by Ali Smith
The level of love has blocked her nose now.
She sits in the bedclothes, breathes through her mouth and misses her mother, who died in 2012, and her father, who went the year after.
Dear God.
She is now completely without family.
She is living in the house of someone else’s family, not hers.
She puts her hands over her face and cries soundlessly into her hands.
Come on.
Get a grip.
Thank God they’re dead now and they missed this and you’re not sitting here worrying about them.
Get up. Go downstairs.
Help Iris.
She doesn’t move.
Outside the day is happening regardless, full of birds doing things in the air etc.
Charlotte sits in the dark.
She looks at the side of her finger but it’s too dark to see what’s bleeding and what isn’t.
She looks at the line of light still getting in at the edge of the blind.
If she had some gaffer tape she could stick the blind to the window frame and stop that light getting in.
There will be gaffer tape downstairs.
But that would mean going downstairs.
Okay. There are two chairs. One is jammed up against the door. She could use the other one, balance a pillow on the back of it and let it rest against the blind so the blind presses back against the window. Then that line of light will disappear.
She gets up, takes Art’s Pussy Grabs Back T-shirt off the back of the chair, throws it into a corner of the room. She picks the chair up. She moves it over to the window. She takes a pillow, positions it.
The light lessens.
—
Charlotte. Yes. Charlotte.
Who used to think herself quite revolutionary.
Everything’s got to change. Everything.
Now? Everything has.
Though Iris isn’t so sure.
Christ but there’s so much you should be blogging about, Iris had taken to saying every time she saw Charlotte anywhere near one of the computers.
Charlotte had sent the three other people in the Art in Nature team home before the lockdown.
Why did you do that? Iris said.
They’ve got families to be with, Charlotte said. And anyway, we shouldn’t be cohabiting with so many people.
We need them, Iris said. Can they work from home? You should all be writing about the PPE shortage. About a too-late response from a useless and distracted government who never thought for a minute they’d end up governing anything. Whose only thought about state was how to dismantle it as fast as possible. Who thought it was all going to be such a blast, being in power, making lots of money for themselves and their pals.
Uh huh, Charlotte said.
You should be writing about how many people have died and are going to die in this country because of this government’s rank carelessness, Iris said. They’re saying twenty thousand deaths will be good. Good!
(Iris has friends in Italy who’ve kept them in touch with the speed of catastrophe.)
Get on to the team, Iris said. Get them writing. About how the hedgefunders have made billions already out of what’s happening. Billions going into their accounts from other people’s losses, while nurses and doctors and cleaners have to wear binliners. Binliners. A government treating them like rubbish. The NHS is not happy to let people die. That’s the difference between them and this government, happy to count the heads of their so-called herd, like we’re cattle, like they think they own us and have the right to send thousands of us to slaughter to keep the money coming in. Peevish. Too focused on their infantile Brexit obsession to accept offers of help and equipment from our neighbours. I bet you anything they’re getting their data scientist pals and advisers and their friends at Google to model pandemic data while they talk a lot of Dunkirk spirit shit to a public they’re selling down the river.
Uh huh, Charlotte said.
Write about how the people who’ve never been properly valued are all holding this country together, Iris said. The health workers and the everydayers, the deliverers, the postmen and women, the people working the factories, the supermarkets, the ones holding all our lives in their hands. Write about that. The mighty Etonians brought low one more time and the meek revealed as the real might after all. Because believe me, it can go either way from here, we need to think about it, and fast, and we need to get united just as fast, because in my experience the mighty don’t like it when the meek get elevated.
United in what, though?
In isolation?
Charlotte shook her head.
Imagine. She used to call herself an online activist, Charlotte, who knew now she was never anything but a revolutio-lite, a sort of Good Life Bless This House sitcom revolutionary, a nostalgia-revolutionary. Who, even though she was born two decades after the 1970s happened, and even though that decade, as she knows from reading countless books and watching countless films, was one of the most fiercely politicized and prescient and fragmented in history, had focused at length, in her dissertation about culture and the 1970s, on why Gilbert O’Sullivan, though he was a grown adult, had chosen to wear 1940s schoolboy clothes to launch his first songs into popular culture and what this had meant for his subsequent lyrics, chart positioning and cultural legacy.
Charlotte. Nothing more than an alone again naturally no matter how I try why oh why oh why sort of revolutionary.
For instance, the only word she’d really heard, really recognized, in that typical Iris outpouring was the word blast. She recognized the word because just then it was a bit like there’d been a bomb blast very near her head, one that had knocked her senses and all her cognitives sideways, leaving her lopsided, strangely deaf, nothing to say.
I’m so sorry, Iris, she said. I’m feeling very much at a disconnect right now.
Nothing’s not connected, Iris said.
Iris is Art’s aunt. Charlotte’s not related to her. She’s a seasoned lefty activist. She won’t tell Charlotte how old she is, but she must be in her eighties. Greenham, Porton Down; she apparently also used to help run a sort of commune in this very house, years ago. Then someone chucked the commune out and left the house uninhabited and rotting.
Then Art’s business-minded mother, Iris’s sister, who’d liked it here, bought the empty falling-down house for herself and renovated it. Iris is always exclaiming about walking into walls that didn’t exist when she first lived here.
Then Art’s mother died, left the house and contents to Art with the proviso that Iris can live here till she dies.
Then Art and Charlotte moved their Art in Nature team down here to live here too. Free lodgings.
Now that everything’s changed she and someone else’s aunt are the only people living in this cavernous house. They each have a floor of it to themselves. The floor Charlotte’s room is on has six other bedrooms on it. Charlotte hasn’t seen anything else of the house, or of this floor, except this room and the bathroom next door to it, for three days now. I’ll be back in a minute, Charlotte had said to Iris. That was three days ago.
Every night Iris knocks on the door and leaves a plate of food and a jug of water outside.
The first night she said,
are you running a temperature?
No, Charlotte said from the other side of the door.
A cough? Iris said.
No, I’m fine, Charlotte said. I really am. I’m not ill.
So this isn’t a case of you isolating because you’re feeling ill? Iris said.
No, Charlotte said. It’s a case of me isolating because I very much want to be an isolate.
Okie doke, Iris said. Tell me if you feel ill or have any of those symptoms. Or any symptoms at all. Or if you need anything. I’ll check in on you every day, if that’s ok
ay. Take your time.
Charlotte thinks Iris looks a bit like what a hedgerow would look like if an animator for a film made up a character who was meant to be a hedgerow. Her hair is wild. She looks out through it with the bright eyes of a bird. She partly brought Art up, from what Charlotte can gather.
She never talks about herself. She says things like this instead:
Yes, it’s surreal for us here right now. But it’s never not a state of emergency somewhere. We’re naive if we think life normally isn’t as surreal as fuck for most people scraping a living on this earth.
Charlotte can’t take it right now.
Also, when an old person swears like that it’s actually sort of shocking. It has revealed her own prurience to Charlotte, who’d also, till now, always thought herself an activist. Until she met the real thing, that is.
Call me Ire. My name’s the only ire left in me. I’m way beyond anger now.
Is it something about how equipped, how practical, how sorted Iris is that has defeated, stunned stone dead, the calm-hearted activist in Charlotte?
Charlotte, when she first got back here from Suffolk, had told Iris about Art falling in love.
She and Iris had both laughed, both fond. Like they were like each other.
Then she’d told Iris – foolishly, her selfish self knows now – about Art and herself going to visit the detainees in the SA4A Immigration Removal Centre and how a clever and thoughtful young virologist being held indefinitely there had taken pains to explain to them, and this was back in early February when nobody much was taking the virus seriously in England, about the dangerous-sounding virus that was beginning to take hold in various countries and had reached England via the airport right next to the Immigration Removal Centre they were sitting in now, from which the planes that took off over their heads made the room they were sitting in literally shake every few minutes, and the virus was apparently now also present in the city just down the road from here where they were about to go and stay for the night.
He told them that if the virus happened to get into this centre he was being held in then all the detainees would catch it because the windows are made of a combination of perspex and metal bars, none of them openable to the outside world, the only air in there the recycled old air filtering through the place’s ventilation system.
Iris’s eyes had lit up.
They’ll quietly let them out, she said. They won’t want detained people dying and becoming a bad publicity story.
Then a week ago a news story broke about the government release of a few hundred illegal immigrants thought to be most medically vulnerable to such an outbreak.
They won’t be the only ones, Iris said. That’s just the iceberg’s tip. And released to where? To what? Where will they go?
I don’t know, Charlotte said.
A lot of vulnerable innocent people will be homeless soon, Iris said, with no money and no family, and they’ll desperately need somewhere to stay.
I guess so, Charlotte had said.
We have thirteen empty bedrooms now your Art in Natures have gone, Iris said, and three large public rooms. That’s a possible sixteen separate rooms for people. I’ll ask Artie if it’s okay with him. I’ll ask him if we can use his room too. That’s seventeen.
(It was in the first days of Art being away elsewhere with other people.)
Ask him if you can use his room for what? Charlotte said.
The only two things we’d have to sort out, Iris said, before people arrive I mean.
What people? Charlotte said.
Because I think we’ll have enough food for everyone for a couple of months, Iris said.
(Iris still works three times a week at a wholesale local healthfood place and the barn is already full of sacks of things like lentils and rice, Iris being generally of a state of emergency mindset.)
No, the real problem, Iris said, will be the increased load of shit, what to do with it.
Shit? Charlotte said.
Sewage is something Chei Bres has always had a problem with, Iris said, when there’s more than a few people living here.
What’s Chei Bres? Charlotte said.
(She thought it was maybe the name of the revolutionary group Iris lived with here in the 1970s and 80s.)
Chei Bres is this house’s old name, Iris said. It’s Cornish for house of thought, house where gestation takes place. House of the mind and house of the uterus. And when my sister renovated it what she forgot to renovate was the sewage system. Not that I’m speaking ill of my beloved dead. But for all her brilliance she could never be bothered to go deeper into anything than she had to. Including this house’s foundational infrastructure. We had overcrowding sewage problems when just two of us lived here. So. First thing we’ll need is a septic tank bigger than the one we’ve got.
Charlotte had nodded calmly at everything Iris was saying. Simultaneously she saw herself driving as fast as she could down to the Asda in town and packing the back of the car with tins of anything she could get and as much toilet paper as she could buy then phoning her old landlord to see if she could rent her flat back again and, even if she couldn’t, driving at over the limit speeds back to London to find somewhere like it as fast as possible.
Why toilet paper?
Because it’s what everybody in Australia had panic-bought.
So, logically, it’d be the thing that would run out first.
You’d always need toilet paper.
And why her old flat or something like it?
Because her old flat was a one-person flat and there wasn’t room in there for anyone else. Or their shit.
She stood up and stretched.
Back in a minute, she’d said as if she were merely going through to the toilet.
She’d nipped upstairs to get her jacket and her wallet and her laptop and her toothbrush etc.
She’d slipped quietly out the back door.
She’d come round the side of the barn where nobody from the house can see you, and she’d opened the car door.
She’d sat in the driver’s seat with the door still open.
But instead she’d opened her laptop and typed in septic tank suppliers cornwall.
Then she’d gone back into the house and given Iris a number to ring for someone to come with a digger.
At least she’d done that.
There’d still been some life in her then.
That’s the thing about Iris. She’s always unfailingly dauntingly right.
I wish they’d stop using war language, war imagery. This isn’t a war. The opposite of a war is happening. The pandemic is making walls and borders and passports as meaningless as nature knows they are.
That evening, as they’d watched half an hour of the endless newsfeed,
Iris, Charlotte said. You’re the endangered age. You have to isolate.
That’ll be the day, Iris said. Isolation spells d, e, a, t and h to me. But don’t worry, I’ve no intention of dying any time soon. And there’s no such thing as the endangered age. We’re all the endangered age now.
You’re being stupid, Charlotte said. Your good intentions mean nothing. Not up against a virus.
Grant me some common sense, Iris said. We’re all walking the line now, the line between one era and another. And you know how the old song goes, don’t you?
Which old song is that, then? Charlotte said.
The one people ceremoniously sing, all across the world, when we’re passing from one time to another? Iris said.
She sang a little of the song people sing at New Year when they’re all holding other people’s hands with their arms crossed over themselves.
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere, she sang. And gie’s a hand o thine.
My trusty fear? Charlotte said.
It doesn’t mean fear. It means a friend, that
word, Iris said. And I know, I know full well that we can’t literally give a hand. What we have to do is work out how to give as much of a hand as we can in all the other possible ways.
My trusty fear.
A friend.
Charlotte went out of the room with the television in it. She sat on the stairs with something inside her as numb and dead as a, a what?
A toilet roll.
She hit herself hard with her own hand, with her fist, in the chest.
It hurt.
Good.
She did it again.
How do you jolt a dead self back to life?
She heard Iris coming through. Iris touched her lightly and affectionately on the head as she passed; she was carrying a lot of laundry under one arm and she had a screwdriver in her mouth.
She dropped the laundry in the hall, went to the front doors and started doing something to the lock on the inside door.
What Iris was doing, Charlotte saw, was taking the lock off.
She slid the Yale apparatus out of its slot and let it fall on to the floor. Then she went to work on the outer door too.
Are you replacing them? Charlotte said.
There’ll be no locking anyone in here, not in any lockdown of ours, Iris said. Not for people who’ve been locked up for so long.
Charlotte’s inner toilet roll blanched even whiter.
Shall I put that laundry in the annexe for you? she said.
It’s clean, Iris said. But if you want to be really helpful you can bring me all the T-shirts you can find in the house.
Why? Charlotte said.
Masks, Iris said. I’ve twelve of my own here. We’ll need between thirty six and forty. Thirty six at the least, two each so everybody’s got a spare. Including you and me. Bring the kitchen scissors. I’ll show you.
Charlotte went upstairs like a person going upstairs to look for T-shirts.
Back in a minute, she said.
She went into her room.
This was three days ago.