It depends, Anna said. Who said that to you? Like a teacher, for a project or something?
No, I mean, the child said. Because, obviously, it is a different meaning from me actually being history, when I am not even famous and I am only nine years old and will not be ten till next April, and have therefore not yet had much time to do anything to make me historic. I know that it doesn’t mean that I am like President Obama. I know it means something not good. But it would be good if I knew what it was called, because then I could say, the next time he says it to me, if he says it again, you can just stop using that pun at me right now.
Anna nodded.
I see, she said. I don’t think it’s a pun. A pun is more like — say you were at a musical at a theatre and it wasn’t a very exciting musical, and you were a bit bored. Instead of saying there’s no business like show business, you might say there’s no business like slow business.
The child’s face filled with delight.
I am going to go to a musical 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 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.