by Ali Smith
Respect.
Richard stands in the grass and clay, next to a leaning old boulder.
Just to let you know, Pad, he says. Knowing how much you love Chaplin. I’m told by the locals that just down the road from here there’s a house he actually owned late in his life, and he and his family used to come here for holidays. He’s probably been here too and had a look round the place.
And also. I’m somatizing. This project’s making me feel, all right. It’s making me feel very all right. I’m spending all this time in a place I don’t know, and I feel like I’m home. I meet people all the time who are risking themselves and they fill me with their confidence. I don’t belong, they know I don’t, I know I don’t. But I feel like I do. What I feel is welcome.
I’m having an unexpectedly lovely time. I wish you were here.
He has the poem in his pocket. He takes it out and unfolds it in the sharp sunlight. The Cloud, by Percy Bysshe Shelley; this is its last verse.
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the oceans and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
Unbuilding, undying, the cloud of unknowing, changing its shape as it crosses the sky.
The unexpected afterlives.
Quite often after that autumn day when his life ended so it could begin again, Richard will think back to those cloud and mountain pictures, remember, the ones he saw in London at the Royal Academy in the early summer of 2018, the pictures made of slate and chalk.
One day around Christmas time, in a round-up of the year’s best exhibitions in one of the papers, he reads an article called A Postcard to Tacita.
In it, there’s a story of how, one day in the gallery, a small child, two or three years old, threw herself at one of the pictures in the exhibition and smudged its chalk.
The artist tells the interviewer that she doesn’t like to put those little low wire barriers between the pictures she makes and the people looking at them, and not just because people are actually more likely to trip over them than not. She doesn’t want anything to be between the person and the picture. But sometimes people and pictures too literally collide. If they get damaged, the artist says, the pictures can be repaired so long as whatever hits them or smudges them isn’t wet. Though when someone shook an umbrella in New York, well. Those raindrops are now a part of the picture they hit, and will be for as long as the picture exists.
Richard laughs out loud at the thought of the child throwing herself at the picture. He hopes it was the mountain she threw herself at.
Then he remembers the young woman he stood next to for half a minute in the gallery that day looking at the mountain.
Fuck me.
Fuck me too.
His daughter will be about that woman’s age now.
His daughter is a girl he last saw in the year 1987, February, the day she sat on his knee and he read one of her books to her. Beatrix Potter. The good rabbit’s carrot was stolen by the bad rabbit. But the hunter chased the bad rabbit till there was nothing left of it but a rabbit tail on a bench.
She laughed and laughed at the picture of the fluffy white tail on the bench.
He puts the Sunday paper in the recycling. He comes back and sits at the table. He opens the laptop.
He types his daughter’s name into the search engine. He takes his time over each letter of her name.
He has never done this before.
He has never dared.
He has told himself she wouldn’t want him to.
Hers is a slightly unusual name, same spelling as his mother’s with the s instead of z in Elisabeth, and if she kept her own mother’s name or isn’t married, a quite uncommon surn –
It comes straight up, a picture of a woman who will be her.
It is surely her.
It is definitely her.
There are several pictures. She looks like her mother in one, and like his mother in another.
She works at a university in London. There is an email address.
Do I dare?
I don’t.
She won’t, wouldn’t, want me to.
He leaves the room.
He walks all round the flat.
He comes back into the room.
Thinking her dead, dead to me, dead to my world, all these years, he says inside his head that night, wide awake in bed, middle of the night, staring at the old ceiling rose he’s never noticed before though he’s lived here all the years.
His imaginary daughter laughs.
What are you like? she says inside his head.
What are you like? he says inside his head to his real daughter.
Silence.
Yeah but enough about the filmmaker and what Russell would call the zzzzzzzz of his story – back to Brit six months ago in October, in the van with Florence and two total strangers on a backroad fuck knows where, going further north, at least Brit thinks it’s north. She watches, like a detective on TV or a person in a drama who’s being kidnapped, for roadsigns with the names of places on them, in case it will be important.
This woman is the world’s worst driver.
There are two seatbelts and currently four people in the front of this van being driven by someone who doesn’t seem bothered about how unsafe it is to have so many people crammed in the front of a joke of a vehicle with a fancy fake-foreign interior as if that’ll make up for having no road weight at all.
Brit has given up her own seatbelt for Florence, who’s squashed over against the door but at least belted in. If they crash it’s Brit and the man who’ll go through the windscreen.
The man is called Richard.
The Scotch woman is called Alda, like Aldi the shop. She and Brit had a stand-up fight at the station.
– SA4A in my van? I don’t think so.
– I go where she goes.
– (to Florence) What’ve you brought a SA4A goon here for? What are you playing at? This isn’t a game.
– How dare you threaten her. How dare you call me a goon.
– She’s not SA4A. She’s Brittany, my friend. (Florence)
– It says SA4A. Look. Right there on her jacket.
– It’s okay. I trust her. (Florence)
Florence trusts her. But Winner of World’s Worst Driver 2018 is making her driving even more terrifying by swivelling about in the driver’s seat looking at things in the scenery and pointing them out. She is giving her filmmaker friend some historic-tour prattle about the area, on which she is clearly some kind of expert.
It’s not like Brit isn’t trying to join in.
She is not stupid. She knows some history, and a lot of things about films too.
She knows about, she has known, too, people who have died, including her own father.
She drops in the thing she looked up yesterday about Cassandra the legendary fortune-teller of the future who the gods cursed by making what she said never make any difference to anyone who heard it, even though it was true.
She is not brainless.
Word in edgewise?
No one will let her.
Are you a director? Brit says to the man when they finally stop talking to each other for a minute.
The man tells her that he worked for TV when he was younger, making the kind of TV that a lot of people didn’t really approve of. He says he’s working on a film now about poets who lived hundreds of years ago and that it’s set in Switzerland and is a historical drama. He says probably they’re too young to have seen something he made on TV but if they ha
ve that they’ll probably have completely forgotten it. All the same, he says, if they saw it, then it’ll be inside them, because everything we see goes somewhere into our memories and is in there even though we don’t know it’s there.
That is so true, Brit says. The most really unforgettable thing I ever saw on a film was on TV. Sometimes if it comes into my head at night even now and I’m in bed, I can’t sleep. I won’t sleep all night. It isn’t even that horrible, or that graphic. I’ve actually seen so many more things that are so much more graphic on TV and in films. And in real life. I see every day in my job things you’d be much more sure would mark you for life. Even if you didn’t see them in real life and only saw them in a film.
But they don’t, not like this one. I can’t forget it. Maybe you’ll know it, it’s the one of a man in a courtroom, I mean it really happened, it’s really happening, it’s not just a drama.
He’s being shouted at and made fun of by a judge, a bigshot Nazi judge who’s shouting at this guy standing at the front of the court and there’s an audience watching in the courtroom too. And the judge is giving him this really big dressing-down. And the thing is, the man, a soldier, has had his uniform taken off him and obviously been given a pair of trousers way too big for him and no belt to tie them up with so he has to hold them up all the time or they’ll fall down. And this means that when he has to do things with his arms and hands like saluting and holding a book it’s awkward to, and they keep giving him things like that to do.
It’s supposed to be funny. You’re supposed to be laughing at him. And the judge is calling him a traitor and shouting at him about his treachery and making fun of him, and the man sort of stammers and speaks up for himself like he thinks explaining will help. Like, he’s an idiot. He’s got no idea. He just keeps on going, he says but this isn’t what we should be doing, we were just standing shooting people into these pits we’d made them dig, this isn’t fighting, it isn’t right, it is wrong, stuff like that.
And the judge makes fun of him some more and then pronounces the death sentence, and presumably they took him out then and there and shot him in the head in the courtyard.
But what got me about it, and what gets me when I think about it, is that they were taking this film of it at all. Because in the end it was all for the camera. All of it. It wasn’t about justice, or there not being justice. Well, it was, on one level. It was about who was in charge of justice, who gets to say what it is. But really. Really it was made for the people who were watching it. Like they were meant, the audience that was there in the courtroom but also all the people everywhere who’d be seeing that film, to find it really funny and at the same time they were meant to be scared by it. They weren’t meant to think, oh that’s so unfair, or, look at the way that man’s being used or treated, like we can see now. Well, they were too, but only because it’s what could happen to them. But most of all they were meant to laugh at him and then to learn from it how to behave, like what not to do, and to know what would happen to them if they ever did what they weren’t meant to.
I was about her age when I saw it. I didn’t sleep for days on end. You know that piece of film? You ever see it?
But the filmmaker next to her just laughs.
He starts talking about doing your best and being good-humoured.
I don’t see that there was much chance for him to be good-humoured about anything with the Nazis about to shoot him in the head, Brit says.
The filmmaker says Nazi stuff shouldn’t be on TV so much, and then goes on about how playing old songs on the radio is wrong. Then he starts talking about horses.
Thanks anyway. For the sheer banality of your observations, Brit says.
My pleasure, the man says.
Brit gives him a look like he’s a constant watch case.
He asks Florence if she’s okay so squashed up against the side of the van.
I’m doing my best in a bad situation and staying good-humoured about it, she says.
Everybody laughs.
Think you’re funny, Brit says.
I am funny, Florence says.
Funny in the head, Brit says.
She nudges Florence. She nods towards the filmmaker.
Seconds after she says that funny in the head thing she starts to feel bad about having said it.
She is questioning everything she is doing so much, about whether it is right or wrong, that she is beginning to wonder if she is going a bit mad.
Then the woman driving them decides to drive them all mad by singing songs, in a language.
First she tells them the story of the song she’s going to sing, about an empty house next to a lake, and some ghosts of people who once lived there and were made to leave it when landlords burned them out are sitting in the snow on what was their floor where their fireplace was and their beds once were, and they are looking up through the place where the roof once was at a sky with no stars and no moon.
Then it turns out that they’re not ghosts at all, they’re real people sitting in that snow, and that now they’re across the sea in Canada and can’t stop thinking of the time they sat in the snow in what had once been their house.
Then she starts singing the story in a foreign language.
It is what Josh would call keeping it surreal. It is what Russell would call wankbag. She casts a glance at Florence while the woman sings the weird way that sounds like someone both caressing you and accusing you. She makes a face at Florence about the singing as if to say weird.
Then she feels bad for doing that too.
The filmmaker has fallen asleep and is leaning really heavily on Brit. The woman starts to sing another sad sounding song. She tells them, like she’s speaking to an audience somewhere and not just some people she’s driving, one of whom is asleep and isn’t listening anyway, that this next song is about a person who goes hillwalking and who starts to be followed by the sound of his own footsteps, but much louder and larger sounding than the footprints his own boots are making in the snow. And when he looks round he finds he’s being followed by a huge grey man, called The Grey Man, out in just his shirtsleeves in the snow, who disappears as soon as the clouds shift above the mountain.
Like a ghostly presence, Florence says.
His own shadow, Brit says.
The woman stops halfway through her singing to tell them that the people who go up those mountains over there, walking or climbing, quite often really do hear the sound of someone else’s footsteps behind them –
yeah,
right,
– and that this is why the song got written. She tells them there’s a local rumour that it’s the ghost of a man called William the Smith who was a local poet and philosopher and poacher, but that the song suggests it’s the sound of the footsteps of all the people anywhere in the world who’ve been wronged, and in its last verse, which she’ll sing them in a minute, the song says we’re all followed by the sound of these footsteps wherever we go, but it’s only in the mountains or the countryside, away from the hurly burly of the town and the noise of ourselves, that we can hear the true size of what lies behind our own footsteps.
So it’s just as well, then, Brit thinks, that it’s being sung in a secret language and nobody has to be bothered by such patronizing garbage being in English and having to actually consider it even for a split second.
The woman starts back into singing the song again like they’re stuck in some awful olden times pub.
William the Smith, Florence says. I am from now on going to choose to be known as Florence the Smith. Poet and philosopher and poacher. What’s a poacher?
Someone who poaches eggs, Brit says.
Someone who charms the deer and the fish that don’t belong to him or her right into his or her hands with just one look, the woman says.
Brit laughs.
Florence the Smith. You said it. That’s you. She’s Florence the Smith all right, Brit says.
She has had enough of being an armrest now for the filmmaker, wh
o smells too much of old man. She nudges her arm and her shoulder into him really hard as if the van’s taken a corner.
It wakes him up.
He shifts over.
Result.
But then he and the woman driving start talking only to each other again and as if they’re actually into each other or something. You’d have thought they were both well past it at their age, he looks ancient, talk about Grey Man. She’s fifty if she’s anything, embarrassing, distasteful at that age, and it’s like Brit and Florence aren’t even here in this van –
her: think I know a really good place for you to say goodbye to your friend blah blah a really ancient place standing stones ancient place of burial really beautiful
him: sounds like it might be exactly right
her: except it’s got a tendency to be busy since they started making Outlander
him: what’s Outlander
her: TV series all about time travelling you don’t know Outlander wow everybody knows Outlander where’ve you been blah inspired by Clava so many cars now it’s hard to get home sometimes or get parked outside your own house and now people go there to have seances to try to raise characters that have died in Outlander
him: seances to contact dead fictional characters
her: aye I know
(Laughter)
him: does it work do the fictional characters send them messages from character heaven
her: I have no idea
him: she’d love that she’d have loved that that whole thing it’d make her laugh and say something very philosophical about human nature and then she’d probably go and make a list of all the characters she’d like to ask questions herself then go there and do it blah amazing really seances to talk to dead fictional characters
