The First Person And Other Stories Part 5

But Crown is high on drink and dust. When he loses at dice he starts a fight. He kills someone with a cotton hook. Get out of here, Bess tells him, the police will be here any minute. At the mention of the police, everybody on the street disappears except the dead man, the dead man's mourning wife, and Bess, who finds all the doors of all the houses shut against her.

Then, unexpectedly, one door opens. It's the door of Porgy, the cripple. She's about to go in, but at the last moment she doesn't. She turns and looks at the side of the stage instead. Everything on stage stops, holds its breath.

The orchestra stops.

A white girl has entered from the wings. She is standing, lost-looking, over by the edge of the set.

Bess stares at her. Porgy, still at his door, stares at her. Serena, the dead man's wife, stares at her. The dead man, Robbins, opens his eyes and puts his head up and stares at her.

The doors of the other houses on the set open; the windows open. All the other residents of Catfish Row look out. They come out of the houses. They're sweating, from the heat under the stage-lights, under the hot summer night. They stand at a distance, their sweat glistening, their eyes on the white girl with the iron in her hand.

The girl starts to sing.

A brother has come to seek her brothers, she sings. To help them if she can with all her heart.

Everybody on stage looks to Porgy, the cripple. He looks to Bess, who shrugs, then nods.

Porgy nods too. He opens his door wider.

The history of history

My mother was sitting on the top stair with her arm round the neck of the dog, whose front paws were up on her knees. She was reading a Georgette Heyer book. There was no tea on. There was no sign of anything to do with tea in the kitchen. My father would be home in an hour.

I stood at the foot of the stairs for a while. The dog looked down at me, wagged her tail. My mother turned a page and yawned. I slung my schoolbag strap round the k.n.o.b of the banister, opened the bag, took my books and pencil case out and went through to the living room. I had homework for tomorrow. Write a newspaper report of the death of Mary Queen of Scots. Translate pages 31 33 of La Symphonie Pastoral by Andre Gide. Write a newspaper report of the death of Mary Queen of Scots. Translate pages 31 33 of La Symphonie Pastoral by Andre Gide. I hated La Symphonie Pastorale. I hated La Symphonie Pastorale.

It was a load of sentimental rubbish about a blind girl. I called my father at his work from the living room phone. I lifted the receiver carefully so the hall phone wouldn't make the little ting that would give away that someone was on the other phone.

You'll need to bring chips, I said.

I can hear you, my mother called down the stairs. If you're telling him to bring chips, tell him I want a haddock.

She wants a haddock, I said.

Couldn't you put something in the oven? my father said. We've had chips three times this week.

Actually I can't put something in the oven because there's nothing in the house, I said over by the door, loud enough for her to hear me.

There's people in the house, not nothing, my mother called down. And there's a dog. That's not nothing, people and a dog.

I can't hear you, I said to my father. She's shouting stuff.

I hung up and went back to the table and wrote up what we'd taken notes on in double history.

A hush came over the crowd as the doomed queen was led to the place of execution. She was dressed in black satin and velvet and she undressed, saying, 'I have never put off my clothes before in front of such a company.' Underneath her clothes she was wearing red underclothes, and her handmaidens then put long red sleeves on her arms and pinned them to her underclothes. She smiled and prayed and said goodbye to those who had served her all her life. There was much crying in the room. Her handmaidens fastened a white cloth across her eyes and she stumbled forward to lay her head on the block. In fact she also put her hands on the block, but luckily someone noticed at the last minute or these would also have been cut off as well as her head. Then the executioner tried to cut her head off, but the first time he missed and only cut her head a bit open. The execution was properly executed the second time and when the executioner held her head up it fell out of his hands and all that was left in his hands was a wig, and the beautiful queen was revealed to everybody as an old lady with very short grey hair. Legend has it that her lips were still moving many minutes after her head was cut off and that her little dog, which was of the breed of Skye Terrier, hid in among her skirts and then curled itself round the place between her shoulders where her head had been, and then it later died as well, of sorrow.

It was only a first draft. The idea was that we were meant to make it as much like a real newspaper report as possible. I went through it again and decided what was important and what wasn't, if it was for a newspaper, and gave it suitable headings and columns.

VERY FAs.h.i.+ONABLE

The doomed queen was led to the place of execution. A hush came over the crowd when it saw her. She was dressed very fas.h.i.+onably in black satin and velvet. Many ladies nodded at her fas.h.i.+on taste.

EMBARRa.s.sING The crowd held its breath while she took off nearly all her clothes. All the people there could nearly see what she would look like with no clothes on. It was embarras-sing. She was wearing bright red underwear. Goodbye! she said to everyone. She smiled a queenly smile. The crowd burst into tears. She was the People's Queen. Her hand-maidens fixed a white cloth on her eyes.

WEARING A WIG When she came forward to the block, she stumbled. The crowd all went oooh! aaah! After two swipes of the axe, she was unfortunately dead. The executioner picked up her head. That's when it was revealed to everyone that she had grey hair and wore a wig and was not at all as beautiful as people had thought, but much older in actuality.

n.o.bLE BREED Legend has it that she spoke for a long time after being dead, though n.o.body has reported what it was she actually said. We at the DAILY NEWS believe she probably said 'I am dead. Do not grieve for me. Please make sure my dog is fed properly after my demise.'

Her dog, a Skye Terrier, which is a n.o.ble breed, would not leave her side even when she was dead. Then it would not leave the place where her head once was. Then it died too. And that was the sad end of the n.o.ble breed herself, the Scottish queen of Scots, and also of her dog.

I heard something clattering on the stairs.

Christ almighty I hate these f.u.c.king books, my mother was shouting. They're full of s.h.i.+t. I'm never going to read a single one of these again in my life.

She must have thrown the book down the stairs. That must have been what had made the clattering noise. Either that or she'd thrown the dog.

I had never heard her use language like that before.

I very much disapproved.

My mother's gone mad, I told my friend Sandra the next day at school.

Mine too, Sandra said. All she does is make things and put them in Tupperware boxes in the freezer. It's because the people next door got a freezer and then my dad got us one, a really huge one in the garage and it's like she can't bear to think of it having any s.p.a.ce left in it so she's busy freezing things.

No, I mean really mad, I said, not just normal mad. She won't cook anything. She says I'm to call her by her real name.

What's she mean, real name? Sandra said.

Margaret, I said. She keeps saying that's the name she was born with. She won't answer to anything other than that anymore. I mean, I can't call her, like, Margaret. I can't say, I'll be back at ten, Margaret, I'm going out with Roddy. I can't say, I'm home, Margaret, when I get home after school. It sounds stupid.

Yeah, Sandra said. Right.

She laughed a laugh that wasn't really a laugh, like I'd told her a joke she didn't understand.

It started last month, I said. She began to say things like, I'm a person, and all that kind of thing. Then she was just, like, watching TV a couple of weeks ago, that programme The Good Life, it was something about the posh one singing in a choir. And she stood up and said, I am no longer your wife, to my dad, and I am no longer your mother, to me. Then she went out in the car and we didn't know where she'd gone, and when she came back it was two in the morning and we thought it would be okay, but the next day she was still saying the stuff.

Oh, Sandra said.

Sandra was my best friend, but she was walking a little further away from me. She was listening but she was looking not at me but at the ground, as though something baffling was walking two feet ahead of her.

Worst f.u.c.king thing is, she's started swearing now, I said.

But it was as if I'd told my best friend I was gay, or something astonis.h.i.+ng like that, and made her feel embarra.s.sed because of me. Oh yeah, by the way, she said. I can't walk home at four o'clock today. I've got to go to town with my mum.

If it was me, imagine, I'd be having to go to town with someone called Margaret, I said. I'd be saying, I can't walk home with you because I've got to go to town with Margaret. And you'd be like, who's Margaret?

Yeah, she said. Ha ha.

What's your mum's real name anyway? I said.

Eh, it's Shona, she said. Bye.

Imagine that, I called after her. Imagine you're going into town with Shona, not your mother at all.

She went round the corner out of earshot without looking back. We went our separate ways to our separate cla.s.ses; I'd taken languages and history, she'd taken geography and science.

When I got home my mother had cut down the hedge at the end of the garden, which meant there was nothing between our garden and the train-line. There was no fence at the end of the garden at all any more. There was no sign of the dog.

Look, my mother said. Now we can see so much further.

Now the people on the platform can see right into our house, I said. The train people won't be pleased with you doing that.

She sat down on the gra.s.s among the strands of hedge.

You used to be so much more of an independent thinker, she said to me.

I'm running out of clean clothes, I said. I've almost nothing left to wear that doesn't need to be washed. I don't know how to work the machine. Neither does Dad.

You'll manage, she said.

She sighed. She looked up. She said, Look at that!

I looked, but it was only a blackbird in a tree. I sighed too.

What's for tea? I said.

You're like me, she said. You're tenacious.

I'm nothing like you, I said.

I turned and went back towards the house to phone my father.

You'll be all right, she called after me.

No I won't, I shouted back over my own shoulder.

No exit

I'm in bed. It's three a.m. I'm wide awake. I turn on to my side. I turn on to my back again. Earlier tonight I was at the cinema watching a film and I saw the woman who'd been sitting a couple of seats along from me get up midway through it and go down the stairs in the dark. She pushed the bar down on the fire exit door, the one over on the left hand side of the big screen. The door swung shut behind her, and I knew, because I know a little about the building, that she'd gone out through the illegal fire exit, the one that actually leads nowhere. Behind that door is nothing but a flight of stairs downwards and two locked doors.

I looked around me at all the other people watching the film. It was a new British film about the relations.h.i.+p between the East and the West.

Right then on the screen a man with a moustache was threatening a spiky-haired man with a kitchen knife.

I looked down at the fire exit doors again. The sign above was lit up, with the word EXIT on it and the small green shape of a running man. But the doors were shut, and it was as if n.o.body had ever gone through them.

I wondered if anyone else sitting here with me knew there was no way out of there, and no way back through after the doors had sealed shut on you. I wondered whether it was only me in the whole audience who knew. I told myself that if she wasn't back in her seat at the end of the film, I'd tell whoever it was she'd come to the cinema with that I'd seen where she went. We would go down the stairs and open the door and she'd probably be standing there patiently on the other side of it waiting for someone to let her back into the auditorium.

I couldn't concentrate on the film.

Maybe the woman had thought it was the way to the toilet. Or, more hopefully, maybe she worked at the cinema. Probably she'd gone in there on purpose. Probably she had a key to one of the locked doors in there.

The film ended with nothing in its plot resolved. The lights came up. The cinema emptied. I went, too, with everybody else, and as I did I saw that a sweater was still on the seat she'd been sitting in and a bag was still there tucked under it. But I went up the stairs to the proper exit. I walked straight past the ushers without telling them. They'd probably work it out for themselves when they found the bag and the sweater. They'd know to go down to the exit door and check.

But here I am now, awake in the middle of the night and asking myself whether she's still in there, on the other side of that door.

I know a story about that fire exit down there, you'd told me once in the cinema.

It was back before we knew each other very well, one of the first times we went to that cinema. The film we'd come to see had ended. The credits were rolling, huge above our heads. We stood up. You stretched and pointed and as you yawned I saw the clean wet insides of your mouth, and your tongue unfurling.

It's really illegal, you said through the yawn. It shouldn't be allowed. I don't know how they got away with it with the fire regulations people.