There but for The

by Ali Smith

  Oh gross, Hannah says. Oh that’s the grossest thing I ever heard.

  It’s true, Terence says. It’s an image from reality. Somewhere there’s a quite famous piece of writing by her, about what it means to have to bear the knowledge of inhumanity, having to bear it communally—about how this thing really happened to a war prisoner, who’d had his eyes removed and then his torturers had sewn beetles into where the eyes had been.

  Oh I’m going to puke, Hannah says, I really am.

  And the big controversy after her death, Bernice says, was that she replaced the man to whom this really happened with what ostensibly, in her paintings, appears to be a series of self-portraits.

  Oh, ostensibly, Richard says.

  Bernice ignores his mocking. She goes on to tell them that this appropriating of history, the fusion of personal and historic, is the thing critics of Palmer’s work still argue about most. In many ways, she says, a continuing tendency to dwell on the details of her autobiography, particularly on the fact that she committed suicide and the possible reasons why, has blocked the proper aesthetic reception of the work.

  Oh, aesthetic reception, Richard says.

  Shut it, Rich, Hugo says.

  Why did she? Caroline says.

  History Sequence 1 to 9, they’re called, Terence says. You must know them. You will, you’ll have seen them.

  And how did she? Caroline says.

  I’d know if I’d seen one. They sound really disgusting, Hannah says.

  You’d absolutely know if you saw one in real life, Bernice says. You can’t not. They’re unforgettable. They’re shocking to the core. But also, they’re really shockingly beautiful.

  No way, Hannah says.

  They are, Bernice says. They just are.

  You wouldn’t take your child to see one of those pictures, though, would you? Jen says.

  Our child sees worse things every day on TV, Terence says. She just needs to type a couple of words into a computer to see things every bit as bad, and, worse, to see them as if she’s not really seeing them. Seeing a picture like one of Palmer’s is very different from seeing something atrocious on a screen. There is no screen. That’s the point. There’s nothing between you and it.

  And to leave a child, Caroline says. What a choice. It’s unthinkable.

  Unthinkable just to leave your own self. Think how robust your own heart feels, and your arms, and your legs feel, someone (it must be Eric) says.

  Very selfish, Hugo says.

  Most difficult thing in the world, Caroline says.

  I’m amazed you’ve heard of her. I’d never heard of her, Hugo says.

  But you’ve seen her, Bernice says. You will have. You’ve seen her without seeing her. She’s hugely influential, she was hugely important in the ways artists, especially women, came to treat history and to examine how history had treated them. And you can see so clearly now too with hindsight, how they parallel Bacon, practically initiate the post-war self-infliction artists of the 1960s and 1970s, and even, in their colour planes, anticipate Hockney.

  That’s not possible, Bacon and Hockney together, Hugo snorts.

  Trust me. They do. They do both, Bernice says.

  Faye Palmer’s son, Terence says.

  Oh God, Jen says. Jewish. And I served him pork.

  Bacon and Hock, Richard says. Ha-ha!

  Yes but he ate it, Jen, Caroline says. He’s probably one of the ones who don’t mind what they eat.

  Mark stands just beyond the door.

  In his muscles he is thirteen years old and the hush is about to happen all over again, will happen in a moment’s time when, small, thin, in the still-too-big blazer, he’ll enter the prep-room full of boys at St. Faith’s, and no longer be just the Jewish one, like Quentin Sinigal is the coloured one. Now that the inquest has been in the paper and everybody knows, he’ll also be the one whose mother—like in the old joke about Jamaica, whispered behind his back for months and months to come (in fact there will literally be years of this whispering)—went of her own accord.

  He glances back up the stairs. He can see the closed door.

  The nice chap, Miles, is safe behind it.)

  Say that a man is fully formed by not / just what’s remembered also what’s forgot Mark sat on the circular bench at the gate of the park. It was a warm October day. What would he remember from his visit to the Observatory today? A seagull had walked across the grass at the edge of the park on the tiny white table in the turret that’s been curtained off to make the Camera Obscura. He’d enjoyed that somehow more than seeing a seagull in real life, he thought now, as he sat and watched another real seagull walk across a strip of grass right in front of him.

  Say that the berries on a tree fermented / say that some birds ate them got drunk demented / couldn’t fly straight flew straight into instead / wall of an office block and fell down dead / down on the pavement people undeterred / stepping over the mound of broken bird Mark sat on the bench on a Thursday in October in 2009. Forty-seven years ago today, to the day, he is standing in the lounge of Aunt Kenna’s house. It is a couple of days since he was moved in. He has drawn the short straw. David got Aunt Hope, his father’s other, nicer, sister, and was moved in to Aunt Hope’s house on the other side of town a couple of days ago too.

  Everything is so neat it’s a kind of proof, though he’s not yet sure what of. The sizes of the chairs in the lounge, new to the backs of his legs, are a kind of proof. The foreign fall of the cloth on the table is proof. The dark wood furniture in the room is proof. The wooden curve on the side and the top of that cabinet thing where Aunt Kenna keeps the drinks, and which gives off the smell of acridness and plush when you open it, which you can only do if Aunt Kenna doesn’t know it’s what you’re doing, is proof.

  His suitcase is in the spare room.

  The note his mother left is in the suitcase.

  In a house-move roughly seven years from now, when Mark will drop in to pick up the stuff that’s still at his aunt’s, and which his aunt has packed in bags for him, the note will get mislaid, and will be given away to a junkshop in the ribbing of what Kenna thinks of as an anonymous old suitcase. Because this happens at a time in his life when Mark is angry with his mother for doing what she did, he will decide not to go after it, not to go to the junkshop to try to find it again. By the time he is ready to want it again, the note, Aunt Kenna is dead and there’s no way of finding out even which shop she gave the suitcase to all those years ago.

  It says, in the dash of her handwriting, on a sheet of Basildon Bond:

  Button up your overcoat.

  Take good care of yourself.

  You belong to me.

  That’s all. Nothing else. It isn’t addressed. His father doesn’t know about it. Nobody knows about it. Mark found it on the desk of the open bureau, detached it from the pad along with the three sheets underneath which bear the imprint of the words and packed it without showing anybody.

  Her writing is her.

  Even the imprints.

  He will never know whether this note was meant for him, or David, or for them both, or for nobody at all, just his mother scrawling down something she might want to think about later.

  His aunt has an ancient pug called Polly. The pug’s face looks ruined, melted. It looks like what Mark thinks the word tragedy would look like if it were a physical reality, a thing not just a word.

  Right now the pug is sitting lumpy in the doorway, looking out on to the yard where Mark’s aunt is what she calls dealing with a fledgling thrush which has fallen out of a nest, can’t fly, and has been there, square, dense, idiot, all afternoon, on the cobbles. There are lots of cats round here so his aunt is putting it out of its misery before a cat does.

  But Aunt Kenna—, Mark said.

  Aunt Kenna waved him away.

  It was the pug found it first; Mark saw it circle the bird, curious, benign. It was so tired, the baby bird, of just sitting there
on guard, that its eye kept lidding over.

  Will the bird’s parents, which are clicking and squawking above the yard, miss it when it dies?

  Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling.

  But Mark has seen the pug, on a walk, pick up a stone in its mouth and carry it for a little of the walk before putting it down, and then on the way back home again stop to find the same stone and pick it up to carry it some of the way back.

  Forty-seven years later Mark could, if he’d chosen to, have called to mind the face of the pug, the dark of the lounge, the ebony cigarette-holder so often in the mouth of his aunt at this time in her life. But of this particular day, this moment, in this room with the resolute tick of its clock and the noise of birds outside, what did he remember?

  Not a single thing.

  Say that there is a heaven up above / say we survive the bumpy road to love Mark sat on the circular bench at the gate of the park. It was his day off. Twenty-seven years ago today, to the day, Mark is on a train coming south. He is thirty-two. His heart is high. In three minutes, according to his watch, the train will pull into Platform 8. Jonathan will be waiting for him at the head of Platform 8. Ten minutes ago, as the train reached the city’s outskirts, Mark shouldered on his stripy cotton jacket, said goodbye to the American nun (!) in mufti sitting opposite him, with whom he’d had a long conversation about many things, including sunlight and Nicaragua, and began walking the length of each carriage all the way to the front. On his way through he carries out a little survey, for fun, of what people are reading on the train. A girl reading Women in Love. A man reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—still (!). A woman reading Death in Venice. A woman reading Heat and Dust. A man reading The White Hotel. A young man, very good-looking, reading a novelization of Chariots of Fire. A girl, looks like a student, reading Slaughterhouse 5. Now he’s past the buffet, now he’s through first class, where nobody is reading anything but the Daily Telegraph (!). Now he’s as near the front of this moving train as he can get, and now he is pushing the window in the door down in the smell of diesel, watching the sun glancing off the deep blue of the moving side of the train as it pulls out of the tunnel into the light before the station, and now his hand is on the handle and pushing the handle down, and now the heavy door is swinging open and the train still moving and he sees him there and he jumps, hits the ground running.

  Twenty-seven years later, this journey was lost to Mark. It was just one of so many mundane journeys they made, over time, towards and away from each other. He couldn’t have remembered the details of this particular one, lovely though it was, even if he’d tried.

  Time came and took your love away and now / say it’s only a paper moon—and how / the ground beneath us melts away like snow / tell every little star I told you so Mark sat on the bench by the gate of the park and looked at his watch. But then again, this is what happens when, one Saturday night, he goes for a drink in the pub opposite the Turkish restaurant after a play, with a nice chap he’s just met.

  Mark: I’ve been invited to this dinner party next week.

  Miles: But?

  Mark: But, well, I don’t want to go.

  Miles: But?

  Mark: But what?

  Miles: Just but.

  Mark: What do you mean, but?

  Miles: Exactly what I say. Those sentences all sound like they have a but attached.

  Mark: But?

  Miles: Yes.

  Mark: And would that but have one t or two?

  [Miles smiles at him, shakes his head.]

  Mark: Shame. Ah well. Right. Got that straight, then. So to speak. Ha.

  Miles: So. You’ve been invited to this dinner party next week, but you don’t want to go. You don’t want to go, but—but what comes next? See?

  Mark: I get it. You mean like a game.

  Miles: I mean more than a game, I mean, like actuality, like how things happen. Like … I was going home, but, this man asked me to go for a drink, so here I am.

  Mark: Is it always but? Can it be and?

  Miles: Yeah, but the thing I particularly like about the word but, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting.

  Mark: Like … this thing happened at the end of the play which threatened to spoil the whole thing—but …

  Miles: See?

  Mark: Ah. I see. You’re kind of … amazing.

  Miles: Ha-ha. But?

  Mark: [laughs] What is it? All that grammar beaten into me at school, and I can’t remember the name of the figure of speech for the word but. Preposition?

  Miles: I’m not prepositioning you.

  Mark: Ha. Damn shame.

  Miles: I’m doing something much better. So. You’ve been invited to this dinner party, but—you don’t want to go. You don’t want to go, but—

  Mark: But I can’t really get out of it.

  Miles: You can’t really get out of it, but—

  Mark: But I’ve just thought of a way to make it do-able.

  Miles: You’ve just thought of a way to make it do-able, but—

  Mark: But it depends on whether this man I’ve just met will accept the invitation and come with me.

  Miles: [surprised] Oh. Oh, you mean me?

  Mark: [surprised at himself] Yes. But—. Yes.

  [Laughter]

  For every new bud there’ll ever be / all the old leaves get shunted off the tree / say it’s a kind of spooning—with a knife / this merciless merciful newness of life Mark sat, now, on the circular bench not far from the gate of the park. In a minute, he’d stand up and go and try the front door at the Lees’ house again. Forty-six years ago, in the Easter holidays (when he is roughly the age of the boy who sheep’s-eyed him earlier today up on the hill), he is “home” from St. Faith’s and Kenna is at the dentist, and because she has a dentist she particularly likes going to across this side of town, she has left him in a greasy spoon until her teeth are done. Across the road there is an antique sort of shop and in its window is a golden-coloured, medieval-looking picture. Mark pulls his coat on and leaves the caff, crosses the road.

  The picture is a holy picture, a religious picture, of two men. They are turned towards each other and a group of men is watching them. One has his arm, his hand, on the other’s shoulders. He is looking at the man lovingly. The smaller of the two men is bending forward slightly. He is putting his fingers, his hand, right inside a wound in the first man’s side.

  Beautiful, a man behind him says.

  It is the man from inside the shop. He has come outside and is standing next to Mark.

  Mark says yes, he thinks it is really beautiful.

  The man’s name is Raymond. He’s quite old, about twenty. He hangs a handwritten notice on the inside of the door. Back in 20 mins. He locks the shop up. Lunchtime, he says to Mark. Fancy something? He winks.

  He takes Mark for a walk in a park Mark later learns is Greenwich Park. There, in the woody part, on a foggy day in London town, things come to a pretty pass. Somewhere between roughness and gentility the man, who is very beautiful, kisses him so thoroughly that when Mark gets back to the place he’s supposed to meet Kenna an hour later he is flushed and new, a whole new person, and all the way across town it is as if his eyes have changed, as if all the colours in everything he sees are golden and ancient and new. They get home and he goes upstairs. He is lying on the floor playing his records (there is that good-looking boy, John Allford, clever, in the form above him at St. Faith’s who says that record is a word which means, in Latin, something which returns through the heart) on the little portable record player Kenna bought and lets him have on a Friday—or also when he is sad and needs to blot out the sad old songs with something more new, which Kenna understands, because Kenna can sometimes be very kind. He has his one ear pressed hard against the machine’s spea
ker behind the little chainmail holes, and he leans to get the next record out of its paper sleeve ready to play it, Then He Kissed Me, and that’s when he sees on it right there, the miracle, the word Greenwich, there on the label right under the word Kissed, and it is as if something somewhere has understood him.

  LONDON AMERICAN RECORDINGS

  Made in England

  Then He Kissed Me

  (Spector, Greenwich, Barry)

  The Crystals

  The song gives him an erection and then, when he takes himself in hand, a coming-of-age every bit as beautiful as the one he had in the park. He knows now what it means, to be bigger than yourself. Greenwich! England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty! The world is a bloodrush of rough harmony. Then it’s over; the song, abrupt, dies away, fades to the noise of the needle on vinyl and it’s gone. But he can lean over and do the thing with the mechanical arm so that the record will play over and over, on repeat, until you choose to stop, and you could even be dead and it would go on playing and playing.

  Consider the fabric of things the vast / dustbin of detail who knows what will last / nothing left but rough wool skin moment touch / who knew so little would become so much Mark sat in the park. It is more than fifty years ago. He and his mother are making a dash through London on a day when the rain makes the pavements greyer, the wind makes the litter more littery, a rough spring day. His mother’s sleeve on her tweed dogtooth coat, the one with the big lapels, is turned back on itself at the cuff and the rough cuff is rubbing his wrist as they hurry along. The wisps of her hair beyond her hat are wet, pretty in the rain. She is telling him things as they walk-run, turning to tell him things even on the move and when they pass men the men turn their heads and look at her. Mark is proud. She is clever and quick, she is beautiful, his mother, she is like a bird both clipped and winged, and when she passes people notice, and when she laughs out loud in the street people stop and stare.

  It’s genius, old man, she says hauling him along and reeling off, like magic spilling behind her, like that dancer Isadora’s scarves that streamed behind and caught in the wheel and killed her, rhymes by one of her favourites, he rhymes sour with Schopenhauer, Freud with avoid, salmon with backgammon, civil with drivel, yes-men with chessmen, solemn with spinal column, Irving Berlin with pounding on tin, he rhymes word with absurd, and hurled with world. Now Porter has wit, but is shifty, a little seamy, I know, and I couldn’t not love him for it, Mark. But Ira, he’s kind, he’s always kind, and for genius to be kind takes a special sort of genius in itself, Mark old man, come on, we’re late (they were always, she was always, gloriously, just a little late, it made everything worth hurrying for), and his brother dead, imagine, he must feel like half a person, imagine it, try, him still in the world and his other half, the tune half, gone so young, only a bit older than me, and I know you think I’m old, but I’m not old, old man. I’m not old at all.