She is wearing the same T-shirt today. She can see herself and the masky face of Siouxsie undulating in the posh French water.
She had not known she was this shy.
She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.
She and the roommate she has been allocated, whose name is Dawn and who is pleasant enough to Anna but is definitely one of the party-people, have nothing to say to each other.
She hasn’t said more than eleven words to anyone for twenty-four hours, and they weren’t even all full words.
(G’night.
G’morning.
Hi.
S’this free?
Yeah.
Thanks.
Bye.)
Look at the blue of the sky above her. Look at the dark of the sky in the surface of that lake. Look at the gold of those fixed, lashing horses. This is paradise. This is success. It said so in the papers which reported that she was the most northerly winner of a place on this tour. So she will be good. She will write it on a postcard and send it home to her parents who are so proud of her. It is amazing here. I am so lucky. We eat in hotels every night. I saw the Eiffel Tower, and a really beautiful church. Today is Versailles. It is like paradise also you can hire a boat and go rowing, ho ho, bye for now love Anna xox She will write what she really wants to say on the postcards she sends to her best friend from school, Douglas, and she will send one from every place the tour visits. No, they will be wittier than that, they will be all song lyrics pretending to be conversational. If she puts her mind to it she will be able to think of a lyric line which will translate as: I am the only fucking Scot, the only fucking person from anything like home, on this tour and everybody else is English and they just don’t get it. Dear Douglas. Could this be the plastic age? Just buying some reflections of my own sweet self. Meltdown expected. Anna xox. PS, they don’t want your name, just your number.
No, she will be even wittier, she will choose specifically Eurovision hits. Ding-a dong every hour, when you pick a flower. She will find a picture of the belltower of that big church and send it on that. Douglas will think that’s really funny. Ding-a dong, listen to it. Maybe it’s a bigot. Even when your lover is gone gone gone, sing ding dang dong.
Along from her at the lakeside there is a gangly boy. He’s one of the tour group. Yes, he’s definitely from the group; he’s got the blue folder next to him on the grass. She’s seen him, she remembers now; he’s one of the popular ones. Is he one of the nasty popular ones or one of the less nasty? And has she been humming that tune out loud, the Eurovision one she was just thinking about? She must have been, because that boy has started to whistle it, and he can’t have been thinking of that completely random song, which is years old, and a private joke between her and Douglas, at the exact same moment as she thought of it.
He starts whistling something else. It’s the Abba song about I have a dream. He doesn’t look the Abba type.
He sings the lines about how if you see the wonder of a fairytale you’ll be fine in the future. He has a quite good voice. He’s singing quite loud, loud enough for her to be able to hear him clearly. In fact it’s almost as if he’s singing for her.
Then, next, does he really sing this?
I believe in Engels.
That’s unbelievably witty, if that’s what he’s just sung and she hasn’t misheard. That’s the kind of thing only a really good friend of hers would have known to do to get her attention.
Then the boy speaks, and it is to her.
Come on, he says.
He seems to want her to sing.
She gives him her most withering look.
You’re joking, she says.
I only joke about really serious things, he says. Come on. Something good in everything you see.
Don’t know it, she says.
You do, he says.
I don’t, actually, she says.
You do, actually, he says, because Abba songs, as anyone who knows knows, are constructed, technically and harmonically, so as to physically imprint the human brain as if biting it with acid, to ensure we will never, ever, ever, be able to forget them. In twenty years’ time Abba songs will still be being sung, probably even more than they’re being sung now.
Is that what you wrote your Britain in the year 2000 thing about, then? she says. The Generation Maimed In The Brain By Abba?
Maybe, he says.
No way, she says.
What was yours, then? he says.
I asked first, she says.
Here’s how mine starts, he says. There was once a girl in a dated-looking punk T-shirt—
It is not dated-looking! Anna says.
— sitting by the side of the water at a French historical palace—
Very funny, Anna says.
She was very funny, he says. Or was she? Nobody knew, nobody ever found out, because she was so determined to keep herself to herself. If only she’d joined in with the Abba song Miles was singing by the water at Versailles that day, then everything would have been, as if by magic, all right. Unfortunately, something stubborn, which had taken hold in her constitution at a very early age—
I’m not stubborn, she says.
Unfortunately, something supercilious, which had taken hold in her constitution—, he says.
I’m not that either, she says, whatever it is. There’s just no way I’m going to be caught dead singing Abba.
I’d never sing Abba, he says. I’m not singing Abba, I’m singing revolution. Unfortunately, something conservative, small c and big C, had taken hold in—
I am no way either of those, she says. And your story’s completely pathetic. I’m actually not joining in because I actually don’t know the words of it.
Making them actually up myself actually, he says. Anyway actually it’s you who started with the actual Eurovision pop, not actually me. There was once a girl twenty years in the future who was totally unable to communicate except by rolling her eyes and saying only the word actually. There. Now. You tell me the first line of your story.
You tell me the real first line of yours first, she says.
He has moved to sit closer to her.
What’s your name? he says.
Anna, she says.
Your name is almost Abba, he says.
This makes her nearly laugh out loud.
There was once, and there was only once, he says. Once was all there was.
That’s your beginning? she says. Really?
He looks away.
That’s quite good, she says.
Thanks, he says.
Except, you say there was once and there was only once, and then with that next line you say it again, so you end up saying the word once three times, which means once doesn’t end up meaning once at all, she says.