There but for The

by Ali Smith

  To the Lees of happiness, Bernice says.

  To the Lees! everybody shouts. Hugo is quite drunk, doesn’t notice his red is gone and raises his white glass. While they’re all drinking, Miles puts Hugo’s glass of red down in front of Mark.

  Then he leaves the room.

  Caroline continues about how pointless art is.

  No, Hugo says shaking his head too, I can’t believe I’m going to have to have this argument again about it. And the very fact that everybody goes on and on about the same people, as if art didn’t exist outside the tabloids. Emin and Hirst and so on, they’re old hat already, they get in the way of what their art does, and part of me is starting to believe they’ve become such a cliché precisely so that people can say exactly the tripe you’ve been saying and you’re about to say, and so there can be some kind of debate, not that I’d call it much of a debate by the way. But I won’t have it said, when there’s so much new art that’s so interrogatory, that subverts the things that need subverting, that challenges all the right preconceptions.

  Here we go again, Hannah says.

  The secret of life is art, Bernice says. That’s what Oscar Wilde said.

  The secret of arty talk is death, Hannah says and draws her finger across her neck and makes a choking noise.

  I don’t care what he says, Caroline says pointing at Hugo who has taken on a piqued, supercilious look. All those words you use all the time, darling, about it, like enhance and retro and articulate and interrogate.

  Money and power, Richard says. The real magic words.

  Yes, Caroline says, and that’s why I’m almost glad there’s been a recession, sorry Jen, because maybe it’ll shake up some of the stupid money there is in things like financial markets round the art he’s always going on about. The kind of art you go on about, where people put themselves in glass cases in a gallery and get looked at, or sell all their belongings, or someone casts the hole in a doughnut in plaster and calls it The Hole From Inside A Doughnut, or fills an old tree trunk with concrete and calls it whatever, it’s all a con. Art. No art has ever really changed anything. That’s the bottom line. Full stop. Show me something that a work of so-called art has ever really done, anything in the world, except give people a migraine.

  Hannah yawns audibly.

  Art is stupid, she says.

  But what about that boy, Mark says, in Germany, the boy who set up the resistance movement with his sister, I can’t remember their names, in the Second World War?

  Everybody turns to look at him. It is quite frightening.

  The boy was in the Hitler Youth, he says, and he was reading a book one day, he was really enjoying it, until his troop leader found him reading it and gave him a severe warning because it was by a, a Jewish writer, it was a banned book. And the boy was so incensed that this really good book he’d been reading had been banned—was the wrong kind of book, the wrong kind of art, if you like, written by the wrong kind of writer—that he thought twice, he began to ask questions about what was happening, and then, it turns out, he went on with his sister, Sophie Scholl, their name was Scholl, to do this stellar work, to try to change things, make it possible for people to think, I mean differently. And they fought back, and they did change things. They did a lot of good before they were caught. And they were killed for it, his sister and him, the Nazi authorities took them to court, tried them, and they spoke out bravely, and were sentenced to death for treason, the Nazis cut their heads off, I believe.

  Yeah, and after they did, they found out that their skulls were, like, encrusted with diamonds, and then the lights in the room they were in went on and then off by themselves, Hannah says and makes a spooky ghost noise.

  Mark, shaken, realizes he has just made the terrible mistake of not just seeming to be but actually being sincere. It finally strikes him that this conversation about art probably takes place every time these people meet for dinner like this. As if to consolidate what he’s just thought, Jen makes a little performance of checking that the child is asleep before she leans forward and says with deliberate sincerity:

  But of course you must have seen some terrible times yourself, Mark, if you were gay before it was legal to be gay, were you?

  Oh yes, I was, Mark says. I was gay all along.

  He blushes.

  Yes, and it was criminal, wasn’t it, right up until the beginning of the 1970s, Jen says nodding.

  End of the 1960s, Mark says and looks down at his own hands on the table.

  I mean, you must have been quite a young man when all that was going on, Jen says in her sincere voice.

  Oh, I was, Mark says. It’s exactly what I was.

  Everybody laughs.

  It must have been terrible for you, Mark, Caroline says on the other side of him.

  She puts a hand on his arm.

  What was it like? she says.

  Oh, it was all very jolly, Mark says. We all hid everything. All very exciting. Very stimulating.

  I didn’t know it was ever even criminal! Hannah says.

  If they caught you it was prison. Or oestrogen injections, Terence says. That’s what happened to Turing.

  It’s called cruising, not touring, Richard says, as far as I know, that is. I don’t know. We’d have to ask the experts among us. Eh, Hughie-boy?

  Caroline cuts in quickly and asks the Bayoudes did they call their daughter after the actress Brooke Shields.

  Who’s Brooke Shields? Hannah says.

  You’re too young to know, Jen says. She was an actress who went out with, what’s his name, the royal, not Edward, the Fergie one, Prince Andrew, but when she was very young, much younger, she was associated with a seedy scandal when a rather dreadful filmmaker used her in a salacious film even though she was under-age.

  It wasn’t a rather dreadful filmmaker, Eric says. It was by one of France’s best twentieth-century film directors.

  Well, we’ve always disagreed on that, haven’t we, darling? Jen says. He’s always putting on things with subtitles. I look at it, and I think, oh no, subtitles. It’s lucky we can all sit in different rooms in this house.

  And no, the Bayoudes tell them, but they did name her after a film star, Louise Brooks, a star of silent film—

  Who did Yorkshire clog dancing, we know, Hannah says—

  —who was associated with playing roles full of free will, girls with an ability to survive, or with a profound nonchalance in the face of the horribleness that life can throw at a person, Bernice says.

  After a brief astonished silence, Caroline, who is now also quite drunk, says: but then her name would be Louise, wouldn’t it?

  Louise Brook, Richard says. Didn’t she win a British rowing medal in the Olympics?

  Brooks, Terence says, not Brook.

  I thought she was that nanny, the one who shook the baby in America, Hannah says.

  Out of nowhere Caroline starts crying and laughing at the same time. She says she wants to make a confession. Her confession is that she’s frightened of flying in aeroplanes. Hannah reaches across the table, knocks over an empty water glass and pats her hand. Jen starts shouting about CBT. Six sessions of CBT will sort you out, she says, only she shouts it, like a mad person, and she shouts it over and over, she has said it about six times, Mark thinks, either that or he is very drunk himself, which can’t be possible since he’s only had one glass and it was only half full. Hannah is shouting too, about how she has rights, and that one of her fundamental rights is the right to be able to take cheap flights, because her parents didn’t have that right, and that flying doesn’t harm the environment nearly as much as they claim. At this point, Hugo and Richard start free-associating a fantasy—Mark watches them slip into cahoots as if they’d not been being the least bit acrid with each other all night, as if cahoots is exactly the same as loggerhead—of filling the windscreen washer-bottles in their cars with urine, so that when they press the button to wash the windscreen the spray coming out of the n
ozzle and going over the roof of the car will cover any cyclists anywhere near the car with piss.

  The Bayoudes exchange looks with each other over the head of their sleeping child.

  I am competitive, Richard is saying, I’m not going to hide that fact.

  Mark turns to look at Hugo. Hugo stares straight back at him, right in the eyes. It is the most lost look in the world. Mark thinks of Jonathan, and of the moment, after Jonathan had gone, that he understood the nature of Jonathan’s love, when he’d sat one spring afternoon six months after the funeral and worked his way through the video footage Jonathan had taken of their lives together over twenty-five years, and found that whether it showed a lovely view looking out to sea on a holiday, or skimmed along a road out of a car window, or panned round whatever room they happened to be in, the camera eye always came to rest, in the end, for its final image, on Mark himself.

  There is something heartbreaking, Mark thinks now, about video’s inferior quality, something human and makeshift in the not-quite-good-enough that it is, the way it’s all that remains, the way it makes what happened so much less. When they’d visited Rome and gone into the pretty little church, empty inside but with the queue of tourists outside it all waiting to have themselves photographed putting their hands into the Mouth of Truth, they’d found, in a glass case, a toothy smiling skull whose forehead was plastered with a name. S. Valentini. Wonder, Jonathan’s voice says behind the image, as the image stays steady on the skull, if we all have our names in there written on us like that, on our foreheads, between the flesh and the bone. Then they both laugh, Mark heard his own laughter meeting Jonathan’s. Then the camera eye, slightly shaky with laughter, comes away from the relic and round to rest on Mark, laughing.

  Meanwhile Richard is demonstrating with his hands the goggles the police use to be able to see what the microdrone is seeing. Hugo puts his hands over his eyes too. Jen and Hugo, still with his hands over his eyes, start a conversation about democracy and internet porn. Mark feels queasy. He thinks about the couple of times he’s brought himself off by watching the free porn on the net: two men on the steps of a blue swimming pool, three men dressed as soldiers in a toilet. Both times he had to go in search of something else on there afterwards to make himself feel less degraded. The second time he had simply typed the words something beautiful into the Google images box. Up came a picture of some leaves against the sun. A picture of a blonde photoshop-smooth woman and baby sleeping. A picture of a bird. A picture of Mother Teresa. A picture of a modernist building made of shiny metal. A picture of two people sticking knives into their own hands. Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google. He surveys the strewn table. Sure, there’s a certain charm to being able to look up and watch Eartha Kitt singing Old Fashioned Millionaire in 1957 at three in the morning or Hayley Mills singing a song about femininity from an old Disney film. But the charm is a kind of deception about a whole new way of feeling lonely, a semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows. More and more, the pressing human dilemma: how to walk a clean path between obscenities.

  Bernice is nodding at him, as if in agreement with him.

  Oh God. Oh no. He thought he was just thinking but he has, it seems, actually been speaking out loud.

  The merest opening of a common buttercup on a piece of wasteground in the light of an ordinary day, Bernice is saying, the mere blowing along a road of a piece of litter, is enough to dispel the so-called truth of every single thing online. But we’re forgetting how to know what’s real. That’s the real problem.

  How much of it has he said out loud? He can’t be sure. Oh God. Did he say the word wanked? Did he say the stuff about the soldiers and the swimming pool? Oh God.

  Bit of a Luddite approach, though, Jen says.

  The internet IS real, Hannah is saying. You can’t just say the internet isn’t real. I have it in my house. That makes it real to me.

  I refute the internet thus, Bernice says and knocks her hand into the neck of an empty decanter in front of her so that Jen has to catch it to stop it from toppling.

  Hannah starts wailing that Bernice, because she has said the words contemporary and philosophy, is being superior and showing off. It is a fate worse than arty talk. Hugo and Richard are now making threats at each other about Damien Hirst’s skull. It looks like a physical fight will break out.

  Mark goes upstairs because he thinks he might be sick.

  The bathroom is empty.

  Through the open door of the room next to it, Miles seems to be measuring something by stepping and counting, stepping and counting. He looks charming, preoccupied. He sees Mark.

  Seven steps long, five wide, he says.

  Maybe Miles is a secret estate agent.

  He has taken his knife and fork upstairs with him. He puts them on the sideboard, takes the salt cellar out of his pocket and puts it down next to them.

  What are they for? Mark says.

  Miles shrugs his shoulders.

  Eating with, he says.

  He presses the light switch, on then off. Both men laugh.

  It’s all sound and fury downstairs, Mark says. They’re going to punch each other’s skulls in any minute over whether Damien Hirst’s skull means anything.

  Miles shrugs his eyebrows and smiles a resigned smile.

  And I think I might be sick, Mark says. Any minute now.

  Miles nods. His eyes are kind.

  See you, he says.

  He means: see you in a minute, when you’ve sorted yourself out.

  Mark goes into the bathroom. He sits on the floor until he feels better, less hot. Then he stands up and urinates. As he does, a whole childhood poem he didn’t know he knew flows by itself through his head.

  Fury said to a mouse, That he met in the house, “Let us both go to law: I will prosecute YOU.—Come, I’ll take no denial; We must have a trial: For really, this morning I’ve nothing to do.” Said the mouse to the cur, “Such a trial, dear Sir, with no jury or judge, would be wasting our breath.” “I’ll be the judge, I’ll be the jury,” said cunning old Fury: “I’ll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death.”

  Like the tail of a creature; yes; the poem had gone down the page in the book shaped like the tail of a creature.

  He’ll tell Miles; Miles will be interested. Miles will maybe know what the poem is.

  But when Mark comes out of the bathroom the bedroom door is shut.

  For a moment he thinks Miles must have gone downstairs again. He turns to go himself. But then he stops. He stands in front of the shut door and puts his ear against it.

  He goes downstairs. He stops before the dining-room door, which is half closed, and stands outside. In there they are talking about someone. There is a great deal of laughter, as if someone is the butt of a joke.

  He listens. They are talking about Miles, maybe.

  No, he’s great, I mean, he’s your stereotypical gay man, Caroline is saying. Your professional working gay man, I mean.

  He didn’t comment on my clothes at all. They’re supposed to comment on your clothes, Hannah is saying. And he’s not as neat and clean as they usually are. They’re usually more pressed or ironed or something.

  Loves his mummy, Richard says.

  His mother’s dead, actually, Hugo says.

  That’ll be why he’s not so ironed-looking as he should be, Richard says.

  Someone, Hannah, laughs.

  How do you know about his mother? Caroline says.

  He told me, Hugo says. She took her own life when he was a boy. Eleven or twelve.

 
They’re not talking about Miles. Took her own life. It is a kindness in Hugo, to be so drunk yet to choose to put it as if he is holding it in gloved hands.

  Sad, Jen says. That’s very sad, isn’t it?

  She was some kind of painter, Hugo says.

  House? Richard says.

  Laughter, somebody, subdued.

  He was brought up by an aunt, Hugo says. His father was away or not there, something like that, and he was brought up by an aunt after she, his mother, after she went. She was quite well known, well, she was after she died, I’d never heard of her. Faye or Faith or something.

  You mean Faye Palmer? Bernice’s low voice interrupts. His mother was Faye Palmer?

  His second name is Palmer, Hugo says.

  Oh, Terence says. Oh my God. One of Faye Palmer’s sons.

  He’d be about the right age, Bernice says. Oh, that’s amazing.

  Who’s Faye Palmer? Hannah says loud and incredulous.

  Faye Palmer, Bernice says.

  The Bayoudes tell the table about Faye. Young. Jewish. Wildly talented. Hugely promising. Original. Seminal. Visual artist. 1950s. Strikingly beautiful when you see photos of her. You must have heard of her, they say, she’s often referenced alongside Plath.

  Oh yes, Hugo says, Plath, someone’s wife, wasn’t she, and completely brilliant, and insane as a nest of snakes.

  Bernice describes Faye’s most famous work, History Sequence 1 to 9, and how it begins with the faraway woman in the chair and, as you come closer, progress from canvas to canvas, you see that the woman is tied at the wrists and ankles to the chair, and then that she looks like she is crying, and then that what she is crying is blood, and as you come closer still you see that her eyes are a bloody mask.

  Then you’re right up against the face, up against the eyes, and you see that the eyelids have been sewn shut, with foul little bloody little black stitches, Bernice says. In number 8 there’s nothing but these stitches in extreme close-up. It’s like an abstract, but it isn’t, it’s painstakingly figurative. And then in the final canvas, she goes beyond the mask, right into the eye, and there’s no eye in there, the socket is empty, there’s a foul-looking insect and it’s eating the lining of the socket.