by Ali Smith
Em –, the voice said.
Then there was a pause.
The other thing about Milton, I said, is that he was a great maker-up of words, and one of the reasons they named a rose after him, not just because it was an anniversary of his birth or death, I can’t remember which, in 2008, is that he’s actually the person who invented, just made up, out of nothing, the word fragrance. Well, not out of nothing, from a Latin root, but you know what I mean.
I waited but nobody spoke, so I went on.
And gloom, I said. And lovelorn, and even the word padlock we wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for him just making it up. I wonder what we’d call padlocks if we didn’t call them padlocks.
Then the voice began saying something serious-sounding about something. But I wasn’t listening, I had seen a bird above the green of me, a swift, I saw it soar high in the air with its wings arched and I remembered as if I were actually seeing it happen again in front of my eyes something from back when we were first married, on holiday in Greece having breakfast one morning in our hotel.
It’s a warm windy morning, it must be very windy because the force of the wind has grounded a swift, the kind of bird that’s never supposed to land, a young one, still small. In a moment you’re up on your feet, you drop your knife against your plate, cross the courtyard and scoop the bird up in both hands; it struggles back against you and a couple of times nearly wings itself free, but you cup it gently back in again, its head surprisingly grey and its eyes like black beads in the cup of your hands; I have never seen and am unlikely ever again to see a swift so clearly or so close. You carry it up the several flights of stairs till we get to the open-air roof of the building, you go to the very edge of the roof with it and then I see you throw your arms up and fling the bird into the air.
For a moment it rose, it opened its wings and held the wind. But then it fell, it was too young, the wind was still too strong for it. We ran down all those stairs as fast as we could and went out into the street to look for it, we looked all up and down the street directly below, but we couldn’t find it. So God knows whether it made it. God knows whether it didn’t.
Hello? the voice was saying more and more insistent, more and more officious in my ear, hello? but I was looking open-mouthed at the first burst of colour, a coiled whorl of deep pink inches away from my eyes, rich and layered petal after petal in the unfold of petal.
The scent was, yes, of roses, and look, four new buds round this opened flower had appeared too, I’d not noticed them till now and they looked as if they were really ready to open, about to any minute.
Yes, I said into the phone. Sorry. Hello.
Urgency, update, condition? the voice said.
Fine, I said. Life’s fine. Life has definitely improved.
Yes, but. Results, hospital, inconclusive, the voice said. Urgent, immediate, straight away.
The voice had become implacable.
Surgery policy, the voice said.
Then it softened.
Here, it said. Help.
Well, I said, for now I’m okay though at some point soon I might need a bit of a hand with some trellising.
With –? the voice said.
I’m so sorry, I said, but I’m on a train and we may lose reception any mo –
I pressed the End Call button then switched my phone off because all four of those new buds had opened right before my eyes and I was annoyed that because I had been talking on a phone I had not seen a single one of them do it.
I have never yet managed to see the moment of the petals of a bud unfurling. I might dedicate the rest of my life to it and might still never see it. No, not might, will: I will dedicate the rest of my life, in which I walk forward into this blossoming. When there’s no blossom I will dead-head and wait. It’ll be back. That’s the nature of things.
As it is, I am careful when kissing, or when taking anyone in my arms. I warn them about the thorns. I treat myself with care. I guard against pests and frost-damage. I am careful with my roots. I know they need depth and darkness, and any shit that comes my way I know exactly what to do with. I’m composed when it comes to compost.
Here’s my father, a week before he died. He’s in the hospital bed, hardly conscious. Don’t wake me, he says, whatever you do. He turns over away from us, his back to us. Then he reaches down into the bed as if he’s adjusting one of the tubes that go in and out of him and, as if there’s nobody here but him – can he really be – the only word for it isn’t an easeful word, it’s the word wanking. Whatever he’s doing under the covers for those few seconds he takes, it makes the word wank beautiful. He’s dying. Death can wait.
A branch breaks into flower at the right-hand side of my forehead with a vigour that makes me proud.
Here we all are, small, on the back seat, our father driving, we’re on holiday. There’s a cassette playing: The Spinners; they’re a folk band from TV, they do songs from all over the world. They do a song about a mongoose and a song about the aeroplane that crashed with the Manchester United team on board the time a lot of them died. That’s a modern ballad, our father has told us, and there’s a more traditional ballad on that same cassette too, about two lovers who die young and tragically and are buried next to each other in the same graveyard, that’s the song playing right now in the car in the July dark as we drive back to the caravan site, the man from The Spinners singing the words and from her heart grew a red red rose. And from his heart grew a briar. They grew and they grew on the old church wall. Till they could grow no higher. When we get back to the caravan and get into our beds in the smell of toothpaste and soap-bags, when the breathing of all the others regulates and becomes rhythmic, I will be wide awake thinking about the dead lovers, they are wearing football strips, bright red, and their hearts are a tangle of briars and thorns, and one of my brothers shifts in his sleep and turns to me in the makeshift bed and says from somewhere near sleep, are you having a bad dream? and then though I don’t say anything at all he takes me and turns me round, puts one arm under me so my head is on his shoulder and his other arm across my front, and that’s how he holds me, sleeping himself, until I fall asleep too.
Every flower open on me nods its heavy head.
I lie in my bed in a home I’m learning to let go of and I listen to my neighbour playing the drums through the wall in the middle of the night. He’s not bad. He’s getting better, getting the hang of it.
Every rose opens into a layering of itself, a dense-packed grandeur that holds until it spills. On days that are still I can trace, if I want, exactly where I’ve been just by doubling back on myself and following the trail I’ve left.
But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leaf-grimy corners of yards.
York City Children’s Library made me the writer I am, Kate Atkinson told me. Then she told me about the adult ticket they decided they’d issue her there at the age of six because she was taking out so many books.
She went on to describe how the quite small area in that City Library which was originally the children’s section is the place where all the library’s books are now, that everywhere else is filled with computers or space dedicated to genealogy, and how it’s not called the City Library any more, how now it’s called the York Experience.
Her daughter Helen Clyne interrupted to say that the important thing about the notion of a public library now is that it’s the one place you can just turn up to, a free space, a democratic space where anyone can go and be there with other people, and you don’t need money –
a clean, well-lighted place, Kate said –
whose underlying municipal truth is that it
isn’t a shop, Helen said. And you can just go. It’s somewhere you can just be. People of all ages all round you. It doesn’t have to be educational. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing. Young or old. Rich or homeless. It doesn’t matter. You can just go there.
So it’s not about books any more? I said. Or it’s about more than books?
It maybe always was, Helen said.
In that books have always been about people? I said.
Well, of course. But there was a culture that encouraged us, and now it doesn’t exist, Kate said. I bought very few books when the girls were young. We went to the library. And nobody bought books when I was young either. I went to the library.
It was what we did, Helen said. It was a habit, a ritual. You borrowed it, you read it, you brought it back and chose something else, and someone else read whatever you read after and before you. It was communal. That’s what public library means: something communal.
The poet
So she’d taken the book and she’d thrown it across the room and when it hit the wall then fell to the floor with its pages open it nearly broke, which was one of the worst things you could do, maybe a worse thing even than saying a blasphemous curse, no, than saying a blasphemous curse in a church, or near a church, to break a book.
And she was a strong lass and she had a good throw on her, as good a throw as a boy any day, easily as good as thon holiday boy she’d shoved into the river. For he might be at school down south but that didn’t mean no folk knew Latin north of Edinburgh, did it, they had the Latin up here as well, not that he even knew what he claimed to anyway. Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit she’d said and he’d looked at her blank-like, the so-called boy scholar who’d never heard of Horace, who said pater and mater to rhyme with alligator, with the mater and the pater vacationing in Nairnshire, so taken with the area, and then he’d said the thing about highland girls and looked at her to let her know he’d a liking, the cheek of it. For he might have a father a famous surgeon but that meant nothing when you’d no need of a surgeon, aye, and no need of a father either, or a mother. And were all Edinburgh boys that feart to hang off the parapet of a bridge by their arms? He was too feart even to try, him and his sister afraid to climb even a tree, and a girl afraid of a tree was one thing, but a boy? Oh no, his clothes he said and his sister with her painted face and her talk of boyfriends, standing doing a dance, everybody’s doing it back at home, don’t you know it, Olive, really truly don’t you up here och dear me that’s too too, then she started doing it, a mad thing with her shoulders and her legs, right there in the long grass at the river, the midges jazzing up and down in a cloud above the sister’s head, and then the brother joined in, he knew the steps too, he shimmied up the riverbank away from the sister, took her own arm as if to make her do it too and then – Well, then he’d found himself in the river, and his good clothes too.
Then she’d run for home, blasphem-o blasphem-as blasphem-at, over and over under her breath to the sound of her own feet hitting the path past the ruined church, blasphem-amus, blasphem-atus, blasphem-ant, it wasn’t grammatical or real Latin like but it made a fine sound. She was laughing some, though she was shocked a bit at herself for doing it, in her head she could see the shock on the face of the boy from the cold of the water when he scrambled to his feet on the slippy stones, the water had darkened his good trews and his jacket too all up the side of himself he’d fallen on.
But it was when she was blasphemating up the High Street she saw the father of the man who was her father. He had his back to her, he was looking in the windows of the butcher’s. And when she got back to the house her Aunt was out and her mother she could hear shifting about upstairs like a piece of misery as usual, and something, a badness, had come over her right then and she’d hated them all (except her Aunt, she’d never hate her Aunt) and she’d gone to the shelf where the books were kept and she’d taken the first one off the shelf her hand had come to and she’d thrown it.
And the book had broken right open and that’s when she’d seen there was a music inside it, one nobody knew about, one you could never have guessed at, that was part of the way that the book had been made.
They were Fraser books. They’d sent them, the Frasers. There were books, and good new clothes too came to the house sometimes, and one day last month – it wasn’t a birthday, it was well past her birthday, but Aunt said it would be meant for her sixteenth – there was even a watch, Aunt said a real gold one and put it away upstairs in its velvet in its hard box still in the shop wrapping from Aberdeen, for they knew otherwise it’d end in the river or buried in sand on the beach, sand choking its dainty face and nobody finding it for who knows how many summers or winters, if ever.
St Agnes Eve! Ah, bitter chill it was. The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold. The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass. That was the poem Keats had written, about her birthdate, 20 January, four long months ago her birthday, and one thing certain, time meant something more than the face of a wee gold watch, aye they could send a watch fine, even one that’d obviously cost a fair bit, but if they saw her in the street they’d look right through her, her father too. Since she was a quite wee girl he’d been back and as close as Flemington right up the road, so close a bird would hardly notice it, hardly have to use its wings if it crossed the sky from here to there.
But he may as well still be in Australia with the sheep for all the difference his coming back made to his daughter, in fact she wished he were, so there’d be no danger of seeing him, no chance of him and his not-seeing her, in a street so close to home. She wished him thousands of miles away from here, truthfully she wished him on Algol, the bad most evil star in the sky, and her mother too, they could go and live there just the two of them and happily never exchange a word to each other for as long as they lived and nobody else would have to care. They could just go, the both, and take all their unsaying with them. For if a flower grew near them, even just the air that came from them would wither that flower.
But did that mean she would wither things too?
Did a badness pass from them to her?
Would it ruin the feel of the mouth of the hill pony on the palm of her hand when she went the hike by herself and gave it the apple she had for her lunch, the bluntness of the mouth, the breath of it, the whiskers round the mouth she could feel, the warm wet and the slaver on her hand that she wiped on her skirt and got into the trouble about?
And the nest shaped like a dome, something that the bird just made without needing to know, without reading in a book how to make, and made it so solid and hung it so firm in the thinnest of the branches over the river?
There was the word gorgeous, and there was the word north, and there was a sound that went between the words that she liked. Could you wither a word?
There was the orchard nobody went to. How could anything touch it? It was all blossom right now. There was the whole meadow full of flowers, wild ones, all the bright faces, out that window beyond this house only a couple of streets away. She sat low on the old nursing chair and the Fraser books sat on the shelf right next to her eye. Fraser. Olive. O LIVE. I LOVE. O VILE. EVIL O.
She reached and took out the first book. She didn’t even look at it, she threw the book. She just threw it.
And that’s how, when the spine fell off it and she picked it up to look at the bad damage she’d done, she saw – music.
Inside, behind the spine, the place where the pages were bound was lined with it, notes and staves all the way down the place where the name of the book had been. There’d been a music inside it all the years the book had been in the world. And that was a fair few years, for on one of its first pages was the date 1871. So that made it fifty-four years, near sixty, there’d been music nobody’d known about in the back of – she looked at the broken piece of spine – Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. And the paper with the notes on it looked like it might be a good bit older than the book whose spine it was hidden in, for there was a qua
lity to the way the staves and notes were formed that didn’t look like these things looked nowadays.
That was an e, but she didn’t have the beginning of the stave so she didn’t know what key. C#, f, e, c#, b, b, f#, a. Then the piece of music ended where the paper had been cut to fit the spine. On the surviving bit of stave below: a, a, e, g, b, e, b.
She went to the space on the shelf that Ivanhoe had left empty. She put her finger to the top of the spine of the book next to the space, tipped the book out, watched it balance on its own weight then fall. She caught it in her hand. Waverley Novels. The Heart of Mid-Lothian. She ran her hand over the good spine. The paper of it felt like brushed leather. Maybe it was leather. It looked expensive. It looked like it would never break.
You could not tell whether there was music inside it just by looking at it.
The clean closed spines all along the Scott collection, book after book, quiet and waiting, lined three shelves. She shouldn’t even be in the front room. It was kept for the good. It wasn’t used.
(The boy’s face, surprised by the cold of the water. The dipper’s nest overhanging the river, disguised by leaves in summer, bare to the eye in winter. The carcasses hanging in the butcher’s window with the red and the white where the meat met the fat. The workings of the watch in its box in the dark.)
She looked at how well the stitching of the binding met the spine on the book in her hand. She gave it a tug with her fingers.
She went to the kitchen to get the gutting knife.
Olive Fraser, born 20 January 1909, Aberdeen. Died 9 December 1977, Aberdeen.