by Ali Smith
She’d shut the door.
She’d got one of the chairs and wedged its back right under the handle so nobody could open it from the outside.
She pulled down the blind.
Then she went and sat on her bed.
She got into the bed.
She pulled the covers right up over her head because a line of light was still getting in at the edge of the blind.
She put her own arms round herself.
—
A text arrives on Charlotte’s non-web phone.
It’s from Art.
It’s later on the same day that he finally phoned and they argued.
It says:
Forgot to tell you this tale. Remember the Greenlaws from Brighton who we took with us to Suffolk? Today a parcel arrived addressed to Daniel. There was a very small violin case in the parcel and inside the violin case there was a very small violin.
Remember the kids? The boy who was really infatuated with you?
He sent a note. Dear Mr Gluck, thought you might like a small present from the past. Best wishes from your sister, Robert Greenlaw. The little violin is really beautiful. Daniel can’t remember what it’s about but he likes the violin a lot, it has delighted him. He has it on the bed next to him. But I bet the boy’s mother and father don’t know he sent it. Have you got an email or an address? We need to check with them.
Charlotte reads it again.
Best wishes from your sister, Robert Greenlaw.
She smiles.
She reaches and puts on a light next to the bed.
Here’s some of what she remembers from the time she drove that family to the hotel they all stayed in, just after the visit to Mr Gluck.
The boy: Why did he call the stone a child?
Their mother: He’s old. Old people get very addled.
The boy: I don’t think he seemed at all addled.
Their mother: He was so addled he thought you were a girl.
The girl: You look like a girl.
The boy: He just thought for a minute I was someone he knew, that’s all. It wasn’t about being a girl or boy. He wasn’t addled when we talked about Einstein.
Charlotte: When did you talk about Einstein with him?
The boy: He knew loads about Einstein. He knew about how Einstein played a violin when he was a child and he knew how much Einstein liked Mozart. And he told me what Einstein means in German. It’s not just a name, it’s two words. It means, literally, one stone, or a stone. So then we talked about Einstein’s stone theory and he knew about that too.
Charlotte: What’s Einstein’s stone theory?
The boy: It’s about how reality isn’t what we see or what it seems, and you can prove it, and how susceptible the mind is and how we make stuff up all the time about reality, by lining up different coloured stones in a geometric shape and counting them. Then you add some more stones, yeah? But when you count them again it’s like you didn’t add anything because the number seems to add up to the same as it was before.
Their mother: Now I’m the one that’s addled.
The boy: And we also talked about how particles meet, I mean when two meet each other, and how something changes in both of them. And after that, even if the particles are nowhere near each other, if one changes, the other does too.
The girl: Yeah, like when Arthur met Elisabeth. Oh my God. Did anyone else see?
Their mother: Oh, I saw.
The girl: Charlotte, did you see?
In that room that afternoon with the old man in the bed, a bright and charming old man who didn’t seem to remember Art’s mother but who took Art’s hand in his and wouldn’t let it go, Charlotte had seen the woman called Elisabeth see Art.
She had seen Art see the woman back.
Well, Art said in bed that night in Suffolk. Because we’ve, we’ve a lot in common.
It wasn’t an answer to a question she’d asked. Charlotte hadn’t said anything. He’d simply begun to try to explain or articulate something out loud, to himself really more than to her. But she sensed, she knew, that she was meant to ask, meant to engage with his engaging. So she did.
Like what? she’d said.
Well, for one thing. We both grew up with absent fathers, he said.
Charlotte lay on her back and looked at the plaster decoration round the light fitting in the ceiling. Fruits and flowers round the source of light.
How does it feel? she said.
It just, feels, well, right, he said.
Right, Charlotte said.
Like a very long view has opened in front of my eyes with a sky that goes on for miles across a sort of summer landscape, he said.
Uh huh, she said. Right.
It’s like, I just, know, he said.
You just know what? Charlotte said.
I’m supposed to be with her, Art said.
Like you used to say you knew about me? Charlotte said.
Aw, Art said. I always knew, we always both knew, that I was pushing it when I told myself that about us.
True, Charlotte said.
I’m not pushing it when it’s about her, he said. It feels quite different. It’s amazing. It’s shocking. It’s lovely. It just, well, is. Where are you going? It’s half eleven. Why are you getting dressed?
I just feel like going for a walk or something, she said.
You want me to come too? he said.
No, no, it’s fine, she said. I just feel like getting some air.
Are you taking the car key? he said.
I might go for a drive, she said.
Will you be long? he said.
No, she said.
When she’d got back after driving around, the bed was empty. It was still warm from him when she got into it.
He’d left a note on her bag.
Am over at Elisabeth’s. You take the car tomorrow. I’ll get myself home when I’ve worked out where I am and what I’m doing.
Charlotte sits in the pool of light six weeks later, a lifetime later, and reads the text about the violin again.
She laughs out loud remembering.
The boy. The boy who stuck glass to his sister’s hand so she’d break it and cut herself.
She remembers him saying, when they drove past a lighthouse on their way to the hotel, that Albert Einstein had once had an idea that a spell of enforced solitude – like lighthouse keepers had to endure as their everyday job – would be a good thing for young people who had a scientific or mathematical bent, because it would give them the chance to be uninterruptedly creative.
Don’t believe anything he says, his sister, Sacha, said.
It’s true, the boy said. Einstein did say it. He made a speech at the Royal Albert Hall and he said it then.
Yeah, sure he did, his sister said. Charlotte, Robert wants to tell you all about Einstein.
In October 1933, the boy said. I can prove it. I can. It’s in a book. I have the book with me.
She remembers he did have the book with him. In fact he had the book with him and nothing else.
His mother told them that night in the hotel pub when they were eating supper that her son had packed an overnight bag with no pyjamas in it, no toothbrush. All that was in it was a book about Albert Einstein.
Yeah because he’s travelling light, his sister said. I mean literally, at the speed of.
At which point the two kids, who’d been fiercely arguing about everything, both fell about laughing at the joke with a pleasure, an infectious delight, the kind that made everyone in that restaurant turn towards their table, not in a way that meant they wished they’d be quieter or were finding something intrusive, but in that way where something warm happening will unite a room of strangers.
Charlotte sits up.
She gets up.
S
he takes the pillow off the chair by the window and leaves it on the floor. She takes the chair over to the desk. She puts on another light.
God, this room could do with a clean and an air.
She goes back over to the window and opens it.
Better.
She picks up Art’s T-shirt. She puts it back over the back of the chair. She sits down.
At the desk she starts composing a text back to Art on her James Bond phone.
Was thinking about that time we were walking around north of kings cross not long after we first met, summer afternoon, and we saw the things arranged on the wall outside that block of flats with the sale sign next to them and you bought the ceramic dog, it said £3.50 on it do you remember, and you gave the man a fiver and told him to keep the change.
What she’d thought at the time was, this man is a fool. He was buying rubbish. Someone either very young or very useless had made it, white and yellow baked clay, body bent in the middle, shapeless paws and a dog head you could see thumbmarks in on both ears.
Over time she’d come to love that ceramic dog.
Not that she’d ever have admitted it to Art.
I think you buying that was the point at which I, too, knew we weren’t really meant as lovers but that I did love you anyway, she thinks.
She doesn’t write that down. She deletes the bit of text she’s already composed.
I’m terrified. Plus I’m having weird dreams. I had a dream where pain all over my body turned into paint all over my body.
She writes none of that.
What she writes instead is this:
I’ve an email for the greenlaws somewhere. I’ll look it out. I wonder if ashley started speaking again or not. More than ever i want to send her a link to that lorenza mazzetti film. I will now.
Thank you for pigeon story. I will write about it and send you the piece i write tomorrow. Anyway my story for you about what i saw today is that i went online and looked at some photos of some of the places we’ve been in our time, all in lockdown, all looking you know as if a hand has come out of the sky in each place and gathered everybody up and away or like the living people have just been photoshopped out and it struck me it was like how in very early days of photography anything that was moving used to disappear because camera exposure took so long, like horses or traffic or people walking along. They became evanescent and vanished altogether or turned into a ghosty blur. Then i found some lockdown pictures of that street we stayed in in paris in montmartre do you remember the bed creaked so neither of us got any sleep so we sat up instead and watched the new day come up? Anyway i gasped out loud when i saw the street because the street has been being used as a location for a film set in the 1940s and when the lockdown came in they stopped filming there and just left it all done up like occupied paris all the fronts of the buildings with brown facades. The very few people in the photos looked like ghosts from modernity visiting the past wearing puffa jackets and facemasks and the occasional 21st century couple walking a little paris dog. So then i looked up the film that’s been stopped by the lockdown. It’s called adieu m. haffmann and seems to be a story of a jewish jeweller who has to hide to survive so hands his shop over to a younger assistant. The assistant asks the jeweller to help him and his beloved have a child. Stage play first, acclaimed in france and when i looked it up too voila this coincidence. The stage play was written by a man called jean-philippe daguerre. So. I began to wonder if the contemp playwright daguerre is maybe related to louis daguerre inventor of daguerreotype the man who took some of the earliest photographic images ever in many of which that vanishing effect happened. One of his most famous photos is of boulevard du temple late 1830s taken at busy time of day and almost every moving or living thing is gone except a man standing having his shoes shined. Everyone else disappeared! It says online that’s the very first living person ever photographed. All because he stood still. Yeah i thought but all the other gone people are still there too. We just can’t see them. That is the thing from today that i wanted to tell you. You know how people keep saying about this time we’re in now, oh well, we are where we are. It’s more like we are where we aren’t.
It has taken her an hour to write that text on her Quantum of Solace phone.
She presses send.
Her phone in her hand goes blank and switches itself off.
What?
What the fuck?
She switches it on again.
The text has disappeared.
It hasn’t been saved.
She checks in the sent folder.
It’s not there either.
She laughs out loud.
It is where it isn’t!
She starts all over again.
Just tried to text you a really long text but james bond phone confiscated it. Here’s a shorter one instead. Got an email *somewhere* for greenlaws. Let’s also contact ashley who wrote the letterbox thing and ask her to let us use her writing. We could start an imprint. Art inertia. Ha ha. I mean real books as well as online. We can use it to report on what language was and is doing to us, what it did in the run-up to now, and what it’s doing in the process of what’s happening now to us all. *Good to talk. I’ve been freaking out for a couple of days but i’m back now.* Thank you for pigeon with unwieldy twig and the urge to put things together. I’ll send my thoughts on it tomorrow and maybe also on the boy sending the violin. It is a lovely story. Plus i wd like to write a piece or two about mazzetti the filmmaker and post online, what do you think. Also we must start to lobby. Iris says a german artist she knows told her he looked in his bank account and found €9,000. €9,000! Where did it come from? From the german government to all that country’s artists and arts workers no strings attached. Piece on art in nature about that too i think.
There.
She presses send.
It goes.
It seems to have gone safely.
It’s in the sent folder.
She takes the T-shirt off the back of the chair and puts it over her nose. It smells of Art, of wood shavings, vinegar.
She smiles.
Best wishes from your sister.
Imagine opening a parcel and inside it there’s a violin case, but a very small one. Like the child of a violin case. Inside that, a small violin, like the child of a violin. It’d have that soft cushion stuff lining it over the fitted shape for holding and protecting the violin. It’d all smell of rosin, and wood, and of those two things coming together.
She gets up off the bed.
She takes the chair away from the door. She opens the door. She looks down.
Soup in a bowl at her feet.
Iris left it there, must be two hours ago.
But there’s still a modicum of warmth in it.
She sits down in the threshold.
It does taste fine.
—
When she got downstairs in the hotel that night, no idea what to do with herself, no idea where she was off to or where she’d end up, only knowing she had to start out on a path for herself or there’d be no path, she saw that the Greenlaw family was still sitting in the pub part of the restaurant.
Grace was texting somebody or reading something on her phone. The kids were, yes, arguing.
Virtue signalling, the boy said.
Better than corruption signalling any day, the girl said back. And I want and need as many languages as I have selves. So should you.
I only need English, the boy said. Needing or knowing anything more is unpatriotic.
Stooge, the girl said. That’s you all over.
What’s me all over? the boy said. You’re a stooge. You’re a scrooge. You’re a humbug. Shut up.
Retarded, the girl said. By what you think is your own initiative and which you imagine is keeping you safe. Oh, hi Charlotte.
Oh, the boy said. Hi.<
br />
Charlotte sat down at the table. Grace nodded to her and then to the half empty bottle.
Help yourself, she said.
She’ll drink the whole bottle if you don’t, the girl said.
I’m on holiday, Grace said. It’s what adults do.
Yeah some adults, the girl said.
I won’t, but thank you, Charlotte said.
She shakes the car key.
Are you going? the boy said.
Maybe, Charlotte said. Depends. What are you two fighting about?
We weren’t fighting about anything, the boy said.
We were, the girl said. First he made me feel like I was going to throw up by telling me about how maggots can jump in the air.
They can, the boy said. They can do somersaults into the air thirty times their own bodylength. They are like little acrobats.
Then he said there was no point in learning different languages from other countries any more, the girl said.
What, like French and German? Charlotte said.
Or even from our own country, the girl said. Like Welsh. Like Ashley speaks.
Languages, Charlotte said, don’t exist singly. They’re like family. They all feed into each other all the time. There’s no such thing as an isolated language.
The boy went red.
Oh I was just devil’s advocating, he said. I don’t really think it. In exactitude I think other languages are cool. I just didn’t want her to think she had the monopoly on, on,
On what? the girl said.
On me, he said.
He stared at the car key on the pub table.
We’re off really early tomorrow morning, Charlotte said. Before you’re up. 6am or so.
Definitely before we’re up, Grace said.
Oh, the boy said.
So I was about to go to bed, Charlotte said, but it struck me. We still haven’t been, Robert, to where you said you wanted to go.
The Einstein place? Robert said. Really?
Depending, Charlotte said. On one or two things. The first, whether your mother says it’s okay for you two to come, because it’s ten past ten now, quite late to go anywhere. The second, on how far it actually is from here.
You’re going to pander to him? Sacha said.