by Ali Smith
Are you threatening me? the man with the gun said.
No, the person dressed as a tree said. You’re the one with the gun.
I’m a peaceable person, the man with the gun said. I don’t want trouble. That’s why I carry this gun. And it’s not like I have anything against people like you generally.
What do you mean, people like me? the person dressed as a tree said.
What I said. People dressed in stupid pantomime tree costumes, the man with the gun said.
But why? the person dressed as a tree said.
Think what it’d be like if everyone started wearing tree costumes, the man with the gun said. It’d be like living in a wood. And we don’t live in a wood. This town’s been a town since long before I was born. If it was good enough for my parents, and my grandparents and my great grandparents.
What about your own costume? the person dressed as a tree said.
(The man with the gun was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap.)
This isn’t a costume, the man said. These are my clothes.
Well, these are my clothes. But I’m not calling your clothes stupid, the person dressed as a tree said.
Yeah, because you wouldn’t dare, the man with the gun said.
He waved his gun.
And anyway, yours are stupid clothes, he said. Normal people don’t go around wearing tree costumes. At least, they don’t round here. God knows what they do in other cities and towns, well, that’s up to them. But if you got your way you’d be dressing our kids up as trees, dressing our women up as trees. It’s got to be nipped in the bud.
The man with the gun raised it and pointed it. The person dressed as a tree braced him or her self inside the thick cotton. The little grassblades painted round the bottom of the costume shivered round the painted roots. The man looked down the sights of his gun. Then he lowered the gun away from his eyes. He laughed.
See, the funny thing is, he said, it just came into my head that in war films, when they’re going to execute someone, they stand them up against trees or posts. So shooting you is a bit like not shooting anyone at all.
He put the gun to his eye. He aimed at the trunk of the tree, at roughly where he guessed the heart of the person inside the costume was.
So. That’s me done, Daniel said.
You can’t stop there! Elisabeth said. Mr Gluck!
Can’t I? Daniel said.
Elisabeth sits in the anodyne room next to Daniel, holding the book open, reading about metamorphoses. Round them, invisible, splayed out across the universe, are all the shot-dead pantomime characters. The Dame is dead. The Ugly Sisters are dead. Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother and Aladdin and the cat with the boots and Dick Whittington, mown down, a panto corncrop, panto massacre, a comedy tragedy, dead, dead, dead.
Only the person dressed as a tree is still standing.
But just as the man with the gun is finally about to shoot, the person dressed as a tree transforms before the gunman’s eyes into a real tree, a giant tree, a magnificent golden ash tree towering high above waving its mesmerizing leaves.
No matter how hard the man with the gun shoots at this tree he can’t kill it with bullets.
So he kicks its thick trunk. He decides he’ll go and buy weedkiller to pour on its roots, or matches and petrol, to burn it down. He turns to go – and that’s when he gets kicked in the head by the half of the pantomime horse it’s slipped his mind to shoot.
He falls to the ground, dead himself on top of the pantomime fallen. It’s a surrealist vision of hell.
What’s surrealist, Mr Gluck?
This is. There they lie. The rain falls. The wind blows. The seasons pass and the gun rusts and the brightly coloured costumes dull and rot and the leaves from all the trees round about fall on them, heap over them, cover them, and grass grows round them then starts growing out of them, through them, through ribs and eyeholes, then flowers appear in the grass, and when the costumes and the perishable parts have all rotted away or been eaten clean by creatures happy to have the sustenance, there’s nothing left of them, the pantomime innocents or the man with the gun, but bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them. Which is what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we’re here or we don’t. So. While we’re here. I mean, while we’re still here.
Daniel sat on the bench with his eyes closed for a moment. The moment got longer. It became less of a moment, more of a while.
Mr Gluck, Elisabeth said. Mr Gluck?
She jogged his elbow.
Ah. Yes. I was, I was – What was I?
You said the words, while we’re here, Elisabeth said. You said it twice. While we’re here. Then you stopped speaking.
Did I? Daniel said. While we’re here. Well. While we’re here, let’s just always hold out hope for the person who says it.
Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said.
Sure you want war? Daniel said.
Elisabeth’s mother is much cheerier this week, thank God. This is because she has received an email telling her she has been selected to appear on a TV programme called The Golden Gavel, where members of the public pit their wits against celebrities and antiques experts by trawling round antiques shops on a fixed budget and trying to buy the thing which in the end will raise the most money at auction. It’s as if the Angel Gabriel has appeared at the door of her mother’s life, kneeled down, bowed his head and told her: in a shop full of junk, somewhere among all the thousands and thousands of abandoned, broken, outdated, tarnished, sold-on, long-gone and forgotten things, there is something of much greater worth than anyone realizes, and the person we have chosen to trust to unearth it from the dross of time and history is you.
Elisabeth sits at the kitchen table while her mother plays her an old episode of The Golden Gavel to show her what they expect. Meanwhile she thinks about her trip here, most of all about the Spanish couple in the taxi queue at the station.
They’d clearly just arrived here on holiday, their luggage round their feet. The people behind them in the queue shouted at them. What they shouted at them was to go home.
This isn’t Europe, they shouted. Go back to Europe.
The people standing in front of the Spanish people in the taxi queue were nice; they tried to defuse it by letting the Spanish people take the next taxi. All the same Elisabeth sensed that what was happening in that one passing incident was a fraction of something volcanic.
This is what shame feels like, she thinks.
Meanwhile on the screen it’s still late spring and the junk from the past is worth money. There is a great deal of driving about in old cars from earlier decades. There is a lot of stopping and worrying at the side of the road about the smoke coming out of the bonnets of the old cars.
Elisabeth tries to think of something to say to her mother about The Golden Gavel.
I wonder which make of vintage car you’ll get to go in, she says.
No, because the members of the public don’t get to, her mother says. It’s only the celebrities and experts who get to do that. They arrive. We’re already there at the shop waiting to meet them.
Why don’t you get to go in a car? Elisabeth says. That’s outrageous.
No point in devoting airtime to people who nobody knows from Adam driving about the place in old cars, her mother says.
Elisabeth notices how truly beautiful the cow parsley is at the sides of the backroads in the footage of The Golden Gavel, which is playing on catch-up, from an episode set in Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, filmed, her mother tells her, last year. The cow parsley holds itself stately and poisonous in the air while the celebrities (Elisabeth has no idea who they are or why they’re celebrities) maunder about. One sings pop songs from the 1970s and talks about when he owned a gold-painted Datsun. The other chats chummily about her days as an extra in Oliver! The vintage cars fume along through England; outside the car windows the passing cow parsley is tall, beaded with rain, strong, green. It is
incidental. This incidentality is, Elisabeth finds herself thinking, a profound statement. The cow parsley has a language of its own, one that nobody on the programme or making the programme knows or notices is being spoken.
Elisabeth gets her phone out and makes a note. Maybe there’s a lecture in this.
Then she remembers that probably pretty soon she won’t have any job to give any lecture in anyway.
She puts her phone down on its lit front on the table. She thinks about the students she taught who graduate this week to all that debt, and now to a future in the past.
The cars on the TV programme draw up outside a warehouse in the countryside. There’s a lot of getting out of the cars. At the door of the warehouse the celebrities and the experts meet the two ordinary people, who are wearing matching tracksuits to show that they’re the ordinary people. Everyone shakes hands. Then they all set off, the celebrities, the experts and the ordinaries, in different directions round the warehouse.
One of the ordinary members of the public purchases an old till, or what the shop owner calls a vintage cash register, for £30. It doesn’t work but its bright white and red buttons bristling off the curved chest of it remind her, the ordinary person says, of the regimental coat her grandfather wore when he was a cinema doorman in the 1960s. Cut to a celebrity who’s spotted a cluster of charity boxes in the shapes of little life-sized figures – dogs and children – standing together at the door of the warehouse like a bunch of model villagers from the past, or from a sci-fi vision where past and future crash together. They’re the boxes that used to sit outside shops for passers-by to put change into as they left or went into the shops. There is a bright pink girl with a teddybear; a dowdy looking boy mostly painted brown and holding what looks like an old sock; a bright red girl with the words thank-you carved into her chest and a brace on her leg; a spaniel with two puppies, their glass eyes pleading, little boxes round their necks, coin slots in the boxes, alternative coin slots in their heads.
An expert gets really excited. She explains to the camera that the brown clothed boy charity box, a Dr Barnardo’s boy, is the most vintage of the set. She points out that the typography on the base the boy is standing on is pre-1960s, and that the little verse written on that base – Please Give, So He May Live – is itself a relic from a different time. Then she gives the camera a nod and a wink and tells it that if it were her she’d go for the spaniel regardless, because things in the shapes of dogs always do well at auction, and the brown clothed boy, though it has vintage status, is less likely to do as well as it ought to, unless the auction is an online one.
What they’re not saying, her mother says, and maybe they’re not saying it because they don’t know it, is that those boxes came about because of real dogs back at the turn of the last century who worked going round places like railway stations with boxes hung round their necks for people to put pennies into. For charity.
Ah, Elisabeth says.
Those dog boxes, like that one there, were modelled on the real live creatures, her mother says. And furthermore. After the real live creatures died they would sometimes be stuffed by taxidermists and then placed back in the station or wherever, whichever public place they’d spent their working lives in. So you’d go to the station and there’d be Nip sitting there, or Rex, or Bob, dead, stuffed, but still with the box round his neck. And that, I’m certain, is where those dog-shaped charity boxes came from.
Elisabeth is faintly perturbed. She realizes this is because she likes to imagine her mother knows nothing much about anything.
Meanwhile the contestants on the screen spill out of the door excited about a set of mugs with Abraham Lincoln’s Fiscal Policy printed on their sides. Outside the warehouse, in the green wastelands round about, there’s a butterfly on the screen behind the heads of the presenters, small white waverer going from flowerhead to flowerhead.
And in astonishingly good nick, a celebrity is saying.
Hornsea, 1974, her mother says. Collector’s dream.
Mid-70s, Yorkshire, the expert who’s bought them says. Good clear Hornsea mark from the American Presidents series on the base, the eagle mark. Hornsea started in 1949 after the war, went into receivership fifteen years ago, thriving in the 70s. Above all it’s unusual to see seven of these together like this. A collector’s dream.
See? her mother says.
Yes, but you’ve seen this episode already. So it’s no big deal you knowing where they come from, Elisabeth says.
I know that. I meant I’m learning, her mother says. I meant I now know that that’s what they are.
And I’d say that’s the lot I’d be most worried about at auction, the first expert says in voiceover while the programme shows pictures of the chipped old charity boxes, one of the ordinary people rocking the red girl with the brace on her leg from side to side to see if there’s any money still inside it.
I can’t watch any more of this, Elisabeth says.
Why not? her mother says.
I mean I’ve seen enough, Elisabeth says. I’ve seen plenty. Thank you. It’s very very exciting that you’ll be on it.
Then her mother takes the laptop back to show Elisabeth one of the celebrities she’ll be on the programme with.
Up comes a photograph of a woman in her sixties. Her mother waves the laptop in the air.
Look! she says. It’s amazing, isn’t it?
I have absolutely no idea who that is, Elisabeth says.
It’s Johnnie! her mother says. From Call Box Kids!
The woman in her sixties was apparently a person on TV when Elisabeth’s mother was a child.
I actually can’t believe it, her mother is saying. I can’t believe that I’m going to get to meet Johnnie. If only your grandmother was alive. If only I could tell her. If only I could tell my ten year old self. My ten year old self’d die with the excitement. Not just to get to meet. To get to be on a programme. With Johnnie.
Her mother turns the laptop towards her with a YouTube page up.
See? she says.
A girl of about fourteen in a checked shirt and with her hair in a ponytail is dancing a routine in a TV studio made to look like a London street, and the dancer she’s dancing with is dressed as a phonebox, so that it literally looks like a public phonebox is dancing with the girl. The phonebox is rather rigid, as dancers go, and the girl has made herself rigid too and is doing steps to match the phonebox’s. The girl is bright, warm, likeable, and the dancer inside the phonebox costume is making a pretty good attempt at dancing like a phonebox might. The street stops its business and everybody watches the dance. Then out of the open door of the box comes the receiver, up on its flex like a charmed snake, and the girl takes it, puts it to her head and the dance ends when she says the word: hello?
I actually remember seeing this very episode, Elisabeth’s mother says. In our front room. When I was small.
Gosh, Elisabeth says.
Her mother watches it again. Elisabeth skims the day’s paper on her phone to catch up on the usual huge changes there’ve been in the last half hour. She clicks on an article headed Look Into My Eyes: Leave. EU Campaign Consulted TV Hypnotist. She scrolls down and skims the screen. The Power To Influence. I Can Make You Happy. Hypnotic Gastric Band. Helped produce social media ads. Are you concerned? Are you worried? Isn’t it time? Being engrossed in TV broadcasts equally hypnotic. Facts don’t work. Connect with people emotionally. Trump. Her mother starts the forty years ago dance routine up one more time; the jaunty music begins again.
Elisabeth switches her phone off and goes through to the hall to get her coat.
I’m off out for a bit, she says.
Her mother, still in front of the screen, nods and waves without looking. Her eyes are bright with what are probably tears.
But it’s a lovely day.
Elisabeth walks through the village, wondering if those children-shaped charity boxes, since the dogs were modelled on real dogs, were also modelled on real beggars, small ones, child-beg
gars with callipers, boxes hung round their necks. Then she wonders if there was ever a plan afoot to taxiderm real children and stand them in stations.
As she passes the house with GO and HOME still written across it she sees that underneath this someone has added, in varying bright colours, WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU and painted a tree next to it and a row of bright red flowers underneath it. There are flowers, lots of real ones, in cellophane and paper, on the pavement outside the house, so it looks a bit like an accident has recently happened there.
She takes a photograph of the painted tree and flowers. Then she walks out of the village across the football pitch and out into the fields, thinking about the cow parsley, the painted flowers. The painting by Pauline Boty comes into her head, the one called With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo. Maybe there’s something in it whether she’s got a job or not, something about the use of colour as language, the natural use of colour alongside the aesthetic use, the wild joyful brightness painted on the front of that house in a dire time, alongside the action of a painting like that one by Boty, in which a two-dimensional self is crowned with sensual colour, surrounded by orange and green and red so pure it’s like they’ve come straight out of the tube on to the canvas, and not just by colour but by notional petals, the deep genital looking rose formation all over the hat on the head of the image of Belmondo as if to press him richly under at the same time as raise him richly up.
The cow parsley. The painted flowers. Boty’s sheer unadulterated reds in the re-image-ing of the image. Put it together and what have you got? Anything useful?
She stops to make a note on her phone: abandon and presence, she writes.
It’s the first time she’s felt like herself for quite some time.
calm meets energy /
artifice meets natural /
electric energy /
natural livewire /
She looks up. She sees she’s only yards from the fence across the common, the other kind of livewire.