by Ali Smith
A soldier patted down the legs of a longhaired teenage boy in jeans and a shirt. A soldier waved a metal stick at a group of eight or nine women. A child’s legs crossed a road in the distance beyond barbed wire.
People spoke about it in parliament. People understood more from it than they knew from a thousand newspaper reports. It foresaw Bloody Sunday. (Though anyone with just one eye and half a brain could have foreseen Bloody Sunday, Paddy said the next year when a newspaper critic somewhere wrote that Sea of Troubles had.)
Her first experimental docudrama. One of the first ever of its kind. His first real anything. His first anything good. And Paddy, safe in heaven dead now, dead as Beatrix Potter’d been to them back then.
Andy Hoffnung: Paddy’d sat next to a man at a Beethoven concert at the Wigmore Hall some time in the late 1960s. An die Hoffnung, he said, and smiled at her. She’d thought it was his name, and told him hers, then she’d seen in the programme it was the title of one of the songs.
They’d gone out to dinner after. (They probably slept together.) He’d told her almost nothing about himself. Paddy, sharp as an arrowhead, had gathered a great deal. He was half German, half English. He’d been shafted by the worst of both. He’d lost a lot at the hands of both, family, friends, home, all gone, and so on. And yet the most hopeful man I’ve ever met, she said at the time. I don’t mean naively. I mean profoundly. I realized, talking with him, that true hope’s actually a matter of the absence of hope.
How can that be? Richard said.
(Richard was jealous.)
I don’t know. But I came away from him hopeful myself, and that’s really saying something in my world right now, Doubledick.
This Beethoven man had taken her hand in his in a club they’d gone to, as if to read her future, tell her fortune, but instead of doing it he’d acted out a scene he’d remembered from a Charlie Chaplin film he saw as a boy, where Chaplin takes a woman’s hand and looks at the lines on her wrist or her hand to tell her how many children she’ll have. He counts them. He says she’ll have five. Then looks at the lines on his own, counts them, and it comes to twenty five, thirty, thirty five, more.
Then he did this silent laugh, she said, he was imitating Chaplin laughing like a child.
What’s his name? Richard said (jealous). Did you sleep with him more than once? Was he any good? He said these latter things only inside his head. From then on, whenever she mentioned, even in passing, anything at all about Charlie fucking Chaplin, he knew she was thinking of, was alluding to – as if in secret, as if nobody would know she was doing it but her, with no idea that Richard knew exactly what she was doing – the An die Hoffnung man.
She’d written the script in four weeks. It was ingenious, told the story by not telling it. A wounded man wanders London with an open demeanour. That’s pretty much it. Frost, fog. Nothing opens to him, though one way or another everything he touches opens. He sits in a kitchen and holds up a postcard. It’s sent from someone in some camp or other in the war.
It’s fine here, the actor playing Andy Hoffnung says to camera.
He is reading what it says on the postcard.
But then, see, he says, what she writes is, but I wish I were with cousin Eury. Eury was a code between us for hell. Eurydice, a dead soul. She’s saying she’d rather be dead.
It’s the only moment the war surfaces in the script. Everything else moves unsaid under the London pavements, the tooth-gaps in the streets where the houses were, the stone steps on the war memorials, the mud by the river, the Thames, shifty against its own sides, the high closed doors of the public art galleries at five o clock, the parked cars in the failing light, the market after the market’s over, stalls gone, broken boxes and cabbage leaves all that’s left. He kicks a gutter turnip the length of the street in the fall of the February dusk.
Heal née Hardiman.
Richard closes the paper and folds it.
Paddy bursts into his head like that first day through the doors of the Hanged Man. Oh. Oh, she was so glamorous. Older than him, a whole seventeen-year-old girl older, and pretty much any older woman would’ve been glamorous to a man in his twenties, but she was so much more so, being so self-contained, so uncategorizable, an uncategorizable sort from the start. (There’s no such thing as an uncategorizable sort, she said when he told her this, you can’t categorize the uncategorizable, you chump.) Look at her, smoking like she didn’t even know she was holding a cigarette and leaning back or forward in that chair in her do-I-give-a-damn way till the moment she’d say, and she did it every time, exactly the right thing. Effortless. Like she knew exactly what to do with a story. Like she held down a marriage, a job, twins to bring up, and then, when her marriage came apart, it somehow just made her even more carefree. When his own marriage would fall to pieces at the back end of the 1980s and he’d fall to pieces with it, he’d spend a month on her couch. She’d help him sort the house out after his wife and child going. She’d help him sort himself out.
He’d never met a girl like her. Well, a woman. She wasn’t just a girl.
(Was that an offensive thing to say nowadays? He’d no idea.)
He’d sat opposite her in the Hanged Man that first time and wondered if they’d ever end up sleeping together. (Nowadays was that an offensive thing to think?) They had. It wasn’t relevant. It was the only irrelevant sex he’d ever had. They were bigger than sex. The people he’d slept with over the years, before Paddy, after Paddy, even the woman he’d married, were here then gone, and there was somehow still Paddy.
There’s a difference between narrative strategy and reality, but they’re symbiotic, she said to him one day in the 1970s.
He was round at her house. It was a light spring night. They’d been listening to the news on the radio in her kitchen. The Maguires had just been sentenced. (They’d serve, between them, seventy three years in prison before their convictions would be quashed and those of them still alive would be released.) The sentence Paddy had just uttered had something to do with the sentencing of the Maguires. But for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what she meant.
Between what? he said. They’re what?
She’d started to laugh, it was the first time she’d laughed for a long time, and she’d laughed so much that he stopped being hurt and started laughing too and they’d laughed into each other’s arms. Afterwards she’d said,
I like a good fuck as much as the next person, Doubledick, and that was a very good fuck. Thanks.
April 1st, 1976.
Then nothing else of that sort. They’d got on with their work and their lives.
Last April. The last April. Four months before she will die. Though nobody knows that yet for sure, obviously.
What everybody knows today is that it’s the hottest April day there’s been since the year Richard was born. They are saying it on the radio and TV like it’s unthinkably long ago, another era.
Well, it is.
He calls into a Maplin’s to buy a memory stick. Maplin, the chain, is closing down soon. EVERYTHING MUST GO. The place looks plundered. He asks a man – his badge says he’s the store manager – whether there are any memory sticks left. The man shakes his head. Just too late Richard notices the dark, the red rim round his eyes, a man who made good, reached store manager level and now it means nothing, has come to nothing in the end.
His life as he knows it is at an end and I’m asking him about a bloody memory stick. I’m a blunt instrument, Richard thinks as he leaves the ruined shop.
He walks along the pavement in the unnatural heat.
I’m so stupid, he tells Paddy when he arrives at her house. I’m a galumphing lout in the world.
Paddy is all bone structure now. Almost all her fury has burned off too; she’s become philosophical about things she was still raging about just days ago.
She’d raged, just days ago, about the British government and Ireland.
It’s possible that they know not what they do, she’d said. It’s equally poss
ible that they know exactly what they’re doing. I won’t forgive them, nobody who knows what it was like will. Messing with the ancient hatreds.
She’d raged about other things too.
Oh, I understand Brexit, she’d said. So many people angered into democracy for all the reasons. What I don’t understand is Windrush. What I don’t get, can’t get my head round, is Grenfell. Windrush, Grenfell, they aren’t footnotes in history. They’re history.
The whole of history is footnotes, Pad, he said.
Common wealth, she said. What a lie. Why hasn’t there been an outcry the size of this so-called United Kingdom? Those things would’ve brought down a government at any other time in my life. What’s happened to all the good people of this country?
Compassion fatigue, Richard said.
Fuck compassion fatigue, she said. That’s people walking about with dead souls.
Racism, Richard said. Legitimized. Legitimized division 24/7 on all the news and in all the papers, on so many screens, grace of the god of endless new beginnings, the god we call the internet.
I know people are divided, she said. People always were. But people weren’t, and aren’t, unfair. Even British racism used to give way when it came to unfairness.
You’ve lived a sheltered life, Richard said.
Make me laugh, she said. I’m Irish. I was Irish in the 1950s. I was Irish when being Irish in London was like being black and being a dog. I know the British people inside out. I was Irish in the 1970s. Remember?
I remember, he said. I’m old, like you.
A twin appeared.
Calm down, mum, the twin said. Richard. Please. Don’t encourage her to talk about Donald Trump.
We’re not talking about Trump, Richard said.
We absolutely bloody aren’t, Paddy said. Let’s never do anything a demagogue narcissist might long for us to do.
Don’t, please, Richard, the twin said. And don’t talk about climate change or the rise of the right or the migrant crisis or Brexit or Windrush or Grenfell or the Irish border.
Are you joking? Richard said. There’ll be nothing left to upset her with.
Don’t be calling it migrant crisis, Paddy said. I’ve told you a million times. It’s people. It’s an individual person crossing the world against the odds. Multiplied by 60 million, all individual people, all crossing the world, against odds that worsen by the day. Migrant crisis. And you the son of a migrant.
Richard, the twin said as if his mother wasn’t there. I mean it. If our mother continues to get worked up like this when you come, we’re going to have to ask you not to come any more.
Over my dead fucking body, Paddy said.
It makes her so fretful, the twin said.
I’m not fretful, Paddy said.
After you’ve visited we can never get her to take her medication, the twin said fretfully.
Too bloody right they can’t, Paddy said.
Her dead fucking body:
They had medicated her out of life.
But she was old, she was ill, it was time for her to go, she had no real quality of life left. The Oramorph metamorph: one week she’d been all facts and wit and energy. The next, what’s that squeaking? my ears are all squeaks. Then she couldn’t follow a conversation, then her face, all worry, like something was missing, she couldn’t think what.
Not that she ever stopped using words bigger than everybody in the room.
We’ll have none of that psychopomposity here, she said on her deathbed.
Not that she ever stopped really being here, even in the delirium of the drip. What they’re all forgetting about Windrush is that it’s a river, and a river more often than not’ll grow from a source and lead to more rivers then to something the size of an ocean.
Does she really need to be on that drip? Richard said to the twin.
The twin asked Richard to leave the room.
Then the twin told Richard to leave the room.
The other twin was sitting outside the shut door on a chair on the landing. He was staring at his feet, or the floorplanks. To get past him you’d have to be careful not to knock him downstairs.
Does she really need to be on that drip? Richard asked the other twin.
What can I do? he said. I’ve no say. I can’t tell him what to do. I’m the youngest.
Youngest by four minutes, Richard said. And you’re a grown man. You’re in your fifties, for God sake.
The twin stared at the planks. Richard passed him, not very carefully, and went back to the flat.
Ten days later in the Guardian he read:
Patricia Heal née Hardiman.
But that’s in the future. Now it’s still April.
He tells her about the man in Maplin’s.
Everything must go, she repeats as if it’s a line of poetry.
And me asking him about memory sticks, he says. I’m the clumsiest man alive.
Memory sticks, she says. There’s a sentence for you. Well, it does and it doesn’t. Memory, I mean. Depends on the Oramorph, which makes a lot of things sticky, and a lot of things stick to you. Mainly actual shit.
She laughs.
Why are they giving you it? Richard says. Are you in pain?
Not at all, she says.
I thought people only took it at the very end of things, Richard says. You’re nowhere near that.
Thanks, she says.
The twin, already hovering in the hall, gets agitated.
Can you leave now, please, Richard, he says.
I only just got here, Dermot, Richard says.
Paddy looks at the twin.
A generation of children who’ve no idea they’re going to die, she says.
Mum, the twin says.
Dying’s a salutary thing, Dick, Paddy says. It’s a gift. I look at Trump now, I see them all, the new world tyrants, all the leaders of the packs, the racists, the white supremacists, the new crusader rabblerousers holding forth, the thugs all across the world, and what I think is, all that too too solid flesh. It’ll melt away, like snow in May.
She says it all still looking at the twin.
I’ll be back in a minute with the spoon, mum, the twin says. Don’t be long, Richard. She’s very very tired today.
The twin disappears through to the kitchen.
Paddy turns to Richard.
They want me dead, she says.
She says it with no rancour.
It’s what’s supposed to happen next, she says. That’s how the story goes. It’s natural, Doubledick. Kids. I should thank God they’re finally agreeing with each other about something.
She closes her eyes, opens them again.
Family, she says.
At least you had a family, Richard says.
Yes, she says. I did. But so did you.
One way or another, largely thanks to you, he says.
She shakes her head.
Truth be told, I wish mine’d been a bit more like yours, she says.
Ha, he says. Well. Crazy weather out there. You’re missing nothing, Pad. One of the worst springs I can remember. Snow up to here just two weeks ago. Minus seven. And now this. Twenty nine degrees.
You’re wrong, she says. One of the loveliest springs I’ve known. Plants couldn’t wait to get going. All that cold. All this green.
so if you could kindly email us at this address by evening of Tuesday, 18 September at the very latest any good anecdotes/stories about our mother’s life that you would like us to include in speeches that will be made on 21st we will do our best to incorporate them thanks very much also any old photos you might have please scan and send to us we would appreciate it as unfortunately we have lost a lot of old photos out of cloud storage when our mother deleted them off a phone and they deleted themselves from iCloud and so far the originals have not turned up. Also please forgive nature of group email but there is a lot to organize as you will appreciate, vbw Dermot and Patrick Heal.
What does vbw mean? he asks his imaginary daughter.
He presses reply.
Subject: Re: Patricia Heal Memorial.
He deletes the name and the word memorial and types in: story of.
But then he can’t bring himself to write her name in the subject box next to the words story and of.
He clicks the cursor into the message space.
Subject: story of
Dear Dermot and Patrick,
Thank you for your email. It was your mother who was the writer not me, so forgive the infelicities of expression there will no doubt be in this ‘story’ I am sending you to try to express what she meant to me. There are of course literally close to a million stories I could send you, to illustrate what she meant, both to me and in the world. But here is just one. When my marriage broke up 30 years ago and my wife and child left the country and to all intents and purposes left my life I was very depressed and for quite some time. One day your mother suggested that I ‘take’ my child to see some theatre shows or films, or take her on holiday, or to see an art exhibition – which basically meant of course anything your mother had made up her mind that I myself should make the effort to go and see. I said, ‘But how?’ She said, ‘Use your imagination. Take her to see things. Believe me your child will be imagining you too wherever she is in the world. So meet each other imaginatively.’ I laughed. ‘I’m serious,’ your mother said. ‘Take her to see things. And tell her to send me a postcard whenever you do go to see things or places. Just so I know you’ve taken me seriously.’ I thought your mother was being very kind, but that it was a rather silly idea. But to my surprise I found myself doing just that, ‘taking’ an imaginary daughter to things I’d never have gone to otherwise. Arcadia, Cats, all the big shows. I saw works by Leonardo at the Hayward, by Monet at the Royal Academy, modern art, Hockney, Moore, I saw too many Shakespeares, I visited the Dome show at the Millennium. I can’t begin to count the number of films and shows I saw at cinemas and theatres and galleries and museums all over the world, and strange as it may seem and still does seem to me, I did none of it alone, thanks to the gift of your mother’s imagination.