There but for The by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

again, probably soon, she said. Show slow. Brooke Broke. I bet you are broke because you are redundant because of the recession, or are you a student or a postgraduate?
    No, I had a job, but I gave it up, Anna said, because the job I had was rubbish.
    Like community service like picking rubbish up on the heath? the child said.
    No, Anna said. In my job I had to make people not matter so much. That was what my job really was, though ostensibly I was there to make people matter.
    Ostensibly, the child said.
    You know what that means? Anna said.
    Yes, but I can’t think what exactly at this exact moment in time, the child said.
    It means, uh, well, I don’t know how to explain what it means, Anna said. It means what things look like on the outside. Ostensibly my job meant one thing, but really it meant another.
    Like lying, the child said. Or like punning?
    Well, you tell me, Anna said. This is what my job was. First, I had to get people to talk to me about stuff that had happened to them, which was usually pretty horrible. That’s why they were having to tell me it in the first place, so that I could help them. Then, because there was pressure on me, I had to put pressure on them, to fit these true stories, their whole life stories in some cases, on to just two-thirds of one side of, do you know what A4 is?
    A4, like paper? the child said. Or a road that is smaller than a motorway?
    Paper, Anna said. So. Because I didn’t like this job, I told the people I worked for that I was going to leave. But they told me how good I was at the job, then they gave me a promotion which meant I made a lot more money. But my new job was to make people redundant, the ones who were doing my old job and weren’t good enough at getting people’s life stories to be less long. So, in the end, I left.
    Your job was immortal, the child said.
    I think you mean immoral, Anna said. But you might mean immortal.
    It’s a pun! the child said.
    Such good pun we’re having, Anna said.
    The child squealed with laughter.
    I’ve got one, I’ve got one, the child said. In a minute we will be going through—the punnel.
    Ha ha. Only if you get back with a parent or a note that says we can, Anna said. Go on. I’ll wait here.
    Will you? the child said.
    Yes, Anna said.
    And therefore definitely be here when I get back? the child said.
    Therefore, yes, Anna said. Careful crossing the road.
    Okay. See you, the child said.
    The history child. She skipped off across the road, down the street opposite and round the corner. Anna watched her disappear. Then she wondered to herself. Did that child really just skip across that road? Did I imagine it? Have I just made up an idyll of childhood to make myself feel better, because that’s the kind of thing a child would do in an imagined idyll, skip rather than run?
    She thought of all the children, literally thousands of them, the same age as that child, crossing the world by themselves right now.
    She told herself, let it go.
    She told herself she was no longer responsible.
    She leaned back in the sunlight. She looked up. The summer sky was blue and full of swifts, lucky birds, world-travellers born with the knowledge hardwired into their nervous systems, by nature, of the routes they were about to fly over terrain they’d not yet even seen. The trees in the distance were lifting and waving their leaves, making the light and the dark of summer. These restless, thrashing new summers, the windy summers, the global-warming summers, were grey and sticky and flyblown, not like the summers she remembered from childhood, summers sweet and complete and enclosed, each held like a story already told, like a set of Chinese boxes holding all its predecessors all the way back to the first ever box, the first ever perfect summer, there inside it.
    Ding-a dong, listen to it. Maybe it’s a bigot. Imagine remembering that after all these years. She should get in touch with Doug, send a Christmas card this year, ask him if he