by Ali Smith
360 degrees is the total number of degrees in a revolution because shepherds, who were the first astronomers, used to believe that the year had 360 days total.
Otherwise, the bottom line is, we wouldn’t have them, his mother is saying. The world would have lost great art if his agent hadn’t been greedy enough to.
Magnus watches Amber’s hand. 360. 360. 360.
His prick twitches.
She stops the circling. She starts pressing places below his mother’s kneecap.
Is that any better? she says.
His mother nods uncertainly.
From nowhere Magnus is overcome with love for his mother, for his sister watching sleepily from the sofa, for Michael at the table rustling the paper. He even loves Michael. Michael’s all right. At the very same moment Magnus understands that if he ever let it be known that he feels anything at all, things will fly apart, the whole room will disintegrate, as if detonated.
There are things that can’t be said because it is hard to have to know them. There are things you can’t get away from after you know them. It is very complicated to know anything. It is like his mother being obsessed by the foul things that have happened to people; all those books about the Holocaust she’s got piled up in her study at home. Because can you ever be all right again? Can you ever not know again?
For example. Is his mother innocent because she doesn’t know about what he is doing with Amber every afternoon in the church? Is Astrid innocent because of it? Is Michael? What kind of innocence is that? Is it good? Is that what innocence is, just not knowing about something? To take an extreme example. Is it innocent, as in a state of goodness or whatever, if you simply don’t know about all those people in the Holocaust? Or is it just naïve, stupid? What use is that kind of innocence anyway?
It seems to Magnus that it is no use at all, unless someone wants to feel more powerful than somebody else because one person knows something the other person doesn’t.
Can you ever be made innocent again? Because up in the attic with Amber, or over under the old wooden roof of the church, fast-breathing the dusty air–held, made, straightened out then curved by her–Magnus cannot believe how all right, how clean again it is possible to feel even after everything awful he knows about himself, even though supposedly nothing about what Amber is doing, or he is doing, or they are doing together, is innocent in any way. In fact, the opposite is true.
He wishes they all, all the people in this room, knew everything about him. One of the really bad things about it is that they don’t.
But one of the reasons the room is still holding together, even in this broken way, is that they don’t.
There’s his mother, telling Amber things. There’s Amber, not-listening, 360-ing her knee. Something about Amber at the centre of it like an axis is what is holding them all together right now in this room, keeping everything going round, stopping everything from fragmenting into an exploded nothing that shatters itself out into the furthest reaches of the known universe.
Amber is ruthless with Astrid. She is unbelievably rude to Michael. As if I give a monkey’s fuck about what you think about books. She is bored silly by his mother, makes no attempt to hide it. Uh-huh. So: Astrid is besotted. Michael looks more determined every time. His mother gets keener to dredge up ‘interesting’ things to say. It is like a demonstration of magnetic gravity. It is like watching how the solar system works.
As concerns Magnus himself, Amber = true.
Amber = everything he didn’t even know he imagined possible for himself.
He will be able to remember this all his life, this losing his virginity to, learning all about it from, an older woman; the kind of thing that would happen to a boy in a classic novel or something but is really actually happening to him, the kind of thing that he will be able to tell someone over a beer in a quiet pub, leaning on the counter, speaking low, moved by his own memory of it when he is much much older, a man, in his late twenties maybe or his thirties.
Magnus catches the train to Norwich. From there he takes the train to the city with the university in it to which he was once meant to be considering applying.
He asks a taxi driver to take him from the station to the library. But the library the taxi takes him to, by mistake, or maybe because he looks like a student, is the main university library, to which, because he’s not a member, he has no access. The man at the computers, at the front desk in the huge entrance hall which smells of complicated polish, treats Magnus like an imbecile for not knowing this. Well, this is fair enough. Only an imbecile would expect anything more.
The city is so beautiful, everywhere tourists taking videos. He walks back into town over a beautiful tourist-heavy bridge. He watches them videoing the beautiful yellowstone walls, the outsides of colleges to which he was once supposed to be considering applying. When he gets to the town market, a rough-looking girl at a stall selling hats directs him to the other library, the public one, behind several municipal-looking buildings next to a multistorey car park.
It smells disconcertingly of people in the public library. Even the stairwell smells of people.
The only book useful to him in the Reference part of the library, which is full of non-members (old people, poor-looking people, unemployed-looking people, foreign-looking people) all using or waiting to use the few computers, is The Penguin Dictionary of Saints. Magnus of Orkney. D. on Egilsay, 1116, f.d. 16 April. This Magnus was a son of Erling, joint ruler of the Orkney islands. When King Magnus Barefoot of Norway invaded the Orkneys, Magnus Erlingsson took refuge with Malcolm III of Scotland and is said to have lived for a time in the house of a bishop. After Magnus Barefoot’s death he returned to the Orkneys, where his cousin Haakon was in possession; at length Haakon treacherously killed him on the island called Egilsay. Magnus was eventually buried in Kirkwall cathedral, which is dedicated in his honour, and other churches bear his name; he was thus honoured because of his repute for virtue and piety, but there appears no reason why he should have been called a martyr. There is a number of other saints named Magnus, mostly martyrs, but little is known about any of them.
Magnus reads the passage again, but not because he wants to know the story, which isn’t much cop anyway, which is a bit annoying after he’s come all that way specially to find it. Instead, he finds, he is totally fascinated by a single word. The word is: and.
Virtue and piety.
And other churches bear his name.
And is said to have lived.
It is so simple, so crucial a word.
He flicks through the saint book letting his eye stop on random sentences.
Only the names of some persons and places survive. It was only to be expected that miracles should be attributed to him, and his reputation as a wonderworker was subsequently enhanced. She made a public bonfire of her wardrobe and jewellery, and was then taken to a house of nuns. At a place called Dokkum he and his companions were set upon by heathen Frieslanders and put to the sword. But no confidence can be put in the story that she was denounced as a Christian by her rejected suitor, and miraculously saved from exposure in a brothel and from death by fire. This story, which gained immense popularity, is not heard of before the seventh century and there is nothing to suggest that she was anything other than imaginary.
Outside the library roadworkers or builders are breaking up the road surface with a pneumatic drill. Inside the library non-members are still queueing to use the computers.
Inside the library non-members are still queueing and outside the library roadworkers are using sheer air pressure to break up rock or tarmacadam.
Air and rock! The word and is a little bullet of oxygen. And Magnus, who came to this learned city to read about his namesake, to research the nickname he has been given by the very experienced older woman spending her summer seducing him every afternoon on the wooden seats of an old church, and the Christian name originally given to him by a father he can barely remember and about whom he doesn’t really give a monkey�
�s fuck (though his little sister feels much more strongly and emotionally about their lack of connection), is suddenly high as a kite, breathing again with the whole of his lungs as if he’s been for a long time cramped in a small and dark and suffocating space not big enough for the proper recognition of a small word.
And?
And, Magnus says out loud.
He must have said it too loudly because a few people in the queue turn and look. The man on the nearest computer stares at him. A librarian at the low desk raises her head as if Magnus might become a problem.
Magnus closes the book and looks the librarian in the eye. He wonders if she fancies him. He wonders what she’d be like in bed. The first computing machine in the world, he tells himself as he leaves the library, was invented by Pascal in the 1640s, and that was before Pascal was even twenty years old!
Magnus glows all the way back to the station along the streets of the glowing city. On his way he stops to breathe in, to take the summer air in, but only for a moment because if he stops for any longer than a moment he will miss Amber at the church later this afternoon. That’s if she’s there. That’s if she turns up. He might stop for longer, actually, maybe just stand here casually for longer. Maybe he’ll miss the train. Maybe Amber will be waiting in the church and it’ll be Magnus who doesn’t turn up today.
He has stopped beside a tree planted outside shops. It is nothing but a nondescript tree. A nondescript tree and Magnus. Its leaves, Magnus can note to himself now, are connected to its twigs are connected to its branches are connected to its bigger branches are connected to its trunk and its trunk to its roots and its roots to the ground. Its species is connected to other members of its species and to other trees related by species and to other trees by virtue of being a tree and to other plants and living things by virtue of being things which respond to photosynthesis = all food, fossil, fuels in both the past and the present: and if there’s a past and a present then there’s probably (and definitely possibly) a future, and the notion of a future and Magnus and all.
It is really raining. They can hear it on the roof of the church. Magnus is telling Amber about what Wittgenstein said about rain, about how there was no point in trying to count separate raindrops and that the correct answer to the question of how many there were wasn’t an actual exact number but was just many. In maths, Magnus explains, correctness is sometimes relative. Some error is tolerable. It isn’t the same as making a mistake.
Right, Amber says. And sin, if I remember correctly without error, equals opposite over hypotenuse, right?
Eh yes, Magnus says. That’s right. But it’s said like sign.
He is momentarily annoyed that she knows so much about things he knows about. And she is being ironic about something though he can’t think what or how.
But he shifts a bit to be more comfortable in her arms, in the musty smell of the church with the rain drumming (allowably inexactly) on the roof and his head on the old-smelling kneeling-cushion and the curves of the tubes of the little organ visible above their heads if he looks to the left past Amber, and the tatty cardboard numbers upside down on the wall in their number-holder announcing the hymns for a service held God knows when, past or future, maybe past and future, who knows? 7. 123. 43. 208. He wonders which hymns they are. He knows from his and Amber’s lunchtimes, afternoons, late afternoons in the church that whoever chooses the hymns leaves the numbers in their neat little divided cardboard piles of 1s and 2s and 3s and 4s and 5s and 6s and 7s and 8s and 9s and 0s under the ledge of the pew at the front. He knows the taste and smell of the church inside and out, and the brown of the old seats, the white of the walls and the brown and white of the pulpit. He has read, un seeing, so many times in the last couple of weeks, the plaques on the walls dedicated to the dead reverends. He knows, now, why people go to church. It is a simple calculation but you have to believe it. Because what does 0 =?
I think I prefer you when you’re a bit darker, Amber is saying. Could you maybe dim yourself a bit?
Magnus has no idea what she means but he nods and burrows his head into her shoulder and continues his calculation in his head. 0 = additive entity such that 0 +a=a. For example 0 + 1 = 1 and that’s all you need to know about 0, not what it means, or anything about it at all, more than the fact that it responds to certain given rules.
He feels Amber drift, bored, above him. She shifts herself physically over him, hurries him up. He looks up into her eyes. He is at the angle of elevation. He feels himself stiffening again. So in a moment they’ll be making that breathing noise they helplessly make again, the noise that he hadn’t realized was even a word, the same word breathed out and in, over and over:
and
and
and
the middle of the mundane Norfolk night Michael sat up in the bed. Eve was sleeping. Everything round them was silent, quite still, deceptively ordinary, deep-down-prosaic–exactly the same as every other night. But something strange had happened to everything, something that came as formed, velvet, disdainful as a cat. Change had happened. Everything rhymed now. Yes, ab was following ab, and then the way cd followed cd, ef, gg…Because he taught this sort of thing all day he tuned straight to it, like a radio frequency:
Michael’s world had become a sonnet sequence(y).
Disdainful as a cat etc. not adequate to describe what was happening, really. KO’d by a heavyweight. Shot through the chest. Earnest surgeons opening his unconscious like a splayed ribcage. Heart an open flower, beautifully petalled, beating, symmetry. Shock and heat and art had seared off all his skin, then he’d been metalled over with a new self and six new senses, a new tongue that could speak only in lines that were pentameter, intelligences that swore it was all poetry and signs:
a girl called Amber walked across a room
and everything became a new-made poem.
Amber was an exotic fixative. Amber preserved things that weren’t meant to last. Amber gave dead gone things a chance to live forever. Amber gave random things a past. Amber could be worn as an amulet. Gypsies used amber as a crystal ball. Fishermen braved oceans with just a net to harvest amber. (Amber, in the hall,
walked past Michael as if he were invisible, a piece of nothing, unbegun.) Greek and Roman legend had it the piss of a wild lynx produced amber. She shone, hardened and perfected by heat and time. Cat urine everywhere became sublime!
Were Amber’s eyes anything like the sun?
Listen, they overexposed him like a Lee Miller / Man Ray solarization. He glowed the moment he was looked at. He glitzed like one firefly in the dark, then like a whole architecture of fireworks spelling her name and the words I love. Mich ael sputtered out his crescendo in jerks and flares she didn’t notice, being quite so bright herself she eclipsed everything that shone back at her with a lesser light. Because she was light itself. Amber, walking through the world, lit the world, took the world, made it, and after her everything in it faded.
But sonnets shouldn’t be so damned one-sided. They implied, at least, dialogue. He found that no one spoke back. No one. Michael persuaded, argued with, no one but himself, looked round at a family that wasn’t his and saw a lot of faded colour, then he satin his car, stared at an empty field, raw, stony, bleached, like he was; sat in the heat watching it dry up. He was such a sucker. He knew her turn of head, her hands, her laughter. He realized that he would never fuck her. He realized that he would never have her. He was a very ordinary bloke. He turned from sand to glass and then he broke.
Million a tesserae was shattered he no possible, no with together putting back . Front, sides, of splinters a splintery self, remainder of a, a window shutting–glass that so fell smashed and out look ! fuck damn on stones the there lay if as malevolent bare feet for unnoticing–with a slameh ? what ? a pieces in man, in a meant fragments, heart, rags skin instead of a . Overcasing the state ? was he ? know, you–mosaic means bits. So do tesserae before done the work, to make them, what ? do things together ? Is a ? make do ? to whole (denie
d a man in love fragments his soul).
Fuck poetry. Fuck books. Fuck art. Fuck life.
Fuck Norfolk. Fuck his job and fuck his wife.
Fuck teenagers who think they know it all.
Fuck that girl walking past him in the hall.
Was there corollary in love and fuck?
Was there corollary in gave and took?
Was there a point in any written book?
Was there a point in anything at all?
Was there a push that ever came to shove?
Was there a rhyme that ever came to love?
Was there a way to discipline a sigh?
Was there a place where pop songs went to die?
Was there a girl who’d never ever ever?
Was there an artery that wouldn’t sever?
Did the heart fuck the mind with all its slummings?
Did Shakespeare always become e.e. cummings?
Was the end always sonnetary ruin?
Did Shakespeare always turn into Don Juan?
Michael went to the village for a walk.
That was the kind of thing a chap like him did,
holiday stroll to the village, hands in pockets,
casual, professional, on a whim, did.
He sat outside a church and got a shock.
It sounded more strenuous than a gym did!
