The Whole Story and Other Stories by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

so I can see down the other road. I go back to the house. Light is blazing out of the open front door. I go straight through to the phone in the kitchen and try your mobile. While I’m listening to the voice telling me to leave you a message I remember: you told me your mobile isn’t working.
    Eight. You are lost. You’ve got lost somewhere. You don’t know where you are.
    I stand in the kitchen next to the fridge and pray, which is something I haven’t done for years. It’s so long since I’ve done it that I can’t really remember how to. I am polite and desperate.
    You are somewhere I can’t reach or hear you and you are in pain.
    I bargain. I promise to become a Catholic again if you will be returned safe.
    You are somewhere you don’t want me to know about, with someone you don’t want me to know about.
    Nine. I sit on the couch. I look at my fingernails. Then I look at my thumbnails, first one and then the other. I wonder what would happen if I didn’t have a nail on my thumb, or on this first finger, or this little finger. I know it is supposed to be excruciatingly painful, used as a method of torture. We have fingernails, as I probably know from watching something on television once, left over from Neanderthal and animal claws; they protect the nerves in our fingers and are made of protein, keratin. They grow quite fast, quite a lot per week. They even grow for a while after death, and the hair. It keeps growing regardless. Everybody knows this.
    I think about how at one point a couple of years ago you tried to stop biting your nails so short by only letting yourself bite one nail a day, the thumb on Monday, the first finger on Tuesday, the next on Wednesday. I try to remember whether you are still doing this or whether these days you just bite any old nail, or whether you don’t bite them at all any more. I can’t remember. I don’t know how long or short your nails are.
    Ten.
    You were saying my name again down the supermarket phone. Hello? you said. Love? Are you still there?
    Yes, I said.
    What was it you did tonight? you said.
    Oh, the usual, I said. Listen. Do you want me to come and pick you up in the car? It’d only take half an hour.
    No, you said. I really want to walk. It’ll be light soon, too.
    It would; it was April. After we hung up, I would phone the bank, lock all the doors, clean my teeth and go to bed, set the alarm for four hours away, lie on my back on my side of the bed and try to sleep through what time there was left with your pillow over my eyes to keep the light out.
    I’ll go and phone the bank for you, I said.
    Don’t go yet, though, you said.
    I looked at the clock.
    Five more minutes? you said.
    Okay, I said.

may
    I tell you. I fell in love with a tree. I couldn’t not. It was in blossom.
    It was a day like all the other days and I was on my way to work, walking the same way as usual between our house and the town. I wasn’t even very far from home, just round the corner. I was looking at the pavement and wondering as I walked whether the local council paid someone money to go walking around looking at the ground all day for places where people might trip. What would a job like that be advertised as in the paper, under what title? Inspector of Pavements and Roads. Kerb Auditor. Local Walkways Erosion Consultant. I wondered what qualifications you would need to be one. On a TV quiz show the host would say, or at a party a smiling stranger would ask, and what do you do? and whoever it was would reply, actually I’m an Asphalt Observance Manager, it’s very good money, takes a great deal of expertise, a job for life with excellent career prospects.
    Or maybe the council didn’t do this job any more. Probably there was a privatized company who sent people out to check on the roads and then report back the findings to a relevant council committee. That was more likely. I walked along like that, I remember, noting to myself in my head all the places I would report which