by Ali Smith
I remember father telling me, too, Iris is saying, and it’s something nobody ever talks about now. That the government after that war took to lying to huge numbers of people who’d been victims of the mustard gas attacks, and to their families, telling them that it wasn’t the gas that was making them ill but that they had tuberculosis, and they did this so the state wouldn’t have to pay all those wounded men and their families a war pension.
His mother snorts.
A typical Iris anti-establishment folktale if ever I heard one, she says.
Iris laughs lightly.
Not even you, Soph, with all your powers of wisdom, all your business acumen and all your natural intelligence, can make something not be true just by declaring it’s not true.
You’ll never stop, will you? his mother is saying. (But she is saying it fondly.) You’re going to chip chip chip away at the unchippable edifice all your life. Be truthful. Don’t you ever get fed up? You know it’s hopeless. Your life. A work of endless futility.
Oh I’m much less ambitious these days, Iris says, now that I’m so much older, wiser, stiffer of limb. These days, since we’re talking truth, I see those signs that say keep out, access forbidden, CCTV in operation, and I realize I’d be quite content just to be a bit of moss in the sun and the rain and the time passing, happy to be nothing but the moss that takes hold on the surfaces of those signs and greens itself over their words.
Since we’re talking truth, Art says still with his eyes closed, I’ve a question for you both.
Ooh, a question, his mother says.
For us both, Iris says. Ask away, son.
He is not, his mother says. Your son.
He tells them that he has a memory of being told a story when he was very small. The story was about a boy lost in the snow at Christmas who finds himself in the underworld.
Ah, Iris says. Yes. I told you that story.
No she didn’t, his mother says.
Yes I did, Iris says.
I know for sure she didn’t, his mother says. Because it was me. I told you it.
You were on my knee in the Newlyn cottage, Iris says. We’d been out for a walk by the boats. You were sad because you’d never seen snow. I told you you had, but that you’d been too small to remember it. Then I told you that story.
Don’t listen to her, his mother said. You were in my bed, you’d had a nightmare. I brought you up some hot chocolate. You asked me what the wrong kind of snow was, you’d heard someone say it on the TV. And I told you the story.
I sat you on my knee, Iris said, and told you it, and I remember it so specifically because I went out of my way to make the child in the story neither a boy nor a girl.
He remembers it as a boy, his mother says. So it’s my story he remembers. I’m sure I’ll have made it a boy. Yes, I did, and I myself remember it so specifically because I wove in a lot of facts I knew you’d love, Arthur, about things like philosophers, and camera tricks, because we’d been to the Museum of the Moving Image and you’d loved it, and I put in astronomers, and the people who’d studied the shapes of snowflakes. You remember.
No, Art says. I remember going to MOMI though. And I remember someone telling me something about stars and snow.
Kepler, his mother says. I told you about him. I told you about Kepler and the comet and the snowflakes. She doesn’t know who Kepler is.
The reason I made the hero of the story I told you, Artie, be a child, in other words a hero who could be a boy or a girl, Iris says, is because our own mother told us that story when we were little and she told it with a girl in it who melted right through the floor of the underworld in her galoshes, and I wanted you to be able to put yourself into the story if you chose to.
In her ga-what? Lux says.
Galoshes, Art says.
What a fine word, Lux says.
They’re not at all exotic, don’t get yourself excited, Charlotte, his mother says. And since we’re talking truth. There is no truth in this endless lie that you lived with her, Arthur. Once and for all, you never lived with her. You lived, for some of the time when you were small, with my father.
Who passed him on to me every time you passed him on to him, Iris says. Because he hadn’t the first idea how to look after a small child.
I think he brought us up pretty well, his mother says.
Our mother brought us up, Iris says. Our father came home at 5.45pm and ate his supper.
He made the money that bought the suppers, his mother says.
Maybe he did. But he hadn’t a clue what to do with a small child, Iris says. And your attempt to write me out of your son’s history will fail. Because I’m safely locked in his memory bank whether he remembers it or not. And a memory bank is much less volatile and much more material than any of your contemporary financial institutions or hedge funds. Do you remember, Artie, the time I took you on the protest where we all did the dance holding up the big letters of the alphabet?
Art opens his eyes.
Yes! he says. I do remember something like that. I was the letter A.
You were the A in CASH NOT CUTS, Iris says.
Was I? Art says.
Then we did some footwork, some choreography, and you became the A in NO POLL TAX, Iris says.
He never lived with you. You never lived with her, his mother says.
Ah, we’re a lucky generation, Philo, to have had all those angry summers, all that strength of feeling, the summers of such love, Iris says.
True, his mother says.
But their generation, Iris says. Summer of Scrooge. And the winter of Scrooge, and the spring, and the autumn.
Sadly also true, his mother says.
We knew not to want a world with war in it, Iris says.
We worked for something else, his mother says.
We were ourselves the vanguard, Iris says. We pitted our own bodies against the machines.
We knew our hearts were made of other stuff, his mother says.
Then a curious thing happens. His mother and his aunt start to sing. They fall together naturally into a song in another language. They sing it sweetly together at first, for the first couple of lines, then they break into harmony. His mother sings low and his aunt sings it high and they know it, how it falls and where to take it, as if they’ve rehearsed. They swing in and out of what sounds like German into English then back into the other language again.
It was always you from the start, they sing.
They sing it in their harmony, back to the other language again, then the end of the song in English.
You’d swear they were related, these two, Lux says.
Yeah, and it’s to me, Art says, God help me.
His mother and her sister sit in the same room looking away from each other again. They’re both flushed. They both look triumphant.
I told him that story, not you, his mother says.
I told him it too, Iris says.
—
It will be a bit uncanny still to be thinking about winter in April, say, and in such a balmy April with the birds and the blossom, the leaves on their way, and on such a sunny day, hottest day of the year so far and a near-record high for the month.
But Art will be sitting on a train in all that unexpected warmth and what he’ll be seeing in his head is the image of an old computer keyboard left out in the snow, the flakes piling into each other over it, soft, air-pocketed, settling above its letters and numbers and symbols in a haphazard natural architecture, and what he’ll be thinking is:
how could she know to make a joke as complex as I refute it bus.
How could she know more about his own culture than he did, and such interesting things, and not just know them but know them so well that she could make jokes, make jokes about a culture that isn’t her culture and in a language that isn’t her first language?
He will already have looked up online and read about Dr Samuel Johnson and the argument he had with the bishop about mind, matter, the structure of reality.
/> He will have passed repeatedly the fast food places called Chicken Cottage, seen pieces of Chicken Cottage advertising repeatedly stuck to pavements by rain and repeatedly known that mind and matter are mysterious and, when they come together, bounteous.
Come on, he’ll have said to himself. Snap out of it. One flown bird doesn’t stop the whole kingdom of birds from singing. It’s just one gone bird.
Then he’ll wonder if he’s being a bit sexist thinking of a girl, a woman, in terms of birdlife.
But there was a bird, a rare bird, involved, and one he never got to see.
Which is why he’s thinking it, he’ll tell himself.
Plenty more birds in the sea, the man said.
Plenty more plastic bottles.
He’ll remember the morning he paid her her salary in Cornwall, the £1,000 cash for the three days of being Charlotte.
She counted it, split it into different bundles and folded it into different pockets in her coat and jeans.
Thank you, she said.
Then he held out both his hands, inside one a five pound note and three pound coins, inside the other three unstruck matches.
She touched the hand with the money. She smiled.
You’re a classy employer, guv, she said. I’d work for you again any day.
She touched the hand with the matches. She smiled again.
And a very classy man, she said.
She sat on the bedstuff and put the first of her studs back in, then the rings, then the little chain, then the silver bars. While she did, while she probed with the silver the inner tunnel of each hole in her skin (with a gentleness that gave him an erection then and still gives him one when he thinks about it months later), she looked round the barn at the Make Do stock, bits and pieces of it still unpacked on top of the crates after the people buying the things the day before.
We don’t own things, she said. Look at them all looking back at us. We think they’re ours, we can buy them, have them, throw them away when we’re done with them. They know without having to know anything that it’s us that are the throwaways.
My mother says you’re really a good salesperson, he said.
I am, she said. It’s one of my many skills.
Then she put her jacket on, kissed him and his mother on the cheek goodbye, got into Iris’s car for the lift to the station for the early train and she left.
He waved. His mother waved. They waved from the door.
He went back into the barn full of all its stupid stuff, his chest feeling far too small.
By the side of the bedding she’d left a plastic water bottle, half full. He sat on the bedding and drank what was in it. Still Scottish Mountain Water drawn from a sustainable source on the protected Glorat Estate in the heart of Scotland.
Unruined water.
He wrapped the empty bottle inside his jumper and put it in his rucksack.
When he got back to the flat and unpacked it he put the bottle on the bedside table by the iPod dock, his Art in Nature notebooks, the phone charger.
One day in the spring to come, he’ll sit on the bed and flick through an old notebook. He’ll see in his handwriting the words blatant and revealing.
He’ll have no idea why he ever wrote them down but he’ll remember writing them on his hand in the Ideas Store.
He’ll go, some weeks later, to the place Lux said she worked. Aw, Lux, they’ll say. They’ll call to each other. A guy here’s asking about Lux. They’ll tell him she got laid off in February, that ten people did and that she was one of them.
As he’s leaving the place he’ll see a few of the polystyrene packing things she told him about blowing round the yard in among what’s left of last year’s leaves.
He’ll bend and pick one up.
!
It is so very light.
Then he’ll go into the Ideas Store. It’ll be the same woman on the main desk. He’ll ask the woman about her, if she knows where she might be.
The woman won’t recognize the name Lux.
He’ll say, after he says the words piercings, thin, beautiful, witty, the phrase one of the most intelligent people I’ve met, emotionally and intellectually.
Oh, the librarian will say.
The librarian will explain how she had to eject the woman he’s talking about from the library, but it was last year, quite some time ago.
She tried to sleep in here overnight, the librarian will say. I think she may well actually have managed it a few times. Without them knowing. I mean us knowing. It’s strictly forbidden, I was in trouble enough with health and safety when she did, plus the rest of this building not being public any more, the rest being private property, it leaves the council open to lawsuits. I was instructed to ban her from the building. I couldn’t do anything else and keep my job. How is she, do you know? This isn’t a place to sleep, except, well, during the day obviously people fall asleep if they’re tired and if there’s no demand for the seat or whatever, well. Overnight though it’s the fire risk and security issue. I couldn’t. We can’t.
The librarian will lean forward then and say more quietly:
if you see her, will you give her my love? Tell her Maureen at Ideas Store sends her love.
—
Boxing Day night. Art and Lux are wrapped in the bedding on the warm floor of the barn.
Lux is lying next to him with her head on his shoulder.
Nothing’s happened, or happening, no sex or love or anything. His erection’s all just a happy part of it. Lux is in his arms and he is in hers and because of this it’s simple: Art’s in heaven.
No, even better than heaven. Right now Art will never die. Art will live forever because her head is on his shoulder.
He tries to look down at her face. He can see from this angle the top of her head where her hair parting forms a curved road across it, then the suggestion of her eyelashes, her nose, part of her shoulder in her yellow T-shirt.
She is explaining to him how it is that she can be from somewhere else, and have been brought up somewhere else again, but still sound so like she grew up here.
It takes hard work, she says. Real graft and subtlety. It’s a full-on education being from somewhere else in your country right now.
And can I ask you, he says. I’m not being rude. But for someone who lives from place to place, sometimes doesn’t know where she’ll sleep. You’re so –
What? she says.
Clean, he says.
Ah, she says. That too takes real graft and subtlety.
She tells him his mother’s got a tumble dryer out in the lobby by the back door. What does he think she’s been doing in the middle of the night every night?
Then she tells him that she decided she’d talk to him at all, at the bus stop, in the first place, because she liked the cleanness of his own spirit.
I have a spirit? he says. A clean spirit?
Everything living has a spirit, she says. Without spirit we’re nothing but meat.
And things like, say, flies and bluebottles, he says. Do they have spirits? Cause if I’ve got a spirit, I’m telling you. It’s not clean, it’s tiny, and rotten, and it’s about the size of a bluebottle’s.
The size of a bluebottle’s spirit, she says. Shining in its armour. Have you ever seen a bluebottle’s determination to get through the glass of a window?
I think you could maybe talk about anything, he says. There’s nothing you wouldn’t make interesting. Even I’m interesting when you talk about me.
She tells him she also decided she’d talk to him that day in the bus shelter because it was as if he was bracing himself against everything he touched and everything that touched him.
So I thought to myself, she says, I wonder what’ll happen if he braces himself against me. Or me against him.
I’d bend. I’m a pushover. I’m like him, Art says nodding to the cardboard cut-out figure of Godfrey by the door.
You met him very little. Your theatrical father, she says.
I met h
im twice in all, he says. When I was very little myself. I told you, they were estranged. They were friends, but, well. He wasn’t a part of my life.
He shrugs.
Once, after a show he was in, we all went for supper. I remember it vividly, I was eight. There were dancing girls from the chorus, the show was at a theatre in Wimbledon, Cinderella, he was one of the ugly sisters. It was exciting, the girls kept sitting me on their knees and making a great fuss of me is what I remember. I remember it more than I remember him. And the other time, we had our photos taken by a newspaper doing a piece on him, we had to pose round a Christmas tree holding presents. I don’t remember doing it but we have the newspaper cutting somewhere. If I think of it I remember the cutting instead of what actually happened.
So I think of him, and I think of the word father, and it’s kind of like there’s a cut-out empty space in my head. I quite like it. I can fill it any way I like. I can leave it empty.
Though there are days when it’s a bit like when they say a car cuts out, just stops, like all my ignition’s gone.
But I like his style, Godfrey Gable. I like to think I’ve inherited it. Dignity regardless of what rubbish you’re thinking about me. My favourite thing he did was an ad campaign for Branston’s. We’ve got the publicity shots somewhere in all his stuff, it’ll be in here somewhere in one of these boxes. He’s holding a jar and looking at the camera with this witty look, and written next to his head it says:
I’m less a man who’ll relish a challenge, more a man who’ll challenge a relish.
I don’t get it, Lux says.
Ah, he says. Quite hard to explain.
What’s Branston’s? she says.
They make pickle, he says. I’ll find you when we’re back in London and bring you a jar of it and we’ll have it on cheese on toast.
Okay, she says. Depending what it tastes like. And since we’re here, and since he’s here with us, your cardboard father. Far be it from me to add to your rucksack when it comes to family matter. And not all the truths in our lives always get through the tight closed fists they’re held in. But I think, one day, it’d be a good idea. You should talk with your mother, about your father.
