The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,8

case anybody should hear. Psst, it hissed. What do you call a woman with two brain cells? Pregnant! Why were shopping trolleys invented? To teach women to walk on their hind legs!

Then he laughed his charming peal of a pure childish laugh and I slipped away out of the aisle and out of the doors, past the shopgirls cutting open the plastic binding on the morning’s new tabloids and arranging them on the newspaper shelves, and out of the supermarket, back to my car, and out of the car park, while all over England the bells rang out in the morning churches and the British birdsong welcomed the new day, God in his heaven, and all being right with the world.

present

There were only three people in The Inn: a man at the bar, the barmaid and me. The man was chatting up the barmaid. The barmaid was polishing glasses. I was waiting for a pub supper I’d ordered half an hour ago. I was allowing myself one double whisky. It was a present to myself.

Have you seen them, covered in all the frost? the man was saying to the barmaid. Don’t they look just like magic roofs, don’t they look like winter always looked when you were a little child?

The barmaid ignored him. She held the glass up to the light to see if it was clean. She polished it some more. She held it up again.

The man gestured towards the pub’s front window.

Go out and look at it. Just have a look at it, look at it on the roofs, the man said. Don’t they look exactly like what winter was like when you were small? Like a white came over everything by magic, like a giant magician waved his hand and a white frost came down over everything.

You don’t half talk a load of wank, the woman behind the bar said.

Her saying this made me laugh so suddenly that I choked on the drink I was taking. They both looked round. I coughed, turned away slightly towards the fire and went on looking at my paper like I was reading it.

I heard them shift their attention back towards each other.

It’s Paula, isn’t it? he said.

She said nothing.

It’s definitely Paula, he said. I remember. I asked you before. Remember? I was here, I was in this very pub about six weeks ago. Remember?

She held another glass up and looked at it.

Well, I remember you, he said.

She put it down and picked up another. She held it up between her and the light.

So if you don’t like Christmas and so on, Paula, he said. If you don’t think it’s a magic time from our childhoods and so on. Well, why’d you bother to decorate the pub, then? Why’d you bother to spray the snowy stuff on the door and the windows? Why’d you make the place look like snow off Christmas cards? It’s only November. It’s not even December.

It’s not my pub, the woman said. I don’t get to choose when Christmas begins and ends.

The whisky I’d choked on had gone down the wrong way and had formed a burning gutter along the inside of my windpipe. I ignored it. I read my paper. It was about how the Gulf Stream was being eroded at an almighty rate. Soon it would be as cold as Canada here in the winter. Soon the snow would be six feet high every winter and winters would last from October till April.

Magic roofs, the woman said. Christ. See the house with the Alfa Romeo outside it?

The man went to the door and opened it.

I can’t see an Alfa Romeo from here, he said.

The third along car from the left, she said without raising her voice.

I saw some cars, but I’ll take your word for it that one’s an Alfa, he said coming back in.

They call him the German in the village, she said. His name’s German-sounding. He never comes in here. He hit black ice round the Ranger Bend with his two sons in the car two years ago and the son that was in the front seat died. The car hasn’t moved from outside that house since it came back from the garage with a new side on it. He walks to work, he walks out his gate and past it every day. We all go past it every day. It’s filthy. It needs a good clean, just from sitting there in the weather. He had a German-sounding name and all, the son,