Winter

by Ali Smith

  nature is dangerous

  nature is dying

  nature is divine

  nature is dead

  Nature writers, however, doesn’t come up as dead. When you type it in, a row of thumbnails comes up, little pictures of the healthy looking faces of all the greats, past and present. He looks at them, the little thoughtful faces, the world-understanders in their row of tiny online squares, and feels a terrible sadness at his core.

  Can natures change?

  Because his is feckless.

  He is a selfish fraud.

  Things never go so wrong, do they, in real nature writers’ lives, that they can’t solve it or salve it by writing about nature? And look at him.

  Charlotte is right. He is not the real thing.

  Charlotte.

  His mother is expecting him and Charlotte in Cornwall in three days’ time.

  He takes his phone out of his pocket. He looks at its screen. Charlotte has started sending out fake tweets from @rtinnature. Yesterday, pretending to be him, she told his 3,451 followers that he’d seen the first brimstone of the new year cycle. 3 months early the first sieg hting of brimstone ! She is also making spelling mistakes on purpose to make him look stupid and slapdash and, considering that little sieg, maybe also trying to attract a few Nazis to the feed. She posted a picture she’ll have downloaded off the net of a female brimstone on a leaf. Twitter went mad, mini twitterstorm, @rtinnature trended briefly because more than a thousand excited, angry and mildly abusive nature-loving people all took to castigating him at once for not knowing the difference between a new butterfly and a wakened hibernator.

  Today’s tweets, which began half an hour ago, also under his username, are telling everybody another blatant lie. Today Charlotte is tweeting pictures she’s found somewhere of Euston Road in a snowstorm.

  It isn’t snowing. It’s 11 degrees and sunny.

  The replies are already foaming like badly poured lager. Fury and sarcasm and rancour and hatred and ridicule, and one tweet which said if you were a woman I’d be sending you a death threat right about now. Art is not sure whether this is a po-mo joke or not. Worse, a couple of media sources, an Australian one and an American one, have picked it up and run with it, with his twitter ID still on it. First Photos Central London Snowfall.

  His phone in his hand lights up. Dear Neph.

  It’s Iris.

  Yesterday Iris texted him to tell him the other meaning of brimstone. Dear Neph, did u ever check out or cm across fire-and-forget function of so-calld Brimstone, I mean air-launched ground attack missile kind. Not very bttrfly eh! if *it* flaps wings then whole other bttrfly effect for sure x Ire

  Today she is unexpectedly comforting. Dear Neph, she says, ur not soundng much like urself on twit :-$. So tell me now that u know persnlly : are we at mercy of tchnology or is tchnology at mercy of us? x Ire

  Well, that’s brilliant. Because if even his aged old aunt who’s into her what must be late seventies and in any case hardly knows him can tell he is being faked then he needn’t worry, his true followers will definitely work it out.

  Knee-deep snow in London tweeby mates!

  He is not going to be drawn.

  He is better than that.

  He is not going to give her the pleasure of a stand-off.

  He will not be brought so low.

  He will allow her to reveal her own lowness by her actions.

  (It is intriguing that Charlotte is so keen to keep in touch with him one way or another.)

  He looks around him at all the people in the library. I mean, look. See that. Not one other person in this room knows or cares about the things that are happening online in his name and under his header photo. When you look at it like that it’s pretty much like it isn’t really happening.

  Except it is.

  So which is the real thing? Is this library not the world? Is that the world, the one on the screen, and this, this sitting here bodily with all these other people round him, isn’t? He looks out the window beyond the boxy old pc screen. Traffic is passing, people passing in all directions, a girl is sitting reading something in a bus shelter opposite and she isn’t in turmoil, is she?

  No.

  So he doesn’t need to be.

  But

  tweeby mates

  Charlotte is demeaning him and simultaneously making it look like he is demeaning his own followers. It is galling in so many ways. She knows it is. She is tweeting about snow specifically to be galling to him. She knows he has had everything planned, that he’s been planning for quite some time for when it does properly snow, if it ever does again, for a piece about it for Art in Nature. He is – was – going to be riffing on the theme of footprints and alphabetical print. Every written letter making its mark, digital or ink on paper, is a form of track, an animal spoor, a line that’s been in his notebook for well over a year and a half. She knows full well he’s been waiting because of the warm winter last year. He has such good words now, great words to conjure with – trail, stamp, impress. He has also been collecting unusual words for snow conditions. Blenky. Sposh. Penitents. He is – was – going to get a bit political actually and talk about natural unity in seeming disunity, about how unity can be revealed against the odds by the random grace of snow’s relationship with wind direction, the way that snow lands with an emphasis on one direction even though a tree’s branches go in so many directions. (Charlotte thought this was a really lame idea and gave him a lecture about how he was missing the point, that all but the very best and most politically aware nature writers were habitually self-satisfied and self-blinding and comforting themselves about their own identities in troubling times, and that the word snowflake now had a whole new meaning and he should be writing about that.) He’s been making notes on the give and take of water molecules, he was going to subhead it Generous Water. He’s been noting why, on a cold day when there’s very little breeze, something turning to ice will produce what looks like smoke, like a fire, and making notes about the combination of snow and ice called snice, with which buildings can be built because it’s so strong, and about the feathery fernleaf shapes ice makes when it forms on some surfaces and doesn’t on others, and on how it’s actually true that no two snow crystals are ever alike, on the difference between flake and crystal and the communal nature of the snowflake – that’s also quite a political thing to write about – as well as how flakes falling from the sky are their own natural alphabet, forming their own unique grammar every time.

  Charlotte tore the pages out of the snow notebook and threw them out the window of the flat.

  He’d looked out and seen what was left of them in the treetops and the bushes, on the windscreens and roofs of the cars parked beneath, blowing about on the pavement.

  You, a nature writer, she said. Make me laugh. You can’t just make up stuff about wandering around in a field or beside a canal and put it online and then call yourself a nature writer. In any case you’re nothing but a grass. That’s as close as you’ll ever get to nature, grassing on people and taking a salary for it. Don’t be thinking you can pass yourself off to people, or to yourself more like, as anything other than the scrappy patch of dishonourable grass you are.

  They were having the fight because she’d caught him cleaning his fingernails out on the page edges of one of her books and had asked him not to, after which, because he was irked at being criticized, he’d started criticizing her endless moaning about the state of the world.

  They made their choice, he said when she complained again about the people from the EU being made to wait to see if they can stay in the country or not, and people married to people from the EU, and people whose kids were born here who might not get to stay etc. They chose to come and live here. They ran that risk. It’s not our responsibility.

  Choice, she said.

  Yes, he said.

  Is this like when we were talking about the people who drowned trying to cross the sea running away from war, and you said we didn’t n
eed to feel responsible because it had been their choice to run away from their houses being burned down and bombed and then their choice again to get into a boat that capsized? she said.

  This is the kind of thing she’s been saying.

  We’re all right, he said. Stop worrying. We’ve enough money, we’ve both got good assured jobs. We’re okay.

  Your default to selfishness is not okay at all, she said.

  Then she started shouting about the effect of forty years of political selfishness. As if you can talk about the effect of forty years of politics with any real knowledge when you yourself, if you’re Charlotte, have only lived twenty nine. It is stultifying. No, what it is, really, is a form of self-hurt: witness the fact that Charlotte keeps talking about a recurring dream in which she is cutting herself open in a zigzag at the breastbone with a pair of chicken scissors, the bonecutting kind, then into four pieces like a chicken for soup.

  In my dreams I’m a quartered kingdom, she has taken to saying whenever she wants attention. In my dreams I embody the terrible divisions in our country.

  In her dreams is right.

  The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what’s happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.

  Art laughed out loud. Charlotte looked furious.

  It’s terrifying, she said.

  No it isn’t, he said.

  You’re fooling yourself, she said.

  The world order was changing and what was truly new, here and there, Charlotte said, was that the people in power were self-servers who’d no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history.

  That’s not new either, he said.

  They were like a new kind of being, she said – like beings who’d been birthed not by real historied time and people but by, by –

  he watched her sitting on the edge of the bed with one hand on her collarbone and the other waving about in the air as she struggled for the right comparison –

  By what? he said.

  By plastic carrier bags, she said.

  Eh? he said.

  That unhistoried, she said. That inhuman. That brainless and unknowing about all the centuries of all the ways that people carried things before they were invented. That damaging to the environment for years and years after they’ve outgrown their use. Damage for generations.

  It. Was. Ever, he said.

  Then after a pause, he said, Thus.

  How can you be so naive? she said.

  After such an ultra-simplified anti-capitalist simile you’re calling me naive? he said.

  When pre-planned theatre is replacing politics, she said, and we’re propelled into shock mode, trained to wait for whatever the next shock will be, served up shock on a 24 hour newsfeed like we’re infants living from nipple to sleep to nipple to sleep –

  A little nipple would be nice, now and again, he said.

  (She ignored this.)

  – from shock to shock and chaos to chaos like it’s meant to be nourishment, she said. It’s not nourishment. It’s the opposite of nourishment. It’s fake mothering. Fake fathering.

  But why would they want to propel us from shock to shock? he said. What would be the point?

  Distraction, she said.

  From what? he said.

  To make the stock markets volatile, she said. To make the currencies jumpy.

  Conspiracy theory is so last year, he said. And the year before that. And the year before that. Plus ça change.

  There’s been change all right, she said (saying the word the French way like he had). Never mind literal climate change, there’s been a whole seasonal shift. It’s like walking in a blizzard all the time just trying to get to what’s really happening beyond the noise and hype.

  I’d love to chat all day about the seasons but I’ve work to do, he said.

  He opened his laptop. He started looking up the sites where he might be able to buy up any remaining deodorant sticks of a certain make. The one he’d been using for years had been recently discontinued. She came across the room and hit the laptop screen with the back of her hand. She was jealous of his laptop.

  I’ve the solstice blog to write, he said.

  Solstice, she said. You said it. Darkest days ever. There’s never been a time like this.

  Yes there has, he said. The solstices are cyclic and they happen every year.

  For some reason Charlotte really erupted at this. It is possible she’s always hated his blog. In the fight, she called it his irrelevant reactionary unpolitical blog.

  When have you ever even mentioned the world’s threatened resources? she said. Water wars? The shelf the size of Wales that’s about to break off the side of Antarctica?

  The what? he said.

  The plastic in the sea? she said. The plastic in the seabirds? The plastic in the innards of nearly every single fish or aquatic creature? Is there even such a thing left in the world as unruined water?

  She had her arms up over her head, round her head as she said it.

  Well, I’m just not a politico, he said. What I do is by its nature not political. Politics is transitory. What I do is the opposite of transitory. I watch the progress of the year in the fields, I look closely at the structures of hedgerows. Hedgerows are, well, they’re hedgerows. They just aren’t political.

  She laughed in his face. She shouted about how very political hedgerows in fact were. Then furious rage came out of her, plus the word narcissist several times.

  Art in Nature my arse, she said.

  This was the point at which he’d left the room, then left the flat.

  He’d stood out in the lobby for a bit.

  She didn’t come out to fetch him back in.

  So he went downstairs to see what he could rescue of his snow notes.

  When he came back up and into the flat he found the hall cupboard door open, everything from its insides strewn across the floor and Charlotte choosing a drill-bit from the selection inside the flung-open drill-carrier. His laptop was flattened upside down suspended between two chairs. She held up the drill and pressed the trigger. It roared and whirred in the air.

  Cue canned sitcom laughter.

  What the fuck are you doing? he shouted over the whirr. You’ll electrocute yourself.

  She held up a large flat black thing.

  Dead, she said. Like your political soul.

  She tossed it at him spinningly like a Frisbee. Was that a laptop battery? Wow. How amazing the batteries in new laptops were, he thought as he ducked.

  It clattered against the TV screen and he was lucky it missed him; such a thing looked like it could, at the right angle, decapitate.

  (This was the moment he’d begun to suspect that Charlotte had maybe found the draft emails he’d been writing to Emily Bray about possibly meeting up on Wednesday evenings between four and six; he missed sex with Emily and had been drafting a letter to ask whether she missed sex with him too and whether some arrangement might be possible.

  He’d never sent it.

  He hadn’t even been that sure he’d ever send it.

  He’ll write a new message to Emily. When he buys the new laptop.)

  Political.

  Soul.

  He’s already tried the word politics. It’s dead.

  Soul is d

  Up comes the word dying.

  Well, there’s hope, then. Not dead yet.

  Laptop is d

  Up it comes, dead.

  His laptop is definitely dead, its screen a mosaic of crazy paving, and Charlotte gone, her suitcases gone. Which is why he is here on a communal pc the keyboard of which makes the fingers on his hands feel as inept as some lovemaking sessions he’d rather not recall, and on which he can’t find the key for the
@.

  He briefly considers contacting Emily Bray anyway to ask her if she’d like to come to his mother’s with him for Christmas, because it will be feeble and embarrassing, since he has made such a fuss about bringing Charlotte, to turn up with nobody.

  But he and Emily haven’t spoken for nearly three years.

  Since Charlotte.

  He gets his phone out and looks through his contacts. No. Nope. No.

  Then he laughs at himself for the outrageousness, the idiocy, of the idea.

  He reads old Iris’s text again.

  Are we at the mercy.

  No.

  Come on.

  He will survive this. Then – yes – he’ll write about how he has survived it. He’ll write a shining piece for Art in Nature about how to survive the fraudulent world, and not just how to survive it but how to get to the truth through it, through the pungent onion-layers of fraud (oh that’s quite good, write it down Art), through even the lies told about you by your nearest and dearest and the lies you don’t know you’re telling yourself about yourself or others. He will cut through false narrative with razor edge writing. It’ll be searing. It’ll be honest. It’ll be about what can’t be taken from you. He will call it Truth Will Out. Or TWO.

  The word TWO, though, makes him think of Charlotte again.

  His heart sinks.

  His phone in his hand starts to hum and buzz.

  Maybe it’s Charlotte!

  No, it’s a number he doesn’t recognize.

  He dismisses it.

  Then another number he doesn’t know is calling him. Then another.

  He checks Twitter.

  Sure enough, she’s just posted a new tweet. The first thing he sees is a link. Above it:

  Just lettin you all know I charge £10 a snow-job or £5 mates rates for followers

  He clicks on the link. It takes him to a page with a picture of him on it raising a glass of wine on their holiday to Thailand last year. There’s a number underneath.

  It’s his phone number.

  Oh God.

  He switches his phone off.

  He looks all round him to see if anyone’s looking at him. Some people in the queue for using the pcs are looking at him but only because he’s turned away from the screen and they’re hoping he’ll be leaving.