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

remembered it too. Where was Doug these days? She wondered if his parents were still living there, where they used to live. Then she wondered if his parents were still living.
    Ding-a dong every hour, when you pick a flower. A world before Interim Dispersal Measures and Significant Knowledge Transfer. A time before weapons sales initiatives were called things like Peace. Words, words, words. Freedom. Identity. Security. Democracy. Human Rights. Deny your bin its rights.
    She shook her head, because her head had started to hurt. The word redundant, which she’d heard in the mouth of that preternaturally articulate child, was beating inside her head. It made her think of a tablecloth, a placemat. It was a cheesecloth tablecloth and it had places on it where the food which had been spilled on it hadn’t washed fully out, had stained permanently. The tablemat, between her knife and fork, had a brown surround and an illustration of huntsmen on horseback jumping a hedge. This is where she was, at the dining-room table at dinnertime, and she was a small child and it was the day her mother had come home from her work at the Telephone Exchange and told them all that she was to be “made redundant” by Grace.
    Who was this Grace, who could upend dinnertime, bring her mother to the verge of tears and her father to such paleness? Anna had wanted to know. But Grace wasn’t a person at all. Grace was a system—Group Routing And Changing Equipment—which meant that there would be less need for telephone operators, which was the thing her mother had always been, because people would from now on be able to dial abroad direct and would be put through automatically.
    Anna sat on a wall in Greenwich nearly forty years later in the summer of the year 2009 and looked down at her shoes. They were trainers, and they were scuffed, and Genevieve Lee had looked at them in something like horror when Anna went up her clean stairs in them. Imagine if people decided at birth never ever to throw away any of the shoes they wore over the whole course of a life, and had a special cupboard where they kept all these old shoes they’d walked about the world in. What would there be in such a shoe museum, when you opened its doors? Row upon row, perfectly preserved, the exact shapes we took at certain points in our lives? Or row upon row, rack upon rack, of nothing but old soiled leather, old stale smell?
    There was person after person, sitting in front of Anna, still in Anna’s head. They were from all over the world. They arrived by air, by sea, by lorry, in car boots, on foot. If they tried to enter the country invisibly their heartbeats could be detected (like the thirteen Afghanis and the two Iranians hidden in the lorryload of lightbulbs had been) by the special new detector sheds of which the Agency was very proud, and the brand new probes that could detect whether someone was breathing where he or she shouldn’t be.
    A lot of the people Anna had seen had trouble speaking, either because of translation problems, or because a rain of blows had made them distrust words. Or both. Translation was sometimes itself a little rain of blows. How could what had happened to them be possible in one language, never mind be able to be retold in another?
    In any language, it was almost always about what home was.
    Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, what one man could remember of seeing his mother’s head being used by the border guards as a football. (This man was finally judged not credible.) Anna had written it down in as shorthand a form as possible, about the rooms one woman passed in the corridor, in which she could hear other people also being tortured, on her way to and from being tortured herself for seven months, daily, on different parts of her body by electric shock applied by the use of two small live electric wires which came out of the wall, like electric wires do, behind the chair she was made to sit in each time. For