by Ali Smith
They both laugh.
They hold themselves and laugh.
They laugh like anything, till they cry with laughter.
They get their breath back. She stretches herself out all along the top of the tomb. She knocks on it with her fist.
Sorry for laughing, she says as if to the person in it. Couldn’t help it.
Don’t know why it was so funny. But it was, he says.
Who looks after this place? she says. The roses smell amazing.
No idea, he says. Lovely here, though. Have to say it’s nice working here.
Then lying in the grass John Mison simply says what sounds at first like a poem or an incantation but is just a list of the names of flowers. Flower after flower. Plant after plant.
Ragwort. Ramsons. Meadow buttercup. Chickweed. Stitchwort. Cranesbill. Vetch. Nettle. Dove’s foot cranesbill. Ivy. Sweet Robert. Sweet violet. Meadowsweet. Willowherb. Cow parsley. Cowslip. Primrose. Goosegrass. Forget-me-not. Yellow archangel. Speedwell. Valerian. Daisies. Mayweed. Lords and Ladies. Groundsel. Dandelion. Not forgetting dandelion clock.
Yellow archangel, she says. Pretty. Sweet Robert.
The archangel’s over there at the wall, he says. Flowers in spring, just looks like nettles now. But it won’t sting you. They call it aluminium, and artillery. Because of its silver colour. The Robert’s there too. Pretty little flowers, red, pink, cranesbill. It’s a healer. Good for skins and wounds, good apparently for where there’s been radiation, they should plant it round Chernobyl, sweet Robert, helps clean out the soil, good for oxygen. Smells horrible though. Which is why its other names are things like stinking bob. Crow’s foot.
You know a lot about flowers, she says.
I like them, he says.
Then they stop talking.
They lie there for a while, her up on the tomb, him down on the ground.
Collared doves occasionally flurry and call in the trees above them.
She closes her eyes.
They say nothing for whole minutes, several complete minutes.
She has never been as happy as she is right now.
Then she hears him roll over and get up.
Hey, he says. Come with me. I found the grandest little thing day before yesterday, on an old stone, when I was having my break.
She follows him round to the back of the church where he bends to the ground.
In among the bramble bushes right at the back of the plots there’s an eaten-away stone. It’s got words written on it.
They both have to get quite low to the ground to read the words, which are greened and yellowed with moss.
Listen to this, John Mison says.
The tree in me shall never die. Be I ashes be I dust. That is the tree that joins the sky. To earth and us. The tree in me shall never die. No lovers sleeping breath compare. With her shy music in the sky. Of leaves and air.
They both sit back on their haunches.
How pretty, she says.
Shy music, he says.
What a lovely poem, she says. Someone really loved someone. Is there a name? A date?
Just the words, he says. Who needs a name or a date when you can be remembered by something like that? Hope I will, when I go.
You can’t go. You can’t go anywhere, she says. It’s not allowed.
He laughs.
I won’t if you don’t, he says.
He leaps to his feet.
I’ve to finish that pew, he says. You can put the stain on for me, if you want. Then we’ll both have changed the course of history.
They walk back round, collecting the coffee mugs up off the top of the tomb-table as they pass it.
It’s a self sacrifice, this, by the way, he says. My favourite part of the whole job. Putting the woodstain on.
I’m honoured, she says.
You are, he says.
—
What Grace remembered three decades later was that there was a fine summer’s day back when she was in her twenties and on the Winter’s Tale / World As It Rolled eastern counties tour when she’d gone on a walk, found a church with a man working in it, had a nice uncomplicated afternoon in a summer that’d become way too complicated, one when she’d made matters worse for herself by sleeping with too many people, not eating enough and not looking after herself well enough, and that she’d left that churchyard feeling more free, more herself, more hopeful than she’d felt for a long time.
Here are some of the things she didn’t remember from that time:
She didn’t remember that after it she’d walked back to the cinema.
Rehearsal was over. Nobody was there.
She’d had to go and find them all in the pub garden, where she ate a baked potato with beans and cheese in it without it being complicated, being anything but delicious, which was, for her, at this point in her life, when it came to food, quite a feat. The World As It Rolled cast was angry with her for not turning up. She’d laughed at their anger and hugged every one of them, Jen and Tom and Ed and whoever. She’d even hugged Claire Dunn, they’d all looked a bit stunned when she did. Life’s too short, she’d said to Claire. Stop it. Life’s too short, she’d said to Jen and Tom together too. If you want me, you’ve both got me, for now anyway, and that’ll have to be enough. If it’s too unsimple for you, then tough.
Jen and Tom both disappeared from her life after that summer. Possibly even together.
It had been something of a relief.
She also didn’t remember how that evening in the cinema she’d stood at the front of the stage and said the lines about remembering a mother’s face in a way that made the whole show pivot on those lines, lending The World As It Rolled a real depth it hadn’t yet acquired. The audience had given them a standing ovation, and afterwards the whole group, pretty much, approached her with their eyes shining, and hugged her, because something real had happened, and the next day strangers, people from the town, or holidaying in the town, had stopped her in the street over and over again to say thank you, and their eyes shone like the group’s eyes had shone at her the night before.
It’s like you literally were another person, Ed had said that night.
But thirty years later? she’d forgotten being that other person for ever. She’d forgotten, too, that one of the people who stopped her in the street the next day was a West End casting agent who took her by the hand and said, you were so good about mothers tonight, and you were so good as the mother in The Winter’s Tale, and I’ve got a role that’d suit you down to the ground in an upcoming commercial if you’d like to call me on this number and arrange a screen test.
Walking along in the future looking for an old English church she visited once three decades ago and vaguely remembered as a special place, what she came to instead was a massive wire fence that seemed to block off most of the common.
The fence was a double fence. In between the two was a newly tarmacked road. A notice on the outer fence said:
THESE PREMISES PROUDLY
PROTECTED AND PATROLLED
24 HOURS A DAY BY
SA4A
CAUTION
THIS FENCE IS ELECTRIFIED
ALARM SYSTEM
CCTV RECORDING
IS IN OPERATION
FOR THE PREVENTION AND
DETECTION
OF TRESPASS AND CRIME
—
She walked alongside these fences for a while hoping she was going in the right direction.
When she met a woman out walking a scruffy little dog she asked her if there was a church anywhere near here with an old graveyard round it.
The woman shook her head.
Then she said,
oh, maybe you mean the Armour?
Very possibly, Grace said.
It’s disused, I mean it’s a discontinue
d church, what’s the word? the woman said. Disestablished. You can’t get through this way any more. You used to be able to.
Why so high? Grace said. Is it a prison?
It’s a government place for people who don’t belong in this country, the woman said. But you can get to the churchyard if you double back. Take the road at the end there, go down the cul de sac and up the pedestrian lane, cross the field when it ends and follow the cliff walk.
Grace asked the woman, who was bending to pick up dogshit in a bag, how long it’d take her to get there.
Half an hour at the most, the woman said.
Then the woman threw the bag with the shit in it as if to get it up over the fence. The bag caught in the razorwire on the outer fence and hung there torn open.
Bullseye, the woman said.
Grace looked at her in astonishment.
She thought about asking the woman why she’d just done that.
She decided she’d rather not – better not – get into it.
She turned and walked back the way she’d come.
She headed towards the coast.
Britain was a confusing place these days.
Was Bullseye the name of the woman’s dog, maybe?
Or did she mean she’d hit a bullseye by throwing the dogshit on to the razorwire? Like kids did with each other’s trainers on power lines?
So did she do it because she didn’t like immigrants?
Or didn’t like SA4A?
Did she do it for fun? for no reason at all?
She’d looked like a respectable person.
Let it go.
Grace did.
Look at her now, walking along the eroding edge of eastern England, in the future and the present and the past all at once. She was keeping to the new footpath and away from the dangerous edge like all the signs told her to. As she walked, more pieces of the Dickens show they toured back then came fully formed up from wherever they’d got buried inside her head.
Can I say of her face – altered as I have reason to remember it, perished as I know it is – that it is gone, when here it comes before me at this instant, as distinct as any face that I may choose to look on in a crowded street?
Grace had no memory, none at all, of herself on the cinema platform standing in the dark and the light saying these words David Copperfield says about his dead mother.
But that night back then, with such a channelling of her own mother’s long-gone face entering her in the moment she said these lines, it so happened that several people in the audience burst into tears, were pierced by the brightness, the vividness, of the return inside them of what they’d thought they’d lost and forgotten.
She didn’t remember.
She was thinking, instead, as the lines from the past fell away and she walked along, about what it was, the commerce between people.
What was it that people wanted from each other?
What had her mother and father wanted that had gone so wrong?
What had she wanted from Jeff?
What did he ever want from her, or for her?
What did Ashley give him that Grace hadn’t or couldn’t?
What had they all wanted from each other in that vote, say, the one that had split the country, split her own family as if with a cheesewire, sliced right through the everyday to a bitterness nobody knew what to do with, one so many people used to hurt people with, whichever way they’d voted, a vote that could now be so anathema to one of her own kids and so like a permission to be foul to others for the other, so important to her, but so much old hat to a bright young person like that girl Charlotte that she could call it a fly on a corpse?
And if it were all to be taken away from us, she thought. Say Sacha and her apocalyptic instinct, the thing that wakes everyone in both houses in the middle of the night because Sacha is shouting so loudly in her sleep again, the vision of the world on fire, blight on her daughter’s mind – say it really was real after all.
Well, don’t be stupid. It wasn’t.
Nothing like that was really ever going to happen.
Nothing really disruptive to life as they knew it.
The blight was all in the mind, not in the world.
But say, just say it was. Say it did.
Then what would have been the point of it all?
What were we here for?
To make as much money as possible?
To have all those people shouting your name at you, or even a name that’s not yours, like famous Claire Dunn faking it on the TV?
Was being on this earth really all about who owned a tree in a garden? About whether it gave you satisfaction and pleasure and fulfilment when you looked at a tree because it was yours, but when you thought it wasn’t yours you longed to remove that tree?
She saw a church tower, off to the left.
She turned inland. She slid herself down a dog-path between bushes towards the bare trees round that tower.
But when she got there she didn’t recognize the place as anywhere she’d ever been before.
Was this it?
She was a bit disappointed.
Well, it was a long time ago.
Summer, then.
Church of the Armour of Light. What a strange name.
In days of old, when knights were bold.
Her mother turning to look at her, laughing, but with a hurt look on her face.
The churchyard gate was locked. So she climbed over the little stone wall. She crossed the graves in the winter sun and sent a scatter of birds from branches. It was beautiful here, even though it wasn’t anything like she remembered. So it had been worth coming for that, very pretty, even in winter, even though there was nothing here but a lot of old graves and dead leaves.
She tried the church’s door.
Locked.
She stood on one of those metal boxes that has electricity stuff inside it. She peered through the bottom of a latticed window.
There was nothing at all inside the church. It was just an empty stone space.
I wonder where the seats went, she thought.
As she did, it came vividly into her head that she had, of all things, actually helped mend a church seat in there.
So I did!
He’d replaced a bit of wood in the seat, the man, and he let me paint it for him.
(She stepped down off the metal box.
She was smiling at the thought.)
He was restoring it. He let me paint it so it’d be the same colour as the rest of the wood it was made of.
She leaned against the side of the church and looked round her at all the sunken stones, the bared structures of the trees.
There was a grave that was a kind of box shape, wasn’t there? I sat on it, or lay down on it.
Did I even fall asleep on it in the warm?
She pushed herself off the side of the church and went round to the side of the graveyard. More graves, more bushes and grass. But there was one of those box graves there under the branches, as big as a table or a high single bed.
She went over to it and read the words on it.
It was the tomb of Thomas Lummis, and of his wife, Anna, and other members of the Lummis family including a baby, Marjorie Lummis, who only lived eight months.
Dates. A skull relief, with what looked like draped veils, theatre curtains, above it.
She didn’t remember any of that.
But wasn’t there a poem?
She walked all the way round the stone slabs.
No, there was no poem here.
She leaned on the tomb and she put her hands over her eyes.
A small beautiful stone, with a poem on it. Somewhere round the back, by a compost heap. Was that right?
But the back of the Armour of Light church was all fenced off.
The wire was broken open, though, at dog height, fox height. She pushed herself through the gap. She poked a hand through some overgrowth. She could feel something deep inside it. She snapped some of the twiggy stuff away. She pushed the rest back. It sprang back at her in turn.
But there definitely was a stone, back then, with a poem carved into it. And an incredibly nice man, I met him for, what, two or three hours, he was a joiner, I can’t remember his name. James? John? and we talked, we just talked, about nothing much, and we did nothing much, we just hung out, lay about in the graveyard like friends though we didn’t know each other, we’d only just met, and we never even thought about keeping in touch, and he let me help him paint a church seat he was mending so it looked, well, not good as new. Good as old. He showed me an old gravestone he’d found with no name on it, no date, obviously a hundred, couple of hundred years old. And we both got right down on the ground to be able to read it.
That’s what she remembered.
Here was the stone. Still here. It was old and curved, eaten into by weather and plants. She pulled the growth away from its front. She got as close to the ground as she could to read its poem. She followed the words on it with her finger.
Such a pretty verse.
She held her phone down low and took a photo of it to show the kids.
She stood back up. She was late.
There was a train to catch. In ten minutes there’d be two irate kids standing on a pavement.
She got herself back through the hole in the fence. She got a move on.
It wasn’t till she was halfway back to town on the cliff path, walking in the sea air with the sky so wide all round her, that she looked at the photo she’d taken and saw that though it was still a beautiful picture you couldn’t see any of the words on the stone to read them, and all she’d actually got a record of was a blur of twigs, a surface of old stone, some bright lichen.