by Ali Smith
It was a prank, surely a prank, a renegade village child out swinging on the rope of that bell to make people who heard it think they were going mad.
Then it’s a summer and Arthur aged ten comes through from the front of the house into the office where Sophia has to be because she hasn’t a choice and has to work from home almost the whole time Arthur’s home for the holidays.
It’s from the mid-1990s, this memory, if Arthur is ten years old in it.
Mum, there’s a woman on the news who looks really familiar, Arthur says.
I’m working, Sophia says.
I really recognize her but I can’t think who she is, Arthur says.
And? Sophia says.
I thought if you see her too you might, he says.
Is this some kind of game to make me come through and watch TV with you? Sophia says.
No, I just want you to look at this one thing, Arthur says. This one person. For one minute. It won’t even take as much as a minute. Some seconds only. Ten at the most. And if you don’t hurry she won’t be on it any more.
Sophia sighs. She writes something down, memorizes where she is on the spreadsheet, leaves the cursor next to the figure she’s got to on the screen and gets up from the computer.
When she comes into the front room Iris is on the TV. She is holding forth. What she’s talking about is sheep dip.
In the drinking water, Iris says. Crop spraying. Relation of pesticides to nerve gas. Relation of nerve gas to Nazis.
Iris looks a lot older. She has put on weight. She has let herself go grey.
She is on the whole weathering rather badly. Depression, anxiety, confusion, she is saying. People placed in mental hospitals, of course, because medical system ignorance leads to misdiagnosis. No recognition of the wide range of symptoms. Difficulty in using language. Hallucination. Headaches. Joint pains.
She is being filmed in a sunny field somewhere, the grass bleached and the trees, full-crowned and dusty with summer, moving in the wind in the distance behind her.
This industry is the offspring, the child if you like, of the Second World War, she is saying.
The camera cuts to the interviewer nodding then back to Iris’s face. Past her face, past the screen, behind the news footage on the TV, here on the edge of Hampstead through the patio doors the early evening is gorgeous too, sunny like it’ll never not be sunny again, and the people next door are having a barbecue in their garden, their children squealing with happiness and jumping in and out of a paddling pool. The programme returns to the news studio. An expert in the studio tells the newsreader that everything that Iris said is laughable and untrue.
We all mine and undermine and landmine ourselves, in our own ways, in our own time, Sophia thinks.
What are you doing watching TV inside on a day like this? she says out loud. Haven’t you anywhere more interesting to be or anything more interesting to do?
Arthur, kneeling in front of the TV, turns round. He looks crushed. Sophia has to work very hard – it is very, very hard – not to be hurt in the heart every time by every single one of her son’s vulnerabilities.
I thought I knew her, he says. Do we know her?
No, Sophia says. That was nobody we know.
She goes back through to the office and puts her finger on the number she’d written down.
She looks at the figures on the screen again.
Yes. Good.
—
Midnight again.
Sophia counted the chimes.
The umpteenth midnight of the night, she told the head. The head didn’t care. The head was the kind of silent they say graves are.
She rolled the head into her hands on the coverlet and picked it up.
It was heavy, the heaviest it had yet felt.
It had no eyes now.
It had no mouth.
Well, but perhaps that was a good thing. Let’s think of it as a good thing.
But there’s face, and there’s faceless. Neither’s always so simply a good thing. For instance, one November evening (what year is it now? sometime in the early 80s, going by her clothes) either Sophia loses her balance, or a nice-enough seeming chap, someone she’s never met before, nudges her in the small of her back so that she falls down half the flight of stairs between the floors in the block in which her flat’s on the second floor.
Some days before this happens, this other thing also happens. A quite different man, a man driving an open-topped car, which is strange because the weather isn’t in any way conducive to taking the roof down on a convertible, draws up beside her as she locks her own car in a car park not far from a retailer to whom she’s paying a visit and this man asks her if she’ll mind getting in beside him for a moment to discuss a pressing matter.
She walks right past him. She doesn’t even give him a second glance.
But the man is suddenly there again driving at a crawl next to her out in the open street. His car has its top closed now in the drizzle but its passenger window is wound right down and the man calls across to Sophia from the driver’s seat that what he wants to discuss with her is important, a matter of life and death, and asks again if she won’t mind just stepping into the car and having a quiet word with him.
She keeps walking as if he’s not there. She looks straight ahead. She turns and walks into the department store she happens to be passing.
She hides behind the door she’s just gone through.
She stands there close to one of the perfume counters and waits in the high mix of scents, watching the door, every so often checking behind her and all round her.
When she gets to the office she calls the police and reports the man and the registration number on his MG.
That was some days ago. Tonight when she gets home to her flat its front door is wide open.
There is no way on earth she left her front door open like that this morning.
A man she doesn’t know is in her house. She can see him through the open door. He is sitting at the table in the dining room. He gives her a smile and a little wave hello as if they’re friends. But they aren’t.
Who the bloody hell are you? she says from the door.
Welcome home. Come in, he says.
How did you? she says.
The man holds both his hands up empty, as if in surrender. He pats the chair next to him.
She stays by the open front door. He gestures to the chair next to him again.
You may as well, he says. I just need a few minutes of your time. Moments, that’s all. Just the time it takes to show you these.
She comes through into the dining room and stands well back from the table. It is covered in photographs and photocopies. They seem to be of people who’re still alive but who’ve been shot or hurt. One man is bleeding all down his legs. Another man has been shot in what was once his face.
Then he shows her a photograph of what looks like a black cave of a room. She sees a hand connected to nothing in the foreground, just lying on the floor like a glove, and then, under a table by itself, a shape that looks like it might be a head.
I’ll be honest. We need your help, he says. We know already what kind of a person you are in the world. We’d like ourselves and others all across the country, all across the world, to benefit from what we know to be your very good sense.
He tells her that a trusted system of monitoring persons of interest is one of the ways of avoiding atrocities like the ones in the photographs.
Persons of what? she says. Monitoring what?
He tells her that monitoring generally helps to keep things clean and neat.
He suggests that he knows she knows there is such a thing as truth, and that the gentle monitoring of those close to us who may or may not be charting anywhere on a fairly wide scale from person of interest to radical activist can sometimes be crucial in disproving their involvement in certain circumstances.
In other words can sometimes quite redeem them too, he says.
Redeem, she says.
>
A very good word, the man says.
You do know I’m no longer a Roman Catholic? she says.
He gives her a disarming smile and nods warmly, as if he approves of everything she’s ever done.
He really does seem like a very nice man indeed.
Whoever you are, she says, I’d like you to leave my house right now.
Flat, he says. The correct term for this place is flat. Apartment, if we were over the pond. It’s nice, though. Cosy.
He shuffles his photographs and papers together and takes a piece of card or paper out of his pocket. He puts it on the table.
For when you need to make contact, he says. Ask for Mr Barth. And think about it. Doesn’t take much. We just need to know simple things. Whens, wheres, whos. Perfectly innocent. Because after all. The answer to life’s mysteries.
Is what? she says.
I’m sorry? he says.
What’s the answer, according to you, to life’s mysteries? she says.
The answer is a question, the man says still sitting uninvited at her table. And the question is. Into whose myth do we choose to buy?
I’ll show you out of the building, now, Mr Barth, she says.
Oh, I’m not Mr Barth, he says.
Is Mr Barth the man in the MG, then? she says.
I’ve absolutely no idea, he says.
Is he something to do with you too? she says.
I simply couldn’t say, he says.
He shrugs back his chair and stands up. She leads the way back out through the open door and on to the staircase down to the first floor. When he pushes her, or when she lurches forward and loses her balance, or both, there are six or seven steps still to fall. As she lands she hurts her arm quite badly.
Oh God, he says. Do be careful.
He picks her up at the bottom of the flight. He holds her very steadily by the sore arm. He looks her in the eyes.
What a nasty fall, he says. I hope you’re all right. What a thing to happen.
And you’re a total bastard, she says. Come near me again and I’ll.
You will, won’t you, he says.
He smiles at her, what she can only call, afterwards in her head, an intelligent smile, one that understands how clever she is herself.
When she comes back upstairs to her flat, not house, she finds the card with the telephone number typed on it tucked under a corner of one of the place mats.
Christ.
She goes back to the closed front door and fixes the chain across it.
She closes the curtains in all four rooms. She pulls down the blind in the kitchenette even though all it looks on to is a brick wall.
Then she sees her own hand in the act of pulling the blind down and she snorts out a laugh.
She lets go, lets the blind flick back up again on its own.
She takes the chain off the front door on the way to the bathroom.
They can come in if they like.
She goes and gets that little card and tucks it behind the carriage clock on the mantelpiece.
She runs a bath.
—
Outside somewhere in the city, or town, or village, wherever she was, a bell was ringing, yes, again, midnight. Where was she now? Could you stop time? Could you stop time playing itself through you? Too late now, because here came Sophia in that bath she just ran more than thirty years ago soaping her sore arm and remembering as she does Iris and herself in their twin beds twenty years before that, a night when Iris was humouring her, helping her work out the harmony, Iris the high line, Soph the low, for the chorus of that song about Grocer Jack who didn’t come back. Then Iris and Soph singing the harmonies they’ve made up themselves for the Elvis song she loves, singing the words in German, if their father’s nowhere near and if it’s likely he’ll overhear singing the translation into English that Sophia made using the dictionaries in the school library:
must I then
must I then
go and leave the little town
leave the little town
and you my dear stay here?
Iris: the kind of person who, if there’s a sheepdog in the room, say, and even though Iris is a stranger in that room, in that house, even if she’s never been in that house before and met that dog, that sheepdog will still come and bow before her with its front legs stretched, then lie at her feet wherever she sits and stay there all night with its nose on its front paws.
Now here’s the day when Sophia, home for the weekend from college, decides she’ll walk from the station instead of take the bus, turns the corner into their street and sees ahead of her a happening of some sort outside her own home, a small crowd of people watching Iris on the pavement, their father standing square at the front gate, the front gate closed, both his hands on its top bar. Their mother is at the front door, half looking from the doorframe. The suitcase on the ground at Iris’s feet is Sophia’s suitcase. The suitcase is open on the pavement. It has some clothes in it, bits and pieces from Iris’s room lying round about it on the ground, like Iris is unpacking herself on to the street.
What’s up? Sophia says.
Usual, Iris says. Can I borrow your case?
She puts the things on the pavement into the suitcase and heaves its two halves together. She clicks its locks, ties its straps, picks it up by its metal handle, swings it to feel the weight of it.
Where’s she going? Sophia says to her father.
Sophia, their father says.
He says it in a way that means: do not involve yourself.
See you Philo, Iris says. I’ll write.
Ever since Iris, who her parents keep saying is still not married, heard a thing on the radio about a gas place somewhere in England she’s been like a one-person protest march about it, writing to the papers, putting up posters in the town square in the middle of the night, the police coming round because they’ve caught her painting over advertising hoardings on the sides of buildings with slogans in red paint, stuff about seals found dead on beaches nowhere near here with their eyes burned out by something, Soph, and weals and burns all over them, imagine, and the weapons being made in factories, again nowhere near here, miles and miles away, and making a scene in the front room every night till their father gets incandescent, about the harm done to the students’ eyes in Paris and the people in Northern Ireland getting it fired at them too, it’s not harmless. It’s poisonous. They call it an incapacitator, they say to the TV and newspaper people or the people who ask questions in parliament that it’s just a smoke. Just a smoke. But it’s related to the stuff they used in the trenches. Was that just a smoke? And on the people in the camps. Was that just a smoke?
None of these things is happening here. They are all happening far away, elsewhere.
But they may as well be, Iris says. What does here mean anyway, I’d like to know. Everywhere’s a here, isn’t it?
Iris: a bloody liability. Trouble. Wasting her life. Warned and warned again. Reputation. Known to the authorities. Police record. Their father crying soundlessly into his supper. Their mother saying her usual downcast nothing, looking down at the nothing in her hands.
I’ll write. I’ll phone you at your college.
Iris walking down the street with the suitcase. All the neighbours watching her. Sophia watching her. Their father and mother watching her.
The neighbours only going back inside their houses when Iris has rounded the corner and gone.
Sophia is in the bath. A man has just pushed her downstairs and pretended not to.
To her knowledge Iris hasn’t been up home since; Iris never saw their mother again; Iris hasn’t seen their father either. Sophia has never known, and probably never will, what the straw was that broke the camel’s back the night Iris left.
Straw. So light. Just a smoke.
Camel, broken back.
Such a violent piece of cliché.
Her arm hurts. There is going to be bruising all down her right side and thigh where she hit the railing and where he
r hip hit the edge of the bottom step; you don’t have to fall very far, to hurt yourself considerably.
She sits on the side of the bath as it empties and towels herself dry with the good thick towels.
These towels are nothing like the thin things they had, that her father still has, still uses, up home.
Treat me right, treat me good,
treat me like you really should
cause I’m not made of wood
and I don’t have a
wooden heart.
—
It was Christmas Day morning.
Thank God.
Thank the living daylight.
Sophia had sat at the edge of the bed, kept her excellent eyes open and dared midnight to catch her out. Oh midnight where’s thy dinga-linga-ling. Midnight hadn’t dared. Up came the light. Good old light. Good new light.
In fact the light had come up today marginally earlier than yesterday. And yesterday’s light had been up a sliver earlier than the day’s before that. There was this different quality to the light even only four days past the shortest day; the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as the waning of light.
Somewhere in this house right now her elder sister Iris was asleep.
Sophia sat at her dressing table and cradled the head in her arms.
The head wasn’t really a head any more. It now had no face. It had no hair. It was as heavy as stone. It was smooth all over. Where its face had been was a surface like polished stone, worked, like marble.
It was hard to tell, now, which way up it ought to be, or which way round – things that had been obvious when the shape it took was a head.
It was now free of obviousness.
It now had a kind of self-symmetry.
She didn’t really know what to call it now, head? stone? It was neither dead nor head. It was too heavy, too solid, to hover in the air any more or do those circus-trick spinning somersaults.
She put it on the table. She looked at it. She nodded.
But she felt for it. She didn’t want it to grow cold.
She picked it up again, tucked it under her clothes on the skin of her abdomen and held it against her.
