by Ali Smith
Whatever, Art says.
And talking of your mother –, she says.
She sits up.
What time is it? she says. I’ve a date. We eat in the evenings, she and I. And I’ve got to wash and dry a couple of things.
She rolls herself out of the bedding. She pulls one of her boots on.
If I were you, she says, I’d stay here in the house with her a bit longer, till the start of the year maybe, and do like I’ve been doing. Get up and cook something in the middle of the night. She’ll come down and eat with you if you do.
She’d never do that, he says. She’d send me away.
Lux pulls her other boot on.
Just talk with her, she says. Talk to her.
Nothing in common, he says.
Everything in common, Lux says. She’s your history. That’s the other difference between meat and humans. I don’t mean between animals and humans. They know how to evolve. We’re more gifted than them, the chance to know where we came from. To forget it, to forget what made us, where it might take us, it’s like, I don’t know. Forgetting your own head.
She stands up.
I am even persuading myself, she says.
He shakes his head.
I can’t do anything for her, he says. How can I? I’m family.
Try, she says.
No, he says.
You might as well try, she says.
No, he says.
You might, she says. I mean, given our histories. We both might.
Something a bit higher than his penis, something up in his chest, lifts.
Ha. Is that it, his spirit?
Might we? he says.
—
Close your eyes and open them.
It’s high summer now.
Art is crossing a sombre London. There is a burnt-out building at the heart of the city.
It looks like a terrible mirage, a hallucination.
But it’s real.
The building has gone up in flames so fast in the first place because it’s been shoddily renovated, not being for the use or the residence of people with a lot of money.
Many people died.
There will be an argument happening all across politics and the media about how many people died because nobody can say for sure how many people were in the building that night, it being a place where a lot of people under the radar have been living.
Radar, Art thinks. World War Two invention for flushing out invisible enemies.
Standing on the tube in the heat he chances to read in a paper over someone’s shoulder a piece of writing about how people are crowdfunding, raising thousands of pounds, to fund a boat that intercepts and waylays the rescue boats sent out from the Italian mainland to help the migrants in trouble in the sea.
He reads what he’s just read again, to make sure he hasn’t misread it.
Natural?
Unnatural?
He feels sick to his stomach.
As he reads the article for the third time, about people paying money to scupper other people’s safety, the coastline swings into the tube train carriage, just a fragment of a second of it.
It juts across the top of everyone in the carriage.
He gets off the tube.
He walks past the British Library and he sees an image of Shakespeare outside it on a poster.
That’s why Lux chose to live here, here of all the places on the earth.
They’re bound to have a Shakespeare he can look at in their shop.
He goes in and crosses the courtyard. He stands in the security queue. He gets searched. He is really surprised by how bright it is in here, and how friendly, how open, how gracious. He sees the reception desk ahead of him. He sees the people in the cafe, the people sitting reading on a metal bench like a sculpture of a giant opened book. The book-bench has a large metal ball and chain attached to it, as if an integral part of it. Instead of going to the shop he surprises himself by going straight up to the desk and asking the woman behind the counter about why there’s a ball and chain on that book-shaped bench. Is it so no one will steal the bench?
She tells him it’s to signify that you mustn’t steal a library book. In libraries in the old days, books used to be chained to their shelves, she says, so that they couldn’t be taken away by any one individual, so that they’d always be there for everyone’s use.
He thanks her. He asks her if it might be possible to speak, just for a moment, to the Library’s Shakespeare expert.
She doesn’t ask who or why. She doesn’t say he’ll need to make an appointment. She doesn’t ask him for anything like proof of membership, anything at all. She picks up her phone’s receiver and dials an extension number. Whom shall I say is calling? she says as she presses the buttons, and it isn’t an old or fusty or bespectacled tweedy man who comes to the desk to meet Art. It’s a young bright woman, the same age, younger than him maybe.
Oh, we don’t have that here, she says when he explains. That’s not part of our collection. But I know the folio you’re describing. It’s almost completely authentic, a real beauty. It’s really something. The print of that flower runs across two late pages in Cymbeline.
Cymbeline, he says. The one about poison, mess, bitterness, then the balance coming back. The lies revealed. The losses compensated.
She smiles.
Beautifully put, she says. And the folio you’re talking about with the print of the rose in it is in the Fisher Library in Toronto.
He sees, in her face, his own face fall and her see it happen.
Our own Shakespeare collection’s pretty interesting too, even though I can’t do you a pressed rose, she says.
He thanks her. He goes to the Library shop to see if they’ve got a Cymbeline. There’s a Penguin one on the Shakespeare shelves. On the cover it’s got a man from the past stepping out of a trunk or a box.
He opens it at random. Embraced by a piece of tender air. Oh, that’s good.
His phone buzzes. It’s a text from Iris in Greece.
Dear Neph meant 2 tll u bfor I left yr mother has movd hrslf into kitchn of house and all other rms full of nothin but moths n spiders like in grt xpctations x Ire.
It’s followed almost immediately by one from his mother in Cornwall.
Dear Arthur please ask your aunt to refrain from reading and commenting on my private mail from you; it is gross invasion of not just my privacy but also yours. Also please ask her to confirm when she is planning to return to Cornwall to stay because I must sort my late summer diary and can plan no movement of my own while your aunt is abroad saving the world (again) and remaining unforthcoming about her date of return.
He’s got into the habit of thinking up something conceptual or metaphysical to ask them both every week or so. He copies them both into everything he sends them. This infuriates them. Good. They’re of the generation to enjoy infuriation, and the fury keeps them in touch with one another as well as with him. It’s difficult sometimes, though, to think what to ask them. So sometimes he asks them something he imagines someone else might be likely to ask. He thought up a good Charlotte-like question last week.
Hi, it’s me, your son and nephew. I have a question for you. What’s the difference between politics and art?
His mother replied just to him: Dear Arthur, Politics and Art are polar opposites. As a very fine poet once said, we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us. That’d be John Keats; his mother has read everything John Keats ever wrote and has even gone to Italy especially to see his grave. Such a narrow grassy space to hold such force of spirit, she said when she came back.
He copied this message to Iris.
Iris replied saying Keats was an anomaly, no Eton or Harrow or Oxbridge for him and that therefore every word Keats wrote and managed to publish was bloody well politicized all right & th diff dear Neph is more betwn artist and politician – endlss enemies coz they both knw THE HUMAN will alwys srface in art no mtter its politics, & THE HUMAN wll hv t be absent or repr
essed in mst politics no mtter its art x Ire.
He copied this to his mother. His mother replied just to him: Dear Arthur, please stop sharing my private messages with your aunt, and dear Iris, since I know he’ll copy this one to you too do you by any chance have a return date yet?
The human will always surface.
Today when he gets home he sits outside his own front door at the top of the stairs behind the firedoors and composes a question he’d like, himself, to be able to ask Lux.
He knows that whatever she’d give as an answer would be enlightening.
Hi, it’s me, your son and nephew. Why is it, what is it in us, in our natures, that means that people would want to pay actual money to make it difficult for other people not just to live but to be literally saved from dying?
He sends it with a link to the article he read over the person’s shoulder on the tube. Then he goes in, sits on his bed and texts Charlotte the tender air quote in case it’s useful for an Art in Nature.
Art in Nature is now a co-written blog by a communal group of writers.
(He’s been asked to help write July.)
He surfs for a bit.
He reads, on the same site as the story about the people paying money to hurt people in the Mediterranean, an article about how a department store chain is about to start selling a teaset which reports back to the company that sells it via an app about how it weathers in the houses of the people who buy it or own it, what gets broken when, what gets most used, and what gets left in the box or the cupboard.
It reminds him of her again.
Lux.
How can anyone disappear so completely in such an age of everything tracked and known?
That’s when he looks up online the library the woman in the British Library told him about, in Canada.
Fissure?
Fisher.
He checks through online images for an image. It’s quite hard to find anything but eventually he does.
At least, he thinks he does. He looks at the photograph of an old page on his screen.
Is that it? Is that the flower?
That sort of smudgy mark?
The ghost of a flower is more what it looks like.
Who knows who pressed it in the book, who knows when? There it is.
The shape left by the bud makes it like the ghost of a flame too, like the shadow of a steady little flame.
He magnifies it on the laptop screen so he can see it more clearly.
He looks at it as closely as he can.
It’s the ghost of a flower not yet open on its stem, the real thing long gone, but look, still there, the mark of the life of it reaching across the words on the page for all the world like a footpath that leads to the lit tip of a candle.
July:
it is a balmy day at the start of the month. An American President is making a speech in Washington at a rally to celebrate war veterans. The rally is called the Celebrate Freedom Rally.
The people in the crowd behind him and in front of him wave flags and chant the initials of the name of the country on earth that they live in.
Benjamin Franklin reminded his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention to begin by bowing their heads in prayer, he says. I remind you that we’re going to start saying Merry Christmas again.
Then he talks about the words that are written on American money as if it’s money itself that’s the prayer.
Now it’s a balmy day near the end of the month. The same American President is encouraging the Scouts of America, gathered at the 2017 National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia, to boo the last President and to boo the name of his own opponent in last year’s election.
And by the way, under the Trump administration, he says, you’ll be saying Merry Christmas again when you go shopping, believe me. Merry Christmas. They’ve been downplaying that little beautiful phrase. You’re going to be saying Merry Christmas again, folks.
In the middle of summer it’s winter. White Christmas. God help us, every one.
Art in nature.
A number of books and resources
about Greenham Common and twentieth
century UK protest have helped in
the writing of this book, especially texts
by Caroline Blackwood and Ann Pettitt.
A core inspiration was Elizabeth Sigmund’s
Rage Against the Dying (1980).
Huge thank you to Sophie Bowness
and the Estate of Barbara Hepworth,
and to Eleanor Clayton.
Thank you, Andrew and Tracy,
and everybody at Wylie’s.
Thank you, Simon.
Thank you, Lesley.
Thank you, Caroline,
Sarah, Hermione, Ellie, Anna,
and everyone at
Hamish Hamilton.
Thank you, Kate Thomson.
Thank you, Lucy H.
Thank you, Mary.
Thank you, Xandra.
Thank you, Sarah.
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