by Ali Smith
Art realizes his mouth is open. He closes it.
Why don’t you just stay at Art’s? Iris says.
She does, Art says. Obviously. Don’t you, Charlotte?
Truthfully? Lux says. No.
They live together, his mother says. At least he told me they did. But who am I to know anything about my son? I’m just his mother. Who am I to know anything about his life? Who am I to think I know the truth?
The truth is, we haven’t come that far in our relationship yet, Lux says.
I understood it was nearly three years, his mother says.
Oh no, I’m not that Charlotte, Lux says.
Oh that’s right. You’re the other Charlotte, Iris says.
What other Charlotte? his mother says.
Art clears his throat. His mother looks at him.
Why does everybody in this room but me know about there being another Charlotte? his mother says.
It’s my fault, Lux says. I specifically asked your Arthur not to mention it to you, Mrs Cleves. Because, uh, because I was shy to come to Christmas here as a family guest so early in our knowing each other. Plus, I don’t really think of myself as Charlotte. In fact, I’d prefer it if you’d all call me the name everyone in my own family calls me.
Not Charlotte? Iris says.
Lux, Lux says.
Art rubs the heels of his hands into his eyes. He takes his hands out of his eyes in time to see his mother’s face go unexpectedly soft.
Like the soap flakes? his mother says. Oh. Oh how lovely they were. They used to melt in the water and make the water smooth and slippery, remember?
And in the advert on TV they sifted down like snow, Iris is saying. And Soph drew a House of the Future for a school project, didn’t you, one where you had to design a Room of the Future, she won a prize for her Future House from the town council, she designed a winter room and a summer room and I helped.
She stuck Lux Flakes on to Sellotape for a textured sheepskin rug for the winter room, his mother says. It was so clever. I can’t remember what we did for the summer room.
I can, Iris says. I cut the little pictures out for you off the sleeve of one of the Linguaphone Speak Italian records and stuck them as if they were pictures on its wall, drew frames round them with black ink –
Yes, his mother says. There was a waiter with glasses and a bottle of wine, and a French policeman, and a man climbing the Alps and drinking a beer, and a woman dressed in something traditional, maybe Dutch –
– and we put these on the walls of the Future Summer Room, Iris says, and I had to take the cut-up record sleeve all the way to town to throw it in a litter bin that far from home, I was so scared our father’d find out, and we tucked the extra 45 into one of the other sleeves with a different lesson –
Lezione, his mother says. I suoni Italiani, Professore Pagnini –
Professor Paganini, Iris sings.
They both sing:
Professor Paganini, now don’t you be a meanie, what’s up your record sleeve, come on and spring it –
They both laugh at the same time.
I drew the sun through the summer room window, Iris says.
We thought the future would be as sunny and cosmopolitan and continental as Italy, his mother says.
She was named for Italy, Iris says.
And she was named for Greece, his mother says.
We were named for the places our father fought in, in the war, Iris says. For Europe.
Oh here we go, here we go, his mother says. I’ve been waiting to see what the catalyst would be. Any minute now, Charlotte, it’ll be all we grew up on a street named after a battle against fascism.
Will it? Iris says. Oh, this is good. This’ll be entertaining. What else will I say, Soph? Though it’s true. We did grow up on a street named after a battle against fascism.
It is strange, Lux says, to think of anyone in this country ever talking about a room of the future when people like so much to buy new things that look like old things, and the only room I’m used to hearing people talk about is the no room, the no more room.
It’s sad but true, Charlotte, his mother says. There is no more room.
Says the businesswoman who lives alone in a house that has fifteen bedrooms, Iris says.
His mother goes a furious red.
She speaks only to Lux, as if Iris isn’t in the room.
They’re economic migrants, his mother says. They want better lives.
The ghost of old Enoch, Iris says in a ghost voice. Rivers of bloo-oOOo-ood.
What’s wrong with people wanting better lives, Mrs Cleves? Lux says.
You mustn’t be naive, Charlotte. They’re coming here because they want our lives, his mother says.
I bet I know what you voted, Iris says. In the so-called vote. My sister. The so-called intelligent one. I was the wild one. So-called.
But what will the world do, though, Mrs Cleves, Lux says, if we can’t solve the problem of the millions and millions of people with no home to go to or whose homes aren’t good enough, except by saying go away and building fences and walls? It isn’t a good enough answer, that one group of people can be in charge of the destinies of another group of people and choose whether to exclude them or include them. Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We’ve got to come up with a better answer.
But his mother is gripping the arms of her chair with fury.
The so-called vote, his mother says, was a vote to free our country from inheriting the troubles of other countries, as well as from having to have laws that weren’t made here for people like us by people like us.
Depends whether you think there’s a them and an us, Iris says, or just an us. Given that DNA’s let us know we’re all pretty much family.
Oh there is most definitely a them, his mother says. In everything. Family is no exception.
Philo, Philo, Soph, Soph, Soph, you’re such a good girl, Iris says. Thinking exactly what the government and the tabloids tell you to think.
Don’t patronize me, his mother says.
It’s not me who’s doing the patronizing, Iris says. And they’re only running away from home for fun. Because that’s why people leave home, isn’t it? For fun.
There is a moment of silence after Iris says this.
Then his mother says:
I warned you, Charlotte.
Call me Lux, Lux says.
My sister, his mother says, is something of a seasoned protester against the powers that be. She’ll be trying to get you all singing next, some song about Mandela, or Nicaragua, or Carry Greenham Home.
Who’s Carrie Greenham-Home? Art asks.
Iris laughs out loud.
Does she live locally? Art says.
Iris nearly falls off her chair laughing.
There hanging out in the mud with the lesbians for years, his mother says.
One of the best and filthiest times of my life, Iris says.
I’m a lesbian myself, Lux says.
At heart, she means, Art says.
Yes, at heart too, Lux says.
She’s a very empathetic person, Art says.
Does she live locally, Iris says. Nearer home than far away. And talking of locally, I went for a walk this morning down to the village. I passed so many people, closed faces, on the streets. Did one single one of them say Merry Christmas to me?
Probably all recognized you from the 1970s and thought oh God no she’s back, his mother says.
Iris, blithe, laughs again.
But I can’t help but worry for old England, she says. The furious grumpy faces, like caricatures on some terrible sitcom on TV. England’s green unpleasant land.
And you worried for England back then, too, his mother says. Nuclear war. And did it happen? No it didn’t.
That’s because what happened at Greenham changed the world, Iris says.
My sister has always been one to talk herself up and our country down, his mother says. She has always had the te
ndency to want to put the blame elsewhere for the inadequacies of her own life. But Greenham. Changing the world. Unbelievable hubris. Glasnost, maybe. Chernobyl. But Greenham? I ask you. I give up.
We did, we gave up everything, Iris says. Homes. Lovers. Families. Kids. Jobs. Nothing left to lose. So, of course, we won.
My sister was quite psychotic about banning the bomb, Charlotte, at the time, his mother says.
We’re all psychotic about something, Iris says. We all have our visions.
And divisions, Lux says.
We were all going to die, his mother says. But in the end? It seems, after all, we didn’t. Nuclear holocaust.
She makes a scoffy sound.
We’re not out of that quicksand yet, Iris says. Let’s see how low the newest leader of the free world can sink us this time round.
His mother stands up. She heaves her chair round to face the other way. She sits down again in it with it facing the wall, with her back to everyone at the table.
Is that you taking back control, there, Soph? Iris says.
The most, eh, amazing dream, Art says. Believe it or not, I was –
Take back control of your teeth, Lux says. I saw it on TV on a commercial. And another: take back control of your heating bills. And there was another: take back control of your rail fares. And bus routes, take back control of your bus routes. That one was painted on the back of a bus.
The funny thing is, Iris says to his mother’s back. When I told our father about me cutting those pictures off the little record sleeve for your room of the future, he wasn’t angry at all. He laughed and laughed.
His mother’s back is now giving off enough anger to fill the whole house.
He’d have hated the vote, our father, Iris says. He was maybe sometimes a foolish old racist himself but he knew a fool’s errand when he saw one. He’d have thought it cheap beyond all precedent.
You know nothing about him, his mother says. You have no right to speak about either of them.
Funny you should mention Freud, Art says (though nobody has mentioned Freud). The dream I had last night, this morning, I woke up from it actually saying out loud the word Freud.
He launches in. He refuses interruption. He tells them the whole dream.
After he finishes there’s a silence like there is when you’ve been telling someone a dream and the person you’re telling stopped listening several minutes ago and is thinking of something else. His aunt is looking at the wall where there used to be a window. His mother is a turned back. But Lux, who’s been rolling pieces of bread into little balls and lining the little balls up in formation like cannonballs outside a castle by her side plate, says:
For you, in that dream, the powers that be turned into the flowers that be.
Ha! Art says.
He looks at Lux.
What a beauty of a thing to say, he says.
Beauty, his mother says to the wall. That’s right. Well said, Charlotte. Beauty is the true way to change things for the better. To make things better. There should be a lot more beauty in all our lives. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. There is no such thing as fake beauty. Which is why beauty is so powerful. Beauty assuages.
Iris roars with laughter again.
That’s it, she says. Never mind recession or austerity. Beauty’ll make it better. Good old Philo. I used to call your mother that, Artie, I used to call her Philo when we were kids.
We should all, right now, tell each other one single beautiful thing, his mother says. We should, each person round this table, tell everyone here about the most beautiful thing we’ve ever seen.
Philo Sophia, Iris says. And I think all these years she’s been imagining that what I meant was that she was like a philosopher. But I didn’t. I didn’t mean philosophy.
She creases her shoulders and laughs.
I meant the pastry kind, she says. The thin kind. The kind of pastry you can almost see through, it’s so nearly not even there.
My elder sister always did like to disenchant, his mother says.
She says it with considerable dignity even with her back to them all.
Okay, I’ll start, Lux says, right, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. It’s to do with Shakespeare again. It was in a Shakespeare. By which I mean not in the writing but on the writing, it was a real thing, a thing from the real world, that someone had at some point in time put inside a copy of Shakespeare.
I was in Canada, I visited a library, we got taken by the school I was at, and they have a very old copy of Shakespeare there, and inside it on two of its pages there’s the imprint of what was once a flower that someone pressed between the pages.
It’s the bud of a rose.
Well. It’s the mark left on the page by what was once the bud of a rose, the shape of the rosebud on its long neck.
And it’s nothing but a mark, a mark made on words by a flower. Who knows by whom. Who knows when. It looks like nothing. It looks like maybe someone made a stain with water, like an oily smudge. Until you look properly at it. Then there’s the line of the neck and the rosebud shape at the end of it.
That’s my most beautiful thing. Now. You.
She nudges Art.
Your most beautiful thing, she says.
Uh huh, most beautiful thing, Art says.
But he can’t think of one, he can’t concentrate because of the insistent noise of his mother and aunt.
I cannot be near her fucking chaos a minute longer. (His mother talking to the wall.)
Lucky I’m an optimist regardless. (His aunt speaking to the ceiling.)
It is no wonder my father hated her. (His mother.)
Our father didn’t hate me, he hated what had happened to him. (His aunt.)
And mother hated her, they both did, for what she did to the family. (His mother.)
Our mother hated a regime that put money into weapons of any sort after the war she’d lived through, in fact she hated it so much that she withheld in her tax payments the percentage that’d go to any manufacture of weapons. (His aunt.)
My mother never did any such thing. (His mother.)
I know she did. I’m the one who helped her work out the percentage every year. (His aunt.)
Liar. (His mother.)
Self-deceiver. (His aunt.)
The idea that only her life counts, only her life makes a difference in the world. (His mother.)
The idea that there might be a world that’s not as she perceives it. (His aunt.)
Deluded. (His mother.)
Deluded all right. (His aunt.)
Mad. (His mother.)
Speak for yourself. (His aunt.)
Mythologizer. (His mother.)
I’m not the person here making stuff up about the world. (His aunt.)
Selfish. (His mother.)
Sophist. (His aunt.)
Solipsist. (His mother.)
Swotty little show-off. (His aunt.)
I know what you did with your life. (His mother.)
I know what you did with my life too. (His aunt.)
After which: unexpected silence, the silence that happens when something too real’s been said out loud.
Art tries to work out what, but he can’t get to it. In any case he doesn’t want to get to it. He stops trying. Who gives a fuck what two old women are fighting over?
As of this moment Art has had enough of Christmas. He now knows he never wants to see another Christmas Day again.
What he longs for instead, as he sits at the food-strewn table, is winter, winter itself. He wants the essentiality of winter, not this half-season grey selfsameness. He wants real winter where woods are sheathed in snow, trees emphatic with its white, their bareness shining and enhanced because of it, the ground underfoot snow-covered as if with frozen feathers or shredded cloud but streaked with gold through the trees from low winter sun, and at the end of the barely discernible track, along the dip in the snow that indicates a muffled path between the trees, the view and the woods opening to a light that
’s itself untrodden, never been blemished, wide like an expanse of snow-sea, above it more snow promised, waiting its time in the blank of the sky.
For snow to fill this room and cover everything and everyone in it.
To be a frozen blade that breaks, not a blade of grass that bends.
To freeze, to shatter, to unmelt himself.
This is what he wants.
But just as he starts to think the word unmelt might be a good word for Art in Nature, this happens.
The room darkens. The room fills, or Art’s nose does, with a smell of plantlife, the smell of greenness you get when you snap the stem of something living.
Art sniffs. He breathes out. He breathes in again.
It is even more pungent, getting stronger by the second.
Something scatters down on to the table, a shower of little sprinkles of grit, tiny rubble.
Is the ceiling coming down?
He looks up.
A foot and a half above all their heads, floating, precarious, suspended by nothing, a piece of rock or a slab of landscape roughly the size of a small car or a grand piano is hanging there in the air.
Art ducks down.
Jesus Christ almighty.
He looks at the others.
No one else has noticed it.
He dares to look up at it again.
The underside of it is the colour that happens when black meets green. The size of it throws into shadow everyone at the table, him too – when he looks at his own hands in front of him their backs and the backs of his wrists are black-green.
His mother and his aunt are both shaded. The girl sitting next to him is cast in dark verdant shadow too, and she’s playing with a piece of bread, rolling it with her fingers like nothing is happening.
We’re all – we’re so green, Art says. We’re green as greenfinches.
The slice of landscape hangs above all their heads. Little bits of rock-dust from the edges of it crumble down, hit the table and skitter across it like a giant salt-cellar is seasoning the room and everything in it. He scratches at his head. There’s grit under his nails when he takes his hand away from his head. There’s grit at the roots of his hair.
