Like by Ali Smith

Author:Ali Smith [Smith, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349007977
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-08-17T21:00:00+00:00

My father still asks after Patricia Shone even now, he asked on Sunday when I got home, remember that English lady, the mother of your friend, she was a right nice woman, do you ever see her? The one with the doctor husband. Not the kind of woman who’ll fall for your average kitchen units, he said, impressed, after they’d gone back next door. You can go driving with them, he told me, though I’d already made up my mind that I was going regardless, if only out of a sense of confusion; no girl who’d ever been to my house had failed to be charmed by my brothers so singularly as this one had. And if you’re short of a summer job afterwards, he called from his chair in front of the tv, you can always come and work for me in the shop. I stood by the door, astounded. I thought our house must have been touched by some sort of magic, and instead of going upstairs I hung about by the door, then sat down and watched tv with him, something with the Marx brothers, Groucho wearing a mortar board and dancing on a table, Harpo in somebody’s study shovelling books on to a fire and warming his hands.

That first summer, then. Amy and I in the back of the car, her mother and father in the front. The backs of her parents’ heads and their so English voices as they held forth and argued about luxurious things like what they thought about books and what they’d read about them in the Sunday papers; it sounded like they would never dream of reading a book they hadn’t read about in the Sunday papers first. Driving on the tourist route roads where the roadside weeds and the cow parsley spilled out on to the tarmac, roads winding round and up and round and down, single-track with passing places, mountains above us and all round us in the distance, forests looming close then the road suddenly splitting away from them again and the sky taking over. Gnarled white birches in the rocky fields on either side of us. Me taking secret glances at Amy, sitting neat and composed, her hands in her lap, her hair long and coiled and her face empty, so much a girl that it made me nervous, like I shouldn’t be there, like I was a mistake. Rain streaking the window by my head with long horizontal slashes, the sound of the windscreen wipers working against the classical music in the cassette recorder, the rustle of their cagoules, the smell of peppermint. Her mother sucking carsick tablets and peppermints, pressing them on me (no, do take one), talking like she did, smiling all the time, saying anything into the air, turning to me once and leaning over her seat like a child and saying, what do you think Aisling, of my theory that my dear daughter Amy, dear to my heart, my only child, was

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