by Ali Smith
The round piece of stone the size of a small head lay there, did nothing. The nothing it did was intimate.
How could something be this uncomplicated?
How could it be, at the same time, so mysterious?
Look. It was nothing but a stone.
What a relief.
It was what the notion of relief aspired to and had always been meant to mean.
Come with me now back to an early sunny Saturday morning in September 1981, to a piece of English common land fenced off by the American military in agreement with the British military, where a car is pulling up across from the main gate in the fence.
A woman gets out.
The woman comes straight over to the policeman standing at the gate of the airbase in the high veil of birdsong, the hum of the summer bees; there are woods just over there.
The woman unfolds a piece of paper, holds it up and begins to read from it. While she does, some more women, one of them quite old, are running across the neat cut grass towards the fence.
If this was a sitcom on the BBC the audience would be laughing like anything.
You’re early today, the policeman says to the woman.
The woman stops what she’s reading. She looks at him. She looks down at the piece of paper and starts reading again from the top. He looks at his watch.
You’re not due here till eight, he says.
The woman stops again. She points to the four women at the fence. She tells him they’ve chained themselves to it in an act of protest and that she’s here to read him an open statement about this.
He is bewildered.
Are these women not the cleaners, then?
He looks across.
What have you done that for? he says.
Since they’re not the cleaners he reports what’s happening to the airbase on his radio.
The fence is made of wire mesh, millions of little wire-and-air diamonds and three rows of barbed wire on top, between a series of concrete posts in a circle nine miles long. The women have attached themselves to the main gate part of the fence by four little padlocks, the type people more usually use to padlock their suitcases. All we could afford.
A man in military uniform comes out of the base and talks with the policeman.
I thought they were the cleaners, the policeman says.
The first woman reads her letter to both of them. This is some of what she reads out loud that morning:
We have undertaken this action because we believe that the nuclear arms race constitutes the greatest threat ever faced by the human race and our living planet. We in Europe will not accept the sacrificial role offered us by our North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. We have had enough of our military and political leaders who squander vast sums of money and human resources on weapons of mass destruction while we can hear in our hearts the millions of human beings throughout the world whose needs cry out to be met. We are implacably opposed to the siting of Cruise Missiles in this country.
The women who’ve arrived here and chained themselves up with what’s frankly such insubstantial ironware have been thinking overnight, they’ll tell the historians afterwards, about what might happen to them for doing this. They haven’t been able to get to sleep for thinking about guards and dogs, barking and shouting, and everything they can be charged for, from disturbing the peace all the way to treason. They expect at the least to be thrown in a cell, taken to court. A police record can mean the loss of your job.
They’ve eaten nothing and drunk very little for the last twelve hours. They’re wearing clothes which will make reasonably discreet urinating possible. They’re pretty sure the airbase authorities won’t want them chained in such a prominent place for long.
They sit on the ground, settle back leaning against the fence as the woman reads the statement. The policeman and the military man stand there a bit bemused.
A little later in the morning the rest of the people who’ve been on the peace march arrive, and some new people who’ve joined in from the closest town; a lot of people who live in the town have wanted their common back for some time; it was requisitioned by the military decades ago when they spotted it from the air, ideal runway space.
A couple of reporters have turned up. The organizers tell them they’re doing this as a protest to draw some substantial press attention to the march they’re on and to get a bigger debate going in public about the missiles soon to be brought here. They say they’re doing what the suffragettes knew to do.
One of them phones the Ministry of Defence and asks them about the women and the protest.
An official at the MOD tells the reporter that if it’s true that some women have chained themselves to the fence, well, so what? The fence is on common land, land the MOD doesn’t own. So this isn’t the MOD’s responsibility.
The official confirms that the MOD has no plans to move the women on.
Not a problem, the official says.
It all feels a bit anticlimactic.
Still, the weather is nice. Everybody sits on the neat mown grass in the sun as if they’re all on an afternoon outing. Military people come and go, some taking photographs. A man arrives talking loudly about mug shots. He’s the base commander. He addresses them. Afterwards, one of the women remembers how white the knuckles on his fists go while he does. He tells them, they say afterwards, that he’d like to machine-gun the lot of them. Then he tells them that as far as he’s concerned they can stay there as long as they like. Without his contemptuous dismissal, we wouldn’t have stayed, one of the protesters says years later. I had five kids to get back to.
When the afternoon is turning into evening another policeman comes over and suggests to the women that since it’s Saturday night it might be best if they moved on. He mentions American whisky, says it tends to flow on Saturday nights and that the men on the base might well come out here in the night and assault the women.
The women ignore this. They stay where they are.
It gets cooler, damper, September after all. Someone asks can they light a fire on a square of concrete. They get permission to. Some of the men from the base even help the marchers set up a standpipe at the water main under a manhole across the road.
Everything is still quite friendly right now. Later there’ll be arrests. There’ll be court appearances. There’ll be sentences in Holloway, a place the protesters will find luxurious in terms of food and heat compared to conditions at the camp. There’ll be attacks in the press the vitriol of which will be on a fouler level than the country’s yet seen in its tabloid media. There’ll be abuse that’s meant to terrify, screamed by the military at the protesters. There’ll be regular routings, regular destruction of everything in the camp by the bailiffs, regular shredding of all the protesters’ possessions, regular scuffles with the military and the police. There’ll be a rising level of police violence. There’ll be regular middle of the night visits from the local thugs who’ll poke burning sticks through the tents made of polythene and branches, and pour pigs’ blood and maggots and all forms of excrement including human, of course, over the protesters.
There’ll be a local council threatening to confiscate their teabags.
But not yet, not now, none of this right at the start, when the powers that be don’t imagine this protest is going to make a difference to anything, never mind be such a big part of the shifting political opinion about nuclear weaponry which will culminate in international policy, within a decade, altering considerably.
They sit round the open fire.
They draw up a chain gang rota for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
While they’re doing this, it gets decided; the decision just happens. They’ll make this protest a permanent one. They’ll stay here doing this for as long as they physically can. Even till Christmas, one woman says
(though in the end there’ll be a peace camp here, in one form or another, for the next two decades).
It began with thirty six women, several children and a straggle
of supporters of both sexes, walking 120 miles in ten days.
Once, on the way, some of the marchers garlanded themselves in flowers from the hedgerows they were passing. A man said this to them when they got to the stopping place in the next town: when you walked in, you looked like goddesses.
It’s by no means the last time they’ll be seen as mythical.
Some of the others on this first night take turns being chained to the fence, swapping places as unobtrusively as possible so nobody from the base will make a dash for them to remove them and disrupt the protest. The four women who’ve been there all day get clean and get a chance to have something to eat.
Then they chain themselves up again and sleep that night where they are, against the fence.
The others sleep in the chilly woods on and under thin sheets of plastic.
In the middle of the night Art wakes up from a dream.
In it he is being chased by giant monstrous flowers.
He runs as fast as he can but he knows they’re closing in on him; he’ll be lucky if he gets away without being eaten alive. The insides of the head of the one closest behind him, he knows without turning to look, is open, ready to swallow him whole, petals like jaws, stamen erect and quivering and the size of a battering ram.
There’s an old church. He runs for its door, closes it behind him, stands in the damp empty echo. He sees a lot of tombs with the shapes of sleeping people on them and one tomb that’s just a box without the shape of a person already on it. Great. He lies down on top of it flat on his back and presses his hands together in the prayer way that the others on top of the tombs have their hands. There. He has metamorphosed into a memorial knight in an armour of stone. Those flowers won’t want to swallow him now. What flower can swallow stone?
But the giant flowers come crowding into the church trailing earth off their roots all over the pews and up the middle aisle where there are also people buried under the flagstones, disrespectful of them to drop their soil like that, and now he realizes he’s really in trouble because he’s wearing an armour made of stone, trapped inside it, can hardly move at all, can only watch as the giant swaying flowerheads surround his tomb waving their leaves like obscenities in the churchy air, opening and shutting their mouth-petals.
He addresses the flower monsters through a mouth he can himself no longer open, stony and shut, his hands pressed palm to palm as if glued like that, like he once saw a hypnotist on TV make people do to see how susceptible they’d be to the techniques of hypnosis.
He is so fucking susceptible.
Stop bullying me. I am political. It’s pathetic. Look at you, all mouth and stamen. Look at me, stiff as stone. What would Freud say about this dream?
He is literally saying the last of these sentences out loud when he opens his eyes in the dark.
His erection subsides.
He sits up.
Where is he?
He is in Chei Bres, his mother’s huge house in Cornwall. Whatever that means.
He gets up when his eyes accustom and he can see the shape of the room. He finds the switch by feeling along the wall by the door. The room lights up in all its emptiness.
He doesn’t want to have to turn on his phone to see what time it is. There’s a smell of something cooking. But it’s still dark out.
The stranger, Lux, isn’t here.
Well, she wouldn’t be, would she?
He has no idea where she’ll be. This house has so many rooms, he still has no idea how many. The downstairs rooms are full of the usual stuff, the stuff you expect, done out like a normal house. All the upstairs rooms are as empty of stuff as an empty house’s rooms.
He has been curled up on the floor in this one in some bedding they found in a cupboard.
Lux found the bedding. She sorted a room for Iris.
Last night she called him a wanker though (and she’s in his employment so really ought to be being more polite). Also, although she’s a total stranger, she rather too much presumed to think she’d know better than he does how to deal with his mother.
I’ll handle it, he’d said.
You don’t handle a mother, Lux said.
You do if you’re from my family, he said.
But when Lux (who, yes, annoyingly, did know better last night how to handle his mother) had persuaded her to take off all those layers of coat and scarf, his mother had been revealed as frighteningly thin. She is much thinner than the last time he saw her. She is as thin as that thin film star on the perfume advertising (which you have to hope for the actress’s sake has been digitally enhanced).
He turns over in the duvet on the floor in the empty-smelling room.
Well. His mother’s thinness is her choice.
Choice? (Fuck off, Charlotte.)
And if his mother is curious and asks, which she is quite likely to do, about their sleeping arrangements, he will say it is his and Charlotte’s practice to sleep separately and that this is actually quite widespread, something more and more couples are just coming round to doing these days.
What is remarkable about seeing old Iris again is how astoundingly like his mother he can now see she is, even though at the same time they really aren’t at all like each other. But they are, in the strangest ways, how they sniff, and move about, his aunt the image of his mother but his mother magnified, as if fulfilled. No, filled full.
He opened his mother’s front door at 2am to what looked like a huge box full of fresh things floating by itself in the air. Potatoes, parsnips, carrots, sprouts, onions.
Artie, she said. Take this box so I can get a look at you.
There she was. Rough-elegant Iris.
You look fine, she said.
You’ll need to take your shoes off, he said.
And bloody lovely to see you again too, she said.
The legendary black sheep. Here. It is a gorgeous joke, a sacrilege. It serves Sophia right for acting up like that in front of Charlotte.
Even if she’s not the real Charlotte.
What’s she like, your aunt, then? Lux asked him last night.
He shrugged.
I don’t know her that well, he said. I hardly know her at all. But a couple of years back she followed me on Twitter and friended me on Facebook. She’s the kind of person who calls people darling when she doesn’t know them, not like an upper class person or a theatre person, I mean the working class way. Not that she was ever working class.
Why don’t they speak to each other? Lux said.
Mythologizer.
His mother’s voice, in the car all the years ago after his grandfather’s funeral.
Deranged. Nobody who isn’t deranged can live like she does. Psychotic. Psychotic people see the world in terms of their illusions and delusions, Arthur. You can’t expect the world to accommodate you on your own terms like she does. You can’t expect to live in the world like the world’s your private myth.
Differences, he said. World views. Incompatible.
He opened the door in the early hours of the morning to Iris the mythologizer and it’s true, she was like a myth of the bounteous world, off straight back out to her car to come back with more and more lovely things, bags and bags of them, butter, grapes, cheeses, bottles of wine. The last thing she came in with was a tree in a pot. It wasn’t a Christmas tree, it was just a tree, an ordinary little tree with no leaves. My star magnolia, she said. The only tree I’ve got that would fit in the car. She balanced its weight against her and held one of the rounded-end twigs towards Art and Lux. Its ends were pointed buds some of which looked like they were covered in hairs or fluff. Next year’s flowers, she said. How are you, Artie? And is this – but this isn’t Charlotte?
She put the tree down. She wiped her hands on her sides. She shook hands with Lux.
You don’t look anything like the Facebook pictures, she said. That’s quite a talent, to be able to alter what you look like so completely.
Comes naturally to me, Lux said.
A skill I’d g
ive a lot for. Maybe you can teach me, Iris said.
She picked up the tree in its pot and put it into Art’s arms, heavy. Find somewhere celebratory for this, she said. (Art, worried about his mother and the earth on the underside of the pot, eventually left it there in the porch.) Now he lies on the floor and marvels at how doing nothing more than holding a tree inside a house, not even the right Christmas kind of tree, just a live tree, in a pot full of earth, but inside a house, had felt weirdly symbolic, maybe even made him feel bounteous.
Bounteous: a word of Lux’s, one he’d never used in his life, never thought to use or ever had need of, a word that had never even entered his lexicon till yesterday.
He’ll make an Art in Nature notebook note of it to remind himself to look up its etymology.
He starts to twitch and itch in the makeshift bed on the floor. The floor being so hard is probably why he woke up in the first place. Now he’s lying here wide awake. It is a prime waste of time.
He usually works on something SA4A based if he’s awake in the middle of the night.
But he has no computer.
He can’t do any work.
He’d use his phone to (though it’s easier to miss the detail on).
He daren’t turn it on. He is bereft without his phone! But when he did turn it on again last night to text Iris he couldn’t help see that the real Charlotte has been tweeting multiple pictures of snapped-off bits of flowering trees in an array of people’s gardens and the text underneath went I cannot tell a lie it was me who chopped down your winter cherry tree send bill or angry comments here.
That’ll be where the flower dream came from.
What would Freud say.
God almighty. It is the dregs, really, to be living in a time when even your dreams have to be post-postmodern consciouser-than-thou.
That might make a good political Art in Nature subject. He will make a note of it.
He sits up in the mess of bedstuff and wonders what message Charlotte will send the world from him today. Christmas message. Like the Pope’s, the Queen’s. The real Charlotte. The fake Art.
Iris had texted him straight back which was very gratifying in front of even a fake Charlotte. Thirty seconds is all it took Iris. On way x Ire.