by Ali Smith
She is saying something congratulatory about what a grown-up way it is to do things.
His mother says marry in May and you’ll rue the day.
His parents are laughable.
They are having a meltdown about their own deaths getting closer and closer now they are so ancient.
His father: Call no man happy till he is dead.
His mother: Kill yourself. Then you’ll be happy.
His father: Tell you what. It’ll be you that’s the death of me.
Remembering that particular fight Robert Greenlaw forgets where he is, forgets to take care, finds he’s braced himself against the memory of the fight without knowing his body is even doing it, and in unbracing himself puts both feet on the creaker step by mistake.
CREAK
Shit.
Everyone stops speaking in the lounge.
Then his mother comes to the lounge door and looks up. She sees the top of his head.
Robert? she says.
Actress pause.
She comes round and up three of the steps.
Why on earth aren’t you at school? she says.
She says it with parental indignation rather than the usual deadpan way because there’s a visitor in.
Robert Greenlaw stands up so that he is even higher above her.
In one of my quantum lives I am actually in school right now, he says. Doing uh (he checks the time on his phone), maths.
His mother has no idea what quantum is or what he’s talking about. As per. She looks at him in bewilderment.
So Robert Greenlaw, quantum son, who knows he can get away with quite a bit by simply acting like he has the right and believes in his right to do whatever it is he’s doing, adjusts his stance to superior by squaring his shoulders and turning his head and comes down the stairs as if there’s no question.
Oh, and Robert, his mother says. What’ve you done with the remote?
I am The Remote, he says as if The Remote is an anti-hero with the superpower of being, yes, remote.
Where is it? she says again.
It’s somewhere miles away from here by now, he says going into the lounge.
And that’ll be why they call it a remote, the beautiful visitor says.
—
Robert: sunstruck, first time ever.
First real time.
His surname melts away. He becomes just Robert, plain Robert, nothing but Robert, an unencumbered someone he hasn’t been for so long now that he’d forgotten he could.
Everything is different.
Everything, changed.
The visitor is beautiful.
His mother says her name.
The visitor’s name is Charlotte.
The name CHARLOTTE lights up like a word in a neon sign.
The visitor called Charlotte is lighting up this room.
Robert himself feels as if he too is neon, lightning zagging through him, he is shining, look at his arms, his hands, he is a source of light too because of her. No, he is light, actual light, light itself. Not just that – he is the kind of light that’s in the word delight.
He is filled with a word from childhood. It’s the word joy. It is not a word he has ever given a moment’s thought before, never in his life, and now he is a self shot out of the dark into the light, arms out wide as if to take everything into them, the whole world, the universe round it with all its galaxies, and hold them up to the light, his light, because now nothing will ever end, everything is infinite. It is like smashed light imprisoned in him till now, in pieces, sharp fragments like smashed lightbulb in the pit of his gut, has been understood, known for what it was, is and could be all at once and is now assembling itself and turning him into a BALL OF LIGHT, also quite frankly yes his balls feel full of light, and the tip of his penis, no, his whole penis, and the tips of his toes and his fingers, tip of his nose, his whole body’s become a pointed twig on a tree whose branches are a network of pure light.
!
Hi, the visitor called Charlotte says.
Hi, he says.
Visitor.
Visitation.
There seems to be a force which bodies, by their very presence, exert upon each other:
quote from Einstein, up on his bedroom wall up in the lofty heights of the house. This is something Einstein actually said about Newton, father of gravity. But look what it really means.
!
It is now clear to Robert for the first time that Einstein was a man in love, a man motivated by love, love for everything.
He sees his sister’s hand.
It has a bandage round it.
His sister waves the bandaged hand at him.
Hi, she says.
Yeah, hi, he says. All right?
You might say, she says.
Oh – there’s a man here too.
There was no sound of a man when Robert [Greenlaw] was on the stairs listening.
Who’s he?
Is the man here with the visitor?
The man is here with the visitor.
But is he with the visitor?
His mother clearly thinks they’re together. His sister clearly does. His mother is telling him that Arthur and Charlotte kindly took his sister to A&E after she had some kind of accident where she cut her hand open, then brought her home in their car.
Had to have a stitch, his sister says. Here. And here. The skin came right off.
She points at her bandaged hand with her other hand, up by the fingers then down at the bottom of the palm.
Right, yeah, he says. Wow.
Stitch in time, his sister says. You might say.
Will she tell?
Will she tell in front of the visitor?
Robert puts on his most unconcerned face, looks away, at the floor, makes himself look busy over at the cooker with the coffee maker while his mother talks some more about how kind the visitors have been. Then his mother takes up where she’d left off, trying to justify to the visitors why her ex husband lives next door with his much younger girlfriend.
What could I do? she says. He met her. He fell in love with somebody twenty years younger, now that’s what I call middle-aged spread. But we’re a family, we couldn’t bear not to be together. Or at least close. So when next door came up for sale we bought it and he moved out. I mean, in.
Next door dad, his sister says. One big happy family.
Yeah, but mum. He didn’t move out because he met Ashley, Robert says with his back to everybody.
His voice sounds weird out loud saying things.
He turns round. Nobody is looking at him like he just spoke in a weird voice.
He looks again at her. The visitor, Charlotte, is every bit as stunning to him as when he first saw her.
She really is that beautiful.
He is shocked.
He looks away.
He looks back.
It is like someone is shining a searchlight into him.
Come and sit down, Robert, his mother says.
He comes to the table, sits next to his mother where she patted the bench.
From here he can both look and look away.
His mother is attempting to change the subject and sound reasonable to the visitors by telling the story of the day a couple of months ago when she went into the Nationwide Building Society to pay in some money.
And the TV screen in there was playing, you know, electioneering coverage, news, his mother says. But with the sound down and the subtitles on. And the subtitles, you know the way they appear sort of jerkily on the screen because they’re being typed up by a machine while the person is speaking, anyway the subtitles kept repeating a particular phrase, the phrase was GET BACK SIT DOWN, they kept saying GET BACK SIT DOWN. Which made me wonder what the news story was about
. Till I realized that what the TV news reporter was actually saying was GET BREXIT DONE.
The visitor is beautiful even when she is pretending something with her face.
Like it’s nothing to do with you that Brexit got done, his sister says.
Sacha, that’s unnecessary, his mother says. Anyway. All over now. Done and dusted. We’re lucky. We’re all in the dawn of a new era.
The thing I find most interesting, Robert says again in his strange-to-him voice.
He is fingering the ribbing on his sock while he says it because he daren’t look up or he will forget what he’s saying. Then he remembers what he uses his socks for. He flushes red and stops touching anything. He holds his hand well away from his shin. He levels his gaze at a cup on the table. The beautiful visitor Charlotte is a blur of light beyond the cup.
What do you find interesting? the beautiful visitor Charlotte says.
A particular feature of its lexicon, he says.
Then Robert flushes up because the word lexicon sounds partly like it’s got the word sex in it.
They are all looking at him and waiting for him to say whatever it is he’s going to say next.
Lexicon, his mother says.
What’s that mean? his sister says.
It’s a word about words, the beautiful visitor Charlotte says.
The visitor is not just beautiful, she is verbally brilliant.
Yes, in exactitude, Robert says. In that our father voted remain and our mother voted leave. But that it’s our father who, in the end, was the one who literally had to. Leave.
Oh God, his mother says. Robert.
Which makes it, he says, like the people who voted leave were sort of also issuing a command. It’s quite clever, really. Like, in my physics class there’s a boy, I don’t know his name, whose father is French and has a restaurant, a good one, with a, a, star –
Michelin star? the beautiful visitor says so beautifully that Robert is silenced and looks away, looks down, then a moment later dares a look back at her from under his fringe.
Yeah, and they’re leaving, they have to leave, his sister says.
Robert opens his mouth but no sound comes out.
Something I’ve always wondered, his mother says too brightly (she is changing the subject). Maybe one of you young people can enlighten me. What is cancel culture?
Nobody answers.
The beautiful Charlotte leans forward.
(Her scent crosses Robert.
She smells amazing.)
The beautiful Charlotte winks at his mother.
You know, she says. All that Brexit stuff, it’s nothing. It’s like, pfft. Like a fly laying eggs on a corpse. Because everything’s got to change. Everything.
And just to set the record straight, his mother says like the beautiful Charlotte hasn’t said anything, our fight, my disagreement with my husband, was nothing to do with what I voted for and all to do with your father meeting Ashley.
Yeah, but mum, his sister says. He didn’t meet Ashley till 2018. And he moved out in 2016.
His mother shrugs, breathes deeply in, breathes the air out towards the ceiling and does an actress laugh.
Done and dusted, his sister says. We’ve been done all right.
It’s going to be better, his mother says. For everyone. In the long run.
Einstein says the future is an illusion, Robert says. And the past. And the present.
You can’t stop change, the man who came here with the beautiful visitor Charlotte says.
It is the first thing Robert has heard him say.
Change just comes, the man says. It comes of necessity. You have to go with it and make something of what it makes of you.
Metamorphosis, Charlotte says. It’s always the answer to the unanswerable. Even if it means turning into a beetle, like in the Kafka version.
Oh I love Kafka, his mother says. A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside you. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things ever written.
Robert looks from the man to Charlotte and back again from Charlotte to the man. No. They are not sleeping together. He can always tell. There is something between them. But it’s not that.
And I was wondering, the man says. I wonder if your friend, I mean your neighbour, is it – Ashley?
It is Ashley, his mother says.
She says it like she owns Ashley.
I wonder if Ashley is finding language difficult, the man says, because there is so much to say.
You mean feeling getting in the way of language? Charlotte says.
She says it beautifully.
(Robert opens his mouth and the whisper comes out.)
Yes.
What’s that, Rob? his sister says.
For the last little while she’s been eyeing him, incredulous. She raises one eyebrow. Then she glances from him to Charlotte and back to him and she raises the other eyebrow too.
Because, because, Ashley’s book is actually about that. I mean language, Robert says.
Book? his mother says.
She’s writing a book, Robert says. Or she was.
Ashley’s writing a book? his mother says.
How do you know? his sister says.
I’ve read it. Some of it, he says.
Ashley? his sister says. Let you read a book? That she’s writing?
It’s about lexicons, he says. In politics. The chapters have words or phrases as their titles.
Like what? his mother says.
Humbug, he says. Girly Swot. The People’s Government. Big Ben’s Bongs. It has a section at the back where it defines words. An Updated Lexicon. It looks at the meanings and histories of words like letterbox and, eh, bumboys.
The word comes out of his mouth before he can stop it. He blushes. His sister sniggers.
Bumboys? Charlotte says. What does she write about that?
Like how, he says. The first half of that word is a word that means uh
(oh no)
buttocks.
His sister sniggers at him again.
You’ve gone bright red, she says.
Keep going, Charlotte says.
How it also means like worthless, he says, or not working properly, or a person that’s lazy or irresponsible or homeless. So that the word in the end doesn’t just mean gay, because it carries all the other subcurrent meanings too.
Subcurrent. Fantastic, Charlotte says.
There’s a chapter about the word fantastic as well, he says. About how in politics they keep saying everything’s fantastic just now, how it’s going to be fantastic, and about how that’s a word that’s always about triggering fantasy. And also a chapter about how people in politics talk about what’s happening in World War 2 terms all the time to make people be loyal and take sides and get with the patriotic spirit.
What’s this book called? his mother says.
The Immoral Imagination, he says.
His mother makes a scornful noise.
Well, there you go. There’s no such thing as the immoral imagination, she says. Because there’s no such thing as the moral imagination. The very idea that the imagination is anything to do with morality is spurious.
Well, the man says.
We can imagine anything, Charlotte says. But every human act, including the act of the imagination, bears a moral context.
Yes, Robert says. It does, mum.
That’s not the same as saying the imagination is moral or immoral in itself, his mother says.
It’s assuming we live at all by any code of ethics, Charlotte says.
Robert nods very vigorously.
His sister looks at him and laughs.
The imagination is as free as the wind, his mother says.
Yeah, but the wind isn’t free, his sister says. It’
s driven by climate shift and now by climate damage.
Okay, not the wind, but as free as, as the free-est thing you can imagine that isn’t the wind, his mother says.
Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it, Charlotte says. It depends what you can imagine. And that does tend to depend on the Zeitgeist of the time, and who and what are influencing a mass imagination.
!
She is so clever it makes Robert feel weak. He sits straight like a choirboy in a church, one whose voice will never break and leave him with no singing voice. He is wearing those choirboy smocky clothes. They are bright white. He has never felt so humble. He has never felt so clean, from the top of his head right down to his toenails. He has been washed clean in light. He understands now why porn isn’t at all the same thing as love. You could never do those things so unthinkingly, so humiliatingly, to someone so, so – truly adored.
Adored! Did he ever think in his life he would have a use for such a word?
His mother is still going on.
The imagination can and does do anything it likes and everything it likes, she says.
It can’t, Robert thinks. It shouldn’t.
Like Robert with the bike seats? his sister says.
Robert the choirboy is mortified inside his imaginary smock.
Bike seats, Charlotte says.
She looks at his sister then at Robert. His sister waves her bandaged hand like a little caveman club at him, a mummy’s stump. Robert looks down and away. His head feels very hot.
Mmphgm, he says.
Yeah, and anyway how come he knows anything about anything Ashley’s doing? his sister says. Ashley won’t even let him in the house. I bet he’s making it up to get attention.
I’m not, he says. I’m not making anything up. I took some photos on my phone of some of the pages of her book. This is what she says about the word letterbox.
He scrolls his phone, finger-widens a photo and reads out the following in his best newsreader voice.
Letterbox is a word compiled of the two words letter and box.
A very banal opening, his mother says.
The word letter comes from Middle English via Old French, from Latin origin, littera, meaning an alphabet letter, and litterae, meaning an epistle. It means several things, from a symbol, and part of an alphabet, and something written to represent sound, to a written message, one that’s often sent by post. It can also refer to literature and learning, particularly scholarly achievement, and to precision, especially in matters of law, as in the phrases to the letter and letter of the law. The word box is originally derived from both Greek and Latin, pyxis and buxis. It usually means a four-sided receptacle for holding anything, sometimes with a lid; or a small set-apart seating area in a theatre; or an enclosure that’s small; or the seat for a driver on a coach; or a shield for the genitals of someone playing cricket; or a –
