Spring

by Ali Smith

  Paddy raises her eyebrows.

  The song starts up again.

  Ah, Richard says.

  Paddy and the twin laugh. The other twin, in a bedroom somewhere behind them, laughs too.

  What is it? Richard says.

  Number one in the charts right now, one twin says.

  Terry Jacks. Seasons in the Sun, the other calls through.

  You’ve tried phoning them, Richard says.

  Dial-a-disc, the twin on the landing says.

  Both twins crack up laughing.

  We’ve phoned, Paddy says, we’ve rung a doorbell, we’ve knocked at the back and the front and hammered on their walls. We’ve thrown stones at their windows. You might say we’re pretty damn certain they’re not in.

  It’s been playing since half past four this afternoon, the twin in the bedroom calls.

  The stylus’ll wear out, Richard says.

  Diamond. Could be days, the first twin says.

  Police? Richard says.

  Paddy gives him a withering look.

  She won’t call the police and she won’t let us call the police, the twin in the bedroom shouts through.

  What if someone’s dead in there? he says.

  Even if they were she still wouldn’t let us call the police, the other twin says.

  If they’re in there and not already dead I’ll happily oblige, the bedroom twin shouts.

  The song finishes and starts again.

  And even if the Hardwicks are dead in there, the other twin says, Terry Jacks is proving immortal.

  More than forty years later, Richard remembers how he’d climbed on to a flat roof and jemmied a window, hoisted himself into an empty house, followed the tune through to the lounge and lifted the arm on a record player, how he’d taken the single off the turntable and brought it back to Paddy’s, and how then at four in the morning she put a pencil through its turntable hole and all four of them sat and watched, drank coffee, that instant kind everybody drank with powdered milk, while a twin held the 45 as close as he could to the gas fire with all its elements lit.

  Then Richard went back in through the window he’d left open and put the single, folded in half, on the carpet next to their record player with a note under it saying One Too Many Seasons In The Sun.

  He closed and snibbed the window to make it seem like no one had been in, and he left by the back door, which he unlocked with a key he found on the upper ledge of the doorframe. He locked it again with this key. He gave the key to Paddy.

  In case Terry Jacks ever rises from the dead, he said.

  That made both twins laugh.

  He laughs now – on a road in another country on a journey with a bunch of people he’s never met.

  It’s like the 60s all over again.

  He is not dead.

  Ha ha!

  He smiles at the woman in the security uniform in delight. She gives him a really strange look.

  The amazing thing about remembering this story, after all the years, is that he is actually feeling affection for the twins. Sweet Dermot laughing. Sweet soft-hearted little Patrick with his hands over his face laughing.

  The woman in the uniform is clearly waiting for him to say something back to her. The girl is looking to him expectantly too. But he has no idea what anyone’s been saying.

  Sometimes, he says, we don’t know why people do what they do. But we can only do our best, the best we can do, in response, and try to be as good-humoured as possible while we do it.

  I don’t see that there was much chance for him to be good-humoured about it, the security guard says. Since the Nazis were obviously about to shoot him in the head.

  The Nazis?

  Uh.

  Richard tries to think of something suitable to say.

  An awful time, he says. Truly. I always feel so relieved not to have had to live through it. Always on television now, always the same awful pieces of footage, the same faces, same thugs shouting don’t buy from Jews, same shopfronts with the slogans painted on them, same terrorized bullied people being filmed walking towards trains or away from them in the mud, same old Hitler shouting footage. As if such terrible history’s a kind of entertainment. All that poison. All that anger. All that brutality. All that loss. You’d think we’d learn from it. But no, instead we play it on repeat, let it play away in the corner of the room while we go on with our lives regardless. Terrible times, easily resurrected. Type in some words, up it comes on any screen. It’s a bit like that song playing a minute ago on the radio. I have this same thought in supermarkets too when they play, you know, music from decades ago as if it’s the soundtrack of now. Well, it is the soundtrack of now. It’s as if. As if someone hobbled a horse. Made it hard for it to move forward without something dragging it back.

  The security woman thanks him.

  Pleasure, he says.

  He winks over at the girl who got him off the rails. There are so many people in this front cabin of the truck that she is pressed hard against the door and can hardly turn her head.

  You all right there? he says.

  I’m okay, she says. I’m doing my best in response to my situation and being as good-humoured as I can while I’m doing it.

  Everybody laughs.

  Anyone driving towards them and past them at that moment will have seen an image Richard knows he’d have liked to have caught on film.

  Think you’re funny, the security guard says.

  I am funny, the girl says.

  Funny in the head, the security guard says.

  Then there’s a silence in the truck except for the song called The Final Countdown on the radio, which Alda reaches over and switches off.

  Better? she says to Richard.

  I’m sorry, he says. Didn’t mean to complain.

  But look, she says. You were right. That’s us completely unhobbled now.

  She puts her foot down. The truck speeds up.

  They can go at quite a lick, these trucks.

  How far is it? the girl asks again.

  The battlefield, Alda says. Well now.

  We’re going to a battlefield? Richard says. The battlefield?

  How far? the girl asks.

  Tell her how far, the security guard says.

  Not far, Alda says.

  In units of minute, hour, day, week or month? the girl says.

  It’s, by my estimate, let’s see now, Alda says. One legend and a couple of old songs away.

  Songs? Britt says. Is she going to sing?

  Did you know, Alda says, that the word slogan was a Gaelic word originally? Your man there saying the word reminded me. From the words for the shout of the army. Sluagh-ghairm. Slogan. It means war cry. Tells you all you need to know about what slogans are always about, whether it’s take back control or leave means leave or don’t buy from Jews or I’m lovin’ it or just do it or every little helps.

  He’s not my man, the security guard says.

  I don’t care what language the time passes in, the girl says. So long as it passes.

  April 1st, 1976: a day as full of all the usual possibilities as any old day; day of deeply troubling news stories, day of narrative strategy and reality, day of the word symbiotic, whatever it might mean, above all, day of an unexpected very good fuck, one towards which, Richard finally understands, he has always been travelling hopefully, since that’s what love is, this matter of hopeful travel against the usual deeply troubling odds.

  Why do you call me Doubledick? he says afterwards with his head on her arm in her bed.

  Why what, darling man? Paddy says.

  (Paddy, right next to him, is what she calls away with the fairies.)

  It’s in honour of my exceptional prowess, isn’t it? he says.

  What is? she says. Oh. Doubledick. Ha.

  Obviously I’d like to think it is, he says. But since you’ve been calling me it for years, ever since we first met, I know it can’t be anything to do with an exceptional prowess you’ve only experienced for the firs
t time today. Unless you’ve been imagining me. Which means that right now, God forbid, you may well be a bit disappointed.

  She laughs.

  Nothing to do with your dick, Dick, she says.

  Oh. Oh well, he says.

  And I like a good fuck as much as the next person, and that was a very good fuck. Thanks. No, your double name’s lifted from an old Charles Dickens story.

  Oh, he says. Now I’m a bit disappointed.

  Not a very famous story, she says, but one about a young man who’s got the same name as you.

  Richard or Lease? Richard says.

  Story of Richard Doubledick, Paddy says. When we first met, and you told me your name was Richard, I’d never met a Richard other than this fictional one, so the word that followed your name in my head, quite naturally did and always will, is Doubledick. And now you’ve taken on the shape of the words.

  As the scriptwriter said to the naked man, Richard says. How does it go?

  Quite a bit of the old up and down in the plot, Paddy says. So you’ve got this young man, his name’s Richard Doubledick, and he’s enlisted as a soldier. He’s not a great soldier – he’s not a great anything. He’s had a bad start in life, a terrible childhood, he’s an unhappy soul, very lost in life, so miserable with himself that he’s taken to troublemaking. But then an officer takes an interest in him, befriends him, helps him sort himself out, treats him like family. Very soon Doubledick becomes a first-class fighting machine. Then that officer is killed in battle and Richard Doubledick is heartbroken. He declares he’ll avenge the death if it’s the last thing he does and that he’ll spend his whole life devoted to that vengeance.

  So. The years pass –

  They do, Richard says. They will.

  – and he falls in love, Paddy says, and gets married to a lovely woman, someone he loves with his whole heart. He goes to meet her people, and he realizes when he arrives at their family seat for the first time that he’s married into the heart of the family of the very officer who killed his beloved captain.

  Ah, Richard says.

  I know, she says.

  Well, what does he do?

  Isn’t that the question, Paddy says. Isn’t that always the question. Because what he does is why this story is a great story. He lets go of the bitterness. He decides to let bygones be bygones. And the story ends prophetically, in a vision of the son of one side of the family fighting alongside the son of the other side of the family on the same side against a common enemy, French and English in the same trench together. War won’t stop, the story says. But enmity can. Things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what’s unthinkable and impossible at one time will be easily possible in another.

  I was a girl when I read it, just turned thirteen. It was my very last schoolday. My life right then had no possibles. My father was newly dead, there was no money, we had to go out to work, even my littlest sister, she was eleven. We weren’t stupid, none of us was. My father, a brilliant man, wasted. Found dead on a road he’d helped make. I mean a road he’d been a labourer on. We’d no chance. And the police were brutal fuckers. It was a brutal time. One of our older sisters, too, dead that year. Maggie. Tuberculosis. Nineteen years old, funny and nimble she was, I can see her now in my head turning on her heel and making light of something, she loved the dancing, loved kissing a boy or two, and we were very alike, her and me. The town photographer had taken our photo, remember how they still colourized photos by hand then, and he’d chosen me out of the whole family and coloured my cheeks the same red as he did hers. Which only added to my feeling I’d next to no chance.

  So I’m in the library and there’s an empty fire grate in the library, the nuns weren’t much on warmth, I’m sitting next to it out of a hope that an empty grate might still hold a bit of heat. I sit with the book in my hands and I think to myself, this is maybe the last day I’ll ever have the chance to sit and hold a book.

  We’d no books of our own. We didn’t have books.

  I’d picked the first that came to hand off the shelf. I was determined, I was going to read a story from its start to its finish if it was the last thing I did. And I thought as I turned its pages, my life is as empty a hearth as that one, I’m the ashes in that grate.

  But time’s factory’s a secret place, that’s Charles Dickens again. Sometimes we’re lucky. With a bit of help and a bit of luck, we get to be more than the one thing or the nothing that history’d have us be. We’re only here by the grace and the work of others. I am anyway. Here’s to those others who helped, that’s my prayer when I go to my bed, and may I be such an other to a good many myself.

  I’m definitely here right now by the grace of you, Richard says.

  I don’t think that place you’ve your hand on is generally called grace, Paddy says. But come on then, will we make it a double, Dick?

  That’s what I call living up to my reputation, he says.

  Afterwards they make up jokes about Hard Times and she invents funny imaginary sex acts that might be given the name Doubledickens. Then Paddy sends him downstairs to make a pot of tea and when he comes back up with the tea things on a tray she’s showered, got all her clothes back on again and they drink the tea.

  And that’s that.

  He opens one eye for a moment to check on the time. 13.04 on the clock next to the speedo. The woman called Alda is singing a song in a language that sounds like it would if your subconscious had a language and could sing.

  He closes the eye.

  The child Paddy at age thirteen is sitting by an empty grate holding a book in her folded arms pressed to her chest like a talisman.

  She is so thin he can see right through her.

  Behind her there’s a line of children that goes so far back it never stops. They’re in clothes as ragged as suits of dead leaves. Their hands are the only things small enough to reach inside the industrial machines and clean out the oily gunk and the fibres, of which their lungs are already full. But no hand can go inside and clean out their lungs.

  Thank God those days are over, he thinks.

  Thank God it’s better in the world right now.

  Update yourself, the child Paddy says.

  She sounds very like his imaginary daughter.

  Kids down the mines right now, she says, right this minute, right this very 13.04. You know there are. They’re mining the cobalt for all the environmentally sound electric cars.

  Kids right now in the rags of Hello Kitty clothes sitting in slave labour sheds hitting old dead batteries with hammers to get metals out of them that poison them as soon as they touch them.

  Kids eating rubbish on landfill mountains.

  Kids of all ages who’re good for sex money, used and filmed and swapped and filmed again, the money changing hands up over their heads right now, 13.04. Thousands of kids who don’t know where their parents are, whether they’re alive or dead, whether they’ll ever see parents again, kids locked in freezing cold warehouses in the US. Right now. In these days you’ve just called better in the world. Kids by themselves all over this country, who get here by crossing the world then just disappear. Not forgetting the hundreds of thousands of kids born and living here, surviving on God knows what, on air, in a whole new version of the same old British poverty.

  A thousand thousand thousand of us. And if they, I mean we, don’t sew fast enough, the line of children stretching away for miles behind the child Paddy tells him, then the people running the factory hold our hands under the needles, make us put our feet on the footpumps and press down and sew thread through our own hands. There isn’t a T-shirt in existence, there isn’t a common chocolate bar we haven’t a hand in the making of. There isn’t a history we’re not deep in the pigfat of the money of. We’re the factory. We’re eaten alive. That makes us the hungriest ghosts. And you’re poor thin things for us to survive off, that’s a fact.

  It’s definitely Paddy, the voice speaking.

  So has
his imaginary daughter maybe been the child Paddy all along?

  When he thinks this, the ragged child in his head spits fire at him. Her hand is on fire. She waves it at him to get his attention. Embers drip off her fingers, fall and smash open on the ground at her feet in little burning fractures of light.

  Stop making it all about you, Doubledick, she says. Wake yourself up, for Christ sake.

  13.05 when he opens his eyes.

  He opens them because the haunting singing has stopped.

  They’re driving over the brow of a hill and the view has opened very prettily below them to a body of water, a bridge, a glinting city.

  Where are we? he says.

  Where were you? Alda says.

  Your songs came over me like lullaby, he says. Like the unconscious has a language it can speak in. The unconscious, the subconscious, I’ve never known the difference. What I mean is, it sounded like one of them was singing.

  I know you mean well, but it’s a conscious and everyday and very real language, Alda says. But thanks for your, eh. What’ll we call it? Romanticism, I suppose.

  Sedative songs, the security woman says. You could market them on the net. Make a fortune.

  Thanks, Alda says. I think.

  Where we are is nearly there, yes? the girl says.

  An urgent child, Richard says. Best impetus in the world.

  I just have to stop off in town for a couple of things, Alda says. We weren’t expecting to be picking up quite so many of you today.

  She turns to Richard.

  And when you said that thing about your friend dying, she says. Something I wanted to ask you. I was wondering if you might maybe have had something to do with the TV play from years ago, it was called Andy Hoffnung. Did you?

  Richard rubs his forehead, puts the heel of his hand in one eye.

  Am I dreaming? he asks the girl.

  You’re awake enough to have offended Alda about the Gaelic language and to have offended me by referring to me as a child, the girl says.

  Then I’m definitely here, he says. But I may still be asleep. Being perfectly capable of causing offence in my sleep too.

  He turns to Alda.

  I made Andy Hoffnung, he says.