by Ali Smith
her: only in the highlands eh where we welcome everybody a hundred thousand welcomes that’s our motto a warm welcome even to ghosts aye even to the ghosts of the imagined
him: you’re a very versatile people
her: right enough
(Laughter)
him: beautiful haunting songs I’m assuming you’re a native speaker
her: no I went to evening class I wanted to learn a language my own family spoke two centuries ago and then were made to stop speaking not that it’s a dead language it’s thriving blah didn’t choose it at school partly because it was too much work sounded too difficult blah courses five years and now I can sing in it which is a start
– at least thank God the creepy singing, in the language that sounds like nothing Brit has ever heard in her life (even in Spring House with all its languages, and it is a horrible feeling when you can’t speak a language and aren’t in charge of or superior to the person who’s speaking it, who might be saying anything at all and you haven’t a fucking clue and no right to tell them to be quiet or choose to ignore them), has stopped.
At least the songs about things like your own footsteps following you wherever you go and being so much bigger than you are finished.
Children born up here in this country growing up hearing stuff like that must be freaked out all the time.
Or if not then they must be incredibly well adjusted when unbelievable things happen to them.
At least now too Brit has stopped feeling bad herself.
She has been quite surprised by how unpleasant she is to other people without even thinking, and by how bad her being unpleasant to other people is currently making her feel.
But she’s the only person in this van who’s really got Florence’s back. It is lucky Brit is here. No one else is even noticing, except Brit. While the singing was happening Florence’s whole self was like a coiled spring, what Torq says in his gay way when he’s trying to describe people who are tense. Now they’re talking about some music machine from the past and nobody has noticed that Florence is getting more and more nervy.
Even so, Florence says the nice thing about her when the man is telling the story of the inventor of the machine. She says,
Brittany’s an inventor too, she has really good ideas for making things.
They aren’t listening to her and don’t hear her. But Brit hears her say it.
Last night in the Holiday Inn, before she goes to her own room, Brit gives Florence some of the chocolate she got for them both out of the machine in the corridor and makes sure everything’s all right for her in the room she’s been given.
Anything you need? Want me to tell you a bedtime story? she says.
She is half serious. That’s what you’re meant to do, isn’t it, when you settle a kid to sleep.
Get with the nearly adolescent programme, Brittany, Florence says.
Your loss, Brit says.
Loss of what? And how? Florence says.
Of me telling you a bedtime story. You’ll never know, now, ever, the story I would’ve told you, Brit says.
Actually, I have a story for you, Florence says. No, not so much a story. More a question.
I’m listening, Brit says.
What is refugee chic? Florence says.
I don’t know, Brit says. Is this a trick question?
No, Florence says. I seriously want to know what it is.
Is it a band? Brit says.
It’s words I saw on the floor of the bus, Florence says. It was on the front of one of those magazines that come with the newspapers at the weekend. It was a picture of some people wearing clothes, and the words on it were Refugee Chic. And I was thinking about it because, considering that I am already worrying about getting up tomorrow morning with no clean change of underwear, I have begun to wonder what it would be like to never know what was going to happen to you next, or to have no way of getting yourself clean or of knowing whether you’d have a clean place to rest, before it all started again the next day.
You trying to get round me with all this lefty hand-wringing talk? Brit says.
Florence shrugs her eyes.
Or is this a manipulative attempt to get me to wash out some clothes for you? Brit says. Because you’re twelve. Which is too old for a bedtime story and old enough to wash your own. Do it now and hang them in there on the radiator with the towels on it. They’ll dry by tomorrow.
I’m just asking. What is it? Florence says again. What is refugee chic?
Brit turns her back to the girl, leans against the TV desk, puts her hands over her own face like there’s something she doesn’t want to see.
I have no fucking idea what I’m doing here, she says.
You’re my private security guard, Florence says. You’re keeping me SA4A. SA4A with you, SA4A for you, SA4A together.
Those are SA4A straplines. They’re on the posters all through the centre telling anyone who reads them about SA4A’s policy of equal treatment for all regardless of gender, race or religion.
You are taking the piss out of me, Brit says still with her hands over her eyes. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare make fun of me.
I’m not, Florence says. I wouldn’t. I’m just speaking one of our languages.
Why do you even need a private security guard? Brit says. You’re fine in the world. You’ve got it made. You do your thing and it all just opens like fucking flowers for you. You don’t need me.
I do, Florence says. Don’t you get it? It’s the most obvious thing ever.
No, Brit said. I don’t get it. Okay?
Brittany, we are humanizing the machine, Florence says. Get with the humanizing the machine programme
We are? Brit says.
Yes, Florence says. I can’t do it without you. Nobody can.
Brit still has her hands over her eyes.
Explain, she says from behind her hands.
Okay, so, Florence says. The machine only works because on the one hand humans make it work and on the other hand humans let it work. Yes? Agreed?
Uh huh, Brit says.
So I thought I’d try employing it direct. Ask it to work for me for a change, Florence says. And it said yes. You said yes.
Oh, Brit says still seeing only the insides of her own hands. And what are you going to pay me for doing this employment that’s got absolutely zilcho future prospects for me?
My respects, Florence says. Your dues. Our debt to society.
Think you’re so clever with words, Brit says.
I am, Florence says. I’m going to write books. Some day you’ll read the book I’ll write about you.
Is that a promise or a threat? Brit says.
Florence laughs.
You tell me, machine, she says.
Brit finally turns, takes her hands away from her face, looks straight at Florence.
Cause what I really don’t get, she says. Why pick me? Why me and not anyone else getting off my train? There were plenty other SA4A staff on that train. Quite a lot of us on shift change, and they all walked past you this morning too. So why me? What was it about me? What was it you thought you could tell by just looking at me that made you think, yeah, that person, rather than that one, or that one?
Brittany, Florence says.
What? Brit says.
Gelf, Florence says.
What’s gelf mean? she says.
Get over yourself, Florence says.
Brit sighs.
Lucky that that’s where we’re going tomorrow, then, she says.
Where? Florence says.
The place you showed me on the postcard. The gelf course, Brit says.
And you ask me why I chose you, Florence says.
She throws her arms in the air like a comedy presenter on a kids’ TV show.
In her own room later Brit lies on the bed flicking channels between a show about pitbulls maybe getting put down or maybe getting saved from legally having to be destroyed, and an episode of The Apprentice where the cretins who’ve
signed up for it are making doughnuts with flavours nobody will ever pay money to eat, just so they can be ritually humiliated in the second half of the episode.
She wonders if she’ll get up in the morning to find Florence’s room empty and Florence gone.
She knows she won’t.
She knows Florence’ll be there all right.
An animal in the zoo next to the hotel is making a noise, lowing, to use an old word from history and songs that nobody uses in real life any more. Definitely a word she’s never had call herself to use for anything. But it’s a good word for it. It sounds low, the noise.
She thinks of all the different kinds of animals just a stone’s throw away.
God all fucking mighty. In a minute she’ll be wondering what it’s really truly like to be a fucking bison or penguin or whatever.
Tell myself a bedtime story, she thinks.
Once there was a Detainee Custody Officer who was on to something. But what? It was mysterious, and at the same time really straightforward. It could cost her her job. Or it might mean a better job. It could be a game changer at work. But it might also be bigger than work. It might be a life changer.
In any case, she couldn’t not do it, couldn’t not have done it.
She did not have a choice.
She knows now that the story about the sex house is easily true. That girl in the room along the corridor could definitely easily have walked into the sex house and got right up their noses, making them feel and act like they’ve never acted before and making them stop what they’re doing and open the locked doors and windows and look the other way while all those girls got out of there.
She can picture their stunned faces. She can feel their rage when the typical Florence concussion effect fades enough for them to remember who they are and how much cash has just walked out the door.
But how that kid will have managed to do this without getting raped and killed, and without the protection of a whole army of private security guards, is what Brit can’t work out.
There’s also a chance that those people who run that place will have been changed by it, and by her – properly changed, changed at life level. Rather than just having an hour’s blurred new vision then back to the usual.
Brit imagines them cleaning themselves up, cleaning up the fetid rooms, throwing out the fetid bedstuff, treating with gentleness what girls and women were left in there then letting them go, cleaned up, apologized to, given their cut of the money they’ve made, off out into the world with something of the freedom those girls and women originally thought they’d have, coming here in the first place.
She switches the TV off.
She gets into the hotel bed.
She thinks in the dark and in the sound of the creature lowing, not an unpleasant sound, not an anxious sound, just a sound she’s never heard before, a sound new to her, from an animal letting people and animals know that it’s stuck in a zoo and is wondering if anything else anywhere in the neighbourhood speaks its language. It will want to talk about being stuck in a zoo. It will want to say, are there other lives possible for me than this one in here?
The girl is like someone or something out of a legend or a story, the kind of story that on the one hand isn’t really about real life but on the other is the only way you ever really understand anything about real life.
She makes people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world.
Get over yourself.
Brit laughs in the dark.
What is refugee chic.
She’s, what’s the word?
Another old word from history and songs that nobody uses in real life any more.
She is good.
But this is the point in the story when the girl will pull a fast one after all.
So it isn’t, wasn’t, goodness.
Or if it is, it’s a good that’s not and has never really been about Brit anyway.
So fuck that.
They’re on their way into a Tesco. They pull into the car park and the woman switches the engine off and they all get out and say goodbye to the filmmaker, and all the way into the shop the woman is talking about her mother’s soup, listing what they’ll need. Leeks, celery, carrots, a big potato, a garlic, some sprigs of thyme.
She’s said that phrase my mother’s soup several times. It may be a coded reference to something to do with Florence’s mother, but may also just as well be boring information about the woman’s mother making some soup.
This Tesco is like the ones in England. It’s one of those big Tescos that even have their own post office. It has a rack of postcards at the front of it, pictures of the place where they are. Brit stops and picks one off the rack, of a cartoon Loch Ness monster in a real lake. She thinks for a minute about sending a postcard. But who would she send it to? Her mother? Stel? Torq? Josh?
Like she’s on a holiday.
She thinks it and her usual life enters her like she’s been taken over by a live dead thing. She hangs heavy from her own shoulders over Florence at the vegetable racks, turns and hangs over the bags of salad and her shoulders feel as big and as dead to her as the dead person’s shoulders look in the old films where a scientist makes a person out of bits of dead people.
Any minute now, though Brit doesn’t know it yet, the woman and Florence are going to dodge her.
They’ll both go to the ladies’ toilet, where there’s suddenly quite a queue of women falling in behind them, so that Brit gets blocked and is made to wait outside.
They’ll go in and not come out. When she goes in to look they won’t be in either of the stalls.
She’ll run up and down the supermarket aisles. She’ll run outside to the car park.
She’ll have gone, the girl will have gone, without taking her schoolbag.
It will feel urgent, that she gets the schoolbag to the girl.
Then she’ll despise herself. Because she has been tricked. Because it was never about her. Because she was never a real part of the story.
She was just an extra in it.
She was the hired help.
She’ll stand with the filmmaker in the car park at a loss in the space where the van was. In fact Brit will be feeling that word loss like she has never felt it, apart from when she was the girl’s age and her father died. The world will tilt. She will stand at a loss like a loss is a rail on the side of a ship and what’s been lost is somewhere deep in a sea the ship is stuck on the surface of.
Call a taxi, the filmmaker’ll be saying.
In a minute, she’ll say.
Will I fuck, she will think.
She’ll phone the SA4A Countrywide 24-Hour Hotline number.
What’s the name of that battlefield again? she’ll say as she waits for them to answer.
That was Brit in autumn.
It’s spring now. Here’s a window (one of the kind that opens) on to DCO Brittany Hall’s spring in Spring House IRC, let’s choose a late March day, typical Tuesday afternoon.
She’s at work on a shift with Russell.
He’s laughing like a drain at the empty bowl someone’s left outside the Kurdish guy who’s on hunger strike’s door. He is pretending that Brit ate something then left the bowl outside empty to taunt the Kurdish deet.
She is not finding it funny.
Who was it ate it if you didn’t? Russell is saying to Brit. You did, you greedy cunt.
Brit is saying nothing, so as not to annoy Russell. Russell is a dick. But he’s her friend in here, isn’t he? And you need your friends in here.
There hasn’t been promotion.
There’s been nothing, nothing from management at all, though Stel will report back to her that she’d heard via the office that SA4A top level were very grateful at the time for her phonecall, particularly because they couldn’t get the facial rec tech to work on the girl’s face, partly because of angles and age and ethnicity – Stel always gets annoyed that facial rec doesn’t work on black people very well, which mean
s people get arrested who aren’t the right people, sometimes aren’t even the right gender – and partly because the system, for whatever reason, just refused to work.
Also, Stel tells her, it’s down to her, and management knows it’s down to her, that SA4A and the HO have been able to identify ringleaders and are working to shut down a wannabe underground railroad group using the railway system at both ends of the country, a network run by cynical activists aiding and abetting illegals for illegal gain, and that her help with this is bound to be on her record for when they look to see who they want to promote.
The woman? The story goes, deported.
But the story also goes, she was picked up, kept in for two months, got let out on indefinite in case of media attention (she’s got a story now) and can be picked up again when interest dies down.
The girl? Legally can’t be picked up, dep’d or anything till she’s eighteen and legally becomes a citizen, or not, depending on whether she’s got legal papers.
Information Brit isn’t party to.
Back in October Brit had small gatherings of staff from across the wings crowding round her in the Ladies three times in total, asking her to tell them what happened.
She told them about getting out there to the battlefield in a taxi in time to see the SA4A vans arrive in the car park.
She left out how she watched the uniforms spread out across the landscape and ran off herself in the opposite direction across paths and grass, through tourists on holiday, visitors doing a tour, till she stopped and bent over and was as sick as a dog next to a sign with the words Conservation in Action on it.
What she said is this sort of thing:
I think literally hypnosis. Not just me but several train guards and a woman in the Holiday Inn. I saw it happen to the other people and didn’t realize it was happening to me too. Like when Derren Brown can make people do things on TV they’ve no idea they’re doing or why they’re doing. Hardly recognized myself. I reckon she hypnotized the facial rec system too. If you can do it to a person I bet she could do it to appliances. I mean a lot of machines are designed to listen to us. So, I mean, what if they’re really listening to people?