by Ali Smith
well, no,
thank you,
thank you very much:
—
instead, it was Christmas Eve morning. It would be a busy day. People were coming to stay for Christmas, Arthur bringing his girlfriend/partner with him. There was organizing to be done.
After breakfast Sophia drove to town, to the bank, which stated on its website that it would be open till noon.
She was still, regardless of the losses, what the bank designated a Corinthian account holder, which meant her bank cards had a graphic on them of the top of a Corinthian pillar with its flourish of stony leaves, unlike the more ordinary account holder cards which had no graphic at all, and being a Corinthian account holder meant she had the right to personal treatment and attention at the bank via an Individual Personal Adviser. For this she paid more than £500 a year. For this, her Individual Personal Adviser, should she ever have a query or a need, was available to sit opposite her and phone through to the bank’s call centre for her while she sat in the same room and waited. This meant she didn’t have to do this phoning herself, though sometimes, all the same, the Individual Personal Adviser simply wrote a number down on a slip of bank paper and handed it to a client suggesting it might be more comfortable for the client to do the phoning from home and this brush-off had also quite recently happened to Sophia, though she was, she believed, still well known, or at least, well, known, in the local bank as a once- stellar international businesswoman who’d come down here to retire.
Where were the bank managers of yesteryear? Their suits, their assurances, their knowing tips, their promises, their clever politesse, their expensive embossed personally signed Christmas cards? This morning the Individual Personal Adviser, a young man who looked to be about the age of a school-leaver and who, with Sophia sitting opposite him and the computer, was still on hold thirty five minutes later waiting for the bank’s call centre to put him through to the right person without cutting him off, wasn’t sure he’d be able to answer Mrs Cleves’s queries before the bank closed at noon. It might maybe be better if Mrs Cleves made an appointment for after Christmas week.
The Individual Personal Adviser hung up the phone and booked Sophia a Personal Advice appointment slot on the computer for the first week of January. He explained to Sophia that the bank would send her an email confirming the appointment and then a text the day before as a reminder. Then – because the screen had clearly prompted him – he asked Mrs Cleves if she’d like to take out any insurance.
No, thank you, Sophia said.
Housing, buildings, car, possessions, health, travel, any kind of insurance? the Individual Personal Adviser said reading the screen.
But Sophia already had all the insurance she needed.
So the Individual Personal Adviser, still looking at the screen, told her some more facts about the competitive rates and the combination possibilities in the insurance range the bank could offer its premier customers. Then he checked through her Corinthian account details to tell her which of these insurances she already had, being a Corinthian card holder, and which of them her Corinthian account didn’t cover.
Sophia reminded him that she’d like to take some cash out today before she left.
Then the Individual Personal Adviser began speaking about cash. Money, he said, was now being manufactured specifically for machines rather than for human hands. There would soon be a new ten pound note too, like the new five pound note, made of much the same stuff, materials which made it easier for machines to count notes, and a lot more difficult if you were a human being working in a bank to count them by hand. Soon, he said, there’d be almost no human beings left working in banks.
She saw a flush on the skin at his neck, up towards his ears. There was a flush on his cheekbones too. Probably the people working in this bank had started Christmas-party drinking early. He didn’t look old enough to drink legally. He looked for a moment like he might actually start to cry. He was pathetic. His preoccupations were nothing to her; why should they be?
But Sophia, who knew from experience the uses of a good relationship with the people who work in banking, decided not to be impatient or unpleasantly sharp while the Individual Personal Adviser told her at a bit too much length about how he had found himself starting to choose the interactive checkout machine to avoid the now old-style real people who still ring purchases through at the supermarket checkouts.
At first he had been incensed, he said, when the supermarket where he buys his lunch took away some of the people working on checkout and replaced them with self-service checkout units. So he’d made a point of always choosing to pay a human being. But the queue for seeing a real person was always long because only one person was ever on those human tills now and the checkout machines were almost always free because there were more of them and therefore the queues for them moved so much faster and so he’d begun to go to the machines when he bought his lunch and now he always went straight to the machines and in a strange way it was a relief to because having a talk with someone, even the smallest, most casual of talks, was sometimes quite hard because you always felt they judged you or you always felt shy or that you were saying a stupid or wrong thing.
The pitfalls of human exchange, Sophia said.
The Individual Personal Adviser looked at her instead of his screen. She saw him see her.
She was some old woman he didn’t know anything about or care about.
He glanced back at his screen. She knew he was looking at her account figures. Last year’s figures weren’t on there. They meant nothing. Nor the figures from the year before, or the one before that, and so on.
Where are the bank account figures of yesteryear?
It is a fact, Sophia said. The slightest human exchange is complex in the extreme. Now. If I may. I came in today specifically to withdraw a sum of cash.
Yes. My colleagues at the front desk will help you with today’s cash withdrawal, Mrs Cleves, he said.
Then he looked at the screen and said, Oh no. No, I’m afraid they won’t be able to.
Why? Sophia said.
I’m afraid we’re now closed, he said.
Sophia looked at the clock on the wall behind him. Twenty three seconds past noon.
But you’ll still be able to provide me with the amount I came in especially to take out today, Sophia said.
I’m afraid our safes lock automatically at close of day, the Individual Personal Adviser said.
I’d like you to check my client status, if you would, Sophia said.
We can check, he said, but it’s unlikely we’ll be able to do anything.
So what you’re saying is, I can’t withdraw the money I wish to withdraw out of my own account today, she said.
Of course you’ll still be able to take out the amount you want up to your limit from the cash machine at the front of the bank, he said.
He stood up. He didn’t do any status checking. He opened the door because their allotted time in this particular room and on this particular appointment was over.
Is there any chance I might discuss this with your branch manager? Sophia said.
I am the branch manager, Mrs Cleves, the Individual Personal Adviser said.
They wished each other a Merry Christmas. Sophia left the bank. She heard him lock the main doors behind her.
Outside the bank she went to the cash machine. The machine had a message on its screen saying it was temporarily out of order.
Then Sophia got caught in the traffic jam congealing in all directions. She got caught next to the patch of grass in the centre of town, you could hardly call it a park, where that tree, all the years ago, used to have the white wooden bench round its trunk especially constructed to fit the girth of the tree but now had nothing. She thought momentarily about abandoning her car in the middle of the road and going to sit under the tree for a while, till the traffic cleared. She could just leave it in the middle of the road. The other people in cars could just drive round it. She could just
sit on the turf.
She looked across at the great old tree.
She looked at the notice about the sale of the park and the plan for the luxury flats office space prime retail space. Luxury. Prime. In heaven the bells were ringing from a hardware, homeware and garden shop across the road from the green with a closing down sale banner across its windows. Gloh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh.
The thing about Christmas music that’s particularly interesting, she thought to herself in a knowledgeable but not offputting Radio 4 voice as if on a programme about Christmas music, is that it’s thoroughly ineffectual, it just won’t and doesn’t work at any other time of the year. But now, at this bleakest midwinter time, it touches us deeply because it is insistent about both loneliness and communality, she told the millions of listeners not listening. It gives a voice to spirit at its biggest, and encourages spirit at its smallest, its most wizened, to soak itself in something richer. It intrinsically means a revisiting. It means the rhythm of the passing of time, yes, but also, and more so, the return of time in its endless and comforting cycle to this special point in the year when regardless of the dark and the cold we shore up and offer hospitality and goodwill and give them out, a bit of luxury in a world primed against them both.
In the bleak silent night holy night above thy deep and dreamless sleep let nothing you dismay. She sighed, sat back into her seat. She knew them all – all the Christmas songs – didn’t just know them, knew them word for word off by heart, plus descants. Perhaps that was what a Catholic indoctrination had been for, and the ancient old Welshman headmaster who took them for singing, remember him, the old head before the new younger head came, he was kindly, which made a change, and in between the singing he’d stop the class, arms out, hands open, like an old-time actor on a stage, and tell them stories instead of teaching anything. He was tweedy, bright-eyed, always had a certain scent all round him, medicinal, not unpleasant, and he was a man from a time so truly in the past to them that the whole class took him and his stories as seriously as if they’d come direct from God.
For instance he’d told them the one about the famed artist who’d drawn nothing but a circle on a piece of canvas with a piece of charcoal when the emperor’s messengers arrived, sent to him to command him to paint for the emperor the world’s most perfect picture. Give him this.
What other stories had that old head told them?
This one.
A man murdered another man in a stony field. They’d had a disagreement about something and one hit the other over the head with a big round stone, a stone as big as a head. This killed the other man. So the man who’d killed him scanned the landscape all round them as far as he could see to see if anyone might have seen it happen. Nobody. He went home and got a shovel. He dug a big hole in the field and rolled the dead man into it, then he dropped the heavy stone over the side of a bridge into the river. He went down to the side of the river and washed himself and dusted down his clothes.
But he couldn’t get away from the thought of the dead man’s broken head. The thought of it followed him wherever he went.
So he went to the church. Bless me Father, for I have sinned. I fear God won’t be able to forgive what I’ve done.
The priest, who was a young man too, reassured him that if he confessed and made a true good penance then of course he’d be forgiven.
I’ve killed a man. I’ve buried him in the cornfield, the man said. I hit him with a stone and he fell down dead. I dropped the stone I did it with into the river.
The priest nodded behind the darkened window, the little grille full of holes. He gave the man his penance and he said the words of Absolution. So the man went out and sat in the church and said the prayers and was forgiven.
Years passed, decades, and the whereabouts of the man who’d died ceased to concern or worry anyone. Everyone who cared had died and everyone else forgot him.
One day an old man met an old priest, by chance, on the way into town, and he recognized him and said, Father, shake me by the hand. I don’t know if you remember me.
They travelled to town together and chatted about all sorts of things, family, life, the things that had changed, the things that had stayed the same.
Then, as they drew close to the town, the old man said, Father, I’d like to thank you for helping me all the years ago. I’d like to thank you for not telling anyone what I did.
What you did? the old priest said.
When I killed the man with the stone, the old man said, and buried him in the cornfield.
The old man took a flask out of his pocket and offered the old priest a drink. The priest drank a toast with the man. They nodded to each other and said goodbye when they arrived in the market square.
The old man went home. The old priest went to the police.
The police went to the cornfield and dug up some bones and they came for the old man.
The old man was tried, found guilty and hanged in the jail.
Riven with angels, the shops were shutting. The light of day was almost gone.
Sophia drove home. When she got home she unlocked the front door. She went through to the kitchen.
She sat down at the table.
She held her head in her hands.
On a late summer day in 1981 two young women are standing outside a typical ironmonger’s on the high street of a southern English town. There is a sign above the door in the shape of a door key, on it the words KEYS CUT. There’ll be a high smell of creosote, oil, paraffin, lawn treatment stuff. There’ll be brushheads with handles, brushheads without handles, handles by themselves, for sale. What else? Rakes, spades, forks, a garden roller, a wall of stepladders, a tin bath full of bags of compost. Calor gas bottles, saucepans, frying pans, mopheads, charcoal, folding stools made of wood, a plastic bucket of plungers, stacked packs of sandpaper, sacks of sand in a wheelbarrow, metal doormats, axes, hammers, a camping stove or two, hessian carpet mats, stuff for curtains, stuff for curtain rails, stuff for screwing curtain rails to walls and pelmets, pliers, screwdrivers, bulbs, lamps, pails, pegs, laundry baskets. Saws, of all sizes. EVERYTHING FOR THE HOME.
But it’s the flowers, lobelia, alyssum, and the racks of the bright coloured seed packets the women will remember most when they talk about it afterwards.
They say hello to the man behind the counter. They stand by the rolls of chains of different widths. They compare the price per yard. They calculate. One of them pulls a length of slim chain; it unrolls and clinks against itself, and the other stands in front of her pretending to look at something else while she passes the chain around her hips and measures it against herself.
They look at each other and shrug. They’ve no idea how long or short.
So they check how much money they’ve got. Under £10. They consider padlocks. They’ll need to buy four. If they buy the smaller cheaper type of padlock it’ll leave enough money for roughly three yards of it.
The ironmonger cuts the lengths for them. They pay him. The bell above the door will have clanged behind them. They’ll have stepped back out into the town in its long English shadows, its summer languor.
Nobody looks at them. Nobody on the sleepy sunny street even gives them a second glance. They stand on the kerb. This town’s high street seems unusually wide now. Was it this wide before they went into the shop, and they just didn’t notice?
They don’t dare to laugh till they’re out of the town and back on the road walking the miles towards the others, and then they do. Then they laugh like anything.
Imagine them arm-in-arm in the warmth, one swinging the bag jangling the lengths of chain in it and singing to make the other laugh, jingle bells jingle bells jingle all the way, the other with the padlocks complete with their miniature keys in her pockets, and the grasses in the verges on both sides of the road they’re on summer-yellow and shot through with the weeds, the wildflowers.
It is winter solstice. Art, in London, is on a worn-out communal pc in what was once the Reference bit of the library a
nd now has a sign over its door saying Welcome To The Ideas Store. He is typing random words into Google to see if they come up automatically in frequent search as dead or not. Most of them do, and if they don’t immediately come up as dead they pretty much always will if you type [word] plus is plus the letter d.
He has a little frisson of something – he isn’t sure what, maybe masochism – when he types in art then is and up it comes, top answer on the top searches:
art is dead.
Then he tries the word masochism.
Masochism doesn’t come up as dead.
Love, however, is definitely dead.
This place he’s in is the opposite of dead. It is buzzing. It is full of people doing things. It was quite difficult to get a place on one of these old pcs and a lot of people are now standing waiting for one of the only five that are working. Some of the people in the queue have an urgent look like there are things they really have to do soon. One or two look frantic. They pace about behind the people in the pc cubicles. Art doesn’t care. Today he doesn’t care about anything. The famously gentle Art, the thoughtful generous lyrical sensitive Art, is giving way to no one else’s needs and is staying in this makeshift fucking cubicle as long as he likes and as long as he chooses to.
(Out of gentleness, thoughtfulness, generosity, lyricism and sensitivity, only lyricism is dead.)
He has a lot of work to do.
He also has a blog piece to write about solstice and to upload before it isn’t solstice any more.
He types in blogs and then are.
Up it comes. Dead.
He types in nature is.
It’s one of the ones that need the extra d. When he adds it, up come these suggestions: