Spring

by Ali Smith

  There’s a paragraph written like a wall, of the obscene kinds of twitter language. Then there’s a really good story, like a fairy story, about a girl who refuses to dance herself to death even though a whole villageful of people and millions of people online want her to.

  She closes the book and puts it on top of the girl’s schoolbag. Pink.

  Brit’s own favourite colour is blue.

  Her favourite song is Heroes by Alesso (though she also likes the Adele song When We Were Young because it reminds her of Josh and her, back when they were at school, back before Josh’s back went).

  Her favourite food is anything burnt or covered in barbecue sauce.

  Her favourite drink is vodka.

  Her favourite thing to wear is nothing at all (but she wouldn’t say such a thing to a child, she talked about her little blue All Saints dress instead), her favourite place is Florida where she and her mum and her dad went on holiday when she was ten, her favourite season is winter, her favourite day of the week is Friday, if she was an animal she’d be a lioness, bird a kestrel, insect something that can eat spiders.

  Thing she’s good at? inventing things.

  Fave way to die? in bed asleep knowing nothing whatsoever about it.

  The battery charger in your trainers so that you charge things while you just walk around is a brilliant invention idea, the girl had said. Someone should make those right now and sell them. You should leave your job and make those. Also, we both like the same day best. And. If we were seasons, I would be following you.

  You’d be the end of me, Brit said. You’d kill me off.

  No, you’d make me be possible, the girl now leaning against her fast asleep had said.

  Then all afternoon on the train, whenever anybody went past wearing blue the girl nudged her and said the word blue.

  Who has given a fuck about Brit’s favourite anything for more than ten seconds in the last ten years?

  It is like being in a fairy tale herself.

  She should text her mother. I’m in an effing fairy tale. Wonder what will happen.

  It feels a little dangerous, to be so close to fairy tale.

  What role is she meant to be playing? Is she older and wiser and there to give advice?

  Is she magic? Or in need of magic? Is she jealous? Is she enchanted? Is she lost in the wood, young and foolish and about to learn a lesson? Is she the guardian of something really precious?

  Is she wicked, or good?

  She looks out into the darkness, seeing nothing but her own face.

  (She’ll be surprised, on the way back down south in a couple of days, when she sees a sea out there which on the way up she’d absolutely no idea was there.)

  Somebody somewhere will be worrying themselves sick about where this child is.

  She will try to find out who to tell.

  Plus, when they hear about this at work nobody will believe it.

  Plus, she is definitely tailing the girl’s parents now, or at least one of them.

  There may be promotion in it.

  She gets her phone out of her pocket as carefully as she can so as not to disturb the sleeping girl.

  She texts Josh for the first time since the summer fight.

  Hey Josh its me i have some latin translation for you text me back tell me what does it mean vivunt spe

  What SA4A IRC Manager Bernard Oates and Florence Smith said to each other that day in September:

  – Hi.

  – What the f –

  – I’m here today to ask you some questions.

  – You’re what?

  – So. Firstly. My first question is.

  – Who are you?

  – Why are all the toilets for the people who are being detained by you in here so dirty?

  – The –? (Calling) Sandra! Sandra, can you come in here a moment?

  – Okay, so what I plan to do is, when you can’t or don’t answer a question I ask, I won’t bother you with it again, I’ll just go on to the next question. So, my next question is: Why do you handcuff the people who come here when they’re being brought here or taken out of here, when they aren’t actually criminals?

  – Did Graham put you in here? Did he, did they, who told you to ask me about toilets?

  – Okay, thanks. Next question is two questions. Why, when you bring people here, do you bring them in the middle of the night? And why do you use vans whose windows are blacked out when it’s dark in the middle of the night anyway?

  – Was it Evie in Personnel? Did Evie put you up to this?

  – Okay, so we’ll go to my next question, which is this. Why do the doors on the rooms here have no handles on the inside?

  – How do you – Are you in the family unit? You can’t do a school thing here. You can’t do a project about here. This is a restricted area.

  – Okay. Why is it the Prison and Probation department and the people who work for it who are dealing with people who are refugees and have come to this country from other countries they can’t stay in because of things like being tortured or wars or not having enough to eat?

  – Stop asking these, these. What are you writing down?

  – Mr Oates, did you know you’re breaking the law? It says in law that you can only legally detain someone in this country for seventy two hours before you have to charge them with a crime.

  – You’re not allowed. It’s not allowed, you need clearance, you’re not permitted to be –

  – The other thing I wanted to ask is. I read online yesterday that the High Court has said it’s also illegal to detain, in detention centres like this one, people who have been tortured. And then I read that the Home Office redefined the word torture to give it a more ‘narrow’ definition. So I wanted to ask someone who might know. What is a narrow definition of torture and what is a broad definition of torture?

  – Okay, I’m now going to ask you to leave. Please leave. I’m asking you politely to leave. Please leave this office. Now I’ve asked you twice politely to leave, have you got that on record? If you don’t comply I’m going to initiate the security alert. Right, I’ve called security now. They’ll be here any – (Calling) Sandra. SANDRA, get in here. SANDRA. Where the fucking – where the –

  – Okay. So, there are only a few more questions. Is migrating to another country because you need help actually a crime?

  – Is this being filmed? Are you recording this? Who wrote these questions for you? What’s the story here?

  – The story is, I’m a twelve-year-old girl sitting on a chair in your office asking you questions about where you work. I am way old enough to read and comprehend books and things published on the net, and I’ve been reading up a lot about these things, partly because they touch my life personally but also because I am curious about them anyway, and some of the things I’ve read made me want to ask some questions to the people responsible, and you are one of those people.

  – Responsible for what? What are you claiming I’m responsible for? Where’s the camera? Is this a news thing? Is this a paper? Is it Panorama? Are you Channel 4?

  – I guess what your story is will depend on what you do about the questions I’ve asked you today, and whether you do anything or nothing or something positive or something negative or something worse or something better. And I’d like to thank you very much for being so informative about how things are today.

  – Informative? How exactly have I been informative, and about what?

  – Goodbye and thank you very much, Mr Oates.

  – Hey. HEY. When was I informative? HEY.

  Last night, cut a long story short, the girl said they should stay in a hotel near Edinburgh zoo.

  So they did.

  Brit had heard the lowing o, o, o, sound of some beast or other in a compound all night and this morning the sound of unfamiliar birds.

  But get this. When she went to the desk after breakfast this morning to pay, the woman waved Brit’s bank card away.

  You’ll be room 62 travelling
with Miss Florence Smith in 68, she said.

  Yes, Brit had said.

  Nothing to pay, the woman said. Have a good journey.

  But the look on that woman’s face was one of stunnedness, the look belonging to the moment before the shock at herself doing such a thing reached her actual face.

  Then they go for a train.

  A ticket guy opens the gate for Florence with a bow and lets Brit through too. A ticket woman on the train asks everybody but them for tickets. When the train is delayed, the ticket woman comes into the carriage, stops at their table and apologizes for the delay as if especially to them.

  You and me, kid, Brit says after the ticket woman leaves the carriage again. I’m starting to think we could conquer the world.

  I’m not interested in conquering anything, Florence says.

  I feel like I’ve run away and joined some kind of happy clappy circus, Brit says. How are you doing it?

  I’m not doing anything, Florence says.

  Then when they get to the station in the place on the postcard, an old guy who’s lost the plot delays them even more.

  Brit turns at the exit as the train’s pulling out of the station and sees Florence way down at the other end of the long platform.

  She sprints down the platform.

  Swing your legs up, Florence is saying to a dishevelled-looking man down on the tracks. Sit here on the side first. Then, one, two, swing them up.

  Three station officials are also running towards the man, who’s weeping, his arms out from his sides like he can’t bear to have his own arms touch him. Two of them leap off the platform and haul him back up to platform level. Then they don’t let go of him.

  He lost his – what was it you lost, again? Florence is saying. Something fell on to the tracks. What was it?

  My, ah, my pen, the man says.

  His pen, Florence says. He dropped his pen.

  It fell out of my hand, he says, I, I had it in my hand and I flicked it in the air by mistake, it flew through the air, and as it’s of great sentimental, ah, uh.

  A pen, a woman who’s a station guard of some sort says.

  Yes, the man says.

  You went illegally and recklessly down on to some tracks where you could have caused a fatality or grievous hurt and trauma, the woman says. And not just to yourself but to all the people on that train that just went. Never mind us working here. Who might’ve suffered untold damage to our employment status too. And without regard to the effect on an already stretched timetable all up and down the country. All because you dropped a pen. Now I’ve heard it all. Where’s this pen? I’d like to see the pen that could’ve lost you your life and me my job.

  Here, Florence says.

  She hands the man a biro Brit recognizes as one of the free pens in the hotel rooms they stayed in last night.

  Brit laughs.

  A Holiday Inn pen? the woman says.

  Great, the man says. Sentimental.

  It means a lot to him, Florence says.

  The man starts crying again.

  You don’t have to keep hold of him like that. You can let him go now, Florence says.

  The two men holding him let go of the man’s arms. Then they look a little surprised at the fact that they’ve just done that. This makes all three station workers bluster. They kick off about how the man has committed an offence. The woman says something about police and gets out a phone.

  Florence gives her a friendly look.

  More a case of lost and found than offence, Florence says. Something was lost, then it got found. Didn’t mean any harm. No harm done.

  The woman looks at her then looks to the crying man.

  However, I’m of a mind that no harm’s been done in this instance, she says.

  Then her face looks bewildered at hearing herself say it.

  What it looks like, Brit thinks. What this feels like.

  The station workers all have the same concussed look. They disappear through doors into different parts of the building and she and Florence walk the crying man to the front of the station, where the man blows his nose on his sleeve. He apologizes for doing that disgusting thing. He sits on a bench at the front of the station and he talks about how he’s always liked stations because they’re the places people come and go from, which means they must be places charged with emotion, and then he goes on about how once he was walking away from the station he used to come and go from in his home town, he hadn’t been there for a long time but he’d come to see the stuff he’d still got in storage there after his parents had died, and when he walked away from the entrance to the station he heard someone behind him singing a bit of a song and he couldn’t think what the song was, he knew it but couldn’t remember its name, and the voice was a nice voice, then he remembered the song was called Every Time We Say Goodbye, and he could hear steps behind him, so he slowed down to let the person pass, and the person who passed him was a young woman, if it had been her singing she wasn’t singing any more and she was way too young and wearing the wrong sort of clothes to know such an old-fashioned song or to know how to sing a song like that with such feeling.

  The man stops speaking.

  Good, because he is actually quite boring.

  Tears start down his face again.

  Brit smiles her work smile, the smile she uses when people, staff and deets both, cry on the wing.

  How about we get him a coffee? she says.

  Would you like a coffee? Florence says to the man.

  He’s a drunk, Brit says. There’s a coffee van.

  I’m not drunk. And that van doesn’t do coffee, the man says.

  Yes it does, Brit says. It says coffee on the side of it.

  Brit goes over to the van.

  When she comes back over, the man has stopped the crying thank God.

  You a filmmaker? she says to him.

  Of sorts, he says.

  Does that mean you are or you aren’t? she says.

  But he gestures with his head at Florence, who’s now the one crying instead.

  What did you do to her? Brit says so suddenly full of protection that she has to stop herself from punching the man in the head.

  He says the library’s closed, Florence says.

  The man takes a few steps back from the fierce look on Brit’s face.

  Well, it is, the man says. It’s true. It’s closed on a Tuesday.

  That’s no problem, Brit says.

  She puts an arm round Florence.

  That’s nothing to cry about, she says. We can go to another library. We can go to one in a bigger town.

  I really needed the library here to be open, Florence says.

  We can easy look up whatever you need on my phone, Brit says. Library in my pocket. Here. What do you need to look up?

  I’ve got to get to the place on the card, Florence says, then get to the library in the place. I don’t have any other message, or any more message, than that.

  Brit takes her by the shoulders and turns her towards the coffee van.

  See that woman over there, in there? she says.

  Florence wipes an eye and looks.

  Do you know her?

  Florence shakes her head.

  Well, she knows you, Brit says.

  How? Florence says.

  She just asked me straight out whether you’re Florence, Brit says.

  Who is she? Florence says.

  Funny, that’s pretty much the question she just asked me, Brit says. I went over there to buy some coffee and she said she didn’t do coffee.

  And then she said, is that girl standing over there next to the man you’re with by any chance named Florence?

  And I didn’t say anything. And then she looked me up and down and she said,

  I’ve already made the acquaintance of Mr Filmmaker but who might you be when you’re at home, Mrs SA4A Uniform?

  So I said,

  thing is, Mrs Coffee Van That Isn’t A Fucking Coffee Van. I’m not at home right now. I’m a
long, long way from home. And that means I might be anybody. Anybody at all.

  March. It can be pretty hard going.

  Lion and lamb. The cold shoulder of spring.

  Month of the kind of blossom that could still be snow, month of the papery unsheathing of the heads of the daffodils. The soldiers’ month, it takes its name from Mars, the Roman war god; in Gaelic it’s the winter-spring, and in Old Saxon the rough month, because of the roughness of its winds.

  But it’s also the lengthening-month, the one when the day begins to stretch. Month of madnesses and unexpected mellownesses, month of new life. Before the Gregorian calendar the new year started not in January but in March, to celebrate both the vernal equinox with its tilt of the North towards the sun again, and the Feast of the Annunciation, the day the angel appears to the Virgin Mary and announces that even though she’s a virgin she’ll conceive, and by good Spirit.

  Surprise. Happy new year. Everything impossible is possible.

  The air lifts. It’s the scent of commencement, initiation, threshold. The air lets you know quite ceremonially that something has changed. Primroses deep in the ivy throw wide the arms of their leaves. Colour slashes across the everyday. The deep blue of grape hyacinths, the bright yellows in wastelands catching the eyes of the people on trains. Birds visit the leafless trees, but not leafless like in winter; now the branches stiffen, the ends of the twigs glow like low-burning candles.

  Then the rain, and the first sign of the branch splitting open to blossom on the old tree, the light inside visible in the wood, you can see it even at night under the streetlamp.

  If you rise at dawn in a clear sky, and during the month of March, they say you can catch a bag of air so intoxicated with the essence of spring that when it is distilled and prepared, it will produce an oil of gold, remedy enough to heal all ailments.

  That’s the voice of the artist Tacita Dean, who in the mid 1990s, when she was thirty years old and the artist in residence for a year at L’École Nationale des Beaux Arts de Bourges in France, decided it was time to try to do something she’d always wanted to do when she was a child – to catch and keep a cloud, maybe even start a cloud collection.