by Ali Smith
he blushes
vagina;
his face is burning
or a coffin; or the name for a small evergreen tree or hedge. Different derivation gives it as a thump or blow on the head, or the act of hitting with a fist, as in to box, and to box can also mean to enclose or make enclosed, to shut in.
Oh for God sake, his mother says.
Is there more? Charlotte says.
He nods.
In British usage, letterbox means a hole in a door or a box placed outside a house as a secure point either for collection or delivery of mail, or a place, compartment or slot whereby mail that’s either being delivered or waiting to be delivered can be deposited and picked up safely by either deliverer or recipient. Other words like it are pillarbox (so called because of the shape of the collection box) and mailbox. In more recent years it has also come to describe an aspect ratio for films transferred to video that recreates widescreen format on a small screen.
Facile, his mother says.
Does anyone want me to keep going? he says.
Me, Charlotte says.
The iconic UK status of the letterbox is made clear in a publication like The Postman and the Postal Service, one of the Ladybird People at Work series from the 1965 UK Ladybird ‘Easy Reading’ imprint of books for children. (This book was reissued in 2016 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Royal Mail.) It featured on its cover a painted illustration of a postman emptying the contents of a bright red letterbox with the royal insignia on the front into a brown sack. He is standing near the kerb next to another British classic, a red Mini van (a typical post van of the time). Behind him, beyond a hedge and some fencing, is a typical British suburban house. Inside, the book featured illustrations of things from the first horsebacked postmen to the apparatus invented in the c20th to collect mailbags from moving trains; it detailed the purchasing of stamps, the mailing of a letter, the sorting, the delivery; it explained why letterboxes are painted the royal colour, red, and how Royal Mail got its name. In 1983 the Ladybird imprint published another book, The Postal Service, in its People Who Help Us series. This was a more modern look at a modern postal service, full of images showing the work of a dedicated community for the wider community. It explained and celebrated the astonishing and quotidian achievement of getting the written message from place of sending to place of delivery as speedily as possible via a national institution working at its best to deliver on every level, and to connect people for every imaginable reason. One of its central symbols throughout was the bright red Royal Mail letterbox.
I mean, very informative, his mother says. But hardly publishable.
You haven’t heard the last bit, he says. About what the iconic British letterbox means right now in the updated lexicon.
Go on, Charlotte says.
In summer 2018, after a disagreement with the then UK prime minister, a backbench MP who’d resigned from his post as Foreign Secretary – a man who just under a year later would become UK prime minister himself – wrote an article he published in the Evening Standard where he stated that though he personally declared himself not intolerant enough to believe Muslim women who wore full face veil burqas should be banned from wearing what their religion often required of them, all the same he thought it ridiculous of Muslim women to choose to go around looking like letterboxes. Their choice of clothing, he said, didn’t just make them resemble letterboxes but also bank robbers.
He was paid £275,000 for the article, which he wrote in breach of ministerial code, and which was cited in the following days as the reason for a quadrupling of anti-Muslim attacks and incidents in the UK.
In the run-up to the UK general election of 2019 he repeatedly refused to grant that there’d been anything harmful, irresponsible, or troubling in the message sent by his rhetoric. This was at a time when attacks on people with Islamic beliefs across the world were rising, with first America then India closing borders to Muslims, India legislating against Muslims and orchestrating attacks, beatings, lynchings, arrests and killings of Muslims and the recent cordoning off of the whole of Kashmir, alongside a massive coordinated international right-wing militarization, and, in China, a simultaneous instigation of ‘re-education’ detention centres for Muslims.
Wow, Charlotte says.
Kudos to Ashley, his sister says. Can I send that to Ayat?
No, Robert says.
Updated Lexicon? Charlotte says. Is that what she calls it?
Yes, Robert says.
Thank you for reading it out, Charlotte says.
S’okay, Robert says.
Why can’t I? his sister says. She told me a horrific thing, about a man who stopped her mother in the street outside their dry cleaners and pretended he was trying to post a letter into her eyes then tried to get everyone passing in the street to laugh. Nobody did. He just looked like a lunatic. But it’s what actually happened to them after that article. It made mad people go even madder.
Be really good material for Art in Nature, the man says.
It would, Charlotte says.
I’ve also got photos of the humbug, piccaninny and die in a ditch pages here if anyone’d like to see or hear them, Robert says. They’re really interesting.
I would, his sister says.
I meant anyone other than you, Robert says.
Do you think Ashley’d mind if you forwarded some of these to us? Charlotte says. Have you got an email address for her?
She won’t mind, Robert says. You don’t have to ask her. I can forward them right now if you tell me your phone number.
Probably best we ask her first, Charlotte says.
His sister laughs under her breath.
So, Charlotte says. Ashley started writing a book about words. Then she stopped being able to speak words. Is that it?
In exactitude, Robert says.
Ashley, his mother says. Writing a book.
She shakes her head dramatically, ie like an actress would. His mother is an educated elite. She thinks books are her thing, her personal possession that nobody else has the same right to as she does.
She must like you a lot, Robert, if she’s let you read it and photograph it, Charlotte says. She must really trust you.
His sister laughs out loud.
Robert doesn’t care because Charlotte has just said his name.
Ashley hates him, his sister says.
Writing isn’t an easy thing to do, the man says.
Arthur and Charlotte speak from real experience. They’re both real writers, his mother says.
Online, mainly, the man says.
They’re here doing medical research, his mother says.
Well, no, Charlotte says. More like reportage.
About the mist that came in on Worthing beach and hurt everybody in the eyes and made people sick, his mother says.
In August, Charlotte says. And the sewage spills over the last few years. When they closed the front and the pier and they moved everyone off the beach.
His sister is scrolling her phone.
Tea cosy, his sister says. I’m going to text Ashley and ask her if she’ll write about that. The prime minister said at the start of the week that CO2 emissions were cladding the world like a tea cosy.
Which demonstrates exactly how un-urgent he thinks things are and wants other people to think, Charlotte says.
Ashley’s phone is broken right now, Robert says. It can’t get texts.
(But it’s all right. His sister has already forgotten about talking to Ashley about tea cosies.)
And also, she says. Someone here tell me. What exactly is skunk?
You know what a skunk is, his mother says. God help us, probably someone somewhere is eating one right now and starting a new Asian virus.
Nobody laughs.
My mother the racist, his sister says. And I’m not talki
ng about a skunk, just skunk. I don’t mean the spliff kind. It says here some soldiers have just spent the morning spraying a street where Palestinian people live with it. With skunk. What exactly is skunk?
It must be something that smells foul, Charlotte says.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world, the man says. Wittgenstein. I think.
(The man is a member of the educated elite.)
Wittgenstein, wonderful, his mother says. Isn’t he?
You very much remind me of my Aunt Iris, the man says to his sister.
Who? his sister says. Me?
She was at Greenham, he says. She was on the first ever anti-nuclear peace march to Aldermaston. She ran a commune near Porton Down, protested against and did research and drew public attention to biological warfare, nerve gas and tear gas manufacture, hidden poisons people weren’t being told about. She’s just back from Greece, again. She’s been working in the crisis in the Mediterranean.
She’s quite a woman, Charlotte says.
What’s Greenham? his sister says.
Famous activist university, Charlotte says.
Don’t be sarky, the man says. Iris is the reason the phrase salt of the earth has any salt in it. At all.
No, she’s quite a force, Iris, Charlotte says.
We need a whole new education, his sister says. The past’s the past. What’s coming’s stuff we can’t even imagine.
She’s even more like Iris than I thought, the man says.
Are you writing a book? Robert says.
He is saying it to Charlotte, not the man. But because he still finds it hard to look at Charlotte he can’t be sure she knows he was speaking to her until she replies.
No, she says. We’re not really that kind of writer.
We’re. Plural. Robert’s chest twinges.
We’re the online sort, the man says. We run a website called Art in Nature which provides thoughtful analysis of the shapes things take in art and nature and, yeah, things like language too, and the structure of the ways we live, and so on.
We’re We
Does that pay very well? his mother asks.
Charlotte and the man say it hardly pays at all but it’s got thousands of hits and is on a steady upward trend so at some point maybe it will, and that at the moment they’re living off an inheritance. Charlotte explains that she’s also becoming really fed up of the net and the way it’s taken over everybody’s lives. The man she’s with looks pained when she says this. Good. Things are uneasy between them.
I keep saying, the man says. A person who helps run an online analysis can’t do it by boycotting going online.
Hits, his sister says.
She starts telling the story of the teacher at Robert’s school getting hit in the head with a brick because she sent kids home saying foreign words from other countries to their parents.
(But his sister doesn’t know the story. It’s Robert who knows the story.
He was there. She wasn’t. He was one of the kids watching when it happened.
Someone’s father: You’re using words on purpose that people don’t know the meanings of. You’re teaching our offspring foreign words.
The teacher: But rancour is just another word for anger. I suggest we stop the anger.
The father: If we want to be angry we’ll be it in the Queen’s English. You don’t have the right to use words from other languages any more.
The teacher: The word Bildungsroman just means a story of a person’s personal development. It’s crossed over into English from German and now it’s an English term. If you’re going to write about this famous English novel in an exam, you have to know the word Bildungsroman.
The father: You’re doing it again.
The teacher: Look. It’s just a fact. A story about learning how to live and maturing into adulthood is called a Bildungsroman.
Which is when the brick got thrown and the police got called.)
It was about a word a class was being taught because of the book David Copyfield, Robert says.
David Copperfield! his mother says. That’s it! Sacha, that’s it! Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life! First lines of David Copperfield. Or whether that station will be held by anybody else.
It’s hero, though, isn’t it? Charlotte says. Whether I’ll turn out to be the hero.
Yes, I know, but we did our own version, his mother says. Back in the 80s. Feminist. We took it round schools. Back in my acting days. We called it The World As It Rolled, I don’t know why we did, if I ever knew why it’s gone. It was all about what happened to the female characters from the book. It opened with us all saying that line, those lines, in chorus, and we were all holding copies of the book and riffling through the pages. Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
His mother talks on and on about times she had when she was acting when she was young, because the visitors are shortly going to be driving somewhere she once had an idyllic summer acting in.
Funny, she says. I hadn’t thought about it for years, until this morning. And then we were watching TV and I saw this woman on screen that I knew, back then, years ago, and then after you went to school, Sacha, I was sitting here and thinking and I remembered all sorts of people and things I’d forgotten. I remembered I had the loveliest time in Suffolk one summer. And you’re off there right now.
Suffolk? Robert says. Is that near Norfolk?
It is, Charlotte says. Right next to it.
She smiles at him.
Because she does, he gets the words of his next sentence mixed up.
Is Cromer the place near? he says.
His sister laughs her speculative laugh again.
The man who came with Charlotte has tracked down someone who used to know his dead mother and they’re going to visit the person there.
I’m so sorry. When did she die? his mother says.
They start talking about when the mother died etc which was ages ago, like over a year ago.
She was a person who never compromised, never much gave herself away, the man says. So it was surprising that she left a request like this, something so specific.
She left a note with her lawyer, Charlotte says, that she wanted Art to track down his family, remember her to them and pass on a memento.
Not someone she ever mentioned, the man says. Not that I recall. Anyway I looked him up, I found some info for him because he was a songwriter in the 1960s, and it so happens he’s still alive. So we’re off to meet him.
What’s the sea on the coast you’re going to? his sister asks.
The North Sea, Robert says.
Is the North Sea actually I mean water-wise in any real way different from the Channel? his sister says. Or is the sea round Britain all the same water and only different because of the names people give it?
His sister is an ignoramus.
It’s a good question, Charlotte says.
Robert readjusts his face to look like he also thinks it’s a good question.
Oh, lovely Suffolk, his mother says. Cornfields high. The cornheads swinging like their own golden wave of the sea. Blue sky above, sea beyond. The gold against the blue.
Bit early in the year for the corn, the man says.
I felt immortal that summer, his mother says.
Sounds like quite a summer, Mrs Greenlaw, Charlotte says.
Call me Grace, his mother said. Ah, now. Thereby hangs a tale. Back in those days we so much wanted to go brown that we’d spray ourselves with olive oil out of a plant-spray bottle then let the sun fry us deeper and deeper brown. How stupid we were. But what summers. They were wonderful. The smell of cut grass.
His mother is infantile.
Old Robert [Greenlaw] (silently): summe
r can fuck off, it’s never as good as you think it’ll be, usually shit weather and even if it is hot now hot just means a whole other kind of shit weather in which it’s too hot to do anything, and the leaves hang off the trees going a duller filthier colour by the week and everywhere smells of shit and sick, all the litter bins smell of off milk, the whole season is like the smell round a rubbish truck as it moves through the city and like you’re stuck on a bike behind it going way too slowly down a too-narrow street.
New Robert (out loud): Einstein. He went there.
Einstein? To Suffolk? Charlotte says.
Norfolk, Robert says. In person. In the year 1933.
Then someone else says something else. Charlotte turns to the something else.
The visitors are getting ready to go. They stand up in a valedictory way.
Robert’s insides become a struggling bird.
But it’s been really lovely to meet you all, the visitors say.
She is going. She is leaving.
Electro minus magnetism.
His chest starts to hurt.
He can feel his eyes grow round.
He now knows a pure and inarguable thing about the infrastructure of everything. When two particles are entangled then a change to one no matter where the other particle is in the universe will mean there’s a change in the other.
But how do the particles know? How do they know whether entanglement has or hasn’t taken place?
It is someone maybe 30 years old.
He is Robert, 13.
There is no way.
Not for several (at least 3) years.
Not that he is thinking of anything bodily anyway.
