by Ali Smith
What DCO means, the girl said.
What? Brit said. Oh.
(The girl was at eye level with Brit’s lanyard.)
It means I’m a Custody Officer, Brit said.
What’s the D for? the girl said.
Detainee, Brit said.
What’s the B for? the girl said.
Brit caught her lanyard up in her hand.
That’s my first name, Brit said.
Your first name’s just the letter B? the girl said. That is so cool. That is such a good idea.
Don’t be stupid, Brit said. It’s the first letter of my name, obviously.
I’m going to change my name just to its first letter, the girl said.
What’s your first name? Brit said.
F, the girl said.
That made Brit laugh out loud.
What’s it really? she said.
Florence, the girl said.
Well, if you’re Florence, does that make me the machine? Brit said.
The girl looked delighted. Brit felt weirdly elated to have delighted anyone.
Come on. People must make that joke at you all the time with a name like Florence, Brit said.
They do. But usually they say, where’s your machine, Florence, or something like that. Nobody’s actually declared themselves my machine before, the girl said.
Yeah, but I really am the machine, Brit said. And not necessarily your machine. And right now the word the machine is saying to you is: school. Shouldn’t you be working hard learning equations or something? What school do you go to? I mean, not go to?
That made the girl laugh too. Brit tried to read the little coat of arms on the laughing girl’s blazer. Vivunt spe. Latin. Living, live. They are living. Something.
The girl got something out of her pocket and held it out to Brit to take. Brit sat down on the metal seat next to her.
It was a postcard, an old-looking one, like one that’d been sent years ago, of a low stony river and some trees. Three kids in the picture were paddling quite far away in it in river water which was a bright blue. Its blue had been enhanced, it was fake, the water wasn’t really that blue; maybe the green had been greened up too. But it was a sunny day in the postcard, with a hazed blue sky, a single cloud, hilly slopes and mountains in the distance, some trees, a stony bank down to the river, a lot of grass behind. At the bottom of the card it said KINGUSSIE·The River Gynack and Golf Course 5359W and when you knew that a golf course was what it was, you could also make out three very small people in the far distance of the picture, presumably golfers.
Uh huh, Brit said. Who’s it from? Can I read the back, or is it private?
Yif, the girl said.
Yif? What’s yif mean? Brit said.
Yif means yes if you want, the girl said.
Thill, Brit said.
What’s thill mean? the girl said.
Thanks, I will, Brit said.
You speak my language! the girl said.
It was old, postmarked decades ago, a decade before Brit had even been born:
5.30pm 16 04 86 INVERNESS A ‘Hail Caledonia’ Product Dear Simon we arrived in Kingussie Saturday night 5.30 It was a nice journey. The weather here is very warm with plenty of sun today Monday I am going to Inverness in the afternoon to have a look at Loch Ness by coach so cheerio now. From Uncle Desmond
She gave it back to the girl.
And? she said.
Where is this place on the card, exactly? the girl said.
Tells you its name, right there, Brit said.
Where in the country? the girl says.
Look it up, Brit said. Look it up on a phone or a computer. If you were in school right now, you could do it really easily.
What if I don’t want to use a computer? the girl said.
Because? Brit said.
I just don’t, the girl said.
Because? Brit said.
I want to travel with no footprint, the girl said.
Because? Brit said.
That’s right, the girl said. Because.
Why would anyone want to do that? Brit said.
You should know, the girl said. You’re the machine. But how do I get to it? I mean really. Is it in this country?
You’ll have to ask your parents, Brit said.
Let’s assume, let’s just assume, the girl said. That I don’t want to ask anyone.
Why not? Brit said.
Except you, the girl said.
You’re asking the machine, Brit said.
No, I’m asking you, the girl said. What do I do?
Well, it’s in Scotland, Brit said.
Is it? the girl said. Wow.
Yes, Brit said. (99.99% sure; at first she’d thought it might be Devon from the strangeness of the name, or if not maybe Yorkshire. But Loch Ness it said on the back. Loch Ness was definitely Scotland.)
Where is it, I mean from here? the girl said. I mean I know where Scotland is. But where in Scotland? How does a person go to this place?
A person can fly, or take a train, or a bus is probably cheapest, Brit said. A person needs an adult to buy that person a ticket, most probably. If a person wants to spend money a person could probably get a flight from here to somewhere reasonably near. Is it specifically this river the person wants to get to? Course it is. I can see. You’re clearly a big golfer. Doing the rounds of the rounds, doing a tour of all the golf courses in the country. I can always spot a golfer.
The girl went molten next to her with laughter.
How’s your birdie? I mean your eagle. How’s your bogey? Brit said.
They’re all fine thank you, the girl said.
You’ll have to be careful not to hit the ball into the water of the river whatsitsname, Brit said. Show me again. Gynack. Sounds a bit medical. What about Uncle Desmond? Is he a golfer? What about Simon? Have they got a car? They could drive you there.
I don’t know them, the girl said. I think they’re not relevant.
Not relevant? Nobody’s not relevant, Brit said.
I will hold you to that statement, the girl said. What I mean is, I think the card is just an example, and all that I need to take from it is the name of the place I’ve to get to.
So who sent you the card, then? Brit said. Could they drive you there? How about your family?
What if someone doesn’t have a family to drive her in a car? the girl said.
How do you mean, doesn’t have a family? Brit said.
Have you got a car? the girl said.
Would I be taking this train to work every day if I had a car? Brit said.
You might be, if you were environmentally minded, the girl said. Would you drive me to this place?
It’s the people who look after you who should take you, not someone you don’t know, Brit said. You can’t just ask strangers to drive you up and down the country. This is the twenty first century. Strangers are more dangerous than ever; we’ve never been more dangerous. Who looks after you?
Foster family, the girl said.
And where do the Foster family live? Brit said.
Then she said, oh. Foster family.
I have to get to here, the girl said. It is imperative. Soon as possible.
Your foster family’ll take you, Brit said.
The girl shook her head.
Why do you want to go there so much? Brit said. What’s happening there? Can’t be that urgent. Posted more than thirty years ago, ha ha.
To go there on a train, the girl said. Which station would you go to in London to get to it from?
Ask your foster mum. Get her to look it up on her phone, Brit said.
Can you look it up for me on your phone? the girl said.
Uh, Brit said. How about. If I do, will you do something for me?
I might, the girl said.
Deal, Brit said. Or clearly as much of a deal as I’m going to get.
She got her phone out. She saw how late for work she was. But she typed the name of the place in and held it up for the girl
to see.
Trains every day from here direct, Brit said. Or – you could go to this place, which is the … the what?
She put her finger on the word Edinburgh and showed the girl.
Capital of? Brit said.
Are all machines this patronizing? the girl said.
That’s machine nature for you, Brit said. Which reminds me. I’ve got work. Okay, so you get to there, and you change to another train to get to there.
If we went today, the girl said. Could we get there today?
If you went today, uh, I don’t know, Brit said. I’d say probably not. Not on a train. On a plane, yes. It’s pretty far north.
Oh.
The girl’s face fell.
You could probably get part of the way there in one day and do the rest the next, Brit said. But I better not be aiding and abetting a runaway telling you all this. You better not be running away.
It is not in my nature to run away from anything, the girl said.
Good. Right then, Brit said. You owe me.
Owe you what? the girl said.
I did something for you, Brit said. You promised you’d do something for me.
What I said was, I might, the girl said.
I want you to promise me, Brit said, that you’ll phone and tell the people who look after you where you are and what it is you’re thinking of doing.
Can’t, the girl said.
Why not? Brit said.
Don’t have a phone, the girl said.
She was up and off running towards the front of the station.
Tell me their names and a number for them, so I can let them know where you are, Brit called after her. Tell me the name of your school. At least.
Come on! the girl said. Quick. We’ll miss it.
I can’t go anywhere with you, Brit said.
She heard the girl tell the man who looked after the barriers that she didn’t have a ticket. The man opened the barriers anyway. She heard the girl say a flying thank you. She got her phone back out to dial – to dial what? Who? 999? Fire? Police? Ambulance?
When she looked up from her screen the girl had disappeared up towards the platforms.
She shook her head. She turned to go on down the road to work.
Three minutes down the airport road she stopped. She turned on her heels.
She ran back up to the station. She stood at the closed barriers.
Let me through, quick, will you? she called to the man who operated the barriers.
He came over.
Ticket? he said.
I just want to catch that kid up that you let through a minute ago, she said.
You’ll need a valid ticket, the man said.
Long long ago in the morning of what was actually still today, Brit had been on her way to work. But now, opposite her on a train speeding its way up the map of England, the girl, Florence, is talking about the invisible life she says there is in this –
she is pointing at a spill of water out of one of the water bottles on the table between them
– so he got the idea for the first microscopes, she is saying. He was something to do with the making of cloth and he wanted to be able to see what the threads he was making his cloth with looked like really close up. So he taught himself to grind glass out of sand, which is how you make glass.
No. Is it? Brit said.
Yeah, it really is, the girl says, and he ground it into exceptionally small but powerful lenses so he could look at things magnified hundreds and hundreds of times.
Exceptionally, Brit says.
Then he invented a wooden thing to hold the lenses up to your eye, the girl says, it was only this size, literally, because the lenses were so small too, but though his lenses were quite definitely tiny the human eye could still look through them and perceive the small things made massive.
Perceive, Brit says. Big word.
My mother always says as a general rule it’s a good thing to make the world bigger, not smaller, the girl says. And then the Dutchman thought, great, I can look at all sorts of things really close up now, and one day in the year 1670-something he was eating his lunch and there was pepper sprinkled on it. And he thought to himself, I bet if I look at a grain of pepper through one of my lenses that the grain of pepper will have sharp sides, or lots of prickles on it like a hedgehog, because that’s what it feels like on my tongue, like it’s pricking it with invisible pointed sticks. So he soaked some grains of pepper in water for like a month. And then he looked at the pepper-water through a lens that made it 200 times closer than the naked eye can see. And he saw that the water was filled with little, animalcules is the word he called them, like the word molecules, all swimming about. So he tried looking again, this time with water that didn’t have any pepper in it, and the animalcules were still there in it so that meant it wasn’t the pepper that put them there.
And there’s this other really cool thing he did. He used one of his lenses to look through the eye of a dragonfly. He cut into a dragonfly eye, the dragonfly was already dead –
How d’you know for sure? Brit says.
– don’t be horrible, and he took out a piece of its eye and placed it on one of his lenses. And when he looked through them both at once out of his window, the lens and the piece of dragonfly eye, he saw his own street, but like an app effect of his own street, with the same picture repeating from different angles a lot of times so it becomes dimension, and that’s how we know what some insects’ eyes can see and how.
And one of the other things he looked at was at the bacteria off his own teeth. And at rainwater. And he looked at the oil out of coffee beans, and at frogspawn, and, and anyway now we know what microbes are and what cells are and that the naked human eye can only see a fraction of what is actually there. And that this –
(the spill of water on the table)
– is full of life we can’t see, and just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t. It really really is. And if you look at, say, a pine needle, just a pine needle, a single needle out of the millions that grow on just one tree in just one pine wood, if you cut into a single one and magnify a fraction of it so you can look at its structure really close up, it looks like a painting or like stained glass, or a mosaic by ancient Romans or the wings of a butterfly, and you can see it’s got a cellular structure, and that pine needles are really cleverly designed so that they can make sunlight into nourishment when it’s winter, and hold on to enough moisture in the hot months of summer. And that’s how they stay green.
Basic biology. Stuff Brit knows already, or knew but has forgotten since school, where you have to know that kind of stuff to pass. But Brit is listening to the girl tell her it, sitting in the low flash of afternoon sun coming through the break in the cloud and hitting the train window between telegraph poles like a drumbeat, hitting Brit like she’s being played by light.
Truth be told, if Brit could thumb back through all the weeks of her time on earth so far, every one of its Mondays, she’d still end up 100% sure that she’s never been happier on a Monday afternoon than she is right now.
She is on a train with a child who’s nothing to do with her, going God knows where, God knows why.
She is not at work where she monitors indefinitely interned humans for a salary –
because looking is just the start of understanding, just its surface, the top layer of any understanding, the girl is saying
– and for sure it’s a long long time since Brit has even allowed herself to remember the more-than-one meaning in a word like cell. Strange, given that she works in a building full of them.
She’d got on the Edinburgh train at King’s Cross at the back and walked up the carriages watching out for the child. Five carriages in she’d spotted her sitting by herself at a table seat pulling her school shirt sleeves down inside her blazer sleeves.
The train slipped out into suburbs and open country and Brit stood in the space between the carriages masked by people’s luggage, keeping an eye on the g
irl through the glass of the door and holding her phone with the work number up on it.
She pressed call. Recep answered. She stepped back round the corner and asked to be put through to Stel.
They put her through to Stel’s office answerphone, where anyone in the office might hear her message as she was leaving it.
So she hung up and called Stel’s mobile. It put her through to its answerphone. Hi, she said, Stel, it’s Brit Hall here, listen. I’m on a train with the girl, you know that girl who got them to clean the place up last month? I think it’s her. I’m pretty sure it’s her. So I’m on this train, and she’s on the same train, I can see her from here, and I, uh, I –
She held her phone away from herself.
Train noise will have recorded itself on Stel’s answerphone for those few seconds.
She pressed 1.
The answerphone voice told her she could press 2 to re-record her message. She pressed 2. She held the phone in the train air and let it record that air over the track laid down by her own voice.
Then she put her phone back in her coat pocket and stepped on the place which makes the door slide open.
The girl looked up from a school notebook she had open in front of her.
Kept you a seat, she said. And furthermore.
She said it like they were still mid-conversation, like they hadn’t been in different trains crossing London separately for the last couple of hours.
If the force of just five more nuclear bombs going off anywhere in the world happens, she said, an eternal nuclear autumn will set in and there’ll be no more seasons.
Who taught you that paranoid rubbish? Brit said.
It’s not rubbish. It’s a bona fide warning for the future, the girl said. Don’t you know about how hot the seas are? If you don’t you can find it on the net. You can just look it up. It’s your future too as well as mine.
I thought you didn’t like using the net, Brit said.
I choose only to use it wisely, the girl said.
Who died and made you the new Socrates? Brit said.
I think if you’re talking classically you might mean the new Cassandra, the girl said.
Think you’re clever, Brit said.
Hope I am, the girl said. Clever enough. Hope you are too.
Oh, I’m plenty clever, thanks, Brit said.