by Ali Smith
About you – continued.
If you need help filling in this form, or any part of it, phone 0800 88 22 00.
Tell us about yourself.
Well. I am a nice person.
It was some time in the future. Lise was lying in bed. That was practically all the story there was.
In a minute she would sit up. Then after she had recovered from sitting up she would try to find the pencil in the folds of the bedclothes, and then she would write the words on the form.
After this she would cross out the word nice, and write above it the word sick.
I am a sick person.
That’s what she would do. She would do it. In a minute. How many minutes were there in an hour? That’s something she used to know, to just know, like people just know things. How many hours in a day, and weeks in a year? That was the kind of thing children knew, the kind of thing you were never supposed to forget in a lifetime. But nowadays there were some days on which she couldn’t remember how many months there were supposed to be in a year. Or which month it was right now.
It was summer, now, so it was one of the summer months, in the middle. She couldn’t be sure which, or which it was of the months that had thirty days, and which had thirty-one, and which had thirty-two. Or even which day of the week it was today. Tomorrow she would (maybe) be able to.
Today, though, something she knew clearly was:
Mazola
Simply corn oil
Mazola
Lets the flavour through
You never taste the oil
You only taste the food
With Mazola.
The voice that was singing the Mazola song inside her head, the same woman’s voice that had sung it years ago in the breaks between programmes, through the volume-holes punched in the side of the television, was friendly, reassuring. Mazola lets the flavour through. The pictures of the oil bottle and then the hands of a lady, delicate and ringed, letting chips fall on to kitchen paper and then shaking them off again, had demonstrated in a moment to millions how ungreasy the chips were, how little oil they left on the paper.
Lise breathed out. Then she breathed in.
Lise was lying in bed, in her room, in her flat, in a block of tenement flats six floors up, behind windows that looked out on to the walls of other tenements. Above and below her people were going on with lives. They scraped kitchen stools across floors, opened and shut front doors, turned televisions and radios off and on and shouted messages through the walls of rooms to loved ones or people they lived with. Outside, in the world, people still walked about and did things. For example, they went shopping. They could walk into a shop and not feel faint or dizzy or physically strange just because of the number of people buying things and the number of things available to them to buy all crammed inside the one roofed space with the noise of cash registers rattling out receipts for the bought things and the colours of all the products it was possible to buy swirling shelfily from aisle to aisle.
Shelfily. Was that a real word? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t be sure. She blinked. Black came over her eyes with her eyelids, and lifted off again. Behind the skin and bone at the front of her head the Mazola song began again. Mazola, simply corn oil.
Lise was lying in bed. That was what she was doing. There was something she had to write down. She was waiting to remember it. Thoughts were slowly unearthing in her brain, like turf being turned up by someone she could make out only on the distant horizon, on the edge of a waiting field, a person made so small by distance and so slowed with age or weariness that he or she could hardly wield the spade.
Lise wasn’t well.
Well: a word that was bottomless, that went down into depths which well people estimated, for fun, by throwing small coins then leaning with their heads over the mouth of the hole and their hands cocked behind their ears listening for their coin to hit the faraway water so they could make a wish. What could well people find to wish for, having everything already? Unwell: the opposite of well. It ought to be a place where things levelled out, a place of space, of no apparent narrative. Nothing could be possible there. Nothing could happen there, for a while.
Instead Lise, lying unmoving in bed, knew; it was as if she had been upended over the wall of a well like that one in the last paragraph and had been falling in the same monotonous nothing way for weeks, down into it like Alice hazily pondering bats and cats, through nothing but languid gravity, in a place where a second of time was stretched so long and so thin that you could see veins in it; and all these seconds, all this time, she (Lise) had seemed to be hardly moving, though in reality the sides of the tunnel were flying up past her at thousands, maybe millions of miles an hour, the curved wall and its slime-cold roughly surfaced bricks only inches from the skin of her nose and chin and the knuckles of her hands and feet, and her whole body tensed, ready, waiting, always about to hit it, the surface of the water.
So there was a story after all, somewhere, insistent, strung between this place and the last and the next, and she was trying to remember it. But this morning all she could remember so far went round and round behind the hard bone of her forehead like the cheap advertising it was. When it wasn’t the Mazola song in there, sinuous with its oily promise, it was the altogether higher, purer voice of the woman who sang: Bring me apples, Bring me (something), Bring me hazelnuts, Bring me wheat, Bring me good things, To eat, Kellogg’s Country Store.
This voice still sounded (inside her head all these years later) as if its owner had been brought up on healthy, very good things; it seemed to suggest that eating them every day had made her the successful and socially-upwardly-mobile singer of light classical repertoire that she was, and had got her the morally blameless job of singing on television about these good things precisely for the benefit of others.
Outside, the sun was shining. It was irrelevant.
There was something Lise had to write down, again. What was it?
I am a ( ) person.
She knew there was a pencil somewhere on the bed, or in the bed.
She didn’t think she would be able to make it across the room to get the notepad off the window seat.
Deirdre would fetch it over when she came.
But Lise might need to write it down before Deirdre came. What if she remembered it and then had to write it down before Deirdre came in case she forgot it? She could write it on the telephone directory. It was right by the telephone. The telephone was right by the bed. It needed one moment of movement, that was all, to reach the telephone directory and then she could tear pages out of it and write on them. She could write on the front-inside cover, and after that on its first pages, on which there would be some spare space, and then in the spaces on the pages of listed numbers, or round their edges, in the margins; it was very unlikely she would run out of room. She was sure she didn’t have that much to say. What she had to say about anything in the world would barely reach into the A’s of the full lists of the names of the people who lived in the same area as her.
Tearing pages out, though, would be hard work. She could hold the telephone directory on her knee, but it looked hulking and heavy with the lives of the thousands of unknown people in it. And look, anyway, she had paper in her hand, folded, already waiting there in her hand. What was it, again?
About you – continued.
In a minute she would sit up, in a minute find the pencil.
Write down your symptoms, a doctor had told her. Keep a diary of how it feels, what it feels like.
Tell us about yourself. I am nice/sick.
Lise was lying in bed. A form had to be filled in. It was important. She was holding the form in her hand. It could have been in her hand for hours; she didn’t remember anything like picking a form up or getting a form out of an envelope. She could have been asleep for days and awake for days, holding it. Who knew? She would ask Deirdre when she came. Incapacity For Work Questionnaire Do not delay filling in and sending back this questionnaire or you could
lose money. How many days have I been holding this form in my hand? Lise wondered. Have I lost money?
Deirdre would know.
As soon as she could, Lise would begin it. I. As soon as she found the pencil. Am.
A nice person. I try to be one. I hold open the doors of shops I’m going out of or coming into for old people, or mothers with prams, or for anybody, for that matter, coming after or towards me, they don’t have to be a mother or old. I flinch at television news showing dead bodies in different parts of the world, I feel for the relatives of the people killed, shown on the television grieving; I worry for people living in war zones. I worry for children whose parents or elders abuse them. I worry for people who are being tortured. I worry for beagles strapped into machines and made to smoke, and horses farmed for oestrogen whose foals are routinely slaughtered. I worry for vegetarians not having proper menus in restaurants, and for them having people be sarky to them because they’re vegetarian, and I also worry for meat-eaters not being given their proper democratic rights, and smokers who are desperate for a cigarette and are stuck somewhere where they’re not allowed to smoke. I worry for the lungs of smokers. I always help people with heavy things carry them up the steps of the bus. I am polite to people when we are standing in queues. I always let someone who has less to buy than I do go ahead of me at the checkout. When I’m driving, I am courteous. I keep to the speed limit, more or less, in built-up areas. I let people in other cars out of side-roads into the queue. I give way.
I am no great shakes. I am no saint. I am no world-changer. But I will put a cup or a glass over a spider on the floor, slide a postcard under with care so as not to catch its legs, and then open the front door and put it outside. Is that good? Or if there is overtime at the hotel and someone else needs it, I will give way. If someone asks me to work a shift for him or her, I will, of course I will, if I can.
Would’ve. Did. Was. Everything – cars, buses, work, shops, people, everything – other than this bed she was lying in was into a different tense now. Now: I am a sick person. I don’t do anything. My skin hurts. My face hurts. My head hurts. My arms hurt. My shoulders and back and legs and feet hurt, at different times usually, though sometimes all at once. Pain travels round my body sticking little stakes into it like I am a new territory that has to be claimed. My hands act like they’re made of stones. They weigh my arms down. When I walked to the doctor’s – which didn’t used to be very far, which is only a matter of hundreds of yards – though now a small room can be a desert, a vast and windwhipped plain from one domestic wall to the other – I found out what slow motion can mean. That was the last time my heart flew, and it flew inside me like a trapped bird, a blackbird caught in a living-room battering itself about above meaningless furniture.
I have not been out of the front door of the flat and down the stairs and out of the building since then.
How small this world has become. How huge that world is. I saw Paris on television. To see a city full of people walking, smoke rising, cars roaring, days happening, was terrifying.
I have since stopped watching television. My heart hurts. It hurts like a sore heart. Light hurts. Dark falls over me like a kind of apathy, and I am frightened that this apathy hurts too, that it is bruising me all over, and that one terrible morning I will wake up and find that I can feel it.
I sleep badly. I lie awake waiting till I sleep badly again.
I do not know when, or if, I will be able to do, well, anything, again.
Lise was lying in bed. She was wondering how to say all of this on the form.
Her doctor had nodded; we can’t actually find anything wrong with you, she had said nodding. She was nice about it. There was nothing she could do. You may have something as yet undiagnosable. Many people do. For instance your lymphocyte and monocyte count, here, are slightly raised. It could indicate that you’ve already fought off a small viral infection. It could also indicate nothing, it can indicate sheer normality.
Lise was lying in bed. Deirdre would come at four. That was normality. All Lise could remember today was the songs of thrown-away rubbish; the songs of plastic bottles and cardboard cereal packets, things made and eaten long ago, long since rotted away or buried in landfill. Someone was to blame. It was Deirdre’s fault, this, that all she could remember was rhyming trash. It was in Lise’s blood like a germ; she had come down a bland line herself after all. Bland lines and forgettable bad rhyme were somewhere in her genetic structure, ha ha. She would tell Deirdre. That would make Deirdre laugh, maybe. At some point today, like all the days, it would be four o’clock. The moments would become minutes, then hours, and the hands of the clock would be at their jaunty angle and the door flying open and her mother would enter, all triumph and disaster. Perhaps this was medically relevant, something she ought to have told the doctor along with the headaches rheumatic and muscular pain backache migraine dental pain flu symptoms feverishness neuralgia nausea undiagnosable etc. Perhaps it was important. Behind me, under me, doctor, no listen, stretching down into the earth beneath me there are centuries’ worth of ancestors who maybe suffered the same strain of bad art that’s come down the line to me direct from my mother. Maybe you’ve heard of her? No?
Back then Lise the child had used to wonder where they all went, the thousands of faces of her mother on all the cardboard sleeves. Who had bought them and taken them home, what rooms they looked out on to. Where were they now? those smiles? that grooved-in voice? gone to LP-heaven? in second-hand stores stacked beside stolen stereos? down the backs of old-fashioned hi-fi systems in old-fashioned units next to old-fashioned three-piece suites in the houses of people’s aging parents, alongside albums by Val Doonican and Lena Martell, Bobby Crush, Lena Zavaroni? At the height of her fame Deirdre had appeared weekly on a consumer television programme making up verses about news and current affairs. Her most popular poem, ‘The Old Computer Card’, had trembled on the edges of the top one hundred pop singles chart; a comic lament made by a computer card punched full of holes, about how new computers on the market had made computer cards obsolete. Deirdre had done a tour of regional theatres, she had signed many albums for smiling pensioners.
That was twenty years ago, when Lise was small. Now the pensioners were dead and her mother was greying, in her late fifties, and was occasionally on local radio where people made fun of her and imitated her unlocal accent. Over the years, the years had made her miserable. Deirdre, Queen of Sorrows.
But Lise being ill had made her happy. At four o’clock into the room through the door she would swing, come alive again, two-stepping to her own signature tune like the heroine of a middle-class sitcom into the sick daughter’s room, a room that’s not really a room but has been strewn by continuity people with all the tables and cabinets and things on the wall and books lying about that rooms are supposed to have, and its three walls open to an audience that’s longing to laugh and clap, dying to laugh at any old rubbish, any bad line, any sick joke; an audience that’s already been fleeced by a warm-up comedian telling them racist or mildly lewd stories. In would come Deirdre on cue to warm applause, all summer scarf and sympathy but happy, happy, happy, because at this particular time in her life (yes, one set of more or less consecutive moments in a lifetime of millions and millions of moments and exhausting possibilities) she was cheered, happier than she’d been in years, full of the new importance of her new major project.
What is happening to you, Deirdre told Lise in all seriousness, three weeks into her bedrest on the first of Deirdre’s happier days as she knelt by the side of the bed and brought her face as close to Lise’s as she could without her eyes losing their ability to focus, is visionary and poetic. It is like William Dunbar’s poem, you remember? Man blown about like a willow tree is blown by the wind? This false warld is bot transitory? Remember? It is revelatory, to be sick like you are. It is a mystic state. Something comes of fevers in this world, girl of mine; prophets had fevers and visions; something will come of it. It’s an ill wind, L
ise, an ill wind, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Girl of yours. Beyond Lise’s tight-closed eyes Deirdre was smiling and eager on the carpet. She was almost quivering with eagerness. After a while of it, Lise had heard her get up, go through to wash her hands (she washed her hands a lot, in case it was catching). Her mother was humming in the bathroom, moving towels around. Here was real art at last. Three days later she announced her new epic poem, to be called ‘Hotel World’.
Lise could, today, lying in bed, recall nothing more than the fuzziest sense of what Deirdre had already read out loud to her of ‘Hotel World’ – a metaphysical pun, of which Deirdre was quite proud, on the Global Hotel chain where Lise had worked – with rhymes like spiral for post-viral, perm for germ, inspire us for virus. (Though if you had been there and you had asked her yourself Lise couldn’t have remembered more than the odd word of it, this is how verse four, for example, of ‘Hotel World’ actually went:
You once worked on Reception
In Control, my daughter dear.
But now you find yourself checked in
To your own Hotel Room, here.
A room whose key’s mysterious,
Whose view is strait and serious,
Whose purpose is imperious,
Whose minibar is Fear.)
Deirdre would sit on the end of the bed with her pen held erect and wagging. Tell me a few little things, she would say most days. Are you up to it? Darling? Up to it today? It’ll help you concentrate. Concentrate for Deirdre. Lise. Lise? Tell me anything. Anything about the hotel, for instance. Just everyday things would do. And when she left at half past six she would still be saying as she slipped out the door, and do remember Lise, if you can, if you could, write them down for me as and when you remember them, things that happened. Anything you remember, anything. You never know what might be important.
The poem was only up to verse eight but it was going to be an epic; it allowed for a good long illness. But the point is, the point is, Deirdre would come. She was coming. Even in the timeless zone of the average day of an unwell person invisible to the rest of the fast-moving world there was Deirdre at four o’clock.
