by Ali Smith
(what’s m–)
Oh Christ. Okay. Well. Meta means something changing, or going beyond itself, and physical means physical and anyway at least Mr Kepler never got lost or died in the snow, though Mr Descartes, who was a French philosopher and another snow lover, was so interested in snow that he went to live in a snowy country, Norway, or Denmark, or Finland or Sweden, and he was out in the cold so much that he caught pneumonia and died almost as soon as he moved there.
(Yeah, but what’s metaph–)
– and then there’s the farmer whose name I can’t remember but who lived in America hundreds of years later and who loved snowflakes so much that he invented a camera with a microscope actually inside it, imagine –
(wow –)
– to take close-up photos of individual snow crystals. And he was out walking in a blizzard one day and he died too –
(oh no –)
So. What about that lost child, then? Lost in snow so heavy, so laden on the branches of the trees above but so glistening in what moonlight manages to break through the less thick places, that the snow forms a cold but moonlit and protective carapace from one end of the wood to the other, which leads straight to the gates of the underworld.
(What’s carapace?)
It’s a caravan that goes at a great pace.
(Is it?)
Ha ha! you believed me! No, really it’s the word for, like, a shell, like the one a tortoise or a crab has on its back, the hard thing that protects their soft insides from the outside world. It’s also a word for something that covers you over and protects you.
(Like armour?)
Exactly. And the underworld, you know what the underworld is, don’t you?
(Yes.)
What is it, then?
(It’s a world underneath a world.)
Well, people tend to think of the underworld as the opposite of heaven, in other words as a hell, a place of brimstone, rocks that turn molten and melt into each other like the stuff that can sometimes in history cover Italian towns like Pompeii and Herculaneum and preserve them for centuries when it explodes out of volcanoes. But no. Because the underworld is the opposite of hot. Like winter’s the opposite of summer. It’s a place where everything and everyone is dead and cold and dark, a bit like being – imagine, imagine this – inside a crow-plucked empty eyesocket –
(uch)
– but if that eyesocket was as big as a huge underground cave, bigger than any of the London train stations, say –
(wow, okay)
– and the interesting thing, since we’re talking about extreme heat and extreme cold, is that both heat and cold can both hurt and preserve, in different ways. Like when the great philosopher Mr Bacon, who also by the way died of the cold, caught a chill by hanging about outside in freezing weather filling the insides of a dead chicken with snow to see if keeping meat frozen might mean human beings could store it for longer. Anyway. Where were we?
(Carapace.)
Yes. The child walks all the way through the woods under the carapace of snow until it comes to the gates of the underworld. There’s a huge door made of ice, and it’s so tall that the child looking up can’t see where the door ends. But the child knocks at the door with all the confidence of a child lost in the snow at midwinter expecting help, warmth and comfort, and it can do this, the child, are you listening? –
(yes –)
it can do this because it’s midwinter, which is a time of year when children and gods are meant to meet, when a child can speak to gods and gods are meant to listen, a time that’s about children and gods being related.
(Family.)
The child knocks on the door, a door so cold that the child’s fist sticks to its surface with each knock and the child has to tear it off nearly ripping the skin on its hand, and it’s hard to tell whether anybody’s heard the knock because if you knock on ice the sound just disappears.
But then there’s a sudden terrible deafening noise. The child looks up and sees, shaking in the sky, a hundred giant door keys made of carved ice.
Go away, a voice made of ice says.
Can you tell the landlord or landlady of this place that I’ve been lost in the snow for ages, the child says.
Come back when you’re dead, the ice voice says.
And can you ask him or her to find me a warm corner to rest in, the child says, and something to eat and drink, just till I get my bearings?
The ice door sighs a sigh as big as a hurricane. Then something picks up that child, swings it up into the air by the shoulders of its coat using icy fingers that are layered with teeth, like shark teeth, which pierce right through the wool of the coat and graze and burn the skin all round the child’s neck. Then it drags the child down through a freezing dark labyrinth at the speed of death.
(Oh.)
But don’t worry. Because the child shoots through that underworld like hot blood through the veins of every cold dead person who grew up to be lost in the snow, and there are millions of them, and the child passes like warm blood through them all and what the child is seeing when it does is pure colour, the colour green, Christmas green, green at its brightest, because green isn’t just a summer colour after all, no, green’s truly a winter colour too.
(Is it?)
The earth is made of it. Green. Moss, algae, lichen, mould. It’s the colour everything was before there were flowers, the colour of the first trees, the trees that didn’t have leaves, had needles instead, the trees that grew in the first hiatus between cold and warm –
(what’s hiatus?)
Hiatus is the word for a short pause. And Christmas trees are related to those first original green trees, and they grew even before the world decided to invent all the other colours. It’s the green of the holly that made the red of the berry.
(Trees have families?)
They do. And God knows where the child in this story got this following bit of trivia but as you know it’s verifiably true that the colour green also happens to be one of the easiest colours to erase when people are having their photos taken or film taken of them, because putting an image against a blue or green background will make it easier to cut round them or to blend them later to make it look like they’re somewhere they aren’t, on a flying carpet, say, or simply floating in space like an astronaut.
(Yes.)
This is what the child’s thinking about before those iceblade fingers slacken their grip and let that child drop in a heap on to a floor as cold as a butcher’s slab, and –
(what’s a butcher’s slab?)
I’ll tell you later. Remind me. But imagine the child for me, now, thin as a blade of grass before the great god of the underworld, towering above on his throne of ice, a god each of whose hands alone is like a massive automated shop-display of flick knives made of ice.
(Oh.)
The child stands up, straightens the coat, brushes it down, feels for where the ice-teeth went through the wool with an annoyed tch at the rows of holes.
Then the god speaks.
Still alive? the god says.
The child breathes out through its nose so its breath is visible in the cold. Then it makes a face at the god as if to say, see?
Well well, the god says. A survivor.
Chilly in here, the child says.
You call this chilly? the god says. I’m the god of cold. This is nothing. I’ll show you chilly. And stop doing that.
Doing what? the child says.
The god is pointing at the child’s feet.
The child looks down too. Its feet have disappeared. It is ankle-deep in water. The child is melting through the floor.
As each second passes, the floor round the child thaws a little more.
Stop it, I said, the god says.
The child shrugs.
How? the child says.
The god begins to panic. He loses his grip on his own slippery throne. He flails around on it at the head of the great hall of ice.
Stop that right now, the g
od shouts.
In the middle of the night the village church bell rang midnight.
Again?
But midnight was already well past. Wasn’t it?
Sophia got up. She went downstairs.
The young woman Arthur had brought with him was sitting at the kitchen table. She was halfway through a plate of scrambled eggs.
Would you like some? the woman said.
She said it quietly as if not to wake anybody though nobody was asleep anywhere near the kitchen.
Sophia said nothing. She stood in the doorway and looked towards the sink where there was an unwashed pan on the side.
The young woman followed the direction of the look and leapt to her feet.
I’ll do it right now, she said.
She did; she washed the pan, again with a degree of care and quietness. Then she put it back in the right place without having to be told where.
Sophia nodded.
She turned in the doorway and went back to bed.
She settled down under the covers.
The head settled back on her shoulder.
Earlier, as Christmas Eve had turned into Christmas Day, she had listened at the window to the faraway church bell from the village ringing midnight. It was a still night and not cold, the wind in the direction to send the sound of the bell here; it would be a warm start to Christmas after the storms, and the lack of frost and cold left the landscape wintry without dignity; the bell’s resonance was more pedestrian than it’d have been on the kind of crisp cold winter night tonight ideally ought to have been. Dead. Dead. Dead, the bell went. Or maybe: Head. Head. Head. The village church had only one bell so couldn’t play a tune. It sounded, she thought, like someone at the back of memory hitting at stone with an axe, which is an act that’ll do nothing but ruin a good blade.
But the head, merry in the threshold of the open window, had played a game of inside/outside with itself to the steady toll of the bell.
The head had lost some of its hair since yesterday. It looked bedraggled. But it smiled serenely, cheshire catly, and closed its eyes in pleasure at the place where the outside air met the warm in the room, swinging like a pendulum, bracing itself against the wind direction when the wind blew, perching on her wrist like an obedient bird of prey when she closed the window, then allowing itself to be deposited on the bed on the pillow next to her own.
To get the head to go to sleep she’d told it the Christmas story.
A woman is visited by an angel. Then the woman is about to give birth. A man who isn’t the father of the child the woman is having but is a very nice man and an integral father-figure part of the Family is leading the donkey with the woman on its back for miles and miles to a town that’s full of people because a ruler has ordered a people count. No room at the inn. No room at the inn. No room at the inn and the baby coming.
An innkeeper offers the couple a place to have the baby where he usually keeps his livestock. Oh, the star, she’d forgotten about the star. It’s how the people know to come and visit the child in the manger, infant of Mary, and she started to sing that song to it but it was too out of her range so she sang the little donkey song instead.
Then she told the head about Nina and Frederik, the duo who originally sang the donkey song. They were foreign, rather glamorous, she said, I think one of them was an aristocrat from Austria or Scandinavia. It was quite a hit-parade hit at the time.
The head had listened with the same grave attentive face to the story of the birth, the story of the donkey and the names of the foreign pop stars. It had rolled gently back and fore on the pillow as she sang about the bells ringing out the word Bethlehem.
Then it had given her a singular thank-you glance, after which it removed, as if by magic, all expression whatsoever from itself, dimmed into a colourless statue like the blank-eyed face of an ancient stone Roman.
More of its hair had come loose on the pillow in a semicircle round it. She’d gathered up the hair and put it in its substantial clumps on the bedside table. The newly visible top of the head’s head, which the hair had covered till now, was very pale, fragile looking as a child’s fontanelle. So she’d got up and found a large handkerchief at the back of the handkerchief drawer. She wrapped it round the top of the head in case the head was cold without its hair. She got back into bed and put the bedside light out. The near-bald head had smiled at her and glowed in the dark in its new turban as if lit by Rembrandt, as if Rembrandt had painted the child Simone de Beauvoir.
She lay in bed now feeling the weight of the sleeping head and thinking about how she’d probably be physically sick if she were ever to eat anything again as rich as scrambled eggs, especially cooked in butter like the woman had made them.
Though it might be worth it, to re-experience what it’s like to be sick, because from what she remembered there was a certain pleasure in it, anarchic force of clearance, one of those powerful liminal times in a life when death isn’t just preferable to being alive, because you feel so lousy, but that also let you negotiate with the powers that be about your own living or dying.
She drifted between sleep and wake holding the head in her arms and dream-dozing of an array of necks with no heads, headless stone torsos, headless Madonnas, baby Jesuses with missing heads or just necks or half-heads. Then the chipped-headless saints in reliefs came into her head, and the ones carved on the fonts and so on, the knocked-off nothing-but-necks in Reformation-vandalized churches in whatever self-righteousness of fury, whatever intolerant ideology of the day. There was always a furious intolerance at work in the world no matter when or where in history, she thought, and it always went for the head or the face. She thought of the burnt-off scraped-off faces of the medieval painted saints on the wooden altar screens in hundreds of churches like the one whose bell across the fields had been ringing in this year’s Christmas,
dead,
head,
which were perhaps more beautiful for the damage done them, the rich reds and golds of the fleur-de-lis backdrops, the richly painted fabrics of the flowing clothes below the space where the head or the face should be, the vividly detailed artefacts they carried to show you which saint or apostle each figure was meant to represent (a chalice, a cross, a different shaped cross, a book, a knife, a sword, a key) because the people who wanted to destroy them never went for the artefact, or the heart. Under the golden halos where the faces should be – like masks, but also paradoxically like all masks had been lifted – there’d be burnt blackened wood.
It was meant as a warning. Take a look at what your saints are truly made of. It was the demonstration that everything symbolic will be revealed as a lie, everything you revere nothing but burnt matter, broken stone, as soon as it meets whatever shape time’s contemporary cudgel takes.
But it worked the other way round too. They looked, those vandalized saints and statues, more like statements of survival than of destruction. They were proof of a new state of endurance, mysterious, headless, faceless, anonymous.
The sleeping head on Sophia’s shoulder grew heavy.
She looked down at it, her very own Christmas infant, because it looked infant-like now that its hair was missing, as if returning to baby state. It was sleeping, yes, like a baby (though nothing like the infant Arthur, who’d been a squalling appalling dark night of the soul. Perhaps she’d have been a different person if her own child had been a bit more like this; perhaps Arthur would, too). An eyelash fell off on to its cheek, then another, and between just the fall of each tiny lash the infant planet grew heavier, markedly so, pressing against her shoulderbone quite painfully, though not heavily enough to pin her down because she sat up very suddenly (and the head, still fast asleep, rolled off like a hardboiled Easter egg over her arm down her side and into a dip in the bed along her thigh) at what she thought next:
Where had that young woman Arthur had brought here got the eggs she was cooking earlier?
There were no eggs in the fridge.
There was no butter.
Well, there was one egg. She’d bought six, but more than two months ago.
If that woman had eaten that egg she’d be dying, and painfully, and soon, of food poisoning.
Could food poisoning make you fall unconscious?
Because what if the young woman was lying on the floor unconscious in a pool of her own disgorgement down in the kitchen?
The bell rang midnight from the village church.
Again?
Oh come on.
Sophia got up. She went downstairs.
The woman in the kitchen wasn’t dead or unconscious. She was fine. She looked up when Sophia opened the door.
Oh hi, she said.
Are you unwell at all? Sophia said.
Unwell? she said. No. I’m very well thank you. I’m feeling pretty good, better than usual.
Is this my second time coming downstairs, or is it my first? Sophia said.
It’s your second, the woman said.
And you’re Charlotte, Sophia said.
I’m Charlotte here for this Christmas weekend, the woman said.
What is your surname, Charlotte? Sophia said.
Um, the woman said.
She looked blankly at Sophia for a moment. Then she said:
Bain.
A Scottish name, Sophia said.
If you say so, Charlotte Bain said.
But you’re not Scottish. Where are you from originally? Sophia said.
Charlotte Bain laughed a little laugh.
Try to guess, she said. If you guess right I’ll give you – let’s make it worth the bet. I’ll give you a thousand pounds.
I never gamble, Sophia said.