First Person and Other Stories (2 page)

I heard the phone being hung up. Message received at three forty-three, my answerphone’s robot voice said. I called her back and went through the exact echo of the morning’s call to the system. She answered and before I could even say hello she said:

Listen! Listen! A short story is like a nymphomaniac because both like to sleep around
– or get into lots of anthologies – but neither accepts money for the pleasure.

I laughed out loud.

Unlike the bawdy old whore, the novel, ha ha, she said. And when I was speaking to my father at lunchtime he told me you can fish for trout with a nymph. They’re a kind of fishing fly. He says there are people who carry magnifying glasses around with them all the time in case they get the chance to look at real nymphs, so as to be able to copy them even more exactly in the fishing flies they make.

I tell you, I said, the world is full of astounding things.

I know, she said. What do you reckon to the anthology joke?

Six out of ten, I said.

Rubbish then, she said. Okay. I’ll try and think of something better.

Maybe there’s mileage in the nymphs-at-your-flies thing, I said.

Ha ha, she said. But I’ll have to leave the nymph thing this afternoon and get back on the Herceptin trail.

God, I said.

I’m exhausted, she said. We’re drafting letters.

When is an anti-cancer drug not an anti-cancer drug? I said.

When people can’t afford it, she said. Ha ha.

Lots of love, I said.

You too, she said. Cup of tea?

I’ll make us one, I said. Speak soon.

I heard the phone go dead. I put my phone down and went through and switched the kettle on. I watched it reach the boil and the steam come out of the spout. I filled two cups with boiling water and dropped the teabags in. I drank my tea watching the steam rise off the other cup.

This is what Kasia meant by ‘Herceptin trail’.

Herceptin is a drug that’s been being used in breast cancer treatment for a while now. Doctors had, at the point in time that Kasia and I were having the conversations in this story, very recently discovered that it really helps some women – those who over-produce the HER
2
protein – in the early stages of the disease. When given to a receptive case it can cut the risk of the cancer returning by fifty per cent. Doctors all over the world were excited about it because it amounted to a paradigm shift in breast cancer treatment.

I had never heard of any of this till Kasia told me, and she had never heard of any of it until a small truth, less than two centimetres in size, which a doctor found in April that year in one of her breasts, had meant a paradigm shift in
everyday life. It was now August. In May her doctor had told her about how good Herceptin is, and how she’d definitely be able to have it at the end of her chemotherapy on the NHS. Then at the end of July her doctor was visited by a member of the PCT, which stands for the words Primary, Care and Trust, and is concerned with NHS funding. The PCT member instructed my friend’s doctor not to tell any more of the women affected in the hospital’s catchment area about the wonders of Herceptin until a group called NICE had approved its cost-effectiveness. At the time, they thought this might take about nine months or maybe a year (by which time it would be too late for my friend and many other women). Though Kasia knew that if she wanted to buy Herceptin on BUPA, right then, for roughly twenty seven thousand pounds, she could. This kind of thing will be happening to an urgently needed drug right now, somewhere near you.

‘Primary’. ‘Care’. ‘Trust’. ‘Nice’.

Here’s a short story that most people already think they know about a nymph. (It also happens to be one of the earliest manifestations in literature of what we now call anorexia.)

Echo was an Oread, which is a kind of mountain nymph. She was well-known among the nymphs and shepherds not just for her glorious
garrulousness but for her ability to save her nymph friends from the wrath of the goddess Juno. For instance, her friends would be lying about on the hillside in the sun and Juno would come round the corner, about to catch them slacking, and Echo, who had a talent for knowing when Juno was about to turn up, would leap to her feet and head the goddess off by running up to her and distracting her with stories and talk, talk and stories, until all the slacker nymphs were up and working like they’d never been slacking at all.

When Juno discovered what Echo was doing she was a bit annoyed. She pointed at her with her curse-finger and threw off the first suitable curse that came into her head.

From now on, she said, you will be able only to repeat out loud the words you’ve heard others say just a moment before. Won’t you?

Won’t you, Echo said.

Her eyes grew large. Her mouth fell open.

That’s you sorted, Juno said.

You sordid, Echo said.

Right. I’m off back to the hunt, Juno said.

The cunt, Echo said.

Actually, I’m making up that small rebellion. There is actually no rebelliousness for Echo in Ovid’s original version of the story. It seems that after she’s robbed of being able to talk on her
own terms, and of being able to watch her friends’ backs for them, there’s nothing left for her – in terms of story – but to fall in love with a boy so in love with himself that he spends all his days bent over a pool of his own desire and eventually pines to near-death (then transforms, instead of dying, from a boy into a little white flower).

Echo pined too. Her weight dropped off her. She became fashionably skinny, then she became nothing but bones, then all that was left of her was a whiny, piny voice which floated bodilessly about, saying over and over exactly the same things that everybody else was saying.

Here, by contrast, is the story of the moment I met my friend Kasia, more than twenty years ago.

I was a postgraduate student at Cambridge and I had lost my voice. I don’t mean I’d lost it because I had a cold or a throat infection, I mean that two years of a system of hierarchies so entrenched that girls and women were still a bit of a novelty had somehow knocked what voice I had out of me.

So I was sitting at the back of a room not even really listening properly anymore, and I heard a voice. It was from somewhere up ahead of me. It was a girl’s voice and it was directly asking the person giving the seminar and the chair of the
seminar a question about the American writer Carson McCullers.

Because it seems to me that McCullers is obviously very relevant at all levels in this discussion, the voice said.

The person and the chair of the meeting both looked a bit shocked that anyone had said anything out loud. The chair cleared his throat.

I found myself leaning forward. I hadn’t heard anyone speak like this, with such an open and carefree display of knowledge and forthrightness, for a couple of years. More: earlier that day I had been talking with an undergraduate student who had been unable to find anyone in the whole of Cambridge University English Department to supervize her dissertation on McCullers. It seemed nobody eligible to teach had read her.

Anyway, I venture to say you’ll find McCullers not at all of the same stature, the person giving the paper on Literature After Henry James said.

Well, the thing is, I disagree, the voice said.

I laughed out loud. It was a noise never heard in such a room; heads turned to see who was making such an unlikely noise. The new girl carried on politely asking questions which no one answered. She mentioned, I remember, how McCullers had been fond of a maxim: nothing human is alien to me.

At the end of the seminar I ran after that girl. I stopped her in the street. It was winter. She was wearing a red coat.

She told me her name. I heard myself tell her mine.

Franz Kafka says that the short story is a cage in search of a bird. (Kafka’s been dead for eighty-four years, but I can still say Kafka says. That’s just one of the ways art deals with our mortality.)

Tzvetan Todorov says that the thing about a short story is that it’s so short it doesn’t allow us the time to forget that it’s only literature and not actually life.

Nadine Gordimer says short stories are absolutely about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.

Elizabeth Bowen says the short story has the advantage over the novel of a special kind of concentration, and that it creates narrative every time absolutely on its own terms.

Eudora Welty says that short stories often problematize their own best interests and that this is what makes them interesting.

Henry James says that the short story, being so condensed, can give a particularized perspective on both complexity and continuity.

Jorge Luis Borges says that short stories can be
the perfect form for novelists too lazy to write anything longer than fifteen pages.

Ernest Hemingway says that short stories are made by their own change and movement, and that even when a story seems static and you can’t make out any movement in it at all it is probably changing and moving regardless, just unseen by you.

William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people’s lives.

Walter Benjamin says that short stories are stronger than the real, lived moment, because they can go on releasing the real, lived moment after the real, lived moment is dead.

Cynthia Ozick says that the difference between a short story and a novel is that the novel is a book whose journey, if it’s a good working novel, actually alters a reader, whereas a short story is more like the talismanic gift given to the protagonist of a fairy tale – something complete, powerful, whose power may not yet be understood, which can be held in the hands or tucked into the pocket and taken through the forest on the dark journey.

Grace Paley says that she chose to write only
short stories in her life because art is too long and life is too short, and that short stories are, by nature, about life, and that life itself is always found in dialogue and argument.

Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two short stories.

There were two men in the café at the table next to mine. One was younger, one was older. We sat in the same café for only a brief amount of time but we disagreed long enough for me to know there was a story in it.

This story was written in discussion with my friend Kasia, and in celebration of her (and all) tireless articulacy – one of the reasons, in this instance, that a lot more people were able to have that particular drug when they needed it.

So when is the short story like a nymph?

When the echo of it answers back.

I went to Waitrose as usual in my lunchbreak to get the weekly stuff. I left my trolley by the vegetables and went to find bouquet garni for the soup. But when I came back to the vegetables again I couldn’t find my trolley. It seemed to have been moved. In its place was someone else’s shopping trolley, with a child sitting in the little child seat, its fat little legs through the leg-places.

Then I glanced into the trolley in which the child was sitting and saw in there the few things I’d already picked up: the three bags of oranges, the apricots, the organic apples, the folded copy of the
Guardian
and the tub of Kalamata olives. They were definitely my things. It was definitely my trolley.

The child in it was blond and curly-haired, very
fair-skinned and flushed, big-cheeked like a Cupid or a chub-fingered angel on a Christmas card or a child out of an old-fashioned English children’s book, the kind of book where they wear sunhats to stop themselves getting sunstroke all the postwar summer. This child was wearing a little blue tracksuit with a hood and blue shoes and was quite clean, though a little crusty round the nose. Its lips were very pink and perfectly bow-shaped; its eyes were blue and clear and blank. It was an almost embarrassingly beautiful child.

Hello, I said. Where’s your mother?

The child looked at me blankly.

I stood next to the potatoes and waited for a while. There were people shopping all around me. One of them had clearly placed this child in my trolley and when he or she came to push the trolley away I could explain these were my things and we could swap trolleys or whatever and laugh about it and I could get on with my shopping as usual.

I stood for five minutes or so. After five minutes I wheeled the child in the trolley to the Customer Services desk.

I think someone somewhere may be looking for this, I said to the woman behind the desk, who was busy on a computer.

Looking for what, Madam? she said.

I presume you’ve had someone losing their mind over losing him, I said. I think it’s a him. Blue for a boy, etc.

The Customer Services woman was called Marilyn Monroe. It said so on her name-badge.

Quite a name, I said pointing to the badge.

I’m sorry? she said.

Your name, I said. You know. Monroe. Marilyn.

Yes, she said. That’s my name.

She looked at me like I was saying something dangerously foreign-sounding to her.

How exactly can I help you? she said in a singsong voice.

Well, as I say, this child, I said.

What a lovely boy! she said. He’s very like his mum.

Well, I wouldn’t know, I said. He’s not mine.

Oh, she said. She looked offended. But he’s so like you. Aren’t you? Aren’t you, darling? Aren’t you, sweetheart?

She waved the curly red wire attached to her keyring at the child, who watched it swing inches away from his face, nonplussed. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. The child looked nothing like me at all.

No, I said. I went round the corner to get something and when I got back to my trolley he was there, in it.

Oh, she said. She looked very surprised. We’ve had no reports of a missing child, she said.