The First Person: And Other Stories - By Ali Smith Page 0,2

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 HER2 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,