by Ali Smith
It’s not a personal memory I myself have, specifically, no, he says. But it’s a good general sort of invented shareable memory for the people who’ll read the blog.
And was it a balmy October day? she says, or is that made up too?
That’s to help people situate themselves inside the piece of writing, he says. It really helps to tell a reader a where or a when and to give a little detail of it.
But none of it is real? Lux says. Not one thing I’ve just read?
You sound like Charlotte, he says.
It’s my job to, she says.
She says I’m not the real thing too, Art says.
I’m not talking about you not being real. I’m talking about this not being real, Lux says.
The act of it is real to me, he says. It kind of keeps me sane.
Lux nods. She looks at him with what afterwards, when he remembers this talk, he will think of as gentleness.
She looks at the screen again. She doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then she says:
I get it. I do. I see. Okay. Now. Tell me something that really did happen, I mean a real thing, not a blog thing, and just a little thing, but something you do remember. I mean from when you were really the boy you imagine you are in that memory you made up about the twigs and the puddle.
A real thing? he says.
Any real thing, she says.
Okay, Art says. Well. I remember being on somebody’s knee, I don’t remember whose. I’m holding the edge of the sleeve of what she’s wearing, it’s wool but it’s like lace, like wool with a repeating pattern of holes in it. I’m holding the holes and she’s telling me about a boy in a story and the boy is looking up at a sheet of ice so high it’s like a cliff face and he’s knocking on it with his small hand as if the ice is a door.
Lux shrugs.
There, she says. That’s it. Why don’t you write exactly that?
Oh I couldn’t ever write something like that and put it online, he says.
Why not? Lux says.
It’s way too real, Art says.
—
Christmas lunchtime. His mother has refused to come out of her room for him. She has also refused to come out of her room for Lux. (‘Charlotte’.) But right on cue she appears in the doorway leaning on the lintel like a fading Hollywood star at the moment Iris starts bringing food through and putting it on the table.
Soph, Iris says.
Iris, his mother says.
Long time, Iris says. How are you?
His mother raises her eyebrows. She puts her hand up to the side of her face. She sits down at the set table.
I shan’t be eating much, she says.
Well, that’s pretty evident just looking at you, Iris says.
Don’t you like food, Mrs Cleves? Lux says.
I suffer, Charlotte, from what some would call the apprehension and I call the knowledge that everything I eat is poisonous to me, his mother says.
What a terrible thing, Lux says. Whether it’s apprehension or knowledge or both.
You understand me perfectly, his mother says.
Jealousy and annoyance course through Art. He says nothing. Iris comes through with a tray of roast potatoes and sits down. Everybody clinks a glass to Christmas except his mother who has refused wine.
I took the room the birds used to live in, Iris says.
All a little different now, his mother says as if speaking generally to the room.
I have good memories of this place, Iris says. Did you renovate it, Soph?
Iris used to live here? Really? But his mother is speaking as if she’s a tour guide, as if the room is full of strangers and there is a wall of glass between her and them.
I bought the house and grounds as you all see them today, she says, after someone else had brought it handsomely back to life from a state of disrepair and near-demolition. I was impressed with the vision of the people who’d renovated. I’d known the house formerly, some years back, of course. When I came to see it again I was pleasantly met with it in this much better state.
Iris looks round the dining room.
This was the orangerie, she says. Used to be all windows along that wall and they looked straight out south facing into the garden, a dream. I was wondering who thought to take all that light out of here.
She turns to Art.
It’s not where we lived, though. That was before your time. You and I lived in Newlyn. We used to visit the pit they dug to commemorate the miners who died, the place with the grassy seats. Remember?
I don’t, he says.
Never mind. I do, Iris says.
As soon as Iris goes through to the kitchen his mother leans forward.
You never lived with her, Arthur. He never lived with her, Charlotte. He lived with my father for a bit, when he was pre-school and I was regularly out of the country. But never with her.
His mother puts one Brussels sprout and one half-potato on to her dinner plate. She pours a little gravy to the side of them. Everybody else eats. His mother doesn’t touch either the potato or the sprout. She dips her fork in the gravy and puts its tips on her tongue.
Nobody says anything, till Lux/Charlotte, who has been watching his mother not eating, says:
I have something I wonder about Christmas.
What? Art says.
What I wonder about is the manger, Lux says. Why did they put the baby in a manger? I mean in the song and the story?
It’s not a song or a story, his mother says. It’s the beginnings of Christianity.
Well, I’m not a Christian, and I’m not up on all the ramifications, Lux says. But what I’m asking is. Why is it a manger?
Poverty, Iris says.
No crib for a bed, his mother says. There were no beds available anywhere.
Yes, but why the emphasis on it being a manger in particular? And why is the little Lord Jesus, in the song at least, I mean, away in one? Lux says.
It’s just the idiom of the time the carol was written, Art says. Wait. I’ll check on Google.
He gets his phone out. But then he remembers he doesn’t want to switch his phone on.
He puts it face down next to his plate and frowns.
Google, his mother says. The new new found land. Not so long ago it was only the mentally deranged, the unworldly pedants, the imperialists and the naivest of schoolchildren who believed that encyclopaediae gave you any equivalence for the actual world, or any real understanding of it. And door-to-door salesmen sold them, and they were never to be trusted. And even the authorized encyclopaediae, even them we never mistook for or accepted as any real knowledge of the world. But now the world trusts search engines without a thought. The canniest door-to-door salesmen ever invented. Never mind foot in the door. Already right at the heart of the house.
On the other hand, Iris says, here’s something I stumbled on, on the net, just last week.
She gets out her own phone and presses and swipes its screen.
If you get a choking feeling and a smell of musty hay, you can bet your bottom dollar that there’s phosgene on the way. But the smell of bleaching powder will inevitably mean that the enemy you’re meeting is a gas we call chlorine. When your eyes begin a twitching and for tears you cannot see, it’s not mother peeling onions, but a dose of C.A.P. If the smell resembles pear drops then you’d better not delay. It’s not father sucking toffee, it’s that ruddy K.S.K. If you catch a pungent odour as you’re going home to tea, you can safely bet your shirt on it they’re using B.B.C. D.M., D.A. and D.C. emanate the scent of roses, but despite their pretty perfume they aren’t good for human noses. For it’s mustard gas, the hellish stuff that leaves you one big blister, and in hospital you’ll need the kind attention of the sister. And lastly, while geraniums look pleasant in a bed, beware this smell in wartime. If it’s lewisite you’re dead.
Halfway through the recitation his mother puts her fork, which she’s been holding in the air, down hard next to her plate hitting its edge.
From the 1
940s, Iris tells them. Not something you’re likely ever to have found in any of those old encyclopaedias. It was given to schoolchildren to learn off by heart to help them recognize what they might be breathing into their lungs in a gas attack. Welsh schoolkids were given the same poem in Welsh.
My sister the internet hipster, his mother says. The internet. A cesspit of naivety and vitriol.
Well, the naivety and the vitriol were always there all along, Iris says. The internet’s just made them both more visible. That’s maybe a good thing. God. If we’re talking vitriol. You should see some of the letters I’ve had over the years.
Art’s mother yawns an ostentatious yawn.
Art borrows Iris’s phone so he can look up something and change the subject. What he looks up is Away in a Manger. He reads some Wikipedia facts about it out loud. Then he looks up the words significance, jesus and manger. The phone suggests a site called compellingtruth.com. The site won’t load.
Because, Lux is saying. Could it be that consumerism and Christmas lunch are both related not just to each other but directly to that tiny baby too for whom there’s apparently no room anywhere in a town and because of this ends up being put in a manger?
And we won’t go until we’ve got some, his mother sing-says.
It Came upon the Midnight Clear’s my favourite, Iris says. Two thousand years of wrong. And man at war with man hears not. Then the angels sing, the angels bend to earth. I like a flexible angel.
I think you’ll find it’s The Holly and the Ivy, his mother says, that’s the only truly truthful Christmas carol.
Because it’s really important, the most important thing about a Christmas carol, that it be truthful, Iris says.
Art sees his mother’s face flinch.
And anyway, I was also wondering, how is it okay, Lux is saying, okay in any way, to be wishing everybody peace, peace on earth, goodwill to all men, merry, happy, but just for today, or only for these few days a year? And if we can do it for a few days, why can’t or won’t we do it all the year? I mean. That story of the football match between enemies in the First World War in the trenches. It reveals it. The stupidity.
It’s gestural, Art says. It gestures to hope.
But it’s empty gestural, Lux says. Why would you not work all the time for peace on earth and goodwill? What’s the point of Christmas, otherwise?
The Christmas shopping weeks, beginning in July, are the point, Art says.
Lux rolls her eyes. Iris grins at her and then at Art.
I suppose what I’m saying, Lux says, I mean about the manger, is. Is it a manger they put the baby in because the baby’s going to be eaten in the end? Is being eaten the destiny of that baby from the very start?
Oh, you’re bright, Iris says. She’s a bright one, Artie. See the tender lamb appears. Promised from eternal years.
Not that we’ve seen any meat at all this lunchtime, his mother says.
That’s because it’s everything I happened to have in the house and brought with me that we’re eating, Iris says, and you’re an old miserly grump who had nothing in the house for your son and his girlfriend for Christmas except a bag of walnuts and half a jar of glacé cherries.
She says it amiably, like a joke. But the air round them in the room thickens like cooling gravy.
Though perhaps you’d like to eat those cherries and nuts, since you seem to be eating nothing else on the table in front of you, Iris says. I can nip through and get them for you, shall I?
Lux leans across the table to speak to his mother.
I happen to be a vegetarian, she says, and it’s been a very nice meal indeed and a great relief to come here and be able to join in with your family meal at Christmas time and meet such hospitality down to the last detail, Mrs Cleves. Try some of these parsnips, on your side plate.
They have seen butter, his mother says.
They really have, Lux says. They’re what people call heavenly.
Then no, thank you, Charlotte, his mother says.
Soph prefers hell, Iris says.
But I will have a piece of bread, his mother says. Thank you, Charlotte.
Iris holds out a basket of bread. When his mother doesn’t take a piece, Iris laughs and passes the basket to Art, who holds it in front of his mother, who still doesn’t take a piece. Art passes it to Lux, who holds it out. His mother immediately takes a piece.
And it strikes me, forgive me, Lux says while taking care, Art notices, to put the basket down near his mother who takes another piece almost immediately, surreptitiously, and eats it very fast like a squirrel. That this room right now is reminding me a bit of the play by Shakespeare where all through the story someone will step forward and say something which the person reading the play, or I suppose the audience, is meant to hear and know about but the other people on the stage when it’s being said for some reason can’t hear, or are meant to act like they can’t hear, even though the person who’s speaking says it really plainly and everybody in the theatre hears it.
I think you mean panto, not Shakespeare, Art says. Where people in the audience all join in and boo the villain when he comes out on to the stage.
No I don’t, Lux says. The one where there’s the king and the lying step-queen, and the king’s daughter, and a man who hides in a box in the daughter’s room then gets out of the box in the middle of the night so he can take a look at her with nothing on, and steal some stuff to prove he’s been there, and then he tells lies about sleeping with the daughter to the daughter’s husband who’s been banished abroad, all to win a bet and make some money, and the queen, who’s her stepmother, is trying to kill her because she hates her, and now the daughter’s exiled husband is trying to kill her too because he’s furious, so the daughter disguises herself as a boy and goes into the woods, where a woodsman is supposed to murder her on the order of her husband, who has believed the lies he’s been told about her sleeping with someone else.
Oh God. To make herself seem more like the imagined Charlotte, presumably, Lux is making up a terrible bland fairytale plot that’s nothing like Shakespeare and pretending it’s Shakespeare.
But the woodsman is a good man and can’t kill her, Lux is saying, and he gives her instead what he thinks is a medicine to keep her safe in the woods alone, but what it actually is, instead, is a poison the queen gave him, telling him it was powerful medicine but hoping secretly he’ll do exactly this, give it to her stepdaughter. And he does, and he leaves her in the woods, where she meets some wild boys who she doesn’t discover till the end of the play aren’t wild boys at all but are princes, and not just that, but they happen to be her long lost brothers, and they all live together in the woods for a bit until she feels unwell one day and takes the medicine and she falls into a deep sleep, like death. But it’s not death. Because it isn’t a poison after all. Because a doctor has been instructed to make it and decided not to make a poison even though the queen ordered him to, because he is a man who wants to do no wrong and he thinks the queen is really untrustworthy. Basically she wants to poison everybody. So eventually the daughter who’s meant to be dead wakes up.
Phew! Iris says.
And that’s only half the story, Lux says. In the rest of it people have visions, a family that’s dead comes back and visits, and a god appears on an eagle’s back and drops a book down to a prisoner in a jail that tells him what will happen in the future, but all in the form of a riddle he has to solve.
It must be, uh, one of the Shakespeares, Art says, that are very little seen, maybe, or one of the ones that are still in the process of being attributed to him.
Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun, his mother says. Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Chimney-sweeper, an old name for the head of the dandelion, a dandelion when it’s gone to seed. So beautiful. Cymbeline.
Cymbeline, Lux says.
A play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning, his mother
says.
Where everybody is pretending to be someone or something else, Lux says. And you can’t see for the life of you how any of it will resolve in the end, because it’s such a tangled-up messed-up farce of a mess. It’s the first of his plays I read. It also happens to be why I ever wanted to come to this country to study. I read it and I thought, if this writer from this place can make this mad and bitter mess into this graceful thing it is at the end, where the balance comes back and all the lies are revealed and all the losses are compensated, and that’s the place on earth he comes from, that’s the place that made him, then that’s the place I’m going, I’ll go there, I’ll live there.
Ah, Art says. Yes. Of course. Cimmeleen.
And I was telling you about it, Lux says, because it’s like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other, like their worlds have somehow become disjointed or broken off each other’s worlds. But if they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what’s happening right next to their ears and eyes, they’d see it’s the same play they’re all in, the same world, that they’re all part of the same story. So.
So, Art says. What’ll we talk about now? I had this dream last night, it was amazingly vivid.
Iris laughs.
What’s it like, living with my nephew? she says.
I’ve no idea, Lux says.
Ha ha! Art says.
I live most of the time in the warehouse I work in, Lux says.
She’s joking, Art says.
They don’t know I sleep there, Lux says. I sleep up in one of the empty rooms on the top floor above the office space.
She likes to make stuff up, Art says. She can be very convincing.
The truth is, Lux says, it’s a far better job than when I worked for Cleangreen, when I still had to grub about for somewhere to stay from day to day, because Cleangreen didn’t have premises, so I spent most of the time on my friend’s sofa, but then my friend Alva got a better job and moved to Birmingham and in any case Cleangreen started employing the African people the boss brings over because he doesn’t have to pay them anything. And it’s miles better working in deliveries and packing than in selling soap, because there’s no way you can sleep in the Mall unless you sleep with the security guys. I mean, have sex with. Which I won’t. So it’s good, the warehouse. But I can’t hang out there on my day off, or sleep there on the night I have my day off, unless I can slip past without the night shift noticing.