by Ali Smith
Don’t think for a minute any of it is easy, she says to camera. It is truly very difficult.
She speaks beautifully, in a thoughtful and hard-won English.
Difficult how? he says.
What it means is, she says. We move from one invisibility to another. I had no rights. I still have no rights. I carried fear on my shoulders all the way across the world to this country you call yours. I still carry the fear on my shoulders. Now I see it like this. Fear is one of my belongings. Fear will always be a part of any belonging, anywhere, that I ever do, for the rest of my life. I fought hard, to get here to your country. And the first thing you did when I arrived was hand me a letter saying, Welcome to a country in which you are not welcome. You are now a designated unwelcome person with whom we will do as we please. Never mind the hundred battles I’d fought to get here. This was the lowest time for my soul. And that’s the very time at which my battle really began. But I’ve been lucky. I was helped. There are different ways to be a nobody. There are different kinds of invisibility. Some are more equal than others. I’m speaking, as you British say, from the mouth of the horse.
It’s a vicious circle, though, Richard says when he interviews the original coffee truck Alda. You’re disappearing people from a system which has already disappeared them.
Alda laughs.
To recoin a phrase, she says. We’re letting people take back control of their own hegemony.
How? he says.
Via a system of Auld Alliance network members all over this country from Thurso to Truro who are working for, not against, the people that other people have designated invisible, she says. It’s a circle, yes. But there’s nothing vicious in it.
What you’re doing’s not feasible in any real world scenario, Richard says.
It’s human, she says. There’s no scenario more real. I mean, if we’re talking humans in the real world.
Emergency help, he says to one silhouette who calls himself Aldo and arrives with his springer spaniel wet from the sea, which trails sand from Nairn beach all through the coffee truck and lies down with its head on its paws through the interview smelling of wet dog.
It isn’t permanent help, Richard says. Surely it does as much damage as good.
Any help is a help, Aldo says, reaching down to pat his dog’s head. Eh, Aldo? (Even the dog has an alias.)
But that’s not true, Richard says.
Wait till you ever need help, Aldo (the man) says.
Tell us, Richard says, where some of the people you’ve helped filter out of detention estate are now.
Every anonymous Alda/Aldo he asks shrugs or shakes a head.
What’s the monetary benefit for you from this? he asks each person.
Every Alda/Aldo laughs like he’s said something funny.
Where do you get your money from to make this network possible? he asks each person.
They shake their shadow-heads.
The original Alda tells him off camera one evening, don’t be silly. Use your eyes. We’re voluntary. Everyone does what they can. Everyone can do something useful. We share skills. It doesn’t take much. It doesn’t ask much. There’s always more to go round. We’re resourceful. There’s always a way. Look at you, finding the money for this film by selling off the stuff from your past. On the one hand an old Chinese plate and a tapestry, on the other, A Thousand Thousand People.
Richard has told her about him raising enough money to make this film, and repay the money on the contract he’s broken for another project he was working on, by raiding his parents’ old things, in storage, in crates untouched for well over a decade, and finding many things people are happily paying him real money for.
But what happens when that resource runs out? he says. This model can’t work for long.
Sometimes it doesn’t work full stop, she says. Sometimes it goes really wrong. But we sort it. We generally find other resources. One of us remortgaged a house recently. That cut us some slack. When it runs out we’ll think again. We know how lucky we are. We spread our luck around. We’re organized.
What about the police? he says. The security firms?
We’re breaking no law, she says. It’s not against the law, so far anyway, to help people who need help. And even if and when they find ways to say what we’re doing is illegal, no difference. We’ll still do it. Volunteers all across the country. Countrywide we’re trying to change the impossible, to move things an inch at a time all those thousands of miles towards the possible, and believe me, there are a thousand thousand people, to borrow your title, ready to help.
More truthfully? he says. More like thirty five of you, rather than a thousand thousand?
Well, we’re still new, she says. We’re just getting going. But a lot of people really don’t like the way that other people are being treated. A lot of people want to do something to remedy it.
People can’t live under the radar any more, he says.
And yet so many do, she says.
People can’t have unrecorded lives any more, he says.
We’re working to make the act of recording lives different, she says. You know we are. You are too. That’s why you’re here recording me.
He shakes his head.
Even so, what you’re doing’s impossible, he says. A pipe dream. They’ll smash it in a minute. This is a story for children. A fairy story.
It is, she says. You’re right. We are a fairy story. We’re a folk tale. I don’t mean to sound in the least fey. Those stories are deeply serious, all about transformation. How we’re changed by things. Or made to change. Or have to learn to change. And that’s what we’re working on, change. We’re serious, too.
She pours him another whisky out of the bottle in the cupboard in the coffee truck, the floor of which they’re both sitting on now in the dusk spring light.
Did you have this bottle in the truck that day we drove up here? he says.
The only beverage on the premises, she says.
Could’ve done with it that day, he says.
Quite a day, she says. People don’t usually come to us the way you first encountered us. That girl’s mother. People don’t usually get out again after the system’s swallowed them. You experienced an aberration that day. But then, sometimes there’s an improbability, a moment against the odds, and the door opens, the thinnest of cracks. We helped a whole group of women who that child came to the aid of. God knows how she did, I mean, what are the chances? They’re the chances. That’s what they are. You try not to miss them. A missed chance, a ruined life.
But I don’t know how that kid got her mother, or those other women, out of where they were. I don’t understand it. Above all I don’t understand for the life of me, none of us can, why she’d think it a good idea to bring SA4A here with her like she did. Like explicit sacrifice.
I thought they were friends, family, he says. I thought you were just being friendly, giving some people a lift, like you were giving me a lift too. And can I ask –
Ask away, she says.
Do you know yet what happened? he says. To the child, and the mother? I met the girl with no idea what was happening. So preoccupied with my own drama. But that girl, carrying such a weight. The weight of her own story, and even so. Stopping like she did to help me with mine.
Alda shakes her head.
We don’t know the end of that story, she says.
He has the Holiday Inn pen in his inside jacket pocket.
He will keep it in the inside pocket of every jacket or coat he wears for the rest of his life.
Five years from now, when he eventually tracks down the girl, Florence, now a young woman, the first thing he’ll do is take it out of his inside jacket pocket and show her.
But first there are more imminent futures to navigate.
Like this one.
An envelope arrives at Richard’s flat. It comes from a solicitor’s office. There’s an old book in it wrapped in tissue paper.
Its letter tells Richard its c
ontents have been left to him in the last will and testament of the late Patricia Heal.
Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Constable. 1948. Blue hardback, the gold lettering faded and gappy on the spine. Post-war paper, ration-era, yellowed, thin, rough to the touch. Handwriting on the inside front page, a girl’s. Patricia Hardiman.
For a couple of weeks just having it there on the table and seeing it every day as he moves about the room is enough.
One afternoon he opens the book near the front at random. He reads a funny, acrid story about middle-class people having a dinner party. The people are ludicrous, fragile, full of themselves and their self-importance, the stories they’re making up to themselves about their lives. Meanwhile in the garden of the house there’s a pear tree, in full blossom. It stands there laden with flowers, stunningly lovely, nothing to do with any of the people who look at it, or admire it, or think anything about it, or don’t even notice it, nothing to do with their realities and their delusions, their conquests and their failures, the knowledge or the naiveties of the people in the house who think they can own that tree.
What a great story.
It’s as he’s closing the book and he turns it over in his hands that he sees for the first time the pages covered in handwriting at the back.
It is Paddy’s handwriting.
He sees his name in her voice.
Hello Doubledick.
The handwriting is her later life handwriting. It starts on the inside back cover and continues for all six and a bit blank pages between the cover and the text, right up to the last page of the last story of the book, the book’s final words, in block capitals, THE END.
He get up. He pours himself a drink.
He sits down and opens that book at its end.
Hello Doubledick.
Snow is general all over Ireland, and London too, by God.
Cold feet, you said as you went today.
(Don’t say I never listen to you.)
When I got my first pay packet, 1948, for my first week’s work as dogsbody at London Films while they launched their Bonnie Prince Charlie, big flop, more’s the pity, I went direct to Foyles on Charing Cross Rd.
First thing I ever bought for myself with my own money, this book.
Yours now.
Here’s some research for your April.
Katherine Mansfield first, of course, who made a promise to her friend and loyal partner Ida Baker one day. When I die I’ll prove there’s no afterlife to you, she said, and Ida says how? and Katherine says, After I’m dead I’ll send you a coffin worm in a matchbox.
She says it because she knows it’ll make soft hearted Ida shriek and shriek, and it does, she squeals I don’t want you to send me a worm, so Katherine M says to her, okay, not a worm I promise, I’ll send you an earwig in a matchbox instead.
So. A few months later Katherine Mansfield has died, as we do. Her friend is grief stricken. She gets to a cottage she’s staying in somewhere or other, it’s a few weeks after Katherine M has died, and Ida’s dog-tired and sad and cold, and she goes to light the gas to make a pot of tea, picks up the matchbox and there are no matches in it.
But there’s something in it all right.
She opens it.
Earwig.
Rilke, now, he had a couple of afterlives that are a whole other matchbox of earwigs.
A countess called Nora was working on translations into English from German of the late Rilke’s elegies. She’d exchanged letters with Rilke about spiritualism in the years before his death (as opposed to after it, ha ha). So she thinks it’ll be a good idea to go to see a medium, quite a famous one, and get to meet the dead Rilke in person.
And the medium says is there anybody there, and the letters on the ouija board spell out R I L, and yes it’s the dead man himself come all the way up from the underworld to tell Countess Nora that he wants to work with her on her translations.
So the dead Rilke and the countess meet at a few seances and he tells her which words and phrases he wants changed in her versions.
Then he congratulates her on how close to his originals her English poems are, and tells her how honoured he’s been to work with her.
Hmm.
I prefer this kind of uncanny myself: you and I were just talking today about how they lived so close to each other, Katherine M and him, and never met, or if they did probably never knew they did. But after you went I was online having a browse for you and I found a letter that Rilke wrote, he was still in Sierre in Switzerland, and the letter is dated 10 Jan 23, which is the day after the day Katherine M dies in Fontainebleau, France.
He is writing to a friend in it about how much he’s been moved by reading some D H Lawrence in German, the novel The Rainbow. He loves it, he says, and reading it has opened a whole new chapter in his life.
Now, I know that Katherine M was good friends with Lawrence and his wife Frieda, and one day she’d confided in them some stories of her own erotic times when she was younger. And something very close to her own stories of her life – I mean close enough to make her very irate when she read it herself – definitely slipped into one of the characters in The Rainbow.
So guess who Rilke finally met? In fictional form, at least.
Now I’ve only one more afterlife for you, and I know I’ll annoy you Doubledick with this final life after death. Sometimes I talk about Chaplin just to watch you so sweetly pretending it means nothing to you that I’m talking about him.
But there’s a strange afterlife connection between Charlie Chaplin and Rilke. There’s a sort of connection with Katherine M too, who called her cat Charlie Chaplin, and then that cat chanced to have a couple of litters of kittens, which gave her quite a surprise, the first time anyway. (And I think one of those first kittens of Charlie Chaplin the cat might even have been named – April.)
In the 1930s Charlie Chaplin is visiting St Moritz. He makes some well-heeled new friends, an Egyptian businessman and his wife, a lovely clever woman called Nimet. One night at dinner Chaplin takes a napkin off the table and ties it round the beautiful Nimet’s head like she has terrible toothache. Then he pretends to be a dentist taking out a tooth, and he holds the tooth up, a lump of sugar out of the sugar bowl.
Now, I’m pretty sure this Nimet is the same beautiful Egyptian woman Rilke picked the roses for, the day the rose thorn pricked his finger with the fairy-tale real-life consequence.
My beloved Chaplin. He moved to Switzerland for good, you know, in the 1950s, when the US threw him out for being too bolshevik and for telling the workers some truths about the machine age in Modern Times. He bought a grand house and grounds, only about an hour away these days from the place Rilke and Mansfield had lived 30 years earlier. He used to come out of his house and shake his fists at the Swiss army practising their gunfire in the valleys and the mountains round his new estate.
He’s got a ghost or two wandering the world – one particularly lucrative haunting is the one making money for the Hollywood bar owner who says Chaplin still regularly visits a booth in his bar that used to be reserved for him.
But my own favourite of the Chaplin afterlives is the adventure his own mortal remains went on after he died.
Do you remember how his coffin was dug up from its grave and stolen? This is forty years ago, when we were still young. He died in the December and they stole him in the March. The police told the journalists, like something out of the bible, The grave is empty! The coffin is gone! It was missing from March till May, with a great number of fraudsters phoning the Chaplin family all the time asking for money and promising the return of the body, before the police caught two mechanics, dirt poor, political refugees. They’d dug him up, taken a photo of the coffin covered in mud, loaded it into the back of their old car and rattled it a mile down the road from where he last lived, where they buried it in a farmer’s cornfield.
The silent remains of the silent star.
Quiet as the grave, in a grave that’s not a grave, on what�
��s his 89th birthday in the middle of April 1978, under the earth under the green shoots under the birdsong under the air under the cold spring sky.
Expect the unexpected afterlives, Doubledick. Life goes on.
For today, I hope you dried those socks and shoes. For tomorrow, may your feet always be warm, old friend.
Your own,
your ever,
your earwig,
P.
Then her handwriting ends, round the words printed in the book,
THE END
and just above these there’s the text of the last story in the book, ending with the lines:
“God! what a woman you are,” said the man. “You make me so infernally proud – dearest, that I … I tell you!”
and Paddy has written an annotation with an arrow pointing to these last lines.
Proud of you, Doubledick. Blaze the trail. Make it your film, not his film.
In a break between interviews one sunny rainy day in that first spring after Paddy, he walks to the place called Clava about a mile down the road from the battlefield car park.
At Clava there’s a gathering of ancient burial cairns from 4,000 years ago, tombs that would at one point have been ten feet high, roofed and dark. The burial mounds are now just rings of stones wide open to the sky. They’re made of circles of piled-up large and small stones, with a cohort of standing stones round them like they’re keeping watch on the tombs.
It’s spring but it’s cold. He chooses the tomb most in the sun. He goes down its stone passageway. He stands in a grave and looks up at the clouds.
There’s nothing at all left of whoever was once buried here. There’s nothing here but piles of stone, trodden path, grass scattered with daisies and clover, bare spring trees whose trunks are bright green with the damp and the moss, above his head an occasional bird call.
Richard walks out of the tomb.
(That’s something you can’t say every day.)
There’s nobody else visiting Clava today. Good. That’s lucky. He’s been warned how busy it can be.
He’s been told, too, how a few years ago a tourist from Belgium helped himself to one of these stones, picked it up and took it home with him. A few months later the Inverness Tourist Office received a stone in the post and a map of the place he’d taken it from in Clava. Please put this stone back, the enclosed letter said. My daughter’s broken a leg, my wife is really unwell, I myself have lost my job and broken an arm. Please apologize to the spirit of the place from which I took this stone.