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

needed sorting, until the moment the ground ahead of me wasn’t there any more. It had disappeared. At my feet the pavement was covered with what looked like blown silk. It was petals. The petals were a beautiful white. I glanced up to see where they’d come from, and saw where they’d come from.
    A woman came out of a house. She told me to get out of her garden. She asked was I on drugs. I explained I wasn’t. She said she’d call the police if I wasn’t gone the next time she looked out of her window and she went back inside the house, slamming her door. I hadn’t even realized I was in someone’s garden, never mind that I’d been there for a long enough time for it to be alarming to anybody. I left her garden; I stood by the gate and looked at the tree from the pavement outside it instead. She called the police anyway; a woman and a man came in a patrol car. They were polite but firm. They talked about trespassing and loitering, took my name and address and gave me a warning and a lift home. They waited to see that I did have a key for our house, that I wasn’t just making it up; they waited in their car until I’d unlocked the door and gone inside and shut it behind me; they sat outside the house not moving, with their engine going, for about ten minutes before I heard them rev up and drive away.
    I had had no idea that staring up at a tree for more than the allotted proper amount of time could be considered wrong. When the police car stopped outside our house and I tried to get out, I couldn’t – I had never been in a police car before and there are no handles on the insides of the doors in the back – you can’t get out unless someone lets you out. I thought at first I wasn’t able to find the handle because of what had happened to my eyes. They were full of white. All I could see was white. The thing with the woman and the police had taken place to me through a gauze of dazed white with everyone and everything like radio-voice ghosts, a drama happening to someone else somewhere at the back of me. Even while I was standing in the hall listening for them to drive away I still couldn’t see anything except through a kind of shifting, folding, blazing white; and after they’d gone, after quite a while of sitting on the carpet feeling the surprising hugeness of the little bumps and shrugs of its material under my hands, I could only just make out, through the white, the blurs which meant the edges of the pictures on our walls, the pile of junk mail on the hall table and the black curl of the flex of the phone on the floor beside me.
    I thought about phoning you. Then I thought about the tree. It was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Its blossom was high summer blossom, not the cold early spring blossom of so many trees and bushes that comes in March and means more snow and cold. This was blue-sky white, heat-haze white, the white of the sheets that you bring in from the line in the garden dry after hardly any time because the air is so warm. It was the white of sun, the white that’s behind all the colours there are, it was open-mouthed white on open-mouthed white, swathes of sweet-smelling outheld white lifting and falling and nodding, saying the one word yes over and over, white spilling over itself. It was a white that longed for bees, that wanted you inside it, dusted, pollen-smudged; it was all the more beautiful for being so brief, so on the point of gone, about to be nudged off by the wind and the coming leaves. It was the white before green, and the green of this tree, I knew, would be even more beautiful than the white; I knew that if I were to see it in leaf I would smell and hear nothing but green. My whole head – never mind just my eyes – all my senses, my whole self from head to foot, would fill and change with the chlorophyll of it. I was changed already. Look at me. I knew, as I sat there blinking absurdly in the hall, trying to