by Ali Smith
He wets the tip of his middle finger in his wineglass and presses it against the table to pick up some of the sandy grit. He brings it close to his eyes. That’s exactly what it is, sand. Grit. The slab of rock is close enough to his head that if he reached up he could touch it. He can see some mica, something glinting in it where its flint surface is rough. Right there in a crevice directly above Art’s head there’s a tuft of grassy stuff that’s taken root.
It will crush them all when it falls.
But it hangs there. It doesn’t fall. It swings slightly in the air. It has heft. Green silence rears beneath it.
Is it real?
Should he say?
But how can it just hang like that, suspended by nothing?
Look, he says. Everyone. Look.
April:
it is a Wednesday lunchtime, balmy for winter, chilly for spring.
On the concourse in King’s Cross Station in London there are two huge Sky News JCDecaux Transvision screens at either end of the departures boards and the screens are promising today’s upcoming news headlines after the advertising.
The first headline today in the 20 second news round-up after the 20 seconds of advertising says that there is now 80% more plastic in the earth’s seas and on its shores than estimated, and that this is three times as much plastic as was formerly thought.
The next headline says that there’s an attack taking place on MPs by MPs of the same party who don’t agree with them.
The next headline says that a poll has found that citizens of this country oppose a unilateral guarantee for the citizens who live here and who are originally from a lot of other countries to be able to stay here with full rights of residents after a certain date.
Panic. Attack. Exclude.
That’s the news part over.
Next on the screen there’s an advert for a soft drink, an image of happy looking people drinking it, then an image of a bottle in sunlight, beaded with condensation.
Up on the balcony a man is standing with a hawk on his arm, a working bird he sends back and fore across the station to stop pigeons from thinking they can come in here for scavenging or roosting.
But a buddleia is growing in the wall up next to the roof above the old platforms. It is bright purple against the brickwork.
Buddleia is tenacious.
After the Second World War, when so many of the cities were in ruins, buddleia was one of the most common plants to take hold in the wreckage. The ruins filled with it here and all over Europe.
Art in nature.
3
What’s to-day?
This is happening some time in the future. Art is on a sofa holding a small child in his arms. The child, who has been learning to read, is sitting on Art’s knee flicking through a book pulled out at random from the bookcase next to Art’s head. It’s an old copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
What’s to-day? the child says again.
It’s Thursday today, Art says.
No, the child says. What’s to-day?
How do you mean, what’s today? Art says.
I mean this.
The child points at the words on the page.
That’s right, Art says. That’s what it says. What’s to-day.
I know that’s what it says, the child says. But what I want to know. Is. What’s to-day?
Today’s today, Art says. This is today.
No, the child says. Is the to-day that’s written here the same thing as today?
Well, this story is from the past, Art says, so the today it’s about is in the past now. And obviously, it’s about Christmas, this is a story set at Christmas time, and it’s June right now, so this also means it’s not the same as today. That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.
You really aren’t understanding me, the child says.
No? Art says.
What I want to know is why does it have the little line between its parts? the child says.
What little line?
Art looks at the page more carefully, at the word the child is pointing at.
To-day.
Ah.
That’s just the old way of writing it, Art says. It doesn’t mean anything different. It’s just that today, I mean nowadays, we don’t write the word today like they used to. That’s the way they used to write it when this book was first published. The little line is called a hyphen.
But I also want to know. What does it mean today? the child says.
What do you mean, what does it mean today? Art says.
What I say, the child says.
You know what it means, Art says. It means today. And today is, well, it’s today. It’s not yesterday any more. And it’s not tomorrow yet. So it must be today.
But why, when it sounds the same, is it not the same as to run or to do or to eat? the child says.
Oh, I see, Art says.
And if it was the same, how would you day? I want to day. I mean I want to be able to day.
I get you, Art says.
He’ll be about to explain the difference between verbs and words like the word today. He’ll be weighing up whether the child is old enough to comprehend that we’re all simultaneously existing in differently numbered years that depend on things like the country you’re in and your religion, though most people across the world agree to go by the Gregorian calendar. He wishes he could remember more about the Gregorian calendar so as to be able to explain it. He’ll be about to talk about the human practice of giving names to days to stop the passing of time feeling quite so random. Though this may have to wait for a more mature understanding.
Then again, why underestimate, ever, the mind of a child?
He’ll be beginning to think, too, sitting here with the child using him as a climbing frame, about how even if you’re drunk, or ill, or mad or drugged or forgetful, or so busy you don’t know what day it is, or out of your head on grief or happiness, it’s still information easily found, when you need to know what today is, there for you on the bar at the top of a computer, on your phone or your watch, if you still use the kind of a watch that tells you days and dates. Or you can always look at the tops of the newspapers on a news stand or in a newsagent’s or supermarket.
But now he’ll begin to wonder this instead.
How do you day?
Regardless of Art thinking anything the child’ll be off across the room and out into the garden to look at something moving in the branches of one of the trees, a squirrel maybe, or a bird.
Well, that’s a pretty good way to day.
Art sits and watches.
He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn’t even know you were at, and break the surface and when you do it’s akin to – to what?
To a salmon leaping God knows where, home against the flow, not knowing what home is, not knowing anything except that there’s no other thing to do, or to a bird or a bear breaking the surface of winter water with a fish so big in its beak or its mouth that it can’t believe its luck, the moment before that fish waggles itself loose, falls away, hits the surface of the water again and disappears back down into it.
Art laughs to himself, his chin down into his chest. He sees and he hears, in the garden, the child yelling in delight at nothing, a bird in a tree.
What’s to-day.
It was well after midnight, early Boxing Day morning, on the top floor in Sophia’s house.
Iris opened the door.
What? she said.
Can you please stop making so much noise? Sophia said. I’m trying to sleep.
I was fucking well asleep, Iris said. The only noise is you banging on this door.
She went to shut the door on Sophia.
Then who’s making the terrible noise? Sophia said.
What noise? Iris said. There is no noise
.
Like someone hammering stone. Moving furniture about, Sophia said. Like I’m staying in a hotel and the people on the top floor are hammering things into concrete and shifting chairs and tables from one side of the room to the other.
It’s the planets in the stratosphere rolling about on purpose just to keep you personally awake, Iris said. How’s Artie doing now?
(Arthur had passed out earlier at the dinner table. He had started shouting about landscaping. Then his head hit the table with a thud. They’d brought him round and spent the evening sobering him up.)
Arthur and Charlotte are asleep, Sophia said.
He should know by now not to drink so much, Iris said.
He is ultra-sensitive, Sophia said. It’s because he is a late baby. Babies who are birthed by more mature mothers can have greater sensitivities to all sorts of things later in life, including alcohol.
I bet you read that bullshit in the Daily Mail, Iris said.
Sophia blushed (because the Daily Mail was in fact where she’d read it). She changed the subject.
Is this really the room the birds were living in back then? she said.
Iris opened the door wider.
Do come in, she said. Witness my first time sleeping on a floor in quite a while. Me who slept on the floor for decades. But now that I’m classed as old the people I work with, even the people I’ve gone there to be a help to, are always going out of their way to find me a bed. When nobody else has one. Or to make me one if there isn’t one, out of whatever they’ve got. In places where there are no beds, where people have nothing, they still manage to rustle me up some kind of a bed. So. I must be old.
Are you getting at me for not having a bed in here? Sophia said.
That’s right, Iris said, and that’s why I’m here. The only reason. To get at you. I left everything behind, all my work, any chance of a Christmas rest, and drove all the way last night and did everything I did today including all the dishes after the lunch I made. All to get at you.
What are you working on at the moment? Sophia said.
As if I’d tell you, Iris said.
She sat down on the bedding and patted the blanket next to her. Sophia sat down. There was nothing in the room for Iris to be making a noise with. There was nothing in the room full stop, except an empty holdall, a folded pile of Iris’s clothes, an anglepoise lamp and the heap of bedding up against the wall. She pointed to the lamp, which Iris had angled to make the light in the room soothing. Iris always was good at doing atmospheric things like that.
Did you bring the lamp with you? she said.
Artie’s girl gave me it from a box in the barn, Iris said. It’s yours. It seems you had nothing to lose but your chainstores. And now you’ve lost them. You’re a free woman at last.
Those lamps aren’t free, she said. They sold, when they were selling, for top price £255. Cost me £25 each.
Oh well done, Iris said.
What’ve you really been doing? Sophia said. Or have you taken idealistic retirement now?
I’ve been in Greece, Iris said. I came home three weeks ago. I’m going back in January.
Holiday? Sophia said. Second home?
Yeah, that’s right, Iris said. Tell your friends that. Tell them to come too. We’re all having a fabulous time. Thousands of holidaymakers arriving every day from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, for city-break holidays in Turkey and Greece. And the people from Yemen who’ve nothing to eat, they head for their holidays into Africa, where there’s loads to go round for everybody especially in the countries where people are already starving, though the more sub-Saharan holidaymakers tend to head for Italy and Spain, also popular resorts with the people running away from Libya. A lot of my old friends are over in Greece, your friends’ll be interested in that. I’ll get together a list of names for you if you like. Tell your friends it helps if you’ve had a bit of experience in how to put together out of nothing a place for people to live in or sleep. Tell them a lot of new young people, energetic young people, people they’ll be keen to have on their files, are there too.
None of my friends would be in the least interested in any of this, Sophia said.
Tell your friends from me, Iris said, what it’s like there. Tell them people are in a very bad way. Tell them about people who’ve got nothing. Tell them about people risking their lives, about people whose lives are all they’ve got left. Tell them about what torture does to a life, what it does to a language, how it makes people unable to dare to explain to themselves, never mind to other people, what’s happened to them. Tell them what loss is. Tell them, especially, about the small children who arrive there. I mean small. I mean hundreds of children. Five and six and seven years old.
Iris said it with her usual calm.
And when you’ve done telling them that, she said, tell them what it’s like to come back here, when you’re a citizen of the world who’s been working with all the other citizens of the world, to be told you’re a citizen of nowhere, to hear that the world’s been equated with nowhere by a British Prime Minister. Ask them what kind of vicar, what kind of church, brings a child up to think that words like very and hostile and environment and refugees can ever go together in any response to what happens to people in the real world. Ask your friends in their high places that. Tell them I want to know.
I have never told anyone anything, Sophia said.
Oh, but I want you to, Iris said. Not that your old friends are that powerful any more. But maybe you’ve got new friends among the new financial lobbyists. Never mind if you don’t, tell your old friends all this from me anyway, I’m fond of them after all the years, fond of all their well-meaning old-fashioned ways.
Then she pointed at the ceiling above the window on the right.
That’s where the birds originally got in, through the rafters, she said. There were a lot of missing slates and the floor of the loft had given way I think long before we even moved in here. That’s where the birds came in and out, they were pigeons, no, they’re called collared doves, they had their families here, several families over the years, I remember there were quite a lot of birds in here at one point. They made a lovely soft sound. We gave them a box full of straw to nest in but they brought their own twigs and took bits of the straw and wove them together, built nests up in the rafters and only used this room when it was rainy or cold. They mate for life, you know, those birds.
I think you’ll find that’s a myth, Sophia said.
We had swifts, too, under the eaves on the other side of the house. The same ones came back every year.
That sounds like a myth too, Sophia said.
Are there swifts now? Iris said. Did you have them this summer?
I’ve no idea, Sophia said.
You’d know if you’d swifts, Iris said. They make that high sound. I hope they’re not gone. I used to lie on the grass at the back watching them teaching their young.
Iris held her arm up in the air. She did this for Sophia to come under it. Sophia gave in. She came under the arm, put her head on Iris’s chest.
I hate you, Sophia said into Iris.
Iris blew hot breath into the hair on the top of Sophia’s head.
I hate you too, she said.
Sophia closed her eyes.
I’ve never told anyone anything, she said. You’re wrong about that.
I believe you, Iris said.
Nothing very important or true anyway, Sophia said.
Iris laughed.
Because Sophia’s head was on Iris’s chest the laugh went physically through Sophia.
Then Iris said,
Do you want to sleep in here too? There’s room.
Sophia nodded against Iris.
The floor’s hard, Iris said. You’re a bit thin for it. I presume you’re not eating again. But there’s two duvets. We can use one for padding.
Iris sorted the bedding. Sophia settled into it next to her sister. Her sister reached to switch the lamp off.
Sweet dreams, I
ris said.
Sweet dreams, Sophia said.
—
The extraordinary way in which the Zeiss projector compresses time makes it a veritable time machine. It is the middle of the night a couple of days after Sophia’s school class has been taken to London to see some historic sights, learn about royal beheadings and visit a Planetarium that opened last year, the first Planetarium in the Commonwealth. It has been built on top of the bomb damage done to Madame Tussaud’s in the Blitz; a man told them in the brand new foyer that the Planetarium has been built on the crater where the first bomb to weigh 1,000 lbs fell on the city.
The whole pageant of the heavens is speeded up as if by magic; the appearances of a day, a month, a year, pass by in a matter of minutes, it says in the programme she brought home. The centuries can be rolled back until we stand in Palestine at the time of the Nativity and witness ‘The Star of Bethlehem’. We can share the excitement of Galileo Galilei when in 1610 he swept the heavens for the first time with a telescope. We can anticipate the appearance of the heavens when near the end of this century Halley’s comet next returns to the vicinity of the sun.
Sophia is thirteen. Tonight she is unable to sleep. The thing she couldn’t stop thinking about when she was sitting under the dome, under the pretend night sky produced by the projector shaped like a giant insect, and the thing she can’t not think about right now in bed, so much so that she’s been turning over and over and the sheets have pulled out both on top and underneath, is the smallness of the capsule they put the dog into in Russia a couple of years ago which they then catapulted into the so-called heavens.
The dog died in space after a week of orbiting the earth. It died painlessly. It said so in the paper. Inside the capsule in the photo in the paper it didn’t look like the dog had room even to stand up, or move much at all, never mind turn round like dogs do before they lie down, what mother calls their ancient habit, making their bed to lie in it, from the years when dogs slept in long grasses and would turn and turn to flatten the grass.
