by Ali Smith
You are a very wise woman, Charlotte Bain said.
You’re not English, I know that, I can hear it in your voice, Sophia said. My own father inherited an abiding hatred of people from particular other countries, from his time in the war.
Which war is that? Charlotte Bain said.
Don’t be obtuse, Sophia said. The war. The Second World War. It accented his life. If anyone came on television or on the radio speaking a language or a particularly accented English, or if anyone from somewhere he abhorred came into a room he happened to be in, he’d leave the room. He hated Germans. He hated the French for collaborating. Even hearing a certain singer sing was enough to reduce him to rage. Then, in his life after the war, he worked in finance. This gave him a range of more illogical but just as heady hatreds of particular races and ethnicities. But I myself am from a more open-minded generation and will accept you, since you are Arthur’s partner, as every bit as English as myself.
Thanks, Charlotte Bain said. But I’m not. English.
You are to me, Sophia said (and put her hand in the air to stop further remonstration). Now. Tell me. How did you meet my son?
I’m sure your son’s already bored you with that story, Charlotte Bain said.
I’m asking you to bore me with it, Sophia said.
Oh. Well. Okay. I will. I met him at a bus stop, Charlotte Bain said. I was at a bus stop on my day off and he came up and started talking to me. We went for a coffee. He bought me something to eat.
And you’ve known each other how long? Sophia said.
It still feels pretty new to me, Charlotte Bain said. Couple of days.
Are you in this kitchen and not asleep in a bed because I told you you’d have to sleep in the barn? Sophia said. Because if so, I renege on my earlier dictat. You are welcome to sleep in the house.
Not at all, Charlotte Bain said. I’m not that tired, I had a sleep on the train on the way here. Plus we waited up to let your sister in and we made up some beds, I hope it’s all right, I found the linen in the cupboard in the upstairs hall. And then I thought I should maybe eat something and after that I was just awake anyway, it gets past the point when I can fall asleep and it’s been lovely and warm in here with that big cooker and there was a bird singing, I could hear it through that window, so I just sat and listened and I kind of forgot about it.
You what? My what? Sophia said.
Sleeping. I forgot about sleeping, Charlotte Bain said.
You waited up to let in whom? Sophia said.
Your sister, Charlotte Bain said.
In this house? Sophia said.
Yes, Charlotte Bain said.
Here? Now? Sophia said.
She was tired, Charlotte Bain said. She got here about a quarter to three, long drive from wherever, and she went off to bed and we put away the stuff and then your son went to bed too.
Stuff, Sophia said.
Charlotte Bain crossed the room and opened the door of the fridge.
Like a fridge in someone else’s house, or in an advert, or a film about ideal everyday family life, it was full of food. The brightness, freshness and cram of it were shocking.
Christ, Sophia said. The last thing I need.
—
Sophia, back in bed with the head beside her, heard the village church bell toll twelve.
Again.
Sophia sighed.
Unless it was another Christmas Day altogether right now. Which it is, Christmas Day 1977, a Sunday, but it being Christmas Day seems to make no difference at all to the people in this big falling-apart old house in Cornwall in which her sister Iris is now – you can’t call it living, since Iris and this bunch of foreigners and layabouts here are paying no rent to anyone – squatting, there’s no other word for it and her sister Iris is far too old to be living like a student, she’ll be forty in three years’ time.
Her sister Iris is making nothing of her life. Sophia thinks of their mother, when Iris worked at the filling station, telling anyone who asked how her daughters were doing that Iris had a good position in an oil company.
And it’s Christmas but it’s not like Christmas in any way. Their mother’d have abhorred that too. It could be just another Sunday, any old Sunday. No, it doesn’t even have the atmosphere special to a Sunday. It could be any day of the week, a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
No. It doesn’t even have that. More like no day.
The only way you’d know, the only clue you’d have that it’s Christmas or any special kind of day, if aliens from other planets for example really existed and you were an alien and had landed your spaceship in the (surprisingly sizeable) grounds round this (clearly once really lovely, what you call rambling, presumably old money) property in its (middle of nowhere) rural location, is the TV set being on and the more-Christmassy-than-usual revolving world going round on the BBC, plus the fact that National Velvet is on TV right now though it’s nearly lunchtime.
Not that it looks like there’s going to be anything resembling Christmas lunch served up here. Christmas is probably too bourgeois. Plus, two of the (God knows how many, it feels like fifty but it is truthfully closer to fifteen) dropouts Iris now lives with are asleep in here, one on each old couch, and it’s possible they’ve been here since last night, all night, haven’t gone to bed or taken clothes off or anything that normal people do, instead just fell asleep where they were and haven’t yet woken.
So even if Sophia had wanted to sit in here and watch a comforting old classic like this on Christmas morning, this Christmas above all when her father is in fucking New Zealand and her mother is fucking dead, there’s nowhere to sit except on this hard chair, the legs of which are uneven.
Commune.
Squat. Mouse droppings, look, there, on the floor.
Ethical alternative anarchic living.
Weak excuse for living irresponsibly. Illegal dirty hippy-hangover pseudo-romantic squat. But someone here is clever enough at least to have made its generator work, so there’s electricity, for which relief much thanks (Hamlet), because it’s bitter cold and Sophia is feeling pretty sick at heart. One of the men living here, though, she thinks his name is Paul, has a very interesting looking Chinese dark striped cotton padded jacket. Iris, whose housemates all call her Ire, saw her yesterday picking the jacket up off one of the tables they pile their coats up on in the house’s decrepit orangerie and turning it inside out to look at the seams to see if there was a label, which there wasn’t.
Think you’ve just given my whizz kid sister her inspiration for next year’s market, Paul, Iris said and put her arm round Sophia.
This is Soph, she said through the cigarette smoke to the roomful of people when Sophia arrived. Which room would you like, Soph?
The house apparently has sixteen bedrooms though some of them have holes in their ceilings and one is lived in by birds who come through a hole in the rooftiles and are roosting in the room for the winter, and the people who live here don’t have a room per se, they just take whichever one they feel like sleeping in on the night.
Not the one with the hole in the roof thank you, Sophia had said and everybody in the room had laughed. The kitchen was full of people; someone moved up on the bench at the table so she could sit down and join in the conversation.
They were talking about a place in Italy where a farmer had one day been working in his farmyard and had seen his cat just fall over on to its side. When he went to see what it was doing, he found it was dead. He picked it up. Its tail fell off.
Sophia laughed. A laugh just burst out of her, it couldn’t not, at the thought of the cat and its tail falling off.
Nobody else laughed. Everybody turned and looked at her. She stopped laughing.
The cat had died because last year a valve had blown in a factory near this farm, and the chemicals the factory was making had leaked out in a cloud, and because the area was a place known for its furniture-making the disaster was still happening all these months later because nobody in the world now wanted to buy any furnitur
e made in that place in case the wood was poisonous. Nobody there had even really known there was a leak till all the leaves had fallen off the place’s trees, dead like winter though it was July, and its birds had fallen dead out of the sky, and cats and rabbits and other small creatures had keeled over dead. Then the people who lived locally started taking their children to the hospital because their faces had broken out in rashes and boils. But the factory owners still hadn’t reported the leak to anyone in authority. So it wasn’t till after a few weeks of the poison being in the air that the authorities sent in the army to evacuate one of the towns the leak had affected, and the people who lived there had had to leave everything they owned in their houses, which must have been terrible because their houses were then bulldozed and buried under a massive mound of earth and people were warned not to eat the salad or the fruit grown locally. Now nobody living there knew whether they were ill or not and a lot of farmstock was being destroyed and people who lived locally had been told by the authorities not to try to have children.
Sophia’s mind wandered.
She looked up at the consonants and vowels of what looked like a nonsense Scrabble game the people living here had painted round the room’s cornicing, still quite elegant regardless of the disrepair. i s o p r o p y l m e t h y l p h o s p h o f l u o r i d a t e w i t h d e a t h.
Those were actually words, or almost words.
I. So. Prop. Me. Meth. Ethyl. Wasn’t it more usually Ethel? And that was almost the word fluoride. Definitely date, and with, and death, there at the end.
One of the people at the table was talking now about how she’d heard from a friend of a friend of hers that someone she knew from the place where the disaster had happened had gone on holiday to another place in Italy and the people who owned the hotel had told them not to mention where they were from in case everyone else staying in the hotel panicked and left.
The girl next to Sophia passed her a couple of creased bits of paper with photographs on them. Two cats were lying on their sides in a grassy field like they were asleep. They didn’t look dead, they looked normal, like cats but weird, lying flat on their sides with their eyes shut. There was a child’s face with a blistered texture like sandpaper: the child was smiling because she was having her photograph taken.
It was terrible what could happen in other countries, Sophia said and everybody round the table fell about laughing as if she’d made a very funny joke.
Then they’d started discussing, for her benefit, a place that sounded as if it was just up the road with a name that sounded like someone in music hall or Dickens. A secret factory there made CBWs, they said. They said things in acronyms all the time; the women draped themselves over the men and the men talked in capital letters. It made CBWs. It made OPs. It made something that sounded like TCP.
Well, TCP is really useful, Sophia said. You can pretty much use it on anything.
Someone laughed at that, just one person, a man called Mark. Someone else, one of the girls, she had a once-nice woollen jumper on though now unravelling at the side, leaned over, offered Sophia a cigarette and asked what she did for a living.
My sister’s a woman of import, Iris said standing behind Sophia and tousling her hair like she’s a child. Left school, started a business while she was still studying at college, she was only in her first year and she made a fistful of money out of Afghan coats. Probably more than a couple of you in this room bought one of my genius sister’s coats. What’s the latest seller, Soph?
Macramé, Sophia said. In bags and bikinis, and clothes too. Greece has really opened up in the last couple of years. And djellabas are still selling, and the latest thing is a new kind of polyester, cheap but really hard-wearing, feels more natural, it actually really does, and the people in the know are sure it’s going to do well in the gap left by cheesecloth.
Silence round the table.
Broderie anglaise is still popular too, of course, Sophia said. Being, I think, quite timeless, and yet also good when worn ironically as part of the punk style.
More silence.
Then the man who is clearly Iris’s current partner, whose name is Bob, started talking about people in their area who had worked for the military and were now suffering from illnesses and everybody had stopped looking at Sophia in the silent judgement way and looked engaged in world politics again instead.
The wallpaper in this room with the TV in it looks original. Turn of the century? What a lovely house it could be if it were somebody’s actual house. Sophia, sitting on the hard chair watching Elizabeth Taylor walk along a track in the kind of brilliant technicolor that only really makes sense at Christmas, the kind you know is still technicolor even when you’re watching it on a black and white set like this one, wonders now how Iris feels about seeing that word death on the kitchen wall every day, every time she makes a cup of tea or just walks through the kitchen. Iris didn’t come home for the funeral. Couldn’t bear to? Wasn’t allowed to? Just couldn’t be bothered to?
There is no mentioning Iris’s name at home.
She’d listened last night to one of the people here rather formally closing the conversation as if it had been some kind of a meeting rather than people just hanging out together round a table, by reading out loud to everyone from what they said was a classic book about spring; the woman, Gail, read a story that sounded at first like a Christmas story but clearly wasn’t one. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
It was all so symbolic and heavy.
She’d gone up to her freezing room on the top floor of this house, arctic after the fires downstairs; she’d been trying to warm herself under her coat when Iris had knocked on the door of it, she’d brought an electric fire up.
Knew you’d be feeling the cold, she said.
She plugged it in. Sophia pulled the edge of the coat over the Radio Times she’d brought with her. One of the things she’d most liked about Christmas at home, at least in the time since Iris stopped coming home for Christmas, was going through her parents’ Christmas double issue and marking with a pen a little cross next to the things she planned to pass the time watching. She’d been reading it, near tears, before Iris came to the door of the room on what will have been the servants’ floor, dilapidated, whose carpeting was ancient, whose flooring, where there was no carpet and no lino or lining, was paintstained rough wood. The Radio Times this year has a front cover with what looks from a distance like a jolly Christmas tree on it, and then when you get closer the tree turns into a lovely snowy typically English village with a path through the middle of it, a dog at a gate, a postbox, and she covered it with her coat to hide it when Iris sat on the edge of the old mattress to show her a pile of her mail that had arrived ripped open and held together with Post Office sticky tape. Found open or damaged and officially sealed. For some reason Iris found the sticky tape funny. Then she kissed Sophia on the head and went back downstairs to her friends.
She didn’t mention, she hadn’t yet mentioned, their mother.
Now Sophia is passing Christmas Day in a room with a couple of sleeping people she doesn’t know watching Velvet Brown’s mother, harsh but loving, make it possible for her daughter to ride in the Grand National.
That red postbox on the front of the Radio Times: why does it mean so much and at the same time so little? She wants it to mean again like meaning used to mean. And why is this a day that had a meaning before but even while it carries on having that meaning, meaning so much to so many people, why can’t it have that meaning any more here and now for her? The very notion of the name of a day of the week having to have a meaning makes her feel tired at a level she’s never known tiredness could go to.
There is a new meanness in meaning.
> Deep breath, Sophia.
In a little while, it’ll be Billy Smart’s Circus. Then the big afternoon film today is The Wizard of Oz.
Well, The Wizard of Oz is partly in black and white anyway.
The big film season on the BBC this year is a series of Elvis movies. Elvis is dead too, now.
When Iris comes into the TV room bringing her a mug of something hot, not tea or coffee but something that smells of farmyards, Sophia says:
Do you remember the day you got me out of school to see G.I. Blues and we went to London?
Iris is still half asleep. Her hair is all up on one side of her head, it needs brushing or a wash. She smells even more of this house than this house does. She smells fuggy, of sex. Everyone in the house does. She leans on the back of the old sofa and yawns without covering her mouth as the Grand National people unbutton the clothes on the knocked-unconscious child Elizabeth Taylor.
Nope, she says.
She rubs at her face with both hands.
They’re showing them all on TV this Christmas now he’s dead, all the movies, Sophia says.
It takes a death sometimes to make us all live a bit more, Iris says.
Platitude, cliché, Sophia thinks. She feels like a cowed child. She has felt more and more childlike and cowed since she arrived here. Nevertheless, she perseveres.
It was on the BBC yesterday morning, she says. G.I. Blues.
Uh huh, Iris says.
You let me wear your jacket. We went for coffee. You took me to the 2i’s, Sophia says.
Iris heaves herself up off the back of the sofa and yawns again.
A million wild horses wouldn’t have dragged me to see a film with Elvis playing stupid war games in it, she says as she leaves the room.
She turns and winks at Sophia as she goes.
—
Dead.
Head.
Head.
Dead.
Twelve.
Midnight again, for Christ sake. The church bell rang it for the fifth time that night. Sophia made an exasperated sound. She turned over in her bed.
The head lay next to her. It didn’t move. It was as still as a stone.