by Ali Smith
You’re the director Richard Lease, she says.
I am, he says.
!
He is so amazed at what she’s saying that he forgets to back it up with the usual for my sins.
Sea of Troubles, she says.
Yes! he says.
The Panharmonicon, she says.
The Panharmonicon, he says. Good God.
My favourite when I was a kid, Alda says. Well, teenage.
Nobody remembers The Panharmonicon these days, Richard says. I’d even forgotten The Panharmonicon myself.
I loved it so much, she says. The writer’s your friend that just died, is that right? The one you were talking about. I saw in the paper.
She did, he says. My friend.
I’m sorry, she says. I read the thing in the paper and I thought, that’s the woman who wrote all those plays. Patricia Heal.
That’s her, he says. Actually, the idea for The Panharmonicon came out of work she was doing on Andy Hoffnung, she’d spent a lot of time in the library reading up about Beethoven for Hoffnung and listening to the music, and she’d come across, you know, the story of the man asking Beethoven to write the piece of music for his orchestra machine.
Panharmonicon, the girl says. Like in the Magic Kaladesh card deck?
Richard blinks.
Beethoven was a composer in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, he says, and –
Uh huh, I know who Beethoven is, the girl says. I’m asking about the music box. There’s a picture of something with the same name in my little brother’s card deck. But go on. Beethoven was a composer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and?
I’m definitely not dreaming if I’m managing to offend over such a broad scale of topics, Richard says.
He tells them what he can remember about The Panharmonicon.
Beethoven had a friend, the man who invented the metronome, who made a machine that could mimic a complete orchestra. This friend asked Beethoven to write him a piece of music he could demonstrate his machine to the public with. So Beethoven did.
It was about quarter of an hour long, Richard tells them, it was called Wellington’s Victory, and it enacted a battle between French and English tunes. Massively popular piece at the time. Nobody much remembers it now. It sets Rule Britannia and the national anthem against the tune of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, which is originally a French tune, not English at all, and is a song about a famous duke who goes off to war and gets himself killed, and a tree grows out of his grave, and a bird sits in the tree. And so on.
Richard tells them how Beethoven wrote it so that the inventor could demonstrate not just the sounds the machine could make but also an early stereo effect.
So the music takes sides, he says. Quite literally. Some of it happens on one side of your hearing and some of it happens on the other. It’s how you know which side’s won. The drums aping the cannons die out on one side sooner than on the other.
And Paddy, everybody called her Paddy, my friend, and she called herself Paddy. Well, Paddy loved this. And she took the germ of it and wrote the script about an argument between the two sides of the road in an English village, about which side thinks it has the most right to the grass verge in the middle where they park their cars, and what happens when one side of the road takes what it calls control.
Carnage, Alda says. Car carnage. It’s brilliant. The burning ice-cream van. They should reshow it, right now. It couldn’t be more timeless, or more timely. It’s like she could see the future.
She was brilliant, Richard says. Is brilliant.
I loved the boy character, Alda says.
That actor went on to have roles in all sorts of films, Richard says. Go-Between, Equus, Midnight Express. Then he went to Hollywood, I don’t know what happened to him after that.
He was wonderful, Alda says.
Dennis, Richard says.
Dennis, yes, Alda says. With his cello. Scared to take it to school any more because of the thuggy kids who hassle him.
And he goes and sits on the top of the town hill with the girl from the other side of the road who he likes and who likes him, Eleonora, her family’s Italian, with the ice-cream van the neighbours set fire to. And they watch the smoke rise from the burning cars, Richard says, and they talk very seriously about why they both think their own side’s got the right to the piece of grass. They nearly fight. And then Leo, he calls her Leo, starts laughing, she says look how stupid what’s happening down there looks from up here. And then so does he, he starts laughing. And then the end – them standing together at one end of the road they live on, watching the neighbours on both sides throwing rocks at the houses opposite. And she starts to sing a tune, and he plays a different tune, and then the two tunes match up and become one tune.
And how for a moment, Alda says, for an unbelievable moment, when the tunes meet and sound so fine together, the people stop throwing their stones and all turn and stare at them and listen.
And a split second after, they’re back at it throwing the rocks at each other’s houses again, Richard says. And then their parents come out of the crowd and drag them off to the different sides of the road they live on.
The cello lying there on the concrete with the burnt-out cars and bits of brick round it, Alda says.
A very vivid ending, Richard says.
That’s not the ending, Alda says.
Yes it is, Richard says.
The ending is them by themselves in the train carriage, Alda says. Leaving the village. Off out into the world. With each other.
Oh, Richard says. Oh. You’re quite right. So it is. So it was.
Those old train carriage compartments with six seats, Alda says. The door’s closed, you can’t hear what they’re saying through the glass, it’s private to them now, they look out to check nobody’s on to them or following them, then the train shunts forward and they fall into each other, start doing a funny dance together, then we see the outside of the train and then the village from above, and the train leaving it, and then up and up, so you see how it all looks, how small, from a flying bird’s view.
Richard smiles.
The God shot, he says. Cost more than the rest of it put together, I had to sweat blood to get it. Can’t believe I forgot that. You know it better than I do. And I made it.
What happened to the girl who played Leo? Alda says.
Tracy something, he says. Carry On Emmannuelle, Persil advert. After that, I don’t know.
The richness of our culture, Alda says.
The security woman starts singing a song to the tune of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.
The bear went over the mountain, she sings. The bear went over the mountain. The bear went over the mountain. But it was a waste of time. Cause all there was was more mountain, and all there was was more mountain. All there was was more mountain. So the bear just stayed at home.
Everybody in the coffee truck joins in, guessing the words as they go along.
The truck pulls into the car park of a big supermarket.
Are we here? the girl says. Is this it?
No, Alda says.
Not to be acting too like a, you know. Child. But are we nearly, and how far now, and how much longer, and other questions of that sort, the girl says.
Tell her how far and how long, the security woman says to Alda.
As long as a piece of string and about as far as I intend to throw you both, Alda says to the woman.
She opens her door. She comes round and opens the passenger door and catches the girl as she falls out.
They all stand in the car park round the coffee truck.
That’s you in Inverness, then, Mr Lease, Alda says. There’s buses from over there down into town if you don’t want to walk down. I’m sorry not to be able to take you further. I can’t believe I got to meet the man who made those Play for Todays. Made my day.
My year, he says. My decade.
What are the chances of that, eh? she says.
She
hugs him shyly. He hugs her shyly back.
He says goodbye to the security woman.
Bye then, she says.
He glances over at the girl.
I believe I owe you, he says.
Actually, she says, if we subscribe to the traditions, you’ll find I’m now officially responsible for you for the rest of your life. But I’m not so bothered about some of the traditions, so you’re lucky.
Lucky to meet you, he says.
He takes the Holiday Inn pen out of his pocket.
I’ll let you off your responsibilities in return for you letting me keep this, he says.
But she’s already off, turned towards her future.
They head for the supermarket, leaving him behind. He stands by himself in a car park in a city strange to him, thrown back into the story of his life.
1.33 on the clock above the main entrance of the supermarket.
A man is looking hard at some lemons.
The skin of a lemon is pitted, like skin slightly goosebumped or roughened.
The snub end of a lemon is reminiscent of the nipple on a breast like the breasts on the statues of the perfect beauties in the Rome museums, the breast on the statue of the woman whose hands are turning into twigs in the Villa Borghese.
Picture of a changed woman, my father says. Having a lovely time. Wish you were here.
I’m an old sexist, he thinks.
You were a young sexist too, his imaginary daughter says. It was fun, no?
How could I not have been? he says. Don’t castigate.
I’m not castigating, she says.
We didn’t know any better, he says.
Dog ate your homework, she says.
Be quiet, he says. I’m busy.
Doing what? she says.
Trying to get to the lemonness of lemons, he says.
Because somewhere in this moment of the story of a man, a man who could be dead but isn’t, who is standing instead at a fruit bay in a supermarket looking at the complexion of lemons grown somewhere, shipped from somewhere to somewhere, driven to here, unloaded into these basins and now on sale here for use before they rot – there’s a moral.
But he still can’t get to it.
His eyes go from the loose ones in the tub to the bay of lemons bagged in the yellow plastic netting. He picks a lemon up from the loose pile. He holds it in his hand, feels the weight of it. He holds it to his nose. Nothing. He digs the nail of his thumb a little into the skin past the wax and tries again, and there it is, the far high smell of lemon, sweetness and bitterness at once.
Sight, smell and touch, vitality again in so many senses, just from the proximity to a lemon. That’s what he should be feeling.
But what’s in his head now is the little lemon tree some friend of his ex-wife gave his ex-wife for Christmas, quite near the end, the Christmas before they left him, and it was a spindly thin thing with one single cuckoo-sized lemon growing on it so huge and heavy and bright compared to the thin-stemmed thing that had produced it that it made fruitfulness seem a kind of monster.
That tree had arrived smelling heavenly. Then it lost all its flowers, lost all its leaves, grew leaves again, lost them again, grew a few back again. But it was a resilient thing. It had only finally died the winter after they’d gone and he realized he’d never once thought to water it in all the months.
Well, they grew in the heat, didn’t they, in arid countries. They weren’t supposed to need water.
None of this is what he wants to be thinking.
He wants to be thinking yes! life! zest!
And a woman! a perfect stranger! who hugged him, who recognized him! knew who he was! said he’d made her day, knew what he’d done in the world! knew his work better than he did!
No.
A leafless tree is what he’s thinking.
Would it be a different experience if these lemons weren’t supermarket lemons? If they were organic Sicilian lemons with their leaves still attached, instead of mass-produced factory lemons grown in massive greenhouses and sprayed with chemicals? Would it be different if he were in actual Sicily under a warmer sky looking at a lemon still connected to its tree?
He thinks of a fruit tree ruined, by him.
What on earth is he doing?
Above all, right now, what on earth is he doing here, in some alien part of the country where the people speak their English with such strange pure vowels as they walk round and past him, him coming down from a high after the deepest low in his life, the low still there under him, a pit camouflaged for a while by the few spindly wilting branches of something else happening, and under it all, still there, his friend still dead, his family still gone, his work still in shreds, a fruit tree ruined forever, his life a winter desert?
1.34 on the supermarket clock.
Above the heads of everyone in the place the supermarket is playing a song telling everyone to reach for stars and climb high mountains.
Come on, Mr Drama, his imaginary daughter says. You so-called king of the arts. What on earth are you doing? What are you doing on earth?
He looks at the lemon in his hand.
Then he sees, beyond his own hand, what’s her name, Britt, the security guard.
She is running up and down the fruit aisle. He sees her rush out through the front entrance and stand there, then rush back in again and sprint along the backs of the cashiers and the scanning area.
She is running like a lunatic. She is as frantic as the song playing above all their heads. She sees him.
She runs at him. She is shouting.
Are they? she says.
I’m sorry? he says.
With you? she says. Are they with you?
Who? he says.
Where are they? she says. Did you see where they went? When did you last see them?
With you, in the car park, he says. Ten minutes ago.
Are you lying? she says. Are you in on it?
What? he says. On what? They’ll be in the truck.
He comes out into the car park with her. They go to where he thought the coffee truck was parked, but they can’t find the right row of vehicles. Or it’s gone.
It was here, she shouts.
She stands in a gap between a couple of four-by-fours.
It was here, she shouts. It was here.
She is almost wailing. She is swinging a pink duffel bag about in the air where the truck was, hitting it repeatedly off the side of one of the four-by-fours. An alarm goes off in the car she hits. She doesn’t notice.
You don’t understand, she says. I’ve got her schoolbag. She’ll need this bag. It’s a matter of trust. I can’t believe she did this. I can’t believe she’d do this.
They can’t have gone far, he says. Call them on your phone.
She doesn’t have a phone, she wails.
They were going to the battlefield, he says. Take a taxi. Call a taxi company.
The security guard gets her phone out.
She asks him the name of the battlefield again.
It is not until much later in the afternoon, after the battlefield, after the SA4A vans, after the shouting and the police, after it’s all over and he is standing trying to put it together in his head, amazed at his own lack of ability to see what’s happening right in front of his eyes, that he puts his hand in his jacket pocket and finds there the lemon he’d been holding in his hand and looking for some kind of moral in, in the fruit aisle of the supermarket.
That was October.
It’s now next March.
By now Richard knows the road between Inverness and Culloden quite well, having gone back and fore, as people say up here, so many times interviewing for his new project, the film he’s planning to call A Thousand Thousand People.
Dear Martin,
Apologies.
I can’t make your film for you.
vbw
R.
He is filming people in silhouette, for anonymity. He films them in the coffee truck parked in the battle
field car park for atmosphere. He arrives, gets the little camera out and ready on its stick, the interviewees arrive, they sit on the low stool inside the truck below the price list for coffees that never existed, he gets the light right so that there’s no way anyone’s visual identity can be made use of by anyone else, and he presses the button.
Recording.
Don’t the people you’ve filtered through here become very conspicuous in a village or small town where every stranger will be noticed? he says to his first interviewee.
We’re a countrywide network, the silhouette that’s the shape of Alda, the woman who drove the coffee truck that day he first came here himself, will say. But it’s good here too. There’s a lot of tourism. And for the most part, folk here are kind. And if anyone’s abrasive, well, if you’ve crossed the world already and survived, got yourself all the way here under God knows what duress, then any local abrasion, wherever you are, is likely to feel like nothing more than midges.
Alda isn’t her real name.
She won’t tell him her real name.
Everyone in the Auld Alliance network calls herself or himself by the name Alda or Aldo Lyons.
When he first sent an email to the original Alda care of the library in Kingussie, someone forwarded it to her and she wrote back to tell him how their network got its name.
When I was fifteen, she wrote, and had seen your Andy Hoffnung on TV and loved it, I found the Beethoven song An Die Hoffnung on a cassette. I listened to it. I even went to the library and looked up the German words and worked out what they meant with a German dictionary. Then I got the train through to Aberdeen, where they had copies of The Listener in the stacks, and I looked up what your friend Paddy said when they interviewed her about writing Andy Hoffnung, and why she’d called it that.
And I loved how she’d made the song name become the man’s name. I loved how she made words that mean dedicated to hope into an actual person, how she gave the words a human shape.
You claim, he says in one of the interviews, that you’ve so far helped 235 people escape or outwit detention estate. Are you exaggerating?
I think it’s actually substantially more than 235, the silhouette says.
This silhouette, who calls herself Alda Lyons like the others, is one of the people originally helped by Auld Alliance and who now in turn works for Auld Alliance helping other people.
