by Ali Smith
Bring food if convenient, he’d texted back, because Lux told him to.
And thank her, Lux said.
How annoying. But he did, because it was a good idea to: thank u ire.
Wanker.
Well, he knows it wasn’t meant rudely, not really.
He wonders if she’s got piercings in the places not so readily visible, beneath her clothes.
What kind of work do you actually do at your work? she’d said to him on the train yesterday. What’s your day like?
I sit at the table in front of my screen, he said.
He explained how he’d spend a certain portion of the day net-surfing. He told her about how he used to do this anyway, before someone offered to pay him to do it, and that one day he’d clicked by chance on some films of close-ups of the stuff in the gaps between cobblestones by an artist in Portugal, which used, as soundtrack, music whose copyright belonged to SA4A.
So you were just watching films and then you thought, I wonder who owns the copyright for this music, Lux said.
Yep, Art said. And I looked it up, it was copyright SA4A, so I wrote to alert them and got offered a job. Simple as that.
Why did you do that? Lux said.
Do what? Art said.
Why did you look it up to see who owned the copyright? Lux said.
I just did, Art said. I had a hunch.
He told her the visual artist had made no mention of permissions in his credits. So he’d checked then emailed SA4A.
Why? Lux had asked.
Art shrugged. Because I could, he said.
Because you could, Lux said.
And the films, Art said. Something about them annoyed me.
What annoyed you? Lux had said.
I don’t know, Art said. It wasn’t so much the films as the fact that, well, there they were. On the net. Holding forth. Like they mattered.
You were envious of the artist’s creativity, Lux said.
No, no, he said. Of course not.
He said it rather loftily.
It was nothing to do with envy. In any case, almost nobody had even watched the films. They’d had like forty nine views. It was uh much more that laws, like copyright laws, are in place for good reason.
I get it, Lux said. You’re like the security men who wander about in the places in London that look like they’re public places but are really privately owned and don’t belong to the public at all.
And in any case, he said. It wasn’t nature, in his films. He was calling them nature films. But there was no nature in them.
Ah, Lux said.
They were just films of, like, grit, and litter, Art said.
I see, Lux said. What he did went against your nature.
Art was tiring of talking about it. He explained in as shorthand a way as possible that SA4A had had the Portuguese man’s so-called nature films removed from the net, had sued the artist for quite a lot of money and then, to his own surprise, a SA4A bot had amazingly been instructed by the SA4A team to email Art back personally with a job offer and what turned out to be a fairly lucrative contract.
I get bonuses when I find anything useful for them, he said. It’s not commission work. I mean, commission work’d be impossible to live on, obviously.
Obviously, she said.
The nature of the job, he said, is very needle-haystack. I mean, the whole wide world on the web is full of rights transgressions. But you have to track them down. It’s not like they’re there on a plate. You have to keep looking, keep your eyes peeled. In any case it’s not my be-all and end-all, the job, it’s just what I do to pay the mortgage. The real job I do, the thing that matters to me most, is write about nature –
About the nature of your job? she said.
– no, nature. Nature itself. The wilds, and weather, things like the, yeah, what’s happening to the environment, the planet, I’m really quite political in that writing, at least I’m getting more so, I mean I will be when I get back to it. I’m actually taking a well-earned break from it at the moment.
Lux had nodded and asked did the planet in any form, or the weather, the environment, ever read him online and threaten to sue him for writing about it or using bits of it in his work?
First he laughed. Then he realized she was actually waiting for an answer to this ludicrous question.
Well, I’m never contravening anyone’s or anything’s copyright, am I? he said. How could I be? The world isn’t copyrighted. Weather isn’t copyrighted. Flowers in hedges, fallen leaves, birds, UK butterflies, puddles, the common midge. These are just some of my more recent subjects. They aren’t copyrighted.
Puddles, she said.
Snow, he said, I’m going to write about snow. The next time snow falls. Snow isn’t copyrighted. I think I’m safe in saying. Yet.
Can I read one of your writings? she said.
They’re on the net, he said. You can read as many as you like, any time you like. Anyone can.
Then she’d asked him did he know about the fields where researchers left dead human bodies out to rot especially to see what happens when we decompose in real weather conditions in the open air.
No, he said. He didn’t. How interesting.
He’d got out his notebook and made an Art in Nature note about it.
Imagine, she was saying while he made the note, a field like that, but full of all the finished-with machines.
What machines? he said putting his notebook back into the front pocket of his rucksack.
The old ones, she said. All the things people don’t use any more. The big computers from ten years ago, no, less, five years ago, from last year even, I mean all the obsolete things, the printers no one can connect to any more, the boxes with the screens built into them, all the things that have outdated.
Art got his notebook out again and began to write some things down. When he finished writing he closed the notebook but kept it out in case she said something else interesting or useful.
I like to picture them in my head, she was saying, I like to think about them scattered in a field and scientists going round studying them.
They never die, those things, he said. They take them all abroad, the things we update by buying the next model. Nothing is wasted. They recondition the outdated ones and give them to, like, third world countries or places where people are poorer, places that don’t have the same access to a speedy technological progress as we do. At least, that’s what I believe happens.
She shook her head.
The world, she said and smiled. Bounteous. But that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
What? he said. The world being bounteous?
No, she said. What we believe is happening.
—
On a wet Wednesday in April in 2003 Art and his mother are in the front row of the church at the funeral of his grandfather. There is what his mother calls a good turnout, though behind them the church is half empty.
One of the people from the funeral director’s stops at their pew with a woman he’s brought up to the front. She sits down beside them.
Artie, the woman says to him.
Hi, he says.
Soph, she says to his mother.
His mother nods but doesn’t look.
She will be some friend of his mother’s from when she lived here, someone who met him when he was a baby.
She sits back when his mother gets up to go to Communion and she gives Art a big sad smile. She is kind of cool, for an older person. She is wearing a parka. It’s a dark-coloured parka, so it’s not too disrespectful, though underneath she’s wearing a bright white trouser suit. After the funeral she stands next to his mother at the church door and lots of people shake her hand as if they know her. Occasionally a person in the queue of people paying their respects will greet her warmly, even hug her. Nobody hugs his mother or him quite like that; she must be someone more local who knew his grandfather, and he himself doesn’t know any of these people. He only knew his grandfather a little, from the
meals in hotels in London when he was home from school and his grandfather was down in the city. There are some photos of him when he was too small for school and stayed here with his grandfather when his mother was working.
Wet clothes drying in front of a fireplace, he says on the drive north to have the funeral when his mother asks him what he remembers of that time. There was steam coming off them and he drew in it, on the window, he drew a street and houses and a park and cars and people on the street, and a dog, a really good dog, in it.
His mother makes a sad noise that’s also a laugh.
I filled that house with expensive central heating and what did he do? Never switched it on. Even when I offered to pay the bills, she says. Electric bar fire in the living room. Calor gas heater in the kitchen.
He’s the only one of my grandparents I actually got to meet, and now will ever have had the chance to meet, Art says.
Well, that’s life and time for you, his mother says.
Tell me something you remember about him from when you were small, Art says.
No, his mother says.
Art frowns. He sits back.
His mother audibly sighs. Then she says:
I remember once I was walking through town with him. Which was rare enough, because he was always at the office, we almost never did anything with him on a weekday except on our holidays, first fortnight of July. Well, we were for some reason walking along on this one particular day, dressed in our good clothes, I can’t remember why, and there was a lorry delivering stock to a pub and a couple of crates of bottles tipped and fell off the back and hit the pavement. And my father, he dived for the ground, he threw his hands over the back of his head like a bomb had gone off.
She indicates left. The sign says ten miles. They are nearly there.
Something to do with what had happened to him in the war, she says.
A couple of miles later she says:
He was very embarrassed about it. Some people stopped and helped him stand up, someone dusted him down.
A couple of miles after that, she says:
I don’t think I ever saw him as distressed as he was that day when he thought he’d made a public fool of himself.
Then his mother stops speaking and starts humming a tune and Art knows the doors of the reminiscence have closed, as surely as if the Reminiscence is a cinema or a theatre and the show is over, the rows of seats empty, the audience gone home.
After the church, after watching the putting of the box into the ground in the rain, the ragged flowers laid out over to the side on the cloth that the gravediggers have covered the mound of earth with, green with fake grass on it, he and his mother give an old lady a lift home then they drive back like everybody else to his grandfather’s house for the refreshments. His mother has been organizing the refreshments part of today all week. They came across early from the hotel this morning to do the preparing and she left the table covered in the teatowels they’d brought from home with the sandwiches and cakes under them.
When they pull up outside the house the wet street in front of it is shining in the glare off the sun coming through the cloud and they have to shield their eyes. When they can see again they see that the house’s front door is already open. Noise and laughter are ringing out into the street.
Christ, his mother says.
What? he says.
Life and fucking soul, his mother says. Excuse my Swahili, Arthur. Come on. Let’s get this over with and get home.
When they go inside, the woman who sat beside him in the church is a blast of whiteness at the centre of the large crowd of people all in black in the front room.
He now suspects she is his mother’s sister, a sister he had no idea she even has, because of what the priest said in his talk about his grandfather in the war, his life after the war in the life assurance business, his late wife, the prizes he won for his dahlias, and how he is survived by his loving daughters Iris and Sophia. The woman is telling the room about a song she says was one of our father’s favourites, she starts singing it, the song about an old lady who swallows a lot of live creatures, a fly, perhaps she’ll die, then a spider, perhaps she’ll die, then a bird, a cat, dog, but then the woman makes everyone laugh by including a bunch of animals who aren’t part of the original song, a llama, a snake, a koala, an iguana, a lemur, and everybody in the room forgets to be (or to act being) sad and they start roaring in anticipation at what the rhyme might be, roaring with laughter at how much or how little she stretches the line, shouting suggestions, cheering at whatever rhyme she comes up with, right up to the point at which the old lady swallows a horse and when she does everybody shouts out in a kind of delight – even the priest – at how that old lady is now well and truly dead.
Then everybody stands and toasts his grandfather and after that several people come across the room to tell his mother how much her father’d have loved this send-off.
His mother smiles and is polite.
The woman who is his mother’s sister gets everybody to join in with the old protest song about how there’s a season for everything, and although she is the only person who knows the words about the parts about a time to be born and a time to die, and reap, and cast away stones etc, everybody else joins in with the repeating of the words turn, turn, turn.
He looks over at his mother. His mother is not singing.
You don’t remember me, do you? his mother’s sister, his aunt, Iris, says to Art when they both happen to be in the kitchen at the same time.
No, Art says. But I know that song you were singing, the one about the lady who swallows the fly. Maybe from TV.
She smiles.
I probably sang it to you, she says. When you were little.
I definitely don’t remember that at all, he says. It must’ve been a really long time ago.
A long time in your life, a short time in mine, she says. That’s life, and time, for you. What are you doing with your life and time right now?
I’ve got exams, he says.
Right, she says. But what are you doing with your life and time right now?
Well, I’m working for my exams, he says. I’ll need good passes if I want to get into university.
Look, she says. Artie. Don’t treat me like a boring distant relative. Not when we’ve actually spent a quarter of your life so far together.
A quarter of my life? he says.
Albeit the quarter of your life you can least consciously remember, she says. Come on. Tell me something real, try again. I’ll ask you again. Ready?
Ready, he says.
So, Arthur, she says in a voice pretending to be a boring relative’s voice. How’s school, you’re boarding, aren’t you, is school going well, and what will you be studying when you go to university, and which university will you try for, or do you already have an offer, and what will you plan to do when you graduate, and how much will you earn doing it, and what will you call the three children you’ll have with the perfectly lovely wife you’re going to marry, which’ll probably be the next time we meet in person?
He laughs.
She raises her eyebrows at him as if to say, well?
Right now I’m spending an inordinate amount of the time in my life listening to this, he says.
He gets his iPod out of his pocket.
What is it? she says. A transistor radio?
A what? he says.
He unwinds the earphones and plugs them in. He switches it on. He scrolls through till he finds track two of Hunky Dory. He hands her the earphones.
A couple of hours later he is lying flat on the back seat of the Audi, still in his black suit. His mother is driving them south again and dropping him back at school. It’s getting dark. The way the beads of rain light up in the blackness of the window whenever the car passes under motorway lights makes him feel inordinately childlike.
That’s a good phrase. Inordinately childlike. He feels proud of thinking it.
He thinks about how he has now seen a dead pers
on. His grandfather in the coffin looked waxy and unreal. He didn’t look anything like anyone Art knew or remembered. The smell of lemon air freshener in the room had made a stronger impression than the seeing of his grandfather as a person who’s died, an air freshener stronger, in scent terms, than the flowers in the room.
Surreal was the word. Above real.
Art likes words. One day he’ll write them and other people will read them.
Sophia, he says.
Uh huh? his mother says.
He wants to ask her if she’s okay. It is her father, after all, who has died. But it feels, what would the word be? Unpermitted.
Instead, he says:
Do you really believe it’s God, I mean when you go to the front and eat the thing they give you like you did today?
She breathes a long breath out.
I went to Communion out of respect for your grandfather and for my upbringing, she says.
But do you believe it? he says. And isn’t it disrespectful to God, to do it for grandad rather than God?
I’ll let you ask these questions again when and if you ever come home having first studied to become and then finally fully qualified as a theologian, she says.
And the other thing I wanted to ask, he says.
Is it theological? she says.
No, he says. But why did you keep Cleves as your surname rather than take Godfrey’s after you married him?
I chose to keep your grandfather’s name so as to be able to pass it on to you, she says.
And the last thing I want to ask, he says. Is. Did I really spend quite a lot of time with your sister Iris when I was small?
His mother snorts.
No, she says.
I didn’t, he says.
His mother makes a pff noise.
Your aunt, she says. Telling all those people it was his favourite song. Your aunt and my father. I’ll tell you about your aunt. She didn’t come home for years. She wasn’t welcome. He was too angry with her. She didn’t even turn up to your grandmother’s, my mother’s, funeral. Your aunt, my sister, Arthur, is a hopeless mythologizer.
She says some more things about her. Then she doesn’t say anything for a bit.
