by Ali Smith
– Okay.
– Okay? Really? You will?
– Okay, I’ll work with you. Play for Today, is it? Okay. On condition we do something more, something a bit more unexpected, in the slot.
– Unexpected how?
– There’s ways to survive these times, Doubledick, and I think one way is the shape the telling takes.
Yesterday morning, a month to the day since the memorial service (they’d had her privately cremated some time before the memorial, he doesn’t even know when, close family only), he is walking along the Euston Road and as he passes the British Library he sees a woman sitting against its wall, thirties, as young as twenties maybe, blankets, square of cardboard ripped off a box on which there are words asking for money.
No, not money. The words on it are please and help and me.
He’s passed countless homeless people even just this morning coming through the city. Homeless people are that word countless again these days; any old lefty like him knows that this is what happens. Tories back in, people back on the streets.
But for some reason he sees her. The blankets are filthy. The feet are bare on pavement. He hears her too. She is singing a song to nobody – no, not to nobody, to herself – in a voice of some notable sweetness, at a quarter to eight in the morning. It goes:
a thousand thousand people
are running in the stre-eet
oh nothing nothing nothing
oh nothing nothing nothing
oh nothing
Richard keeps going. When he stops keeping going he is just past the front of King’s Cross station. He turns and goes in, as if that’s what he meant to do all along.
There is a stall in the middle of the concourse beneath the giant Remembrance poppy. The stall is selling chocolate in the shapes of domestic utensils and tools: hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, cutlery, cups and so on; you can buy a chocolate cup, a chocolate saucer, a chocolate teaspoon and even a chocolate stovetop espresso-machine (the stovetop machine is costly). The chocolate things are extraordinarily lifelike and the stall is thronged with people. A man in a suit is buying what looks like a real kitchen tap, made of silver-sprayed chocolate; the woman selling it to him places it delicately into a box she first lines with straw.
Richard puts his card into one of the ticket machines. He inserts the name of the place that’s the furthest a train from here can go.
He gets on to a train.
He sits on it for half a day.
An hour or so before the train reaches this final destination he’ll see some mountains against some sky through the window and he’ll decide to get off the train at this place instead. What’s to stop him doing what he likes, getting off at a place not printed on the ticket?
Oh nothing nothing nothing.
King Gussie, to rhyme with fussy, is how he’d always thought it was said, like the robot announcer pronounces it over the speakers in London King’s Cross above his head before he boards the train.
Kin-you-see is how it’s said by the guest house people whose door he knocks on when he gets there. They will be suspicious. What kind of person doesn’t book ahead on his phone? What kind of person doesn’t have a phone?
He will sit on the edge of the strange bed in the guest house. He will sit on the floor and brace himself between the bed and the wall.
By tomorrow his clothes will have taken on the air-freshener smell of the room he’ll spend the night in.
11.29. An automaton voice apologizes over the station speaker system that the 11.08 ScotRail service from Edinburgh Waverley is delayed due to a rail incident south of Kingussie, that the 11.09 ScotRail service to Inverness is delayed due to a rail incident south of Kingussie, that the 11.35 ScotRail service from Inverness is delayed due to signalling problems and that the 11.36 ScotRail service to Edinburgh Waverley is delayed due to signalling problems.
Virtue signalling problems, Richard tells his imaginary daughter.
This calls for some serious no-platforming, his imaginary daughter says.
(His imaginary daughter is still with him, even if Paddy’s dead.)
Whenever he’s not sure what something particularly current means, he asks his imaginary daughter. For instance, #metoo.
It means you’re implicated, his imaginary daughter told him. You too.
Then she’d laughed.
What’s a hashtag? he’d asked her.
She’s been about eleven years old now in his head for a couple of decades. He knows it’s patriarchal of him, wrong of him, not to have allowed her, so far anyway, an adult life. (He reckons he’s probably not the only father, not by a long chalk, who feels like that or who’d do this if he could.)
A hashtag is quite different from a hash brown, his imaginary daughter said. Don’t try to eat one. Or smoke one.
In honour of his real daughter, wherever she is in the world, presuming she’s still in the world, he looked it up online to see what it really meant.
About time too, he thought when he did.
Then he didn’t sleep for a fortnight, lying awake at 4am night after night worrying about this time or that when he’d thought it was all right to act however he liked to the women he was with. He’d touched many a leg. He’d taken many a chance. He’d been lucky more often than most. No one’d complained.
At least, not to him.
After a fortnight he started sleeping again. He was too tired not to.
I was sometimes a bit of a devil, you know, he’d told his imaginary daughter in his head.
I’d expect nothing less, his imaginary daughter said.
I was sometimes a bit of a devil, you know, he’d told his real daughter in his head.
Silence.
Last March. Five months before she will die. He navigates the miles of pavement slush between his place and hers. He rings the doorbell. One of the twins lets him in. Paddy is through the back. She hears him in the hall and starts shouting.
Is that my beloved king of the arts?
She’s the kind of thin that looks like her arm might break if it lifts a mug of tea. But the spirit of her is full-force-gale at him as he comes through, about his hair being too long, his shirt stained from, what’ve you been doing, madman-eating? look at your trousers, have you no boots? look at your poor lovely shovelback chest in the terrible stained shirt, Dick, who do you think you are, bloody Pericles of Tyre?
Pericles of Tired, he says. Six miles through blizzards, to talk good governance with you.
Oh you’re the tired one, are you, you self-indulgent fraudster. It’s me that’s the dying woman, she says. Take those wet shoes off.
You’ll never die, Paddy, he says.
Oh yes I will, she says.
Oh no you won’t, he says.
Grow up, she says, it’s no pantomime, we all will, it’s a modern fantasy and malaise that we won’t, don’t fall for it, and right now it’s my turn for the boat with the hole in it, not yours, so back off.
We’re all in that same boat, Pad, Richard says.
Stop thieving my tragedy, she says. Put the shoes on top of that radiator. Get the socks off your feet and up on to the radiator. Dermot, bring a towel and put the kettle on.
Ship of the liberal world, he says. We thought we’d be shipmates sailing that ship into the sunset horizon forever.
All changed, changed utterly, she says. How’s the ship of the new world order shaping up out there, then?
He laughs.
Shape of a ship in a computer game, he says. Digitally designed to be torpedoed.
Human ingenuity, she says. You have to applaud it, finding such interesting new ways to enjoy the destroying of things. How’re you doing, apart from the end of liberal capitalist democracy? I mean, it’s nice to see you, but what do you want?
He tells her his news, that he’s just found out he’s been assigned Martin Terp’s latest.
Terp? Oh Jesus Christ, she says.
I know, Richard says.
God help you, and that’s help you’re going to
need, she says. Assigned for what? to do what?
He tells her about the novel about the two writers who happen by coincidence both to live in and around the same small Swiss town in 1922 but don’t ever meet each other.
Katherine Mansfield? she says. Really? Are you sure?
That’s the name, he says.
Neighbours with Rilke? she says. And is it true?
The acknowledgements page at the back of the novel swears it’s true, he says.
What kind of a novel? she says. Written by whom?
Literary, he says. Second novel by Nella something, Bella. A lot of language. Not much happens.
And they’ve given a project like this to Twerp? she says.
It’s a bestseller. Been on all the shortlists, he says.
I’m a bit off that particular radar, she says. Any good?
Paperback blurb says an idyll of peace and quiet, a gift from the past, be swept away, luxuriate, escape from an era of Brexit, all that, he says. I quite liked it. Two people live quiet writerly lives and pass each other sometimes in a hotel corridor. One’s finishing a life’s work, though she doesn’t know it. She’s ill. To get away from fighting with her husband, who’s further up the mountain, she’s come down it to live in this hotel with her friend, a rather mousy-seeming character. The other writer, how do you say the name?
Rilke, Paddy says.
He’s finished a life’s work earlier that year, Richard says, he’s exhausted. He’s got renovations happening in the tower he lives in, so he’s moved down the road into the same hotel till the renovation finishes. It finishes, he’s off home, and he leaves the hotel just as she arrives, with her friend like a packhorse carrying all their bags on her back. But he likes to eat there, so he wanders down the road most evenings for dinner, it’s a ski resort and it’s summer so the place is empty, the hotel as well as the town, and sometimes the two writers end up sitting not far from each other in the same dining room. Sometimes they walk past each other in the hotel gardens, and the novel goes on at some length about the mountains above them and them below etc just, you know, living their lives with all that grandeur of the Alps as their backdrop.
And what happens? Paddy says.
I just told you the whole plot, he says.
Hmm, Paddy says.
A season changes, he says. They never meet. Horses, cloche hats and little waistcoats, high grass, flowers, meadows with cows in them, cows with bells round their necks. Costume drama.
She shakes her head.
But Terp, she says. Disaster. Can you get out of it?
He holds up the cuff of his shirt so she can see where it’s frayed. Then he holds up the cuff on his other wrist, also frayed.
Have you seen any script? she says.
I have, he says.
Are there terrorists in it? she says.
They both laugh. Last year they’d watched together the whole iPlayer box set of National Trust, Martin Terp’s latest drama, which has had rave reviews all across the media: five heaving-breast explosion-filled episodes about police and intelligence operatives dealing with a group of female Islamist terrorists who’ve barricaded themselves and some suicide vests into a north of England stately home with several members of the public and a newly qualified Historic England guide as their hostages.
I’m here today to tell you, Paddy. There’s worse than terrorists, Richard says.
He tells her that Martin Terp has already handed in a series of draft sex scenes, about which the people at the UK broadcaster who originally commissioned the adaptation and the people at the massive online retailer that’s largely funding the film have all been very enthusiastic.
Sex scenes? Paddy says.
He nods.
Between Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke? she says. In, what did you say – 1922?
In his tower, in her hotel room, in various other hotel beds including her friend’s bed, there’s a bit of lesbian interest too, and – wait, I’m not finished – in the hotel’s gardens in a little grotto where a string quartet usually plays, in the hotel corridor wrapped in a curtain behind a pot plant, and in the hotel’s billiard room on the billiard table, the balls go everywhere. Comedy fuck, he says.
Paddy laughs out loud.
I’m not laughing at the comedy fuck, she says. I’m laughing because it’s not just laughable, it’s impossible. For one thing, Mansfield had fully-developed TB by 1922. She died of it at the start of 1923.
I know, he says. I’m already sore here because of her fully-developed TB.
He takes her too-thin hand and puts it on his chest. She smiles at him, raises an eyebrow.
Fish are jumpin, Doubledick.
Somatize and the living is easy. Since they started working together, since Sea of Troubles when he’d literally turned a shade of what she called Irish green for the six weeks of the shoot and she’d diagnosed it as seasickness, Paddy’s theory’s been that when what he’s making starts to happen in his own body then the outcome’s charmed, the outcome will be good.
He grins, lets go of her hand.
Can’t make anything good without you, he says.
I’d gainsay you there but I can’t, can I, now you’ve told me it’s Terp that’s the new me, she says. And don’t make me even more annoyed. This is one I’d give a lot to be doing with you. Katherine Mansfield. Jesus, a script about Katherine Mansfield. And Rilke. Literary giants, Mansfield and Rilke, same place, same time. Amazing.
If you give a damn, Richard says.
Oh, I give a damn all right, she says. The stories Mansfield wrote in Switzerland were her best. And him, about to finish the Elegies, write the Orpheus poems. Their two brilliances, going down into the dark to find the ways to talk about the life and the death. The seminal remakers of the forms they were using. There, in the same room at the same time. The very thought. It’s mindblowing, if it’s true, Dick. Really.
Take your word for it, he says.
She shakes her head.
Rilke, she says. And Mansfield.
Now Richard remembers; now the penny drops. Katherine Mansfield will be one of the many women writers Paddy’s told him about all along, one of the writers she’s been telling him about for decades and he’s never listened about or done anything much about.
He tells her something he makes up on the spot, that he’d always imagined the Mansfield she’s talked about over the years as rather Victorian, a thin spinstery sort of person, a bit prim and innocent.
Prim and innocent! Paddy says. Mansfield!
She laughs out loud.
Katherine Mansfield Park, she says.
Richard laughs too, though he doesn’t really get why it’s funny.
She was an adventurer all right, and in all the ways, Paddy says. Sexual adventurer, aesthetic adventurer, social adventurer. A real world-traveller. A life of all sorts of loves, very risqué for her time, I mean, she was fearless. Pregnant God knows how many times, always to the wrong people, got herself married to a virtual stranger so her child by someone else would be legit, then miscarried it. Is that in the book?
No, Richard says. Nothing like that.
Got herself behind the lines in the First World War, Paddy says, to spend a night with a French lover who was fighting. She showed the officials the postcard her ‘aunt’ had sent her saying would she please visit urgently. Sent by her soldier lover. Signed it Marguerite Bombard. Bombardment of daisies! She shocked into distaste all those people who thought they were the social revolutionaries. Made them seem suburban, Woolf, Bell, the Bloomsburys. A New Zealand savage they thought her, the little colonial. Oh, she was a pioneer all right.
Paddy shakes her head.
But the weight of a blanket on her chest in her bed was too heavy for Mansfield in the year 1922, she says. Never mind sex. In 1922, sweet Jesus, from what I know, she was so weak she could hardly walk from a carriage to the door of a hotel. And hotels were a bit iffy about the consumptive, wouldn’t let a coughing girl stay. Different in Swit
zerland, maybe, where consumption tourism was an industry.
An industry how? Richard says.
Good clean air, she says.
How come you know everything about everything, Paddy? he says.
Please, Paddy says. Don’t get at me for knowing. I’m a dying species, I’m that thing nobody out there thinks is relevant any more. Books. Knowledge. Years of reading. All of which means? I know stuff.
That’s why I’m here, he says.
Thought as much, she says.
She wedges herself against the edge of the table and pushes back her chair. She takes hold of the side of the table and stands herself up. She takes a moment because standing up has made her dizzy. She sees him tense and move as if to help her.
Don’t, she says.
She looks towards the booklined hall.
I think the Rilke I had is long gone to the heaven of the Amnesty charity shop, she says. A man beautifully dead well before he was dead. Look at this bowl of roses, he said, and forget all the distracting things in the so-called real world. But there’s only so many angels and roses, only so much death-as-a-means-of-expression-come-into-me-and-me-into-you-and-together-we’ll-conquer-death-by-dying that a woman can take. Especially a dying woman. But I’m being unfair.
She walks herself over to the entrance to the hall. She balances herself against the wall, then against the books themselves, and moves along the shelf until she gets to the letters of the alphabet she wants.
Nope, no Rilke left, she says. Told you I was unfair. But I’ve plenty Mansfield for you.
She pulls out a book, opens it, leans it and herself against the other books and flicks through it. She claps the book shut and tucks it under her arm. She pulls another couple of books out. At this point Paddy is still strong enough to walk across a room with two or three hardback books held against her chest. She lets them fall on to the table in front of him. He reads what catches his eye where one of them’s fallen open.
A storm rages while I write this dull letter. It sounds so splendid, I wish I were out in it.
Ha, he says.
Paddy smiles. Then she taps with a claw-finger a couple of times at the date at the top of the open page, where it says 1922. She gets back to her seat and lowers herself into it.
