by Ali Smith
Cue a lot of jokes about liberal elite toasters, bleeding heart hairdryers, politically correct washing machines.
By her third day back at work people knew the story and stopped being interested. By the fourth not even the deets were asking any more.
She listened one winter night to the song by the person called Noname, the one called Self, that the girl told her was a favourite song.
She was surprised at how obscene some of the lyrics are. There is a lot of bad language in it. A twelve-year-old girl really shouldn’t be listening to music like that. That’s bad parenting.
After it, the Nina Simone song, about how things are going to get easier, sounded – well, Brit had two images in her head, one of a Disney cat like the ones in the old film The Aristocats, and the other a real cat, the one the boys from the other side of the park superglued to a tree back when Brit was twelve herself.
One Noname line stuck in Brit’s head too – the one where she says something about a female cunt writing a thesis about colonialism.
Brit looked up the word colonialism on a web dictionary to remind herself exactly.
A practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another.
It is a funny image, a cunt writing a thesis at a university. Maybe it means they’re all cunts at university, ho ho ho.
But that girl was bright, like close to insane bright. She’d have been one of the cleverest people in her year at her school. Brit still has the Hot Air book, in fact she still has, in her wardrobe underneath the pile of jumpers, the schoolbag. There’s a pencil case in it too, full of pens of different colours. Some nights, when she’s not faffing about online, Brit reads things to herself out of the book, the funny pages, about realism, the foul things people really say or tweet. She has worked out, from how the girl has positioned them on the pages, that some of the pieces have been written to go together as if they are in sort of dialogues with each other, the right wing stuff answered by a voice bigger than it, the earth speaking, or time or her favourite season, and the story about the person with no face answering the ways people are used by the technology they think they’re the ones using, and the foul things people send people on twitter answered by the story of the girl who refuses the people who want her to dance herself to death.
Brit quite often gets the book out specifically to read that villager story.
But invariably she ends up feeling bad when she looks at the Hot Air book.
One reason is that at the front, under the words RISE MY DAUGHTER ABOVE, a different older handwriting has written this: All through your life people will be ready and waiting to tell you that what you are speaking is a lot of hot air. This is because people like to put people down. But I want you to write your thoughts and ideas in this book, because then this book and what you write in it will help lift your feet off the ground and even to fly like you are a bird, since hot air rises and can not just carry us but help us rise above.
This paragraph of handwriting really annoys Brit.
Her mother never gave or made her a book like this one.
Sometimes she thinks she could try to find the school. She could return the book in the schoolbag to the school and they will maybe have a forwarding address for it.
The girl said she had a little brother.
Brit wonders where he is too. Maybe she could find him and give him the book to give to his sister.
Vivunt spe.
Or she could just burn the book and throw the schoolbag away.
She doesn’t yet know which of these she’ll end up doing.
Josh texts her back a week after she texted him from that train.
It means live in hope or they are living hope. Something like that. Unusual conjugation. No doubt you already looked it up on google. Hope you’re okay Brit jx. Him using her name like that at the end of the message made her feel like he was patronizing her.
She won’t yet have seen Josh again, by March.
She said to Torq, the first time she was on shift with him after she got back from Scotland, that she’d been to the country he’s from.
I heard, he said. I know all the latest news. Where were you exactly, Britannia?
She got up a map on her phone.
Here. Then here. Then here.
He pointed to a place on the map quite close to one of the places she’d been, and then he said something she didn’t understand because he was speaking in that melted sounding language they have there.
Fàsaidh leanabh is labhraidh e faclan a theanga fhèin, faclan a dh’fhoghlamaicheas na h-uibhir den t-saoghal dha nach eil nam faclan ann. Ach, dhan leanabh ’s gach fear is tè a dham bheil a dhàimh, tha brìgh sna faclan sin agus is eòl dhaibh am brìgh. Èist rium, bi an leanabh sin is greim aca, bhon fhìor-thoiseach. Air gach sian, dorch is soilleir, trom is eutrom, a thig an rathad.
For some reason just hearing it made her angry. It made her near tears. It felt like being bullied did, back when she was at school and had to pretend she wasn’t clever. Then Torq made it worse by smiling at her like he really liked her while he made the impossible sounding sounds.
Her throat started to hurt like it does when you try to stop yourself crying. It was the language that was making it hurt.
What I’m saying, he said, roughly translated and losing a lot of the beauty in the translation, is this.
A child grows up saying words that the rest of the world tells the child aren’t words. But the child and everybody the child holds dear all know that the words mean, and what the words mean. Listen, that child will be equipped, from the very beginning. For everything, dark and light, heavy and light, that life will bring to that child.
Whatever, Brit said. If you say so.
It’s called Living Language, Torquil said. Smior na cànain. It’s a poem. Written on my heart, Britannia, like Calais and Mary Queen of Scots.
I have no fucking idea what you’re on about most of the time, mate, she said.
Uh huh, he said. But hey. I’m well equipped for that.
All that Really channel Most Haunted stuff they taught you in your childhood up there must have deepfried your brain, she called at him down the corridor with her throat pulsing inside her.
It was pulsing like she was a string on a musical instrument that was being played against its will.
Different languages shouldn’t be allowed in England.
Britain. She meant Britain.
Basically, from then on she’d find herself more often than not hanging out and signing up for shifts with Russell.
She is sorry for the hunger striker.
But there’s nothing she can do.
She picks up the bowl and gives it to one of the kitchen deets to take to the kitchen.
End of day.
Outside the IRC the little hedges are now one hedge. You can’t see where one plant ends and another begins.
She is down on her knees breaking the branch off when Stel goes past.
You all right, Brit? Lost something?
Got it now, Brit says. Thanks.
This time next week it’ll be lovely and light with the hour going forward, Stel says.
Brit nods.
Yeah, lovely.
She puts her hand in her pocket with the twig inside it. On the train she crushes one of the leaves and holds to her nose the smell of the green colour.
What you doing with all that boxwood in here? her mother says next morning, when she comes in and sees the pile of twigs, dried, old, dull, green, fresh, shining, on Brit’s table in her room, because Brit’s still in bed so well past the alarm going off that her mother’s had to come in to get her up.
Boxwood.
Who knew her mother would know what kind of a hedge it is?
Her mother never lets on about knowing anything, but she does, she knows loads.
The 24-hour BBC news is already on and blaring in the front room as per. Same old meltdown. What on earth’ll happen etc. Same old noise. Same old same old, over and o
ver, lots of noise, signifying nothing. Phrase from school. William Shakespeare. They’d read it round the class. A man takes over a kingdom by foul means not fair. But the ghosts are on to him, and the trees form an army and march to get him.
She gets up.
She pulls on clothes.
Her mother has taken the hedge twigs and put them in the kitchen bin. Brit sees them in there when she goes to put the teabag in.
Got to stop taking my work home with me, she thinks to herself.
But right now? It’s still October.
There’s a countrywide wintering to go through yet.
Out on the old battlefield the autumn tourists are heading between the flags marking where the different armies were.
They wander past the Well of the Dead. They take photos of the Memorial Cairn. They visit the only cottage left standing now that was there on the day of the battle.
They bend to read the low stones carved with the names of the clans that fell at this place or that, the day the Jacobite army led by Charlie the Scottish Frenchman fought the Government army led by his cousin Billy the English German in the cold spring sleet and the hail, and the soldiers of Billy’s army, largely because they’d lost so badly to the Highlanders the last few times they fought, and had since worked to perfect the new sideways stabbing action with their bayonets and swords and the new kneeling/standing rifle-firing and loading rota, managed to beat them, and all the local men and women and children out counting the corpses on the road between Culloden and Inverness in the aftermath of the battle had to hide from the Redcoats so they’d not end up being bloody meat themselves.
Fastforward a blink of history’s eye, 272 years from then, give or take a half year.
Here’s today’s battlefield:
a child runs across the grass over the bones of the dead and leaps into the arms of a young woman.
Can you imagine seeing a heart leap? That’s what it looks like.
The young woman wraps her arms around the child.
They stand there like that and it’s like the world can’t not coalesce round it.
Then what looks like a small mob of people in uniform is running towards them across the grass. From a distance it looks like someone must be making a comedy film, like an old Keystone Cops silent, there are so many people running with such fierceness at a woman and a child.
It’s not hard for the uniforms to surround them. They don’t run away, the child and the woman. They just stand there hugging as if they’re one person, not two.
The people in the uniforms separate the woman and the child.
The woman and the child are taken separately back to the main car park.
The child is placed in the back of one van and the woman, who they handcuff, in the other.
The vans start up and drive off.
A few tourists who see it happening follow the woman, the child and the officials to the car park, keeping their distance. A few more people round the car park, including some actors who’ve come out of the visitor centre dressed up as people from the past, a bit like ghosts, ghosts from both sides of the battle, watch them being loaded into the vans.
One of the actors gets a phone out from under his costume and starts taking phone footage. Several people get their phones out to do this. When they hold the phones up people in SA4A uniforms come towards them waving their arms and shouting at them to stop filming.
The people keep filming anyway. They film the vans going.
When the vans have gone they film the white woman who is standing shouting in the middle of the road at the going vans, like shouting at them’ll make a difference. They film her being loaded into the police car. They film the police car driving off with the woman in it.
They film the man watching it all, who comes over to them and asks the people who’ve recorded what’s happening on their phones if he can have their contact details.
They ask him, what just happened? What’s going on? What was it about?
Then it’s back to the trail over the war graves, or into the visitor centre, warmer than out here. The 360-degree CGI re-enactment of the last battle fought on British soil is reputed to be really good, to really bring the battle to life. 700 Highlanders dead in three minutes and a free audio guide with GPS. Not too expensive, rated excellent, five stars from most of the people on TripAdvisor.
And that’s all there is, for now anyway.
Story over.
Well, almost:
April.
It teaches us everything.
The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April.
The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness.
Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year.
Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month.
In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different.
Month of dead deities coming back to life.
In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title.
April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.
Pass any flowering bush or tree and you can’t not hear it, the buzz of the engine, the new life already at work in it, time’s factory.
Acknowledgements and thanks
I’m indebted, above all, to the refugees and
detainees who’ve spoken to me or written
about what it’s like to be detained indefinitely
at a UK Immigration Removal Centre and
especially to an anonymous friend who
told me about everyday life in this
country’s IRCs.
Thank you, Simon,
thank you, Anna,
thank you, Hermione, Ellie, Lesley B, Lesley L, Sarah C
and everyone at Hamish Hamilton and Penguin.
Thank you, Andrew,
thank you, Tracy,
and everyone at Wylie’s.
Huge thank you to Tacita Dean.
Thank you, Julie Fowlis and Raghnaid Sandilands.
Thank you, Rachel Foss, Gerri Kimber,
Andrea Newbery, Howard Nelson.
Special thanks to Kate Thomson and Lucy Harris.
Thank you, Mary.
Thank you, Xandra.
Thank you, Sarah.
THE BEGINNING
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HAMISH HAMILTON
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First published 2019
Copyright © Ali Smith, 2019
Cover artwork by David Hockney, Late Spring Tunnel, May, 2006, oil on 2 canvases (48”x36” each, 48”x72” overall), © David Hockney, Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt.
Extracts from Katherine Mansfield’s letters are taken from The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, 5 vols. (OUP, Oxford, 1984–2008), especially vols. 4 and 5 (1996 and 2008). Reprinted by kind permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Katherine Mansfield.
Excerpt from ‘The Tenth Elegy’ in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, collected in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Random House, 1982), edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell.
ISBN: 978-0-241-97334-9
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