same bar in which you happened to be headlining. That afternoon, at four o’clock, rehearsal time, I came through the door of the bar –

You were eating an apple, I say.

It was a Discovery, apparently, you say.

I know, I say.

And we saw each other, you say.

So that’s how we met, I say.

Yep, you say. Or how about this? How about we’re story-free? How about, there is no story as to how we met?

(You walked past my door. I was sitting in the doorway reading my emails. I was in a bad mood because the night before I had stayed up late and found myself watching a repeat of a 1970s episode of Tales of the Unexpected; it was one I had seen thirty years ago, in my adolescence and which I’d never forgotten. It was about a teenage girl whose parents have been killed in a car crash. She lives a rather unloved and abandoned life, and after a bad piano lesson with an unpleasant lady piano teacher, she is followed home to her unsympathetic grandmother’s house by a sinister man. Someone is murdering adolescent girls. There are lots of shots of lakes being dredged and policemen with German Shepherd dogs pulling against the leash in long grass. The next time the girl goes out, he’s there again. He follows her again. To escape him she turns for help to a sweet old lady she meets by chance. The sweet old lady seems much more grandmotherly than the girl’s grandmother. So the girl goes with this sweet old lady across a ragged wasteland to a caravan where the sweet old lady says she’ll make her a nice cup of tea. The girl settles down. She feels safe for the first time. Then someone else comes in the caravan door. It’s the creepy man. He’s been in cahoots with the sweet old lady all along. That’s where the story ends.

Thirty years ago, this thirty-minute story had terrified me. Thirty years on, the same story had made me very angry. It had sacrificed its girl character to a horrible end for the sake of a neat story; I had been arguing with the neatness and foulness and cynicism of it in my head all night. I had woken up still trying to think of