Winter

by Ali Smith

  He leans back against whoever’s rucksack is behind him.

  How to describe Charlotte, he says.

  But he doesn’t have to describe her after all because the girl, the woman, Lux, has fallen asleep with her head on her arms on somebody’s suitcase.

  He is moved by the trust. It takes trust to fall asleep with someone you don’t know.

  Then he is moved by his own being moved.

  Narcissist. She’s asleep because she’s so not interested in you. (Charlotte, in his ear.)

  He wonders if he’ll end up sleeping with her

  narciss–

  she is thin and wiry. Her body looks younger than she says she is. Her head looks bigger than it should. Her wrists have the thinness of the child she isn’t far from having just been, her ankles above her boots are bare and their thinness is moving, in an upsetting way. Her face, glinting metal, toughened, suggests she’s a lot older. Her clothes are clean but worn. Her hair is clean but dull. Now that she’s asleep she looks exhausted. She looks like she hasn’t had enough to eat for too long. She looks like sleep’s punched her in the gut and dropped her into this train carriage corridor from a great height.

  He’d asked her why she was sitting out in the cold and not in the warm library across the road. She told him she’d had a difference of opinion with the woman behind the Ideas Store desk. What about? he said. That’s between me and her, she said. He’d offered, at the bus shelter, to buy her something off the Chicken Cottage menu. And spoil my perfect imaginings with the reality? she said.

  He wonders if he looks nice in this turtleneck.

  He’d check what he looks like on his phone, if it didn’t involve putting his phone on.

  Narcissist.

  He shakes his head. He has no idea what he’s doing. A girl like a broken bird.

  St Erth! she’ll say in a couple of hours as they draw into the station and she sees the signs. They’ve spelled it wrong! she’ll say.

  And: when do we get to see the wall?

  Which wall? he’ll say.

  Of corn, she’ll say.

  And: it looks like old postcards here, she’ll say as the train pulls out along the coast. Like cards from the past with the faded colours. Is that a castle? Is this place real? Did you grow up round here? No, he’ll say, I grew up in London, but my mother bought her house here a couple of years ago, I haven’t even seen it yet, but my mother’s sister used to live down here I think and maybe she sent me books or something when I was a kid because I know there’s a lot of lore, stories about the landscape being made of sleeping giants and such like, and I know it’s a place whose own language is ancient and apparently won’t ever die out, always resists, comes back even when it seems to be fading, won’t ever be killed off by anything. You know, specific local language. Idiolect.

  What did you just call me? the girl will say.

  Then she’ll raise an eyebrow at him because she’s caught him out underestimating her, a laugh will come out of his mouth and as they draw into the station Art will catch himself laughing at his own preconceptions.

  —

  The bus service, it says on the noticeboard, has been permanently discontinued.

  It takes an hour and a half to get a taxi. Then, because of Christmas traffic, it takes another hour and a half for the taxi they eventually get to drop them off at the gate in the dark.

  In it, on the way, the girl removes her ear bars, her nose and lip rings, the studs, the little chain connecting her nostril and her lip.

  CHEI BRES, it says on the sign at the gate.

  What does it mean? the girl says.

  No idea, Art says.

  A house called No Idea, the girl says.

  The walk from the gate to the house is unexpectedly far and the path is muddy after the storm. He puts his phone on to light the way. It buzzes with Twitter alerts as soon as he puts it on. Oh God. So much for low reception. He worries about what the alerts might be alerting him to, then deflects that worry by worrying about his boots and about remembering to stress to the girl to take her own boots off when they get to the front door of the house, which is clearly just over there, lit-up behind the hedges.

  But then they round the corner and see that the light isn’t house light, it’s car light, and they find a car strewn in the middle of the road with its driver’s door hanging open outside an outbuilding whose doors are also wide open.

  Is this it? the girl says.

  Uh, Art says.

  He feels about on the inside wall of the building. When the fluorescent tubes blink on he sees that the place, which is huge, goes back much further than just a garage and is full of boxed-up stuff.

  Stock storage, he says. My mother’s chain of shops.

  What kind of shops? the girl says.

  She’s pointing at the old lifesize foyer cardboard cut-out of Godfrey over against a wall standing with one hand on a hip and the other in a flourish at what’s written above his head in the rainbow arch: Godfrey Gable says: Oh! Don’t Be Like That!

  Ah. Art says. That’s my father.

  The girl obviously doesn’t recognize Godfrey. Well, she wouldn’t. She’s way too young to. If Godfrey hadn’t been his father, he probably wouldn’t recognize him either.

  (Charlotte hadn’t just known who Godfrey was, she even had a vinyl copy of one of the radio recordings, though no turntable to listen to it on, when he’d first met her. She’d known more about Godfrey, when Art met her, than Art himself did.)

  Wild, the girl says.

  Long story, Art says. Daddy I hardly knew him.

  You say such weird things, the girl says.

  I only met him twice, Art says. He’s dead now.

  That does the job, stops her in her tracks saying the word weird at him; she looks at him with the right kind of sad face instead.

  He switches the light off in the barn, sits in the driver’s seat in the car and finds the headlight switch. Off. Everything goes dark.

  This building, and all this land, and you’re telling me there’s also a house as well? the girl is saying.

  They follow the path to get to the house. It looms out of the darkness at them in darkness itself. Its front door is wide open and the inside door beyond it too.

  Take your shoes off, he says.

  While he’s pulling his own boots off the porch lights up, then the hall lights up. He walks over the unopened Christmas cards in his socks. The girl is going ahead of him finding the light switches; a living room off the hall lights up. The level of heat in here is high. A lounge lights up. It’s very hot in there.

  He opens a door and finds a small room with a toilet and washbasin. He washes his hands.

  He crosses the hall past the cabinet full of the priceless ceramics. Godfrey’s. They’re skewy, some are broken, most are lying on their sides or on top of and under each other like a meteor has hit their world.

  He comes into a huge kitchen. The girl is here, already sitting opposite his mother at the table. There’s an Aga giving off immense heat. The radiator he touches on his way in is so hot the touch is close to a burn. But his mother is wearing a buttoned-up coat, a scarf, sheepskin gloves and a fur hat of a thickness that makes her head look animal.

  She is staring ahead under the fur as if there’s nobody here but her.

  Is this your mother? the girl says.

  Art nods.

  He looks around for a boiler or a thermostat. He can’t find either. He opens the fridge. There is almost nothing in it. There’s a jar of mustard half empty, a single egg, an unopened packet of salad the insides of which are brown sludge. He looks inside a large cupboard. It has a couple of coffee packets. A tub of organic bouillon. An unopened packet of walnuts.

  He comes back to the table. Two apples and a lemon in a bowl. He sits down.

  Is this not normal, then? the girl says.

  Art shakes his head.

  The girl bites a fingernail.

  Are you planning going out somewhere cold? she says to
his mother.

  His mother makes a noise, impatient and sarky and dismissive all in one grunt.

  I’ll call a doctor, Art says.

  His mother raises a warning glove.

  You will call a doctor, Arthur, she says, over my dead body.

  The girl gets up. She lifts the hat off his mother’s head. She puts it on the table.

  You’re far too hot, she says to his mother.

  She loosens the scarf and takes it off and folds it, puts it in front of his mother on the table next to the hat. She bends round and undoes the buttons of the coat and shakes it open at his mother’s shoulders. But she won’t be able to get the coat off his mother without removing the gloves and his mother now has her massive sheepskin hands firm-clasped.

  Would you like to take off your gloves as well? she says.

  No, thank you, his mother says. But thank you very much.

  Take them off, Sophia, Art says. This is my partner. Charlotte.

  It’s nice to meet you, the girl says.

  I’m very, very cold, is all his mother says.

  She shrugs her shoulders inside the coat so the coat closes over at her neck again.

  Okay, the girl says, well. If you’re cold.

  She opens cupboards till she finds a glass, which she fills with water from the tap.

  I wonder if you’re aware, if you know, his mother says taking the glass of water in her sheepskin paw, that your face is full of little holes.

  I do know, the girl says.

  I also wonder if you know how unwelcome you are here, his mother says. I’m unusually busy this Christmas and won’t have time for entertaining guests.

  No, I didn’t know that till now, the girl says, but now I do.

  In fact, it’s so hectic this year you may have to sleep in the barn rather than the house, she says.

  Anywhere will do, the girl says.

  No it won’t, Art says. She can’t. Sophia. We can’t. Sleep in a barn.

  His mother ignores him.

  My son has, in passing, told me about your virtuoso status on the violin, she says.

  Ah, the girl says.

  So given that you’re here you may as well entertain me at some point, his mother says. I’m very fond of the arts. I don’t know if he’s told you that.

  Oh, I’d be far too shy to play anything for you, the girl says.

  Self-deprecation is almost always distasteful, his mother says.

  No, I can honestly say I’m honestly going to be nowhere near as good at playing a violin as you imagine, the girl says.

  Well, there’s nothing else I need to know about you right now, his mother says.

  Thanks, the girl says.

  You’re welcome, his mother says.

  No I’m not, the girl says.

  Ha! his mother says.

  His mother actually almost smiles.

  But then she closes her face again, sits there staring at whatever nothing she’s staring at in her outdoor clothes and the girl steps back, polite, and goes and stands in the hall. She beckons to Art from the door but his insides have become a kind of frozen. All he can do is stand in the wings of whatever the drama is. His head is empty, like everything has drained out of it, as in the old song about the hole in the bucket, dear Liza, which is all that’s inside him right now, an ole. Well mend it, dear Henry. How can you mend an ole with a straw? He has never understood that song. Unless the ole is very very small. Right now the ole in im is too big for that, and this song playing through him in its comedy regional voice has turned him into a bit-actor on the stage of his mother’s life. Again.

  He looks at the long-dead flowers in the vase on the table. Perhaps that’s where the smell in here is coming from. They make him even more furious with his mother, who tonight is outdoing any previous performance of herself. She is surpassing herself.

  He looks at the strange girl in his mother’s house. He has been an idiot to bring anyone, an idiot to come, himself, at all.

  Not an idiot. An idiolect. That’s what he is, a language no one else alive in the world speaks. He is the last living speaker of himself. He’s been too blithe, he’d forgotten for a whole train journey, for almost a whole day, that he himself is dead as a disappeared grammar, a graveyard scatter of phonemes and morphemes.

  He makes a supreme effort. He walks across the room to the girl at the door. The girl takes him by the arm.

  Is there someone you can call? the girl says.

  She is saying this quietly so his mother won’t hear. She is being kind. Her kindness makes him flinch nearly as much as his mother’s coldness.

  I’ll call that taxi back, he says. I’ll call another taxi. It can take us to, to, I don’t know. There are hotels in the town, I can call a hotel. I can try and call us a taxi to get us back to London, but I, I think, given it’s Christmas Eve, and how late now, we might have to wait till –

  Don’t be a silly wanker, the girl says.

  I’m not a –, he says but the girl puts her hand up, she isn’t listening.

  The sister, she says.

  What? he says.

  You said there’s a sister. Does she live near here?

  He moves the girl slightly further out into the hall with his big blunt hands.

  We have to call the sister, the girl says.

  I can’t, he says.

  Why not? the girl says.

  They don’t speak, he says. They haven’t spoken to each other for nearly three decades.

  The girl nods.

  Phone her, she says.

  January:

  it is a reasonably balmy Monday, 9 degrees, in late winter a couple of days after five million people, mostly women, take part in marches all across the world to protest against misogyny in power.

  A man barks at a woman.

  I mean barks like a dog. Woof woof.

  This happens in the House of Commons.

  The woman is speaking. She is asking a question. The man barks at her in the middle of her asking it.

  More fully: an opposition Member of Parliament is asking a Foreign Secretary a question in the House of Commons.

  She is questioning a British Prime Minister’s show of friendly demeanour and repeated proclamation of special relationship with an American President, who also has a habit of likening women to dogs, and who has announced, on a day marked in calendars as Holocaust Memorial Day, that he intends to prohibit entry into the United States of America to large swathes of people based on their faith and ethnicity.

  While the Member of Parliament is speaking, on the one hand bringing up the impact of this planned ruling on the refugee crisis and on people in forced exile from the war in Syria, and on the other asking a serious question about what leadership itself might mean both here and in the United States, a governing senior Member of Parliament barks at her like a dog.

  Woof woof.

  Some trivia: the House of Commons is one of the two Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom, the UK’s twin bodies of legislative supremacy.

  The female MP is a law graduate and also happens to have been a bit of a TV star in Pakistan, having spent years before her time in the House of Commons acting in a popular drama series shown there.

  The male MP is a former stockbroker and a grandson of Winston Churchill.

  Afterwards, when the female MP complains, the male MP apologizes. He suggests it was lighthearted banter.

  The female MP accepts his apology.

  Both are gracious about it.

  It’s winter, still. There’s no snow. There’s been almost none all winter. It’ll be one of the warmest winters on record, again.

  Still, it’s colder in some places than others.

  This morning there was frost on the ridges of the turned earth across the fields, frost the sun had melted on one side only.

  Art in nature.

  2

  Now it’s the dark of early Christmas morning, the time before dawn, and this is the best time in the world for an old song about a lo
st child travelling in the snow.

  (But who was the child in the song? Where was the child going? Why was the child out in the snow at all? Was the child really cold? And would the child have been as lost if it was summer or spring or autumn, or was that child more lost because it was winter?)

  I don’t know.

  All Dickens says in A Christmas Carol is that bye and bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim; who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed.

  So how about I tell you instead some more verifiable kinds of thing –

  (what’s verifiable?)

  Verifiable means things we can prove are true because of facts that exist in the world about them –

  (okay)

  – for instance, I could tell you a very verifiable fact or two –

  (very very fiable, ha ha!)

  – about a man called Mr Kepler, who studied time and harmony and believed that truth and time were kindred –

  (what’s kindred?)

  Kindred means family, what I’m saying is he thought that truth and time are sort of related, family to each other.

  (Oh.)

  He was one of the people who first identified Halley’s comet, one of the first to realize it wasn’t a different comet every time, which is what people had believed over the centuries, but was actually the same comet coming back to visit us again and again. And he was a man who paid things attention up close as well as far away. One day a single snowflake landed on the collar of his coat and he became one of the first people in history to count the sides of a piece of snow and write about how there’s a repeating pattern in snow crystals.

  (Is a snow crystal the same as a snowflake?)

  It can be. But snowflake can also mean the thing that happens when two or more snow crystals fall together and create one structure all together. Anyway, he found there was a symmetry in the shapes of –

  (what’s symmetry again?)

  it’s, oh God, –

  (it’s God?)

  No, ha ha, it’s not God. But it’d be a nice idea of God, and I wish that was what God means. Symmetry means that things have a very similar shape, or reflect each other or match each other in a balanced way, or in harmony, it can also mean harmony. Your ears. They’re symmetrical, and your eyes, your hands. But the thing Mr Kepler wondered was this. If every snow crystal had something in common with all the others but at the same time was still completely unique, different from any other snow crystal, what would be God’s reason for making them like that? Because we’re talking about the days when people thought such things mattered for metaphysical reasons –