by Ali Smith
What she’d said had sounded like: her name’s a hammer.
?
It meant nothing recognizable. The cleaner had continued, machine-laden, into the lounge.
It wasn’t that Eve had been scared to ask the cleaner to repeat whatever it was she said. Not at all. It wasn’t that Eve was intimidated by the cleaning girl in any way, who looked poor, who looked old before her time, who looked a bit simple, who looked down or away all the time, who in fact would never look Eve in the eye, who had a habit of talking to Eve with her back to her or looking away from her which definitely signalled a refusal of responsibility and meant the curtains in the main bedroom would never get changed or laundered no matter how many times Eve asked, and who was like some dreamed-up cartoon version of a resentful cleaner in a sitcom on tv but who somehow (now how did she do it?) left Eve feeling like it was Eve who was the cartoon, like it was Eve whose life was somehow less on this beautiful summer’s day than the greyed-out existence she imagined for Katrina the cleaner in whatever wallpapered living room or whatever downmarket supermarket where the goods weren’t quite good enough, who, with her insolent back-turned answering-back, her answering an incomprehensible answer to a question Eve hadn’t actually asked, left Eve feeling off-balance, as if challenged and beaten by someone who was supposed to, who was paid after all to, make life easier for Eve.
Eve had stood at the top of the stairs and the vacuum had roared beneath her.
Eve woke up in the middle of the night. Michael was asleep with his pillow over his head. It was quite light in the room because of the moon. People were gathered at the end of the bed.
Who are you? Eve said.
She shook Michael’s pillow. Michael didn’t wake up.
There were two men and three women. One of the women was sitting at the foot of the bed holding a very small, quite motionless child. Another of the women held up something that glinted in the dark like a broken tumbler of glass. The men behind the women looked torn-up, rough. One glistened, wet down his front and across his face. The last of the women had an old-fashioned hairstyle as if from a BBC drama about the past. She held in her hand a little baton, like a tubular stick, with light coming out of one end of it. She shone this light right into Eve’s eyes. Eve put her hands up over her face. When she could see again the people had gone. Where the woman with the child had been, at the foot of the bed, there was a different, older woman. It was Eve’s mother. She was wearing her dressing gown as if she’d just got out of the bath.
Hello, Eve said. Where have you been?
Look, come on, I can’t. I’m dead, Eve’s mother said.
Eve shook Michael’s pillow again. Michael woke up.
Yes, he said like a statement.
My mother was here, Eve said.
Was she? Michael said more blearily. Where? Where was she? Where is she?
She’s not here any more, Eve said.
Do you want me to do something? Michael said. Some tea?
Okay, Eve said. That’d be nice.
Michael got up and went downstairs. Eve sat in bed in the empty room, listening to the unmysterious little noises of the house. Eventually she heard Michael on the stairs again. He came in with two mugs of tea and handed her one with the handle turned towards her so that she wouldn’t be burned.
Thank you, Eve said. That was nice of you.
Hardly nice of me. Was it a bad dream? he said.
No, Eve said. I think it was quite a good dream.
They drank their tea, talked for a while and then both went back to sleep.
Was dream a reality? Was reality a dream? Eve walked to the village, where she knew there was a church. She was wondering if a church might help.
But the church door was locked. A notice on it gave directions as to how to get into it.
Eve found the house of the man who had the key. A woman answered the door, presumably his wife.
Are you a genuine visitor to the village? she said.
She was a stocky woman wearing an apron. She had the same inbred jaw as Katrina the cleaner. She looked at Eve with possible malevolence.
Yes, Eve said. I’m staying at the Orris house; my husband and I have rented it for the summer.
No, what I mean is are you a genuine tourist? Do you have permanent accommodation elsewhere? the woman said.
Of course, Eve said.
Have you got an electricity bill? the woman said. Or a gas bill or something with your name and address on it?
Well, no, not right now, Eve said, not on me. I didn’t know I’d need one to get into the church.
Well, you do, the woman said.
But you could phone Mrs Orris and I’m sure she’d vouch for me, Eve said. Do you know Mrs Orris?
Do I know the Orrises? the woman said. You’ll be the one with the family, are you?
I expect so, Eve said.
She asked Eve’s name and home address. She shut the door. Three minutes later she came back with an old mortise key on a piece of rope.
Is it for praying or are you just going in there for a bit of a look, like? she said.
Probably a bit of both, Eve said.
Now, you can have the key, but don’t be giving the key to nobody who asks you for it, the woman said, because them travellers are threatening to camp out in the church, so if you give it to anybody else and any traveller gets into the church and we can’t get them out then it’s you that’ll be to blame for that and you that’ll have to pay for any sorting it out and any damage as gets done.
Right, Eve said. Got you. Guard it with my life.
And bring it back when you’re finished with it, the woman called after her down the garden path between the neat pinks and the rose bushes.
Eve walked back through the murderous village to the church.
Its grounds were at least quite interestingly wild and its door reassuring and traditional in its heaviness. But inside, the church was disappointing. It was nothing special. It was blank, utilitarian and modern, regardless of its old stone walls. It was ugly. It didn’t smell spiritual, whatever spiritual would smell like. It smelt of disuse; it smelt a bit seedy. It said nothing about the possibilities of anything after this life, other than more of the same small dull accountings, more of the same colour brown. Brown, Eve decided, was the real colour of the empire, of Great Britishness–the sepia colour that had set in like a dampstain in the Victorian era. Ceremonial brownness. The Union Jack should be brown white and blue. The St George cross shouldn’t really be red. It should be brown on white, HP Sauce on a white plate, or an HP Sauce white bread sandwich. All the small towns and villages flew the flag. They had driven, on their way here, past repetitions of repetitions of brown-brick Victorian semis and terraces, houses and shops like extras from a post-war kitchen-sink drama, houses brown as decrepit dogs and so on their last legs that someone should really take them in hand and have them humanely put to sleep. It was the end of an era. It was the brown end of an era.
Eve sat down on the back pew and felt a bit illegal for thinking these things. She tried to think about the big subjects, but now she couldn’t get a song out of her head from when she was small, by a group she had forgotten the name of who had insisted that the concrete and the clay beneath their feet would begin to crumble but love would never die and that they’d see the mountains tumble before they said goodbye. My love and I will be. In love eternally. And that’s the way. That’s the way it was meant to be. It was meant to be like it was on all the American tv series, where the Waltons had their lumber mill right outside the house and all the girls got married and the boys worked the mill or went to the war and came back from the war, and the eldest boy grew up to be a voiceover and kept the solemn record of their lives on Walton’s Mountain, the mountain named after their family, and Laura and her sister Mary and Ma and Pa built a whole town with just their bare hands and the goodness of their family, and all went to the church they’d helped build, every week. If beautiful blonde Mary went blind, then a few ep
isodes down the line she’d get her sight back, of course she would with beautiful big blue eyes like those, how could eyes like those not see again? Pa and Ma gave each other knowing looks as Laura saved a whole orchard of trees from something–was it a drought, or an evil woodchopper? Eve couldn’t remember. Ma helped the girls (and herself) comprehend pregnancy by getting them to help their cow give birth; Ma and the cow had a special understanding. Laura ran down the hill with her arms out like a bird for the sheer joy of it again and again in the closing credits. Then she learned the truth at seventeen, like in the Janis Ian song; because presumably that child actress got hardly any parts in anything after Little House on the Prairie was over. Eve couldn’t remember seeing her in anything ever again and surely she’d have been easily recognizable, unless she’d had her teeth fixed.
She put her feet up on the wood of the pew then took them off again, dusting down where they’d been with her hand. She tried to recall the words of At Seventeen: inventing lovers on the phone who murmured vague obscenities because the girl in the song was too ugly to get any valentines and do anything other than invent lovers. And then that Marianne Faithfull song about the woman so past it at thirty-seven that she’d never drive through Paris in a sports car with the wind in her hair. It was all over at seventeen. Then it was all over again at thirty-seven. Forty-two, Eve thought. I’ve really had it. There was the tape, too, that the German assistant teacher at school, blonde, petite, and who must have been all of twenty-two, brought to class for them to translate, a song by a German rock star. Sie ist vierzig, he sang, und sie fragt sich, war es nun schon alles? Because she’d never get to California now, would she, that forty-year-old woman, being so old? She’d never get to frolic in the sea now with Jimmy Dean and all those film stars she’d dreamed about. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Eve (15) looked up from her desk in the German class at Eve (42) all those desert years later, and winked. Eve (42) sat in the church with all its buried dead outside under the grasses and paving stones and wondered how her books were doing on Amazon. She wondered if there was anywhere in the village she could go online and look it up and find out.
Then she wondered how her books would do on the real Amazon, if she were to drop them into it off the side of a boat.
This vision of herself on a boat and her books in the water sinking took her by surprise and made her laugh out loud. The church rang with her solitary laughter. It wasn’t respectful. When she stopped laughing the echo of herself stayed in her ears.
She locked up the church again. She returned its key to its rightful keeper.
What is it that’s wrong with your knee? Amber asked Eve out of the blue one evening.
My knee? Nothing, Eve said. Why?
You always hold your right leg that way, at that angle, when you sit down, Amber said.
No, Eve said. Well, funny you should say it, though, since I did damage the knee quite badly, years ago, but it’s fine now. How funny. I’d never noticed I held it like that. Probably because I’m sensitive about it I do it.
It hasn’t completely healed, you know, with you holding it like that, Amber said.
It feels fine, Eve said.
It looks sore, Amber said.
She had come across the room and knelt down in front of Eve. Now she was holding Eve’s knee with both her hands and pressing the muscles round it with her thumbs. Eve felt panic shoot out of her knee and up and down her body.
No, really, it’s absolutely fine, she said.
Amber didn’t stop. She was pressing quite hard. She had very hot hands.
It’s sensitive, Eve said.
Yes, Amber said.
She began to circle Eve’s knee with her hand and Eve had the peculiar sensation she usually only had when she was in an aeroplane air-bouncing in mid-takeoff, her heart in her mouth, her body sprung and fearful with her feet braced against the floor and her arms hard against the arms of the chair.
Eve started to talk. She said the first thing that came into her head.
Later, when they were getting ready for bed, Michael was strangely resentful.
You never told me you had a bad knee, he said. All these years and you never mentioned it, not to me anyway. Why didn’t you?
You never asked, Eve said and lay back in the bed. Michael: What did you do to it to damage it?
Eve: I fell off a horse.
Michael: A horse? When were you ever on a horse?
Eve: It was before I knew you.
Michael wasn’t listening and didn’t really care when it was. He was traipsing round the room like a petulant boy, looking for his special pillow. Eve lifted the sheet and showed him his pillow, tucked under the crook of her knee.
Eve: I need to borrow it tonight.
Michael: You know you can’t. You know I need that one.
Eve: Can’t you use one of the others? This one would really help me get some sleep, I need to put something under my knee after all that playing about with it, and it’s just the right shape for it.
Actually her knee felt fine, but she didn’t want to tell Michael this. Actually it felt very good, better than it had felt for years. Actually she was annoyed, though she knew it was irrational, that Michael had never at any point in their more-than-ten years together noticed she might even conceivably have a history of a sore knee. Instead it took some girl who didn’t even know her, to notice it. How many other things didn’t he notice? How many other things was she blind to, herself, because of his inadequacies?
She gave Michael back his pillow and he put the light out and positioned the pillow over his ear.
Eve lay in the dark with her hands folded neatly on her stomach. As she lay there she got angrier and angrier.
Very quietly, she got up and pulled on her dressing gown. Very quietly, down she went.
Amber was lying on the back seat of the car. When she saw Eve through the open window she kicked open one of the back doors with her foot. She drew her legs up to her chest so that Eve could sit on the edge of the seat.
Couldn’t sleep? she said.
Eve shook her head.
Want to go for a drive? Amber said.
If you’re not too busy, Eve said.
Amber laughed and shrugged her shoulders. Up to my eyes, she said.
I mean, obviously not busy, I mean tired, Eve said. If you’re not too tired.
I’m not tired at all, Amber said. She buttoned up her shorts. She swung herself over the front seats into the driver’s seat and opened the passenger door for Eve.
Forty miles an hour on the Norfolk backroads, the headlights lighting up dizzied insects and the colourless sides of the hedgerows; Eve and Amber had their elbows out of the rolled-down windows in the warm-cool air of the night. Eve lit a cigarette and passed it, lit, to Amber.
I feel quite renegade, Eve said.
I like driving nowhere, Eve said. It’s much better than driving somewhere.
We’re just like Thelma and Louise, Eve said.
Whee, Eve said.
I was twenty-three, Eve said, and I was on a tube train in London, and there was this boy opposite me, he was very good-looking. He was reading a book. That’s the thing, he was reading this intelligent-looking book, but he had a name-badge on which meant he worked for Curry’s. It said Curry’s, and then underneath it said his name: Adam. So I waited until he looked up and saw me looking at him, and I said, you’ll never believe this, but I’m Eve. And he said, actually you’ll never believe how many people come up to me telling me they’re Eve, and he smiled, and then he looked back down and carried on reading his book as if I wasn’t there. I had never done anything like that before in my life, I had never so much as said boo to a goose, never mind made a direct pass at someone I’d just seen thirty seconds ago. So I stood up to get off, but before I got off I leaned in over the top of his book, it was a book about a Polish film director, Adam was always finding things to be interested in before they became trendy and everybody else was interested in them. I leaned in over t
he top of it and said, yes, but what you don’t realize is, I’m the real Eve, the original Eve, and then I got off the train, it wasn’t my stop but I wanted to make an exit. So I went up the escalators and up to the street, and I stood in the air and I was really angry at myself, but I was exhilarated too, I was both. I kept telling myself he wouldn’t have been worth it because he worked, you know, for Curry’s, and I was right, because as it turned out, as I found out, he had almost no ambition, Adam, in fact you could say he had negative ambition. But there I was, standing in totally the wrong place, I had no idea where I was in the city and I was going to have to buy another tube ticket because I’d exited the station, so I turned around to go back down the steps and–there he was, standing right behind me, it was like something in a film, it was even raining, like it would be, in a film, and I said, hello, and he said, hello, and I said did you follow me all the way off the train and up the escalators? And he said, no, actually, it’s my stop, and he pointed, I live here, I live just round the corner. Then he said, Are you really Eve? I said yes. And he said, well, do you want a coffee or anything? And I said yes.
Eve sat back, finished, in the passenger seat.
Isn’t that amazing? she said. That he said are you really Eve?
God, you’re boring, Amber said.
I’m–I’m what? Eve said.
Is that it? Amber said. Is that the highpoint, the true-blue, the secret-can’t-be-told everything-must-go ultimate all-singing all-dancing story-of-you? Jesus God you’re going to have to tell me something a bit more interesting than that or I’m going to fucking fall asleep right here at the wheel.
You are? Eve said laughing.
Next you’ll be telling me the ‘story’ of giving birth to your babies and how hard it was or how easy or whatever, for fuck sake, Amber said.
Well, Magnus, as you know, was a complicated birth, but he was fine and so was I. To be honest, it was after Astrid that I felt so totally fragmented. I still do, in some ways. But babies smell so nice. I think I’d give everything up just for the smell of my own new baby again, Eve said.
