by Ali Smith
It would at least have been a paying of attention.
What he will do, halfway through the month of January, is write Charlotte a letter in which he will tell her he’d like very much to pass over the domain, the maintenance and the workings of the Art in Nature blog to her, if she’d like it. He will write that he knows he wasn’t really up to it, that he knows that she is and will be. He will write that he knows she’ll be brilliant at it. He will sign off his letter with love.
He will also send an email to the SA4A Entertainment Division and ask if it will be possible to meet someone from the organization to have a chat, person to person, just generally, about the company and his role in it.
What Charlotte will do is write a very nice letter back in which she will apologize for what she did to his laptop and offer to buy him a new one. He will write back and thank her and say he’d love a new laptop. (He will be polite and resist suggesting make, model and OS.)
Within days Charlotte will have posted a blog about how the camera eye of the drone has taken over from the crane shot as the eye of God in TV and film dramas. It’ll be really good. The Art in Nature hits will start to soar. She’ll follow this with a blog about the ubiquity of plastic microbeads in everything from clothes to saliva. Then she’ll post a blog about sexism in parliament.
Within half an hour of sending his email to SA4A, Art will get the usual reply from the usual friendly-sounding SA4A bot addressing him in a friendly way and sending him the SA4A website link as information about contacting the SA4A Entertainment Division.
He will write back again asking if it’s possible to be referred to a real person by the bot, to set up a meeting just to say a hello in person to his employers.
Within half an hour he will get the usual reply from the usual friendly-sounding SA4A bot with the website link for contacting the SA4A Entertainment Division.
He’ll go to the website. He’ll click on CONTACT US.
It will give him the e-address of the friendly-sounding bot with whom he’s just been communicating.
—
Let’s do the impossible now and look through a window we can’t physically see through at all, given the winter condensation on the ones along the side of the barn, where Art is rolled in Lux’s makeshift bed and Lux is sitting crosslegged above him on one of the stock crates.
It is Boxing Day morning, towards 10am. Art has just woken up. Lux has brought him a mug of coffee. His aunt’s in the kitchen making breakfast, Lux says; she says his mother and his aunt are both in the same room and are not arguing, and no, the dining room is not full of coastline, there is no coastline to be seen anywhere in it or in the kitchen or in any of the rooms she’s been in this morning.
But it was, Art says. In the room. With us. Over our heads. Like someone had cut a slice out of the coast and dipped it into the room with us, like we’re the coffee and it’s the biscotti. And them arguing under it and you just sitting there and none of you with any idea it was even there.
The coastline that came to dinner, she says.
He scratches his head. He rubs his thumb against his fingers. He holds his fingers out to show her.
I’ve still got bits of it in my hair, he says. See? I wasn’t drunk. I really did see it. It really was really there.
Like you banged your head on the world, Lux says. You’re like the dictionary doctor.
The what? he says.
Kicking the big stone with his foot, she says, to prove that reality is reality and that reality physically exists. I refute it thus.
Who? Art says.
The literature doctor, she says. The man who wrote the dictionary. Johnson. Not Boris. The opposite of Boris. A man interested in the meanings of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.
How do you know all this stuff? he says. About books and dictionaries. Shakespeare. You know more about Shakespeare than I do.
I’ve got a deg, she says.
A what? he says.
The first half of a degree, she says. And I spend my days off in the library. Well. Used to. Did.
And you saw nothing? he says. You really saw nothing?
The earth didn’t move for me, she says. I saw the room, and us in it. I was there. But I didn’t see any coast, or land, or anything like you describe, in the room. No.
See a doctor, he says.
You see a doctor? she says.
She stands up on the box and looks all round the barn.
No, I mean I’ll see one, I’ll phone and get an appointment when the surgeries reopen, he says.
And that won’t take long, she says sitting down again. It only takes an average of six months just now in your country to get any real help for serious mental health issues.
But I’m going mad, he says.
He cuddles back down under the duvet. He pulls it up over his head. Lux gets down off the box and sits by his feet, he can feel her sitting there. She takes his foot in her hand through the duvet and holds it. It’s nice.
I said to your aunt last night, she says. After you came out here, when you were asleep. I said, Art is seeing things. And your aunt said, that’s a great description of what art is.
Then your aunt said it wasn’t surprising you were seeing things and that we’re living in strange times. Then she told me she’d been walking through a railway station last week and she’d seen four policemen all dressed in black with machine guns and they were standing asking some old people on the concourse looking at a map if they needed any help with their directions. The old people looked really small and frail. The police looked huge, like giants, next to them. And she thought, either I’m seeing things or the world is crazy.
Then she thought to herself, but what’s new? I’ve been seeing things in the crazy world all my life.
And I said, no, that the thing you’d seen had been a hallucination, not a real thing. And then she said this:
where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing.
What about you? Art says from inside the duvet. Have you ever?
Coastlined? she says. Well. I’ll take you on a short tour of one of my coastlines.
One of my mother’s uncles was doing the family tree thing when I was about ten and he showed me my place on the map of people he’d made, I was down at the bottom. I looked at all the names above mine, going back and back in time, all the centuries that the names meant, and I thought, look at all those people over my head, real people and all related to, all a part of me, and I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about almost all of the people on that map.
And then this happened, years later, when I was seventeen, walking along a street in Toronto and I stopped and just stood there in the middle of Queen Street because the day went dark all round me even though it was the middle of the day, and I knew for the first time I was, I am, carrying on my head, like a washerwoman or a waterwoman, not just one container or basket, but hundreds of baskets all balanced on each other, full to their tops with bones, high as a skyscraper, and they were so heavy on my head and shoulders that either I was going to have to offload them or they were going to drive me down through the pavement into the ground, like that machine that workmen use to break up tarmac, and all I could think was, it’s so dark I wish I had a torch, I wish I had just a box of matches, just a tiny struck match in the dark will do to be able to see where to put my feet, get a grip, so I can balance and put these things I’m carrying down and look into each basket, offer it respect, do it justice. Don’t misunderstand me. I also knew they weren’t there, there were no bones, no baskets, nothing on my head. But all the same. They were. There. I mean here.
Yes, Art says.
Though on the other hand, Lux says. When I spoke to your mother about what you’d seen last night, she looked annoyed and said you should snap out of it. I think your mother is one of the millions and millions of people who live every day at the finis of their terre.
But Art under the duvet doesn’t hear what
she’s saying about his mother because he’s begun to hear a rumbling sound and feel the floor pulsing under him.
Oh dear God.
He pulls the duvet off his head.
He holds his hand up to ask Lux to stop talking.
What? she says.
I think it’s happening again, he says.
Is it? she says.
The air is rumbling, he says. The ground is shaking.
It is, she says. Like traffic, or an aeroplane.
Can you hear it too? he says.
She nods.
He gets up. He goes over to the door and opens it a crack. A single decker bus full of people is reversing and then jolting forward, inching its way up the path outside the barn, going up the road towards the house.
I’m seeing a bus, Art says.
I’m seeing a bus too, Lux says.
Art pulls clothes on. When they get to the house the bus is parked on the drive, its door open. Lux knocks on the bus’s metal side.
I refute it bus, she says.
There’s a man at the wheel holding a cigarette out of his side window as far from himself as he can.
It’s a no smoking bus, the man says.
The house is full of people. There’s a pile of coats and boots in the porch. There’s a queue of people waiting outside the little toilet room in the hall.
A stranger is sitting in his mother’s study working at his mother’s computer.
Don’t speak to me, the man says. I’m on FaceTime.
A woman is standing behind him looking bored. The man starts talking to somebody onscreen about map co-ordinates.
This is my husband, the woman says, and this is the worst Christmas I’ve had in my life thanks very much for asking, I’ve just spent all Christmas night trying to get to sleep on a bus and I don’t even like rare birds.
The woman introduces herself as Sheena MacCallum and says that she and her husband, their three grown-up kids and their grown-up kids’ partners have all been on this bus since it left Edinburgh last night. The bus has been picking up keen birdwatchers all the way down the country. Her husband organized this bus. She herself doesn’t care whether she ever or never sees a Canada warbler in her life. But her husband knew there’d be money in it as well as a possible bird sighting and decided a great deal of people would want to if they had the chance, even if it meant travelling at Christmas, and that they’d pay well for the experience if someone were to organize it.
And he was right, she says. What can I say? The world is full of people looking for meaning in the shape of a bird not native to this country turning up in this country after all.
Her husband winks at Art from behind FaceTime and rubs his fingers and his thumb together.
A very happy Christmas to me, Mr MacCallum says.
The woman called Sheena introduces her children to Lux. Art goes into the kitchen. People in their socks are padding about; people are sitting round the kitchen table drinking hot drinks; Iris is at the Aga frying and boiling eggs and a woman is buttering slices of toast.
Art dares to go into the dining room.
There is no coastline at all anywhere in the dining room.
Okay.
Good.
The dining table is covered in leftovers from last night’s meal to which people are helping themselves. The people round it make a great fuss when they find out who Art is. People shake his hand. People thank him. They are excited to meet him. It is like they think he is some kind of a celebrity.
What did it look like? a man says. Did you get any pictures?
I didn’t, Art says.
But you saw it, the man says.
Art blushes.
I –, he says.
He’s about to tell them all the truth. But the man shows him a map of Cornwall with ink crosses marked all over it and says:
I know, I know. Your bird has flown. It happens to the best of us. But you saw it. We’re keen to get a look at where you saw it anyway, if you can pinpoint it for us. Just in case. You never know your luck. Then we’re meeting another group that’s come down in a bus from London over at Mousehole to check the other locations.
What other locations? Art says.
We’re going to check all the sighting locations, the maybes and the verified, the man says.
There’ve been verified sightings? Art says. Of a real Canada warbler?
Where’ve you been? the man says. It’s all over the net!
Reception, Art says.
The man points out on the map where four possible sightings and three definite sightings have taken place.
He shows Art a photo on his phone, then another, and another.
It does look like a Canada warbler. And behind the Canada warbler the landscape does look like here.
It really is, Art says. My God.
And you’ve seen it, the man says. You’re one of the lucky ones. The mythical Canada warbler, and you’re one of the few people on earth to see it with their own eyes on this side of the pond.
And in any case, the man called Mr MacCallum says coming through and putting his arm round Art’s shoulders, whether we’re as lucky as you or not there’s plenty more birds in the sea round here. I’m excited enough, myself, at getting to go to a place called Mousehole.
The woman called Sheena rolls her eyes.
I can help, Iris tells her. I have some spare Christmas spirit. Come with me.
Oh good, you’re up, Arthur, his mother says. I’d like to show some of the visitors the stock in the barn before they go to the coast.
Quite a lot of people follow his mother outside.
But Art starts to worry. If he is meant to be such a nature lover, such a nature thinker, shouldn’t he also be going with them on the bus to see the Canada warbler? Why isn’t he more excited at the thought that he might get, really, to see a once-in-a-lifetime bird that’s survived the ocean and arrived by the skin of its beak?
But this isn’t what’s really worrying him about the thought of the bus and the birders.
What’s really worrying him is that these people on this bus from the north are off to meet a group who’ve come on a bus from London. And what if Lux might take it into her head to decide she’d like to ask those people from London for a lift back to London on their bus?
She will want to leave with them, surely.
It is her chance to get out of here today, to not have to wait till tomorrow.
She will have had enough of being anything to do with the unhinged life of a person who sees coastline that isn’t really there, and his unhinged mother who told her she wasn’t welcome.
She hasn’t even had a bed to sleep in here.
He’d leave, if he were her.
He has no idea where Lux is right now. He hasn’t seen her since they came back up to the house. Has she maybe already got on the bus?
The too-real bus?
He goes and looks.
She’s not on the bus. Nobody is on the bus except the driver who offers him a cigarette. No, thank you, Art says. But have you a couple of matches you could spare me?
He looks upstairs in the attic, then in all the empty rooms. He looks in the dining room again and in the office. He looks out in the back garden, goes right down to the fence between the garden and the field. He comes back towards the noise of the house, looks in the lobby and finally the kitchen where Iris is standing by the sink pouring a sweet-smelling alcohol into a hipflask the woman called Sheena is holding out.
When the others off the bus see Iris doing this a murmur goes round the group and a polite queue of people holding hipflasks and plastic water bottles forms in front of Iris.
The birdwatchers stay for about half an hour more. They pick up their cameras, pull their coats and boots back on, shout their thank-yous and get back on their bus. The bus does a three point turn in the drive only hitting the side of the house twice, and rocks its way down the path between the trees with the people inside waving from the back window till they can’t see th
e house any more.
The woman called Sheena is waving one of the anglepoise lamps from the stock in the barn in the air.
His mother, standing next to him at the door, opens her hands as the bus leaves. She shows Art the roll of banknotes.
Boxing Day sale, she says. Everything must go. Did you know your girlfriend’s a natural salesperson as well as a virtuoso on the violin?
—
Boxing Day later afternoon; the light is gone outside, which makes it evening; the room is a winter dream of warmth. Art is dozing in a chair. Lux is sitting on the floor leaning against his legs like a girlfriend or real partner in front of the open fire in the lounge. It all almost feels like an imagined Christmas might.
His mother is talking (quite rationally) to his aunt about the programmes that used to be on all the TV channels first thing on Christmas mornings when they were small, televised live from children’s wards in hospitals, as if to remind people to think of people worse off or realize how lucky they were not to be in hospital or be having to worry about a child in hospital at Christmas time.
Not that we ever watched them, his mother says. But even if we switched them off, still, somewhere at the backs of our heads, at least we thought about people in hospitals while we had our hospital-free Christmas. And there was something good in the thought.
You old Catholic, Iris says.
Well, yes and no, his mother says. Because those programmes did us all a service. They made us think of others whether we wanted to or not. Presumably they were very poor television, unless you happened to be related to someone in a hospital at Christmas time personally visited by the cameras and Michael Aspel or whoever. Then you’d be interested. Then you’d really care.
I remember father telling us, when we were small, Iris says. You’re maybe too small to remember. About how his father took him, in the years after the First World War, to see the war veterans in the hospitals on Christmas Day. Maybe the ethos of those programmes comes from those post-war visits, the post-war times.
Basically, Art thinks in his half-dozing state, though nobody’d dare say it now, everybody in those wars must’ve been close to mad, not so much spunky Kenneth More with his flying helmet on swinging himself into the cockpit of the Spitfire even though he’s had his legs amputated, more the crazy man in the film called A Canterbury Tale who goes round pouring glue into the hair on the heads of anyone female in the army.