by Ali Smith
She goes down on to the beach.
Hi, she says.
He doesn’t say anything.
She sits down on the wet stones beside him.
He doesn’t look at her. But he says:
Can you just give me your hand, Sach, just for a minute?
He wants to hold her hand?
He sounds so small and so fragile.
So she puts her left hand out. He takes it in his, takes it right inside his (warm) jacket and dries the palm of her hand on his jumper.
Close your eyes, he says.
No, she says.
Please, he says.
Why? she says.
Just for a minute, he says.
She sighs. She closes her eyes.
He is pressing something cold and curved and glassy into her hand.
Don’t look yet, he says.
What is it? she says with her eyes still closed.
Present, he says. For the future. Wait a minute.
He holds both his hands tight over and under her hand with whatever the present is in it. He keeps his hands both clasped round her hand for what feels quite a long time like that.
He lets go. But her hand feels really strange.
There’s a quite large double-curved glass thing in it. It’s made of two connected globes of glass. It’s longer than the palm of her hand. It’s smooth, the glass of it is quite thin, and it’s got, what is it? bright yellow sand? inside it?
She tries to open her hand to look at it properly. Her hand won’t open for some reason. Whatever it is is stuck to her. Her hand is stuck to it.
It’s an eggtimer.
He holds up in front of her face, just long enough for her to see what it is, the superglue bottle.
Then he’s running up the beach and she’s scrambling after him on the stones, but it dawns on her that she has to be more careful, has to not scramble or scrabble because the thing he’s stuck to her hand is made of very very thin glass and she’s got to not break it or she’ll cut herself open and there’ll be broken glass stuck to her hand.
She yells his name.
She watches his back disappear up under the railings.
She stands on the slope of stones shaking her hand as if to shake the stuck thing off. It’s stuck right across her first three fingers. She can’t uncurl them. She can move the thumb and the pinky. They’re not stuck. The other three fingers she can only waggle the ends of.
She pulls at it. It’s quite sore, to pull it.
Some people, a woman and a man, are coming towards her going, are you all right? can we help? is something wrong? so she must’ve been really shouting.
Thanks, yeah, no, it’s okay, I’m okay, she says.
Her phone goes off in her pocket.
She reaches for it with her wrong hand, awkward.
There’s a new text from him:
know how worried ur about how theres no time left so this woz best present I cud imagine from now on u always have time on ur hands
She presses reply.
But she can’t text with this hand, the wrong hand.
She holds her phone out to the woman.
I wonder would you mind just typing in some words for me and pressing send? she says.
Sure. Of course. What would you like to say? the woman says.
Sacha thinks for a moment.
Thanks for the exceptional bonding experience, she says.
The woman laughs out loud.
The man starts looking on the internet on his own phone to see how you get superglued glass off skin.
Then the woman holds up Sacha’s phone with the reply Robert has sent back:
a smiley face emoji next to a sad face emoji next to a middle finger emoji.
How did this happen to you? the woman says.
Sacha shakes her head.
Who’s – the woman glances back at the phonescreen – Robert?
Sacha looks at the thing that’s made a seagull claw, a birdsfoot, of her hand. She tips her claw upside down so that the sand inside the glass runs, and it does run very prettily, from the first globe into the other, a fine thread of gold through the tiny opening that connects them.
My brother, she says.
Time is dimensional. Robert Greenlaw has just demonstrated not just the curve and dimensionality of time but also its multiple nature and given himself a TOTAL HIGH by affixing irremovably a piece of curved and dimensional time into the curved dimension of a mortal hand.
Heh.
!
The song he’d sing if he could still sing would be about how time is more than one thing, time is glass and sand, time is brittle and fluid, time is fragile and tough, time is sharp and blunt, time is now and ancient, time is before and after, time is smooth and rough and if you try to remove your attachment to time, time will laugh out loud and take the skin off you.
And because time is relative and there is more than one kind of time, today time can be my time and I will make it all the more mine by not worshipping acquisitive educational success, to quote Einstein. Given that Einstein himself was a rubbish school student. I mean, Einstein’s school, when Einstein was Robert Greenlaw’s age, thought Einstein was stupid. Einstein! Infra dignit catastrophe.
So today I will go home, sneak in and up the stairs, they won’t know it but I’ll be in and invisible and upstairs playing ABUSEHEAP till the sun goes down on me, Robert Greenlaw, lone wolf, lost boy, soul of patience in exactitude.
Had he been his younger self he’d’ve cocked an invisible Robin Hood cap forward on his head right now as he crosses the street past the window of the shop he stole the eggtimer out of, but he is older now and way past being some loser who wears invisible hats. What he does is he keeps his head down, face turned away, Greenlaw outlaw with his winter coat pulled round him lined with life’s ironies keeping him warm. Outward 13 year old boy, inward true singer (all by ear by the way, a natural talent) of the subcurrent ballad of his time and times – because the two, time and times, are not the same thing.
Bookshop?
Yep.
Because:
there exists in the world a book he only recently found out about by scanning his mother’s Sunday Times and the book is about the time/s that Einstein came to Britain and especially the time he stayed in Norfolk. Robert Greenlaw isn’t completely sure where Norfolk is. He knows it’s somewhere over there. He badly wants Einstein to have come to Brighton or anywhere in the environs of here. But. Nowhere on the net does it say Einstein came to Brighton.
Though anywhere in Sussex would do.
Host of other places, the net says yes, says London and Oxford and Cambridge and Nottingham and Woolsthorpe (Woolsthorpe? Because Newton, born there, understood in Woolsthorpe for the first time about the apple falling from the tree, discovered all the colours that make up light there too in 1666 when he was twenty four years old stuck at home away from college because of Yersinia pestis) and Southampton, Winchester, and Kent, Cotswolds, Surrey, Norfolk, Einstein even went to Glasgow, photo taken smoking pipe, spoke about relativity to a huge crowd, went to Manchester. But not Sussex, never Sussex, nowhere in Sussex appears ever to have been graced by the sole of the foot or the mildness of face of Einstein.
Face like an Eastertime lamb, head like a dandelion clock, but a dandelion clock holding the hidden infrastructure not just of the world. Universe too.
!
What weedy toughness.
And the internet’s not always right, though, no, the internet doesn’t know the half of it, and a new book about the time Einstein was here, on this island, might say something as yet un-net about Sussex.
And they might have this book. In that shop.
So he turns himself meek, becomes 13 year old boy again in case
why aren’t you at school?
physics teacher Mr Musgrave (completely made-up name, such a brilliant teacher, the made-up ones always are) has sent me here to see if you’ve got the new book about Einstein in Britain in stock,
and he slinks in through the doors of the bookshop –
and nobody asks anything.
He looks.
Not in sciences.
Not in new books.
Then meek 13 year old boy goes to look on the biography shelves and
!
Boy finds book.
Boy sinks to crosslegged on bookshop floor and reads it where he opens it,
about Einstein’s father giving Einstein (as a boy) a compass and Einstein (just a boy himself) working out from that compass in his hand what magnetism might be.
Why have you never given me a compass (Robert Greenlaw to his father, in his head)?
Robert I’ve enough on my plate don’t give me any more hassle (his father, to Robert Greenlaw, most days, in reality).
It’s understandable. His father’s business is fucked. His father’s marriage is fucked. His father’s girlfriend has stopped wanting to be fucked.
Back to book.
Robert Greenlaw opens it at random again: story about when Einstein gave a lecture somewhere in England and wrote his arithmetic equations on two blackboards and the two blackboards were put carefully aside after he left because they were now treasured possessions and they got sent to a museum or special place of storage where ONE OF THE BLACKBOARDS GOT CLEANED BY MISTAKE.
!
Einstein’s actual handwritten figures – erased.
!
Also, accompanying story that Einstein’s maths calculations on those boards had mistakes in them too.
Einstein = human
!
It is funny.
Robert Greenlaw knows from online how trolls from everywhere piled in on long dead Einstein after the BBC reported that in his diaries Einstein said some rude things about Chinese people and people from then Ceylon now Sri Lanka.
Racist and xenophobic!
Einstein! who the Nazis said they were going to hang soon as they got the chance because of him being so Jewish.
Einstein! who called for civil rights in the USA.
Einstein! who warned against the nuclear bomb and said if he’d known they would use what he discovered about quantum and relativity the way they used it he’d have become a cobbler and mended people’s shoes all his life instead.
Well that’s what you get if you read people’s private diaries.
I am offended! shout all the lined-up people just before they’re shot into ditches in Robert Greenlaw’s imaginary computer game provisionally entitled Blood and Irony which one day soon he will properly invent and sell for a fortoon
troubled?
me?
so Robert Greenlaw checks the index at the back of the book about Einstein coming to Britain, for the word
Brighton
no
Sussex
no.
Ah.
Ah well.
He is sad, though, about it.
Why does he need to be near a place where Einstein has been, today, right now, at this point in his life?
Who knows?
It is a mystery.
He just does.
He flicks through the book again, photos of Einstein taken in the very same country that Robert Greenlaw is in right now, England.
In the photos Einstein always looks unlikely.
It is brilliant.
Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn’t need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.
Quote at the front of this book about Einstein, written by someone who saw him with his own eyes at the time:
See him as he squats on Cromer beach doing sums, Charlie Chaplin with the brow of Shakespeare…So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against him. He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast – intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump.
Plump.
It is kind of an unpleasant word to use.
(Robert Greenlaw has been called plump in his time.
It is why he is now very, very lean.)
What / where is Cromer?
Robert Greenlaw looks it up on his phone.
Ah. There. Okay.
Opposite of the blond beast. If that was written nowadays blond beast = UK prime minister. Yesterday the blond beast prime minister tried, like the Americans, banning some journalists and not others from being let into Downing St. Some were told to stand on one side of the carpet and the others to stand on the other side of the carpet. On the one side they were going to be permitted. On the other they weren’t. All the journalists boycotted the dividing of them into two. But that won’t last. Robert Greenlaw admires above all the adviser of the prime minister, who knows how to style politics so that it doesn’t look like politics any more, who knows full well that Stalin and Hitler were possible even though everyone in old-style politics looks aghast when anyone suggests it’s possible to act the ways they did.
The people in charge in England right now are geniuses of manipulation.
Robert Greenlaw is in awe of their performance of callousness.
He is in awe of how they get away with talking about patriotism with all the fervour of 12 year olds – Robert Greenlaw still aspires to it a bit, though he’s now 13 and recognizes its preadolescent ventriloquisms.
It is all just more genius.
Prime minister, consciously dishevelled. Styled.
He puts, in his mind, the two dishevelled men together on, what was it, a beach.
Hmm.
One looks dishevelled because disinterested in looks and clothes, because thinking.
The other looks like he’s acting a bit drunk or acting like a boy not a man. It is a brilliant subterfuge to look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing and to make people like him for it.
One is his hero for bucking every trend and rewriting the universal truths to make them truer.
The other is his hero for the opposite – for the brilliant application of lies. It is impressive. And for seeing, following, cultivating, using and profiting big-time by the current trends, which is the best way to survive the trends.
What would they say to each other if they met? Would they talk about time? Would they talk about ethics, heroism? Robert Greenlaw knows what Einstein thinks about heroism. But the PM?
Robert Greenlaw gets his phone out and keys in ‘Einstein’, ‘hero’, ‘Prime’, ‘Minister’, ‘ethics’, and ‘time’.
A quote comes up from – Time Magazine.
There they both are, on an English beach.
Einstein: Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them!
Our PM: My hero is the mayor in Jaws. He’s a fantastic guy, and he keeps the beaches open, if you remember, even after it’s demonstrated that his constituents have been eaten by this killer fish. Of course, he was proved catastrophically wrong in his judgement, but his instincts were right.
It’s not a real conversation. More like a caricature.
But that’s okay because this is the dawn of a new era, a caricature kind of an era.
Robert Greenlaw’s father’s girlfriend comes into Robert Greenlaw’s head.
Uch.
There is a trunk in his head, like a medieval trunk, in which he locks her whenever she does that unasked.
Take care, she used to say in the days when she still spoke. She said it instead of saying the word goodbye. She said it like a threat. Take care.
In you go. Lid down. Padlock.
Now.
<
br /> Robert Greenlaw, scrolling the phone, sees again his sister’s reply,
bonding experience
He smiles.
He closes the Einstein book. He is going home to play ABUSEHEAP. Ultraviolent catastrophe.
He checks, without looking like he’s checking, for CCTV.
No. Do it like you have power.
He looks straight at the camera. He shows it himself tucking the book into his trousers, pulls his jumper down over it, pulls his coat closed, stands up.
No bells, no nothing, no sound of anyone coming after him,
yep, there, see,
nobody gave a fuck,
sign of the times,
nobody even saw, or if they did, cared.
—
What Robert Greenlaw finds most curious about playing ABUSEHEAP (subheading die a thousand deaths) is that it doesn’t matter what era/s you’re in, torture really hasn’t changed much. When electricity starts to be available it gets more everyday since every room has a socket and there are so many ordinary things that can be plugged into that socket, drills and saws, and others more excitingly innocent like lamps, toasters, hair curling irons. One of the first things they did with the invention of the telephone is work out a way, by connecting it by wire to a human and turning its little crank handle, to deliver pain. They called it? The Telephone.
Riches, ironies. Robert Greenlaw is an Iron(y) Man. Just as well, since across the aeons and the global distances what all the peoples of the world really have in common is so many similar ways of doing humiliating and painful things to each other.
Dislocation, discomfort via acute ways of sitting / standing / squatting / hanging. Boiling oil / tar / wax / water. Just water. Dripping it very slowly on to someone, in exactitude. Or just filling people with too much of it. Heat, cold, roasting, freezing. Heavy stones. Iron chairs or contraptions featuring spikes and blades. Finger screws. Toe screws. A global variety of boot-like contraptions via which the foot and leg bones can be wedged till broken or crumbled.
The contraptions which hold the whole body in place are often, interestingly, designated female. Skevington’s Daughter, Duke of Exeter’s Daughter, Iron Maiden. There’s also the claw-like metal thing called The Spider, for when Victim is itself a female.