by Ali Smith
So, Art says, this is how we’re going to get through this time.
It’s nearing the end of the month of March. Charlotte and Art are on different coastlines of the same country. He’s east, she’s west.
They haven’t been this far apart, and for so long, for a couple of years now so are both finding it odd.
Or maybe it’s just her who’s finding it odd.
Given that what Art’s found is love, and so on. Partner. Art doesn’t like the words girlfriend and boyfriend. Art and Charlotte have been not-partners for more than three years now. Deciding to be not-partners is one of the best things they ever did.
But it’s still weird, to Charlotte anyway. A bunch of strangers he only met last month have magicked themselves into becoming his family. Equally weird, she’s now living with his aged aunt at his dead mother’s old house in Cornwall, a house so huge that it feels pointless. What also feels a mixture of too-meaningful and pointless is how he’s not here but most of his stuff is. His books, notebooks, are scattered round the house splayed open page-down as if he just left the room for a minute. The mug he likes best is still upside down on the kitchen draining board. A T-shirt that smells of him is still on the back of that chair here in her bedroom. In his own bedroom that old plastic water bottle he always keeps next to the bed to drink from if he wakes up in the middle of the night has water in it from the last time he filled it. His bed still has the dip in the pillow where his head last was, covers folded back like he got out of it ten minutes ago, because the last time he was in this room he didn’t think for a moment he’d be anything other than back in that bed a couple of days after they’d done their Worthing work and gone to Suffolk to meet the old man.
Things can change fast. They just do.
The whole world’s learning that lesson simultaneously right now, one way or the other.
One of the things that has changed is that this is the first day they’ve spoken for about a fortnight.
Charlotte is trying not to feel resentful. But it was so love at first sight that since that moment of first sight he hasn’t come home. He spent the first weeks away travelling into London and staying there with his new love, when university teachers were still going to work, then travelling back with her to her mother’s at the weekends. When lockdown happened he’d made his choice.
You listening? he says.
We’re speaking on the phone, Charlotte says. What does that tell you about whether I’m listening or not?
Actually not that much, Art says. Though since you’re on your stupid James Bond phone that’s about all you can do, so I suppose you must be.
Art is irate because at the turn of the year Charlotte reverted to a Sony C902 from 2008, a phone that came with a special set of decade-old Quantum of Solace tie-ins ready-installed, some preview stills, screensavers, a ringtone she’s never listened to. Charlotte bought it before Christmas so the net would neither own her nor succeed in its mission to become her new phantom limb or brain.
You can access the web on it.
But she told Art you can’t, that it’s too old.
Charlotte’s non-web, Art said when she told him this.
If you’d a smartphone, he says now, we’d be able to see each other. I’d be able to see where you are. Where are you?
Sitting on the stairs, she says.
It’s a lie.
If you had a smartphone I’d be able to see which stairs you’re on right now, he says.
And why would you want to? she says.
(It cost you more than my phone, Art said when the box arrived from eBay and she unwrapped it and set it up and first phoned him on it.
She was in the bedroom looking out at the garden. He was in the piece of garden they’ve turned into an allotment. They waved at each other while they spoke.
I can’t believe you paid that much for a phone that won’t do things, he said.
Negative capability, she said. I don’t want all those old shed-skin selves following me everywhere putting their footprints all through the good clean new-fallen snow of my life.
More proof of how cold you are, Art had said.
I think you mean cool, Charlotte said.
No, I definitely mean cold, he said.
Then he told her it was a particularly dyspeptic thing for an internet artist, writer and publisher to do.
Dyspeptic? she said.
Ornery, he said.
Or – ? she said.
Irascible, he said. Waspish.
Are you looking up adjectives on your phone while we’re having this conversation? she said.
Maybe, he said.
See? she said. That’s why.)
Anyway, he says. I’m phoning because listening and communicating and staying in touch with each other is how we’re going to get through this time for sure.
Not that this time’s going to be over for any of us very soon, she says. I have a feeling this time’s here to stay, one way and another.
She sits on her bed, stares in the little light there is at the chair shoved up against the door of her room.
No, Art says. Times do pass. They do. But we have to choose to live through our times as mindfully as we can.
Pff, Charlotte says.
Which is why I had this idea about the structure of our day that I wanted to talk to you about, he says.
Our day, Charlotte says.
Well, your day, Art says. And mine. And to some extent, yes, everybody’s.
If this, Charlotte says, is going to be you telling me what to do even though you’re four hundred miles away and officially someone else’s boyfriend –
Partner, Art says.
Instructing me, Charlotte says, about me structuring my days with regular mealtimes and being up by 8am and not letting my day lose its shape and doing exercise etc. Well I know all that stuff already inside out. Being just as self employed as you. Isolation’s what our everyday life is like. No?
She hopes she sounds blithe enough.
But I don’t mean just you and me. I mean all of us, Art says. You know. All of humanity.
You want to talk to the whole of humanity about the structuring of its day? she says. Ambitious.
We’re all in the same boat now, he says.
Yeah, albeit with an awful lot of humanity still stuck in, you know, steerage, she says.
So, he says. One of the ways we can get through this is every day for you and me to just say hello. Like we are right now, I mean personally, intimately, on the phone.
Us phoning each other, she says. That’s your eureka?
Calling each other expressly every single day, he says, just for a few minutes, no pressure. But also, get this. We make it an aesthetic practice. We tell each other expressly, consciously, something we’ve happened to see or experience that day.
Expressly, Charlotte says.
Yes, Art says.
How else would we tell each other? she says. By not saying it?
Uh, Art says.
And if that’s what you’re saying, Charlotte says. Does your Elisabeth know about you phoning me right now asking me to be personal and intimate every day with you?
That’s not what –, Art says.
How is Elisabeth, by the way? Charlotte says.
She’s fine. And that’s not what I mean, and you know it isn’t, Art says.
And how’s the old man? she says.
He’s fine, Art says. Thank God. Thank God he’s here, because the care home he was in this time last year has a lot of people very sick in it. Nobody’s been tested there. His carer told us. His carer comes in every day, she sees quite a few people in the course of a day, not just him.
Has she got masks and gloves? Charlotte says. Nobody seems to.
She bought herself some masks on Amazon, Art says. She has to put them o
n secretly at the front door because her work bans the carers it employs from using anything since nobody’s been given it officially and their line manager’s been told to avoid accusations of inequality and not to report shortages.
Christ, Charlotte says. Christ almighty.
I know, Art says. For some reason the government wants them all equally in danger. Plus the people they visit and care for.
How’s Elisabeth’s family? Charlotte says.
Everybody’s fine, Art says, Elisabeth’s mother’s fine. And her partner, she’s fine. But it’s quite a small house now for all of us. So Elisabeth and I have converted the front room into a bedroom. I best not stay on the phone too long. Anyway. I was saying. We could, I mean you and me, Art and Charlotte, do this every day, just as a token, a little door open into each other’s day.
I hear you, she says. You’re saying I’m token.
No I’m not, Art says.
You’re asking me if it’ll be okay by me if you phone me or I phone you every day, she says. Yes?
Yes, Art says. But. Then we listen to the thing each of us tells the other, and we go away and write up the thing the other person’s told us. I tell you something I’ve thought or seen or whatever, then you tell me something you’ve thought or seen or whatever. Then I go away and write what I remember or took from what you told me, and you do the same with what I told you. Then we put it online, and people, anyone, can join in with their own comments or thoughts if they want. Like giving a gift out to the rest of the world from our own isolation every day. To keep the days going. To help mark them, for you and me, and not just for you and me.
Charlotte looks at the line of light coming in at the edge of the blind.
Charlotte? Art says. You there? Hello?
So what gift are you going to give me from your isolation today, then? Charlotte says.
Okay. For instance, he says. I just saw a pigeon fly past the window and it had a long piece of twig in its mouth, and it was so long, the twig, it was so much bigger than the bird, that it was sort of unwieldy for it to fly with it. But the pigeon still did. It kept having to correct its balance, adjust to being pulled lopsided. But it did.
Silence.
Then:
is that it? Charlotte says.
Uh, Art says.
The sum total vision of your day? Charlotte says. The pressing thing you saw and wanted to tell me?
Yes, Art says. But. Obviously. Because, because from seeing this, I knew, I know, don’t I, that that pigeon’ll be making a nest with that twig. And that’s really meaningful right now in this world where everything is so surreal and seems to be coming apart at the seams for so many people, especially people who are stuck at home. Whereas, in nature, creatures are rushing to make themselves homes. It is meaningful. It is. It’s hopeful, and natural. You can’t deny it.
Right, Charlotte says. And you think this is worth telling the lockdown world about, because?
Why are you blocking my benign analysis of what I’ve experienced and my determination to connect through it with others and let them connect with me and you? Art says.
I’m not, Charlotte says.
You’re being quite chippy, Art says. I’d forgotten how unromantic you are.
Unromantic’s better than being a clichéd and stupefied-by-love romantic any day, Charlotte says.
Are you jealous? Art says.
No, Charlotte says.
I feel a bit better, Art says. It’s quite like bodily being with you, you being this grouchy. Anyway. Now. You tell me something you thought or saw. And then we go away and write down our take on each other’s moment, and then we post both versions, our own and the other person’s. And then – do you think we should post it online via the Art in Nature site?
Charlotte winds the drawstring on her pyjama trousers round and round her finger really tightly till her finger starts to pulse. Then she whips it off again very fast.
I’ve been thinking, she says. I’m not sure I want to keep going on our Art in Nature platform much longer.
Silence.
I’ve been meaning to say, she says.
Right, he says. Okay. Well. Yes. You’re right. It has to change. It has to meet the new situation head on. So. Would, would we maybe call it something else, something new? How about Art in Nurture?
How about Art Inertia? Charlotte says.
Ah, Art says. I see.
What I’m saying is, I don’t want to do the Art in Nature project at all any more, she says.
You mean you’re leaving the project? he says.
(He sounds hurt now.
Good.)
And anyway, she says. If we were to do what you’re suggesting, what we’re doing wouldn’t exactly be art. Would it? Not what you’re proposing.
How do you mean? Art says.
It’s just not what art, lower case a, is about, she says.
Charlotte sitting in the dark picks at the already red raw side of a fingernail with her thumbnail.
How about you tell me again one more time in our lives, like I’m not allowed to know for myself or decide, and you’re the only authority, what art lower case a is about, then? Art says.
Art lower case a, she says, is, is, it’s uh about the moment you’re met by and so changed by something you encounter that it uh takes you both into and beyond yourself, gives you back your senses. It’s a, a shock that brings us back to ourselves.
If that were true there’s enough shock happening all across the world to make the whole of the world right now the biggest ever art project there’s ever fucking been, he says.
Well, she says, well. Well, art lower case a always was about our getting to grips with concepts like mortality, and randomness –
And are we really going to have a lockdown argument about art? Right now? he says.
Randomness, she says, and contingency, and –
She picks again at the place on her finger, which now seems to be bleeding.
Uh huh, he says. Okay. You keep finding the big words for what’s happening to us all so that you won’t have to think about what’s happening to us all, yeah? And I’ll sit and contemplate how my pigeon with a twig just wasn’t striking enough to count, and how here I was, thinking wrongly all along that art lower case a was something to do with coming to terms with and understanding all the things we can’t say or explain or articulate with help from something which we know will help us feel and think then articulate those things, even at times like this when feeling and thinking and saying anything about anything are under impossible pressure.
Except, she says. That art lower case a isn’t ever about helping anyone.
Oh really? he says. Who amputated your ethos?
What art does is, it exists, Charlotte says. And then because we encounter it, we remember we exist too. And that one day we won’t.
At the other end of the phone Art yawns.
He has a tendency to yawn, she knows from her years of living with him, when he’s particularly angry.
Then Charlotte yawns too.
I just caught your yawn, she says. So much for isolation.
Yeah, he says. Tell you what. I’m feeling a bit rattled now. Maybe we’ll talk about this another day.
Okay, she says.
Okay, he says.
And thanks for phoning, she says. And forgive me for being a bit, you know.
I’ll forgive you if we finish this phonecall with you telling me something you saw or heard, he says.
I can’t, she says. I’ve got to go. I want to uh go and help Iris with the rooms. Or she’ll do it all herself.
I was just about to ask, Art says. How’s she doing?
Great, Charlotte says.
(She hasn’t actually seen Iris for three days.)
She’s amazing, she says. She’s been cycling to
town and back, delivering bags of food and things to people thirty years younger than she is, and yelling hello at everyone she passes, asking them if they need anything or if she can help. I couldn’t, can’t, persuade her not to go out. I tried. There’s no stopping her.
Can’t tell old Iris what to do, he says. Nobody can. You’re so alike.
Charlotte’s heart sort of folds in two. It hurts inside her.
I came in from the garden and caught her dragging one of the mattresses up to the third floor, you know, up the spiral staircase, she says. I said, can I help you with the others? and she said, no, darling, this is the last one. Which means she’d already got the six other mattresses up there. By herself. On her own steam. Without even telling me. She’s actually in great form.
Great form, Art says. Now there’s a good name for a web page like the one I’m talking about. Talk tomorrow? When do the people all arrive?
This is the precise point at which Charlotte takes the phone away from her ear and presses the hang-up button.
She puts the phone in her pyjama jacket pocket.
She is close to tears.
Why is she nearly crying?
Because of something quite unexpected. The bright sides of graffitied trains and the smudges on the insides of train and bus windows where people have pressed their noses.
She is now crying because she is missing these things so much.
Just thinking about it. Thinking about a pigeon. And Art seeing it with a twig in its beak, and about a smudge on a window on a train they were on not that long ago, though in truth it’s a different life ago. And some orange-jacketed workmen in the sidings of a station they passed through. She fills with love for everything and everybody, every single human being, young, old, all of them, who’s ever thought about or not thought about seeing a pigeon fly past, or ever left an oily nose or mouth or finger smudge on a public transport window.
The feeling fills her so full that it has to come out at the eyes. There’s nowhere else for it to go.
She cries with love for Art.
She cries for their intrepid selves, for their travelling around, Art sitting next to her on a train, on a bus, for them both slamming the doors on the new car and heading off out into the world, her in the driver’s seat, Art lying flat out on the back seat, which he likes doing because it reminds him of when he was a kid.