by Ali Smith
Who made your blue? he says.
I did, I say.
He does a shrug like he doesn’t care who made that blue : he lifts his eyes and looks back at the picture again : he sighs : he gives a little disapproving shake of the head and then he disappears again through the opening in the airy walls.
2 nights later the painting went : I came out in the morning, the workshop was wrecked and ruined as usual but cause I knew my brothers liked their fun I always stored the tools and things that mattered well away : I went down to my mother’s storeroom : the overgrown grass on the path down the field had been stamped back by more feet than mine : its door was open : the painting was gone and the roll of sketches too (though my father had taken everything else with him to the palace where no one had had the time to see him so he’d brought it all back home again : it was safe in the house, in my mother’s bedroom up on top of the cupboards out of the reach of the mouths of the goat and her babies).
Who knows where it went? The river? A fire? A back room, cut, rolled and squeezed into the gaps between the wall and the window or the door and the floor or hammered into the cracks in the wood or the brick to block out the damp?
(Shining Cosmo, favoured court painter who’ll oust the court painters favoured before you then be ousted in turn by my own beloved apprentice pickpocket (ha!) : bright bejewelled Cosmo old and ill, writing to the last of your Dukes a letter for money cause you’re too ill now for painting and the bishop and the clerk who owe you for the altarpiece and the saint panel are both ignoring your invoices : them so rich and you so poor : green forgotten Cosmo, old then dead, though quite some time after me, of poverty, yes,
but not of the cold,
cause I take my unfinished working of an old old story and unroll it over you, spread it all your length, tuck you in beneath it and fold its end down under your chin to keep you that bit warmer in the winters of being old –
I forgive you.)
The girl has a friend.
The friend has a look of my Isotta, very fine, and has arrived in here like a burst of air as if a new door opened itself in a wall where no door was suspected : there’s a kin between them and their hearts are high with it : they are sharp and bright together as the skins of 2 new lemons.
The girl is holding up to her friend the wall she’s made from the many small pictures : her friend is admiring and nodding : she takes a piece and looks closely at a single picture and then at how the picture has been made to become a brick.
One girl takes one end of it and the other takes the other and they measure its length by stretching it across the room : it is long, the wall : then into the room like a mischievous small dog comes the little brother who ducks down below the stretch of picture-wall in the middle then knocks into it with his head like a goat or a ram : both girls squeal : they gather it and swing it carefully away from him, drape it in its fragility on the table and place its ends on either side on the floor with no twists in it so it will stay whole : when this is done the girl turns and yells at the brother : he is abashed : he leaves the room : the girls go back to fussing at the long picture-wall : moments later the brother comes in again carrying 2 cups with something hot in them, steam coming off : a truce, an offering : sure enough, there is a kind of accord : he is to be let to sit in the room with them for bringing them these drinks : he sits good and quiet on the bed as if he has never been anything other.
The girls go back to examining their wall : as soon as they forget he’s there the brother dips his head and his hands into the bag the friend has brought with her : he has found something to eat in there and is ripping at its wrap : both girls hear him and turn and see and shout at him at once, then both stand up and chase him out of the room.
But when they get back –
ruination !
They have put their too-hot cups on the surface of the picture-wall and the cups have spilled a bit when the table got knocked : these cups are stuck to some of the pictures of – what are they of, again? –so much so that to pick a cup up by a handle is also to pick up the whole wall.
Both girls peel the picture-wall off the cups : the studies the cups stuck to are marked from the heat and the spill with 2 perfect circles from the shapes of the bases of the cups.
The girl looks appalled.
She holds up the bit of the wall : she unsticks with a little knife the 2 studies marked with the circles : she waves the studies in the air as if to dry them.
But the friend takes them out of her hands : she laughs : she holds them both up in front of her eyes like they’re eyes.
Ha ha!
The girl looks astonished : her mouth opens : then it breaks into a smile : then laughter from them both : then both girls take one end of the long wall of pictures each, like they did before but now with its cut-out bricks gone from the middle and they stretch it out across the room again : this time rather than treating it with such care the girl, when the wall is at full stretch, wraps her end of it round her shoulder and tucks it under her arms like a collar or a scarf.
When she sees the girl do this the friend does the same : next moment both girls are shawling themselves in it : they twist themselves round inside the swath of wall until they are both a bristle of pictures like armour over their chests and stomachs and arms and up to their necks : then they twist towards each other as if it is the wall that is bringing them together : they meet wrapped like caterpillars in the middle of the room : but they don’t just meet, they collide : at which the paper wall breaks and as it comes apart its brick-shapes fly off like rooftiles and the girls hit the floor together in each other’s arms in the mess of the pictures littered round them.
I like a good skilful friend.
I like a good opened-up wall.
I’m doing a portrait now of my brown-eyed friend : what’s his name? I forget his name : you know who I mean, I mean what’s-his-name : his father has died which means he is the official head of his family : he owns all the land and all the ships and has come into all the money : it is an unofficial portrait though cause his wife will not have me paint him officially so to placate me he has asked me to do him too, since official versions are never true, is what he says when I ask him why
(can’t remember his name but I remember pretty clearly my annoyance at his wife)
and I’ve sketched some ships in the far background and come back to the shape of his head again : but my friend, sitting in front of me, is even more restless today than usual : I work on the fold in the undershirt where it prettily tops his collar but with my eye on him today he can hardly sit still.
I know his frustration : I’ve always known it : it is almost as old as our friendship : the walled-up power, the dismay in the air round him like when a storm is unable to break.
But as ever out of kindness he pretends to me to be feeling something else.
He says he has been infuriated by a story.
It haunts him, he says : he can’t stop thinking about it.
What story? I say.
All stories, he says, really. They’re never the story I need or really want.
I ready the picture : I am quiet : I let the time pass : after a bit he speaks into this silence and tells me the bones of the story.
It’s about a magic helmet which allows its bearer to turn into anything, transform into any shape he likes, all he has to do is put the helmet on his head.
But that’s not the part that maddens him : he likes that part of the story : there’s this other part of the story and it’s about 3 maidens, guardians of a store of gold, and whoever wins the gold from them and forges it into a ring will have power over everything, over the land, the sea, the world and all its peoples : but there’s a snag : there’s a condition : he’ll have all the power, the man who forges the ring, but to keep this power he’ll have to renounce love.
My friend looks at me : he shifts about on the stool : his eyes are blunt and aimed : the everything that he can’t say to me makes him even finer to my
eye.
I mark behind where his shoulder will end the curve of the line for the rock where I’ll put the fisherman : over here I’ll put the 2 children with the fish-spear under the high rock overhang : I mark where his hand will come over the frame at the front : I mark out in rough the little circle shape for the ring his hand will hold.
I just don’t see why, he is saying. Why whoever is brave or lucky enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can’t have both the ring and the love.
I nod that I agree and that I understand.
I know now what to make of the rest of the landscape behind him.
Here I am again : me, 2 eyes and a wall.
We are outside a house, have I been here before? There are 2 girls kneeling on the paving.
An old woman, I think I
do I know her? no
has come out and is sitting on the wall watching them : they’re painting, eggs? No, eyes : they’re painting 2 eyes on to a wall : they take an eye each : they begin with the black for the hole through which we see : then they ring the colour round it in segments (blue) : then the white : then the black outline.
An old woman is telling them something : a girl (who is she?) bends down to a pot with white in it, reaches forward, adds a small square of white the size of the end of her fingertip then does the same in the same place to the other eye cause an eye with no light is an eye that can’t see, I think is what the old woman sitting on a wall is telling
hardly able to hear though cause there’s
something
God knows what
drawing me
skin of my father?
the eyes of my mother?
down to
that thin-looking line
made of nothing
ground and grit and the
gather of dirt and earth and
the grains of stone
there at the very foot of this
(really badly made just saying)
wall at the place where the crumble of
the brickbase meets the paving
look
the line where
one thing meets another
the little green almost not-there weeds
take root in it
by enchantment
cause it’s an enchanted line
the line drawn between planes
place of green possibles
cause whatever they’re doing up there
eyes painted on a wall
it’s nothing
to the tiny and the many
variations of colours invisible
till the eye’s so close it
becomes the place
where a horizontal line meets a
vertical and a surface meets a surface and a
structure meets another which looks to
be 2 dimensions only but is deeper than
sea should you dare to enter or
deep as a sky and goes as deep into the
earth (the flower folds its petals down
the head droops on the stem)
through layered clay on stone
mixed by the
worms through whose mouths
everything passes
paddled by the many legs of
spores so small they’re much
much finer than an eyelash and
are colours only darkness can
make
veins like tracery
look
the treebranch thick with
all its leaves before even the
thought of the arrow
how
the root in the dark makes its
way under the ground
before there’s
any sign of the tree
the seed still unbroken
the star still unburnt
the curve of the eyebone
of the not yet born
hello all the new bones
hello all the old
hello all the everything
to be
made and
unmade
both
one
Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George’s mother says to George who’s sitting in the front passenger seat.
Not says. Said.
George’s mother is dead.
What moral conundrum? George says.
The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver’s seat is on at home. This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.
Okay. You’re an artist, her mother says.
Am I? George says. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum?
Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. You’re an artist.
This conversation is happening last May, when George’s mother is still alive, obviously. She’s been dead since September. Now it’s January, to be more precise it’s just past midnight on New Year’s Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George’s mother died.
George’s father is out. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the kitchen or going round the house switching things off and on. Henry is asleep. She just went in and checked on him; he was dead to the world, though not as dead as the word dead literally means when it means, you know, dead.
This will be the first year her mother hasn’t been alive since the year her mother was born. That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can’t not think it. Both at once.
Anyway George is spending the first minutes of the new year looking up the lyrics of an old song. Let’s Twist Again. Lyrics by Kal Mann. The words are pretty bad. Let’s twist again like we did last summer. Let’s twist again like we did last year. Then there’s a really bad rhyme, a rhyme that isn’t, properly speaking, even a rhyme.
Do you remember when
Things were really hummin’.
Hummin’ doesn’t rhyme with summer, the line doesn’t end in a question mark, and is it meant to mean, literally, do you remember that time when things smelt really bad?
Then Let’s twist again, twisting time is here. Or, as all the sites say, twistin’ time.
At least they’ve used an apostrophe, the George from before her mother died says.
I do not give a fuck about whether some site on the internet attends to grammatical correctness, the George from after says.
That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. They keep talking about how grief has stages. There’s some dispute about how many stages of grief there are. There are three, or five, or some people say seven.
It’s quite like the songwriter actually couldn’t be bothered to think of words. Maybe he was in one of the three, five or seven stages of mourning too. Stage nine (or twenty three or a hundred and twenty three or ad infinitum, because nothing will ever not be like this again): in this stage you will no longer be bothered with whether songwords mean anything. In fact you will hate almost all songs.
But George has to find a song to which you can do this specific dance.
It being so apparently contradictory and meaningless is no doubt a bonus. It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.
Okay, I’m imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song. Outside the car window Italy unfurls round and over them so hot and yellow it looks like it’s been sandblasted. In the back Henry snuffles lightly, his eyes closed, his mouth open. The band of the seatbelt is over his forehead because he is so small.
You’re an artist, her mother says, and you’re working on a project with a lot of other artists. And everybody on the project is getting the same amount, salary-wise. But you believe that what you’re doing is worth more than everyone on the project, including yo
u, is getting paid. So you write a letter to the man who’s commissioned the work and you ask him to give you more money than everyone else is getting.
Am I worth more? George says. Am I better than the other artists?
Does that matter? her mother says. Is that what matters?
Is it me or is it the work that’s worth more? George says.
Good. Keep going, her mother says.
Is this real? George says. Is it hypothetical?
Does that matter? her mother says.
Is this something that already has an answer in reality but you’re testing me with the concept of it though you already know perfectly well what you yourself think about it? George says.
Maybe, her mother says. But I’m not interested in what I think. I’m interested in what you think.
You’re not usually interested in anything I think, George says.
That’s so adolescent of you, George, her mother says.
I am adolescent, George says.
Well, yes. That explains that, then, her mother says.
There’s a tiny silence, still okay, but if she doesn’t give in a bit and soon George knows that her mother, who has been prickly, unpredictable and misery-faced for weeks now about there being trouble in the paradise otherwise known as her friendship with that woman Lisa Goliard, will get first of all distant then distinctly moody and ratty.
Is it happening now or in the past? George says. Is the artist a woman or a man?
Do either of those things matter? her mother says.
Does either, George says. Either being singular.
Mea maxima, her mother says.
I just don’t get why you won’t commit, ever, George says. And that doesn’t mean what you think it means. If you say it without the culpa it just means I’m the most, or I’m the greatest, or to me the greatest belongs, or my most.
It’s true, her mother says. I’m the most greatest. But the most greatest what?
Past or present? George says. Male or female? It can’t be both. It must be one or the other.
