There but for The Read Online Free PDF

No. That’s pathetic, and regardless of pathos and regardless of dreams, all the passports are in the safe-keeping of Barbara, the Bank’s Accountant, one of the five accompanying staff members (ten future-writers per staff member, presumably). Anna tries to imagine her passport, rubberbanded to a wedge of the other forty-nine passports, probably alphabetically, somewhere safe, maybe in a safe, the hotel safe. Or does Barbara the Accountant carry them everywhere with her in that briefcase? Anna in her passport photo—taken in the photobooth at the post office at home, at the beginning of June, and never did a photobooth seem so blessed, so lucky, even its little curtain enviable, just in being back there in that place called home—is wearing a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt; she is dark-eyed, she looks stern, disaffected, miserable and you better not dare ask why, and this is the self that has to last her in the world until she is the ancient age of twenty-seven, when she will be a totally different person, when everything will be different, life will be easy, will make sense, will all have fallen into place.
    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