by Ali Smith
I can cry about anything I like, she says.
He is surprised. Can people just do that, cry about anything they like? He wishes it held true for him. He can never cry about anything.
His future wife, rubbing her face against his chest hair to dry her eyes, which feels actually very erotic, and sex quite often does make her cry in their early days together, tells him that after she’s dead she’s going to come back every year as blossom on a tree.
And if you die before me, he says, I will spend all the time I’m alive and not with you negotiating the various time differences across the world so that I can spend as much time as a man possibly can on this planet in springtime, in search of you.
She bursts into tears again when he says it. He feels very romantic.
Five years on from this spring promise he’ll walk through their house towards the shattered panel of glass in the back door some days after something’s been thrown at it (the kettle? the cat?), because the whole door is now a frosted jigsaw of fragments, and since it’s one of the light sources for much of downstairs, and he’ll sell the house all the years later without ever having had it repaired, it’ll be like the house is stuck in winter light for nearly a decade no matter the actual season.
Now? He is a man at a station waiting for his last train.
The seasons are meaningless.
No – worse than meaningless. Paddy is rubble, and time just keeps on going. Autumn, then there’ll be winter. Then there’ll be spring, and so on.
He looks down at the rails, the neat-keptness of their pattern. He looks at the ground round about them, the stony stuff and grass round the neatness.
I’m rubble too, he thinks. Just in a different form. The whole world and all its people. Rubble.
So shouldn’t we be treating the world better? the imaginary daughter says in his head. Since it’s so much us? Since we’re so literally made of it?
My darling, you’re imaginary, he says.
Yeah, I know, she says.
You don’t exist, he says.
And yet here I am, she says.
Go away, he says.
How can I? she says. I’m you.
That’s when the train appears down the track. It approaches. It draws level. It stops. Its doors beep.
Only the very back set of doors opens; nobody else is getting off except these two people he passes, a girl and a woman, one white, one mixed race, the woman in some kind of uniform, thick trenchcoat, the girl in schoolclothes that look too thin for the north of Scotland. The story about them, whatever it is, starts to spark away but on the worst terms, nothing but outer appearance.
Extinguish it.
What a relief, to be finished, finished with it all for good, and he passes them by, they’ve become nothing but rubble too, same as everything else, right now they’re really useful ballast because they’re blocking the view between him and a station guard, a woman in high-vis who’s come out to meet the train.
There’s not much room to fit a body under. This train is pretty close to the ground. Its metal, down here at the less visible level, is caked with mud. Even the machine has to encounter nature, not even it can escape the earth. There’s something reassuring in that.
He bends to the train’s, what’s the word? Underneath. Underside.
If he gets his body down prone on the ground he can get his head – he looks to see where the wheels are. He lies down on his front. Stones. Grass. Metal. He turns over. He tries to get his head near the wheel with the back of his neck against the rail.
In less than a minute from now several people in high-vis will be running towards the end of the platform from the station offices.
But right now, nothing. A moment of nothing.
Another moment of nothing.
You’d think a late train would leave a station faster.
The underside of a train drips with a kind of truth. Well, to be more truthful, with filthy water. He closes his eyes.
Any second now he will stop time in its tracks.
Any second now time’ll be over.
Any second now.
–
Hey.
Hey. Sir.
He opens an eye. One of the drips hits him in it. He lifts a hand to rub it and bangs the back of it on something metal, jerks his head when he does and hits his forehead hard off the underside of the train.
Ow.
Excuse me, sir.
He wrenches his head out from under the train.
A girl, a real one, the one who’d just got off this train, is crouched on the edge of the platform along from the back of the train. She is looking straight at him.
I really need you not to do that, she says.
February. The first bee hits the window glass.
The light starts to push back, stark in the cold. But birdsong rounds the day, the first and last thing as the light comes and goes.
Even in the dark the air tastes different. In the light from the streetlight the branches of the bare trees are lit with rain. Something has changed. No matter how cold it is that rain’s not winter rain any more.
The days lengthen.
That’s where the word Lent comes from.
In Latin the name of the month derives from words about how to purify, how to appease the gods, usually by burnt offerings, probably both etymologically sourced in Februa, the Roman feast of purification. Vegetation month, month of the return of the sun, rain-month, cabbage-sprouting month, month of ravenous wolves, month of cakes offered to the gods for a good year, good harvest, good life.
In the Highlands of Scotland, back when traditions were more closely followed than they are now, it was the month when people lit candles to call the sun back to the earth (the source of Candlemas); at this time of the year girls would model shapes out of the last sheaves of the last harvest’s corn, place their creations in a cradle and dance round the cradle singing a song about life coming back, about the snakes waking and leaving their nests, the birds returning, about St Bride, or Brigid, or Bridget of Kildare, patron saint of, among many things, Ireland, fertility, the season of spring, pregnant women, blacksmiths and poets, cows and milkmaids, mariners and boatmen, midwives and illegitimate children. A version of a celtic fire goddess called Brid, in whose honour people used to light bonfires, she was also a blesser of holy wells and places whose water is still said to have the power to cure ailments, especially of the eyes.
Whatever her name was, she took her father’s sword which was studded with jewels and gave it away to the local lepers. They gouged out the jewels and sold them for food. She gave her father back his empty sword.
Then she asked an Irish king to give her some land she could build an abbey on, where a community of women could live and dedicate themselves to charity.
But the king wasn’t listening. He was looking at her breasts.
When he saw her see him looking, he looked instead at the little cape she was wearing over her shoulders.
Will you give me as much land as this cape I’m wearing will cover? she said.
The king laughed. Okay, he said.
She took the cape off and put it down on the ground. The cape began to spread. It grew and it grew. Brigid took one corner. Three other versions of Brigid took the other corners. They started walking, one east, one west, one north and one south.
Brigid herself went north. She crossed a field of mud. Wherever she stepped, wherever her feet touched the ground, flowers sprang up out of the nothing there.
2
* * *
Now don’t go getting us wrong.
We want the best for you. We want to make the world more connected. We want you to feel the world is yours. We want you to see the world through us. We want you to be yourself. We want you to feel a little less alone. We want you to find others just like you.
We want you to know we’re your best source of knowledge in the world. We want to know everything about you. We want to know about all the places you go. We want to know wher
e you are right now. We want you to post images of what it is you’re looking at so you will remember this special moment always. We want you to take a look at what you posted ten years ago right now. Happy Anniversary! We want to remind you regularly of the special moments you’ve had in the past. We want to show you what your friends were posting ten years ago right now. We want you to record your lives because your lives mean so much. We want you to know you mean something in the world. We want you to know how much you mean to us. We want you to know we’re very interested in what matters to you. We want you to know it matters to us too.
We want to count every step you take. We want to help you be fit and strong. We want to know what makes your heart beat faster. We want you to send us a sample of your DNA and a sum of money so we can help you find out who you are, who your family is and was and where you came from in history, and we want it only for these totally legitimate reasons as a useful service to you.
We want you to be everything that you can be: friends, in a relationship, single, and complicated. We want to know what you buy. We want to know what music you’re listening to on your headphones. We want to know what you’re wearing. We want to tailor our advertising bespoke to you. We want it to be right for you. We want you to find out more about yourself. We want you to take our fun psychological personality test to find out what kind of person you really are and who you’ll vote for in elections. We want to be able to categorize you precisely for helpful input for other people’s fun projects as well as our own.
We want to be there in your living room. We want to help you sort out everyday little problems like where to eat, where to stay on holiday, where a film is showing and at what times, where lots of people near you are having a really good time right now. We want to help you with the chore of ordering things online: catfood, gardening things, things for your children. We want to help you with general knowledge for your children. We want you to think of us as a family member. We’re interested in everything you say. We want to hear what you say every time you look at a screen. We want to be able to see you through that screen while you’re looking at something entirely other than us. We want to know what you say to each other in every room in your house. We want to know what hours you keep, what you spend them doing when you’re online and when you aren’t, and how you spend your money.
We want the phones we sell to you to work more slowly and less well than the previous models, so that you’ll want to buy a newer model sooner.
We want to hire people to attack anyone powerful who says stuff about us that we don’t like, regardless of whether it’s true. We want the black and Latino people who work for us to feel a little less important and protected and able to rise in the company hierarchy than the white people, though we want them to give us their helpful input when it comes to dealing with ethnicity data too.
We want to stand up for freedom of speech, especially for powerful rich white people. We want to help millions of people to read posts by trolls. We want to help with government propaganda and to help people skew elections, and not to hinder people organizing and promoting ethnic cleansing, all as helpful by-products of being there 24/7 for you.
We want you to know how much your face means to us. We want your face and the faces of everyone you photograph and the faces of all your friends and the faces of the people they photograph recorded online on our sites for our fun data archive and research.
We want you to know we’re keeping you safe. We want you to know we respect and protect your privacy. We want you to know we believe privacy is a human right and a civil liberty, especially if you can afford it. We want to assure you that you have control. We want you to know what good control you have over who can see your information. We want you to know you have full access to your information – you and anyone who shadows you.
We want to narrate your life. We want to be the book of you. We want to be the only connection that matters. We want it to be inconvenient for you not to use us. We want you to look at us and as soon as you stop looking at us to feel the need to look at us again. We want you not to associate us with lynch mobs, witchhunts or purges unless they’re your lynch mobs, witchhunts and purges.
We want your pasts and your presents because we want your futures too.
We want all of you.
Any time at all. Here, take it. Take my face.
I’m not surprised you want my face. It’s the face of now.
What I mean by my face is the face on this A4 photocopy, the proof I exist. Without it I officially don’t. Even though I’m bodily here, without this piece of paper I’m not. If I lose it, wherever I am I won’t be anywhere. It’s getting a bit worn – not surprising, just an A4-size sheet of paper – and because it’s folded at the place where the face happens to be copied on it, some of the photocopier ink that makes my face has flaked off in the crease of the fold.
But I’m here. I exist because this piece of paper with my face on it proves I’m not able to study here or work here or live here without permission or earn any money here.
My being ineligible makes you all the more eligible.
No worries. Happy to help.
Also you’ll notice this face resembles the drawings on the posters that tell you to report anything you think looks suspicious.
Tell the police if you see anyone who looks like me, because my face is of urgent matter to your nation.
Not at all. No problem. Glad to be of service.
And it’s this face, like the faces on the poster-lorry the white man in the suit posed in front of, of a great queue of people, I mean non-people, at a border, which proved once and for all that all the people on the poster were faceless nobodies while his was the face of a somebody. He had the only face that matters.
My face is a breaking point.
Don’t mention it. Any time.
It’s the face you see on dramas, films, or you picture in your head in the novels about people who aren’t you, the books you read because you love literature, or to kill some free time, the ones that tell the stories that let you feel that you’ve felt, you’ve been really importantly moved, more, you’ve understood something major about the history, the politics, of the time you live in.
It’s nothing. My pleasure. My face is all about you.
My face trodden in mud.
My face bloated by sea.
What my face means is not your face.
By all means. You’re welcome.
It was September Brittany Hall first heard of the girl, the morning when Stel from Welfare went past her in staff lockers and told her, listen, Brit, age of miracles isn’t past, some schoolkid got into the centre and – you won’t believe it. I still can’t. She got management to clean up the toilets.
Management to what? Brit said.
Then she said: how do you mean, she?
Kids weren’t as such that unusual. The CIOs often sent people here they’d designated adult who were plainly still kids, thirteen, fourteen. But this was a male-only centre.
All of the toilets, Stel said. Every single pan in every room on every wing, even isolation. I don’t mean management personally, management cleaning the shitters, shite for sore eyes. I mean it, a kid. A girl. Twelve or thirteen, I didn’t see her myself. I haven’t spoken to anyone who did with their own eyes. But she got in. Not just that. Got all the way to management. Got them to bring in a cleaning company to do it, I mean really do it, between the tiles, the cracks and the staining, all the stuff the cleaner-detainees can’t get clean any more, and they came in with these great big pressure cleaners, steam cleaners like at the car handjob places and they did all the pans and all the tiles and surrounds and then they mopped it all up afterwards, God, smells so much better in there, wait till you get on the wing, they did all the wings, whole H block. Some of the detainees’ve seen her too, school uniform, wandering about by herself on B wing, everybody standing back looking like what the fuck.
You are shitting me, Brit said.
Shit�
�s all gone, Stel said. Ta daa. Like magic. Even off the walls in constant watch.
No shit, Brit said.
That’s it, Brit. Innit? No shit, Stel said.
You’re a poet, Brit said, and you don’t know it.
I do know it, Stel said. I just don’t get much chance these days to use it. But today? Today, oh, me, I’m full of it today. Poetry I mean.
She went off down the corridor singing lines from oh what a beautiful morning using the corridor echo so the song went from one end to the other. She waved to Brit with one hand while she waved to the camera so they’d let her through security with the other.
Stel’d been working here years, three years someone said, as long as that. She was nearly thirty. Brit herself was relatively new. Deets could still tell. This wasn’t a good thing. I congratulate you that you are here four months same as me, and you are not dead, and I am not dead, we are both not dead yet DCO Miss Hall, one of the Syrians, every day, teasing her. It was kindly meant. But kindly meant was complicated. There were lines you had to draw. There were correct responses. On the one hand there was laugh and say something funny back, on the other there was how dare you talk to me like that. It depended.
Body cams. Razor wire. Deets.
(Stel for instance never said deets. Stel being black herself got checked more than the not-black staff every time she left the centre to go home. Even though everybody knew Stel. Stel was patience itself. You’d have to be. Doing what she did every day.)
Imagine a child on the wing.
Actually Brit quite often imagined a child on the wing, because of how they describe the weight restriction of personal possessions per deet across detention estate. 25kg, same as the weight of a small child three or four years old, so whenever the new deets arrived she’d use it as a reminder to herself, does that look more or less than the weight of a small child? because if it looks a lot more they’ll be kicking off any minute when it’s taken from them.
