by Ali Smith
She switches on the radio. Radio 4. People are droning on about a siege that happened exactly a year ago in a church in Bethlehem.
One side says there were hostages in there being held at gunpoint.
The other side says there were no hostages, that no one was being held hostage, that there were just people taking refuge in the church along with some other people who were choosing of their own free will to stay in there with the people taking refuge.
It caused a bit of a drama, when she swallowed the llama.
She swallowed the llama to catch the snake. Think what it’d take to swallow a snake.
It was bigger than a banana but she swallowed the iguana.
She thought it might redeem ’er to swallow the lemur.
It was awfully hard-work to swallow the aardvark.
More than she could chew, the gnu.
Koala. Swimming gala.
Iris had put the earphones in her ears.
Oh You Pretty Things.
He’d pressed play.
Her face lit up so that she looked old and like a child both at once.
Inordinately childlike.
I used to play you this, she shouted so loud that a lot of people turned in the hall to look at them.
She started singing the lines about the nightmares coming and the crack in the sky. Art put his finger to his lips. She stopped singing. She leaned forward still with the song playing in her ears and took him by the shoulders.
I was never any good at keeping quiet, she said in a whisper.
—
Let’s see another Christmas.
This one is the one that happened in 1991.
Art has no memory of it.
It is when he is five years old and living near a place where someone called Newlina’s father cut her head off because she wouldn’t do what he said. After he did that, she’d picked her head up off the ground and tucked it under her arm and left his house. This story makes his grandfather laugh and laugh when he comes to stay. He laughs till tears come out of his eyes and he puts his arms round Ire. He isn’t here right now but he comes quite often. When he does he always brings floral gums, which are sweets that taste of flowers and Ire says the other taste is chemicals.
The other thing the lady with no head could do is simply stick pieces of broken branch in the ground and they’d turn into trees with fruits already on them.
This is where he lives when he is not staying at his grandfather’s house.
At this house there is a Christmas tree bigger than he is. It is in a pot so it can go back into the ground when it isn’t Christmas any more.
He tells Ire he wants a Game Boy for Christmas. She says when her ship comes in, which means no.
But she gets him one anyway, and gives it to him though it is not quite Christmas Day yet, she says she is not one for rules, and he is fighting her on her lap to get to play with it more than she does, they are laughing and she is tickling him, when the lady who is his mother parks a really big car like a Jeep at the front door, comes into the house and picks him up and carries him out, puts him on its back seat and buckles him in. The seat smells clean. The car smells clean. It is really clean. There is nothing on the floor where your feet go, no papers or blanket or books. There is nothing in this car except him and the lady in the front who is his mother.
He tells her about his clothes and the Game Boy. She says they will get new ones in the new place he’s going to be living now that he is school age.
He tells her he already has a school and a lot of friends at the school.
She says ah but she has a better school for him, the kind where it’s an adventure because you get to live there and be with your friends all the time and not have to come home on the nights and days in between.
They do get new clothes and a new other Game Boy. The new house is really big, so big that you can go from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom and there are still other places to go in it.
The lady who is his mother has a television that is bigger than any television he has ever seen. At his mother’s house it is Christmas all week and then it is New Year, on the television.
—
Christmas Day, near noon. He goes to find his mother in her house full of empty rooms. He knocks on shut doors till she shouts from behind one.
I’m not ready yet, she says. I’ll come out when I’m ready to, only when I’m ready to and not before, so don’t bother me, Arthur.
He goes down to the kitchen.
Iris is making Christmas lunch. She waves him out.
Go and write a blog or something, she says.
He goes out of doors, down to the barn. Lux is there. It looks like she really did sleep in the barn. She’s made herself a bed up against some boxes. She points to her bare feet.
This is a place with heating in the floor, she says.
She has shifted some of the open stock boxes and crates to one side to make a small enclosure for her bed. One of the open boxes is full of lighting stock.
Look, she says holding up in each hand an anglepoise lamp, the kind manufactured to look like old anglepoise lamps from the past.
Oh good, he says. I could do with one of those. And a bed. Tell me if you come across anything resembling a bed in here.
What is all this stuff? she says.
I think it’s what was left, he says.
Of what? she says. Why isn’t your mother selling it somewhere? There’s a fortune in here. Why are these made to look so old when they’re brand new?
That’s what people like buying just now, he says. Things that look like they’ve got a history, reclaimed looking things. Or used to like buying, before they didn’t have the money to.
Is it all lamps? she says. In all these crates?
Probably not, he says. God knows. Drinking glasses that look like they’re from French cafes of the 1960s. Nail brushes and washing-up brushes with wooden handles. Things that look like people kept biscuits or flour in them in the last war. Household stuff that looks like it has a history. Like you can buy yourself a pretend history for your house or yourself. The same balls of string as the ones you can get in the Post Office, except in Make Do they cost £7 instead of £1.50. Patchwork quilts. Mock Victorian tin plaques with the names of chocolate manufacturers on them. You know the kind of thing.
Lux looks blank.
All the money, all the things, all the years, he says. From the kilims she brought in before I was born, before the cultural revolution meant she couldn’t any more, which was a cataclysm for her business, all the way to the 1990s dreamcatcher stuff. Did you never shop at Minerva’s Owl?
Lux continues to look blank.
In the 90s? he says.
I wasn’t here in the 90s, Lux says.
Soapstone animals, buddhas carved out of driftwood, incense sticks, incense cones, raffia. Meditation stuff. Minerva’s Owl ate our London house, we had a house by the river when I was at school. She sold everything, including the flat she was living in, to open the Make Do chain. And the Make Do chain did well for a bit, and then?
He makes a sound like an explosion.
But she has here, he says. So she’s okay. She has the house. Not on the company books. Largely thanks to him.
He nods his head at the cardboard cut-out of Godfrey. Oh! Don’t Be Like That! Futurist Theatre Scarborough twice nightly Tel 60644 Opens Sat 19 June Stalls 75p (15/-) 65p (13/-) 55p (11/-) 45p (9/-).
Your father, Lux says.
That’s him, Art says.
You were engendered by a meeting between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, Lux says.
Ha, Art says. Explains a lot about me.
You are a modern miracle, Lux says.
She puts one unplugged lamp at each side of her bedding on the floor of the barn.
There, she says. Now we’re home.
She sits on her bedding. Art sits next to her.
A good man? she says. Your father.
I don’t really know, Art says. Th
ere’s a sort of hole in my life, where the word father is. He played a gay person on TV and in panto; if I had my laptop I could show you him on YouTube, there’s old film of him on there.
We could watch on your mother’s computer, Lux says.
She’d never permit it, Art says. I mean, she’d never permit me to use the computer.
I don’t think she’d mind, Lux says. We could just go and look.
In any case, Art says. I don’t know the password.
I know the password, Lux said.
No you don’t, Art said.
I do, Lux said. She said I could use it.
My mother? Art says. Let you? Use her work computer?
Yes, Lux says.
What for? he says.
I wanted to send a message to my mother, she says. I asked. She said I could.
She’s never let me use a computer of hers, not once. My whole life, he says.
Perhaps you never asked, Lux says.
He’s about to ridicule this. Then he thinks about it. It could be true. It is possible he has just never asked.
Because I knew I’d be turned down, he says.
Lux shrugs.
She says something with ks and zs in it in another language.
Which means, you don’t play, you can’t win, she says.
In his mother’s office, Lux shows him the piece of paper with his mother’s password on it. He types it in, brings up YouTube and looks up the documentary about old theatre stalwarts in which Godfrey has a three minute slot. Godfrey, filmed on stage somewhere in grainy bleached old filmstock, stands as if constricted, his arms crossed over himself and his legs crossed too like a ballet dancer. Then he runs across the stage waving his arms in the air. Don’t be like that! he shouts. The invisible audience laughs off camera, off mic, off acoustic, sounds distant and ghostly. On a clip from a BBC sitcom from the early 70s Godfrey grimaces, bats his eyes at the camera in disdain and wears a cravat. The studio audience erupts. The big joke is, he works in marriage guidance. Ever feel trapped in a farce you can never in a million years get out of? he says boredly to the camera as a young tall blonde actress comes in on the arm of a bald man whose head only comes up to her sizeable chest. Triplets, Godfrey says. Art has watched this video many times. The studio audience laughter is always a bit like being hit with a blunt instrument; every time the camera does a close-up on Godfrey pulling his long horse face even longer, every time he says even just a part of his catchphrase – oh! don’t be! – the laughter is thick as a mallet.
Lux frowns. The audience laughs again.
What are they laughing at? she says.
Sacrifice, Iris says.
Iris has come into the room behind them and has been watching Godfrey too over their shoulders.
I think he was a very nice bloke, Godfrey Gable, she says. I only met him the once but sometimes once is enough to know. A very intelligent man, I think now. He knew exactly what he was doing. There’s good money in humiliation. Of course, you’ll know this already, Artie. His real name was Ray, Raymond Ponds. After they were married the papers pretty much left him alone. No story. Especially after your mother had you.
Art nods as if he knows (though he really only knows anything about Godfrey from the mentions he got in the books Charlotte had for her dissertation).
And now for our entertainment when we want humiliation we’ve got reality TV instead, Iris says. And soon instead of reality TV we’ll have the President of the United States.
She holds out an iPad to Art.
Thought you should see your latest tweet, she says. According to your feed you’ve just told 16,000 people that a bird that’s usually only resident in Canada’s been seen in a rare sighting today off the coast of Cornwall.
How has he told 16,000? He only has 3,451 followers. He takes the iPad. 16,590 followers. As he looks at the screen the number rises to 16,597.
Canadian warbler alert in UK, he reads. Blown off course map co-ords in next tweet MERRIEST XMAS EVER to all tweeby birders.
Anyone who knows will know it’s Canada warbler. Not Canadian.
Charlotte, he says. I’ll kill her.
No violence necessary, Iris says. Just tell her to stop it. Here she is, right here.
Art nearly chokes on his own in-breath.
I’m a different Charlotte, Lux says. His other Charlotte.
She winks at Iris.
Oh, his other Charlotte, Iris says. Well, far be it from me to tell anyone what to do. But if I were you, Artie, I’d tell the Twitter people. I mean report it to the organization. Someone who’s not you is pretending to be you.
I will, Art says. I intend to.
Unless you’re not you, Iris says, and the real you is elsewhere tweeting. Well? Are you you?
I’m me all right, Art says. I’m more me than I care to admit.
Me, me, me, Iris says. It’s all your selfish generation can ever talk about. I’m going to tweet about it in a long scroll unrolling itself out of my mouth like in an illustration of a dandy by an eighteenth century satirist. No, I mean like a president. I’ll do it presidentially. I mean a fake president, I’ll do it fake presidentially.
Art’s chest contracts.
She knows, he thinks.
His heart sinks.
Everybody knows the fake I am.
—
It was a balmy October late afternoon three years ago. I have, as you will already know if you follow this blog of mine, been thinking about writing about puddles for quite some time now and voila today I am about to write about for you now was the first day that I decided that I would begin studying them in practice.
I was driving west out of the city to go and see some puddles in the wilds, for I was tired beyond tiredness of city puddles, which never remind me at all of my boyhood, or of anything about it, which means I loom in them rather than look in them if you see what I mean, which believe it or not was a moment ago I admit just a mistake I made with my keyboard, loom for look, but is now, by the muddle of all true things that happens all the time, meaningful in its own right. [NB this word muddle. It will becomes important in a moment.]
Anyway as chance and luck and fate would have it I was by myself that afternoon having had a sad and painful break-up with ‘E’, the woman with whom I had been going out with, and I was feeling something more profound than melancholy, something like a boat that has been cut adrift from its worn mooring on a fetid pond in a misty fog, and so I had decided this warm afternoon in October that I wanted to see some untamed puddles, by which I mean puddles not on pavements outside shops in urban settings, but, puddles like the ones that the birds come to drink from and to splash their colourful wings in in old-time poems written by people who lived in the country not the citified poems, about puddles the citified birds drink at and ablute in.
Here is what I like to call the history-poem or poem-history of the etymology of the word Puddle. If you are not interested in the history of words then best to skip the next paragraph. You Have Been Warned.
Puddle the word comes from pudd the Old English word for a furrow or a ditch, and puddle its Middle English diminutive with the addition of ‘le’ making it diminute. Old German has a word Pfudel, which in Old German means a pool of water. Puddle also means a muddle and can also bear the meaning of a muddler according to a dictionary I own that’s not online, and that, I take it, is why we associate puddles and mud, a muddle of ground and water perhaps!
I drove speedily out of the city or as speedily as the M25 will legally allow and I took the exit at Junction 15 and I stopped off in a small village off the dual carriageway the name of which I do not recall, for I was about to have a moment which wiped everything else of detail from my mind as I looked at one of the stony path puddles on the way to a generous spread of parkland, where there was still a buzzing of insect life and a proliferation of things growing even though it was now autumnal and this could so clearly be seen in the shadows thrown by the sun’s angle to the earth.
I l
ooked into the brown black liquid left by the rainfall on the surface of the path and I felt that at last my childhood had come to mean something more than it had done previously that day or any other day.
For when I was a boy there was a game I liked to play of launching twigs in one of the big puddles which doubled for me as ocean in the summer holidays in the place where cars were parked near my home. I stood at the edge of this puddle in the fading light of the year and of my own years – for I am now so much older than I was when I was a little boy – and I launched some twigs I had gone and broken off a nearby hedge for this purpose. And I watched them as they sailed across the puddle.
And my love for velocity and for life, life itself, returned to me that October afternoon as strongly as it had been and done when I was that boy and am that man.
Art in nature.
Lux clears her throat.
It doesn’t seem very like you, she says. Not that I know you that well. But from the little I know.
Really? Art says.
They are sitting in front of his mother’s computer in the office.
You don’t seem so ponderous in real life, Lux says.
Ponderous? Art says.
In real life you seem detached, but not impossible, she says.
What the fuck does that mean? he says.
Well. Not like this piece of writing is, Lux says.
Thanks, Art says. I think.
What I mean is, it doesn’t read like the real you, she says.
Oh, it’s the real me all right, Art says. No getting away from it, I’m afraid.
What are you afraid of? Lux says.
No, no, it’s just a figure of speech, Art says.
What kind of car was it? Lux says.
How do you mean, car? he says.
What I say, Lux says. Car. The one you drove to the puddle in.
I haven’t got a car, he says.
So you hired a car? she says. Borrowed one?
I can’t drive, he says.
How did you get to the village in the blog then? she says. Someone drove you?
I didn’t actually go anywhere. I looked it up on Google Maps and on an RAC route planner, he says.
Ah, she says. But the thing about liking sailing the sticks across the water. That’s real. Yes?