by Ali Smith
I picked up a book but I couldn’t concentrate to read.
I began to wonder instead who the person was, the person who’d pretended, somewhere else in the world, to be me. What did he or she look like? Was he or she part of a group of people who did this kind of thing? Or was it a single individual somewhere in a room by him- or herself? Somewhere in the world this person knew enough about the numbers on a card in my wallet in the dark of my pocket to fool a respectable airline company into selling an expensive ticket.
I looked at the statement again. It didn’t say anything about where the ticket was from or to. Dec 21. Maybe this other me had been going home for Christmas. Did she have a family? Did the family know she was a fraudster? Were they maybe a family of fraudsters? I could see them all round a long table set for Christmas; I stood ghost at their feast and watched them with their arms round their shoulders as Hogmanay gave way to New Year. How could she be me? I hadn’t sat in Departures with a print-out ticket paid for by me. I hadn’t walked down the tunnel that led to the door of the aeroplane, or climbed the steps out in the cold of the winter airport air.
Oh Christ. Passport.
I ran upstairs. I pulled open the cupboard door. But my passport was safe there on the underwear shelf.
I put it back. I closed the door. I laughed. Oh well. I came downstairs and put the kettle on, thought about making something to eat. But it was after nine o’clock and if I ate now I’d not sleep.
So I sat on the kitchen stool until the kettle boiled and I thought about how once, years ago, I had been really well pickpocketed in an Italian seaside resort by a child. The child, a dark-haired girl with a miniature accordion slung on her shoulder, had been walking up and down outside the restaurant we’d decided to eat at, playing the opening riff of Volare. I must’ve looked an easy touch; she had approached me and asked for money and when I’d said no she had talked to me briefly and shyly while thieving from me with such sleight of hand that it wasn’t till I’d put my hand in my pocket half an hour later for the roll of cash I was carrying so I could pay the bill and found the pocket empty that I knew. She’d done it with such artistry that I almost didn’t regret what she’d taken. On the contrary, I’d felt strangely blessed. It was as if I’d been specially chosen.
How was this different? It felt different. It felt like it had been nothing to do with me. There’d been no real exchange. More, it somehow made me the suspect. No amount of speaking down a phone to someone in a call centre could restore my innocence.
I got my Barclaycard out of my wallet and folded it in two. I folded it back on itself the other way. I did this several times very fast until the fold gave off heat. When I could no longer put the tip of my finger on it because it was so hot, I ripped the card in two, one half valid from, the other expires end.
Five days later a new card with a new number and my name on it arrived from Barclaycard.
Ten days after that, a form arrived. It asked me to tick a box which confirmed whether I agreed or disagreed that I had made the transaction in question with Lufthansa.
I ticked the box which disagreed. I wrote underneath in capitals: I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE CARRIED OUT ANY TRANSACTION WITH LUFTHANSA WITH THIS OR ANY OTHER CARD and I signed the form with my name.
Two weeks after that, a letter arrived from Barclaycard which said they’d credited my Barclaycard with the amount involved while they made further enquiries.
Meanwhile, here’s the story of what maybe happened to the remains of DH Lawrence.
After he died in 1930 at the age of forty-four, his wife, Frieda, married her lover, Angelo Ravagli, and they moved to New Mexico. In 1935 she sent her husband back to Vence in France, where Lawrence had died and was buried, with the instruction that he have Lawrence’s body exhumed and cremated so that she could put his ashes in a beautiful vase.
Ravagli took the vase to Vence. He came back to New Mexico with the vase full of ashes. Frieda sealed the ashes up in a resplendent memorial shrine inside a block of concrete in case of thieves. When she died in 1956 she was buried next to this shrine. There’s a photograph of the shrine on Wikipedia. It has a risen phoenix carved in stone or concrete above it and the letters DHL surrounded by bright painted sunflowers and foliage on the front.
But in the biography I’d been reading, which is by John Worthen, Worthen says that after Frieda died, Ravagli announced: ‘I threw away the DH cinders.’ He’d had him exhumed and burned as instructed, he claimed, but then he’d dumped the ashes – maybe in Marseilles, Worthen thinks, maybe at the harbour, into the sea. When he got back to New York, Ravagli filled the vase with the ashes of God knows what or who. He gave it to Frieda, who buried it with honours and died believing she’d be being buried next to what was left of Lawrence.
Wikipedia, too, seems to suggest that the ashes in that shrine are actually Lawrence’s.
Who knows? Maybe they are.
But whether they are or they aren’t, imagine the husband, faithful and lying, seething, triumphant, steady in deception for twenty whole years till she dies. Imagine his foul understandable need, his satisfaction, changing DH Lawrence to DH cinders.
Imagine the ashes of Lawrence shaken into the air, dissolving in the ocean.
‘Fish, oh Fish, / So little matters!’
That’s from the poem called Fish. In another poem he calls the mosquito he’s hunting ‘Monsieur’, then ‘Winged Victory’. ‘Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?’ In another he declares that for his part he prefers his heart to be broken, cracked open like a pomegranate spilling its red seeds. In one of his most famous, he watches a snake drink at a waterhole then throws a log at it to show it who’s boss. The moment he does this he understands his own pettiness; he knows he’s cheated himself.
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 because of him. Literary merit went to court and won because of him. Class in the English novel radically shifted because of him. His mother, poor, ruined by work, dirt and poverty, could be delighted by a tuppenny bunch of spring flowers; at least that’s what Frieda says in an article she wrote in 1955 for the New Statesman, where she’s responding to a newly published 1950s biography of Lawrence which, according to her, is full of laughable untruths and inaccuracies. ‘There is nothing to save, now all is lost, / but a tiny core of stillness in the heart / like the eye of a violet.’ That’s from a poem called Nothing to Save. ‘High in the sky a star seemed to be walking. It was an aeroplane with a light. Its buzz rattled above. Not a space, not a speck of this country that wasn’t humanized, occupied by the human claim. Not even the sky.’ That’s from St Mawr, a novel about how human beings will never be able to be fully natural or free while they give in to civilization’s pressures and expectations, also about how women and stallions will never understand each other, especially when the woman is handicapped by being clever.
His clever friend Katherine Mansfield suggested to him that he call the cottage he was living in The Phallus. Her letters and notebooks are full of her anger and frustration at him. At the same time she typically writes this kind of thing in her letters to friends. ‘He is the only writer living whom I really profoundly care for. It seems to me whatever he writes, no matter how much one may “disagree” is important. And after all even what one objects to is a sign of life in him.’ And: ‘what makes Lawrence a real writer is his passion. Without passion one writes in the air or on the sands of the seashore.’
He himself wrote this in a letter in 1927 to Gertie Cooper, a friend and neighbour from his home in the north of England who was about to start treatment for tuberculosis, from which he also suffered and which killed him in the end: ‘while we live we must be game. And when we come to die, we’ll die game too.’ There’s a fury, a burning energy associated with TB suffering. Some see it as one of the driving forces of Lawrence’s temperament and his writing. The same could be said for a writer like Mansfield, who also died far too young of the same condition, a condition completely curable so few years later.
Me
anwhile, a little less than a hundred years later, I was sitting at my desk on the one hand pondering hopeless fury and in the other literally holding my latest letter from Barclaycard.
According to Barclaycard, Lufthansa claimed that I had reserved a ticket with them and that they had issued me this ticket, as yet unused, on 21 December last year. So, did I agree with the merchant (Lufthansa) that I had bought this ticket? If I didn’t, I was to write back and tell Barclaycard and I was to do this within ten days of the date at the top of this letter.
The letter had taken eight days to arrive. I had two days left to reply and one of them was a Sunday.
Phish, oh phish. So little matters! Was there even any connection here, between the life, death and dissemination of Lawrence and me battling a fraudulent claim on a credit card statement? All I knew was, it cheered me up to think of Lawrence, whose individualism meant he’d fight anyone with both hands tied behind his back and whose magnetic pull always towards some kind of sympathy meant he’d grant a mosquito formal address in French and even compare it to an ancient work of art in the Louvre before he swatted it.
Imagine Lawrence in the virtual world. The very thought of him railing at an internet porn site, yelling at the net and all its computer games for not being nearly gamey enough, meant I forgot for a moment the letter in my hand from Barclaycard.
But back to Google Earth. I googled the address for the Lufthansa Office in London. I was thinking I could maybe go in, in person, and explain to them personally that it hadn’t been me who’d bought or reserved any ticket with them, used or unused, on 21 December or ever. Google told me that the London office is in Bath Road, at the postcode UB7 0DQ. I looked it up on Google Maps. It’s near Heathrow; Google Street View indicates it’s a huge warehouse or hangar at the back of the airport, off the kinds of street that are practically motorway, the kinds almost nobody walks along.
The photos on Google Street View had been taken in the early summer; the trees were leafy and the may was in bloom on the low dual carriageway bushes outside the Holiday Inn. At one point you could see right inside people’s cars. Google Street View had protected privacy by pixellating the numberplates of the cars. But at one point two cars were level at a junction and a man was in one, a woman in the other, and a lone pedestrian was waiting behind them at a bus stop. It was good to see some people coinciding, even unknowingly, just going somewhere one day, caught by a surveillance car and immortalized online (well, until Google Street View updated itself). Seeing them made me wonder briefly what was happening in their lives on the day this picture was taken. I wondered what had happened to them since. I hoped they’d been okay in the recession. I hoped they’d arrived safely wherever they were going.
Then I wondered if any of them was going to Lufthansa to complain about being charged for a ticket he or she hadn’t bought.
Of course in the end I wasn’t going to go there and explain anything. Of course it would make no difference. Of course it was impossible anyway to see anything of Lufthansa’s London Office on Google Street View since it was on a bit of the map to which the little virtual person couldn’t be dragged.
So instead I skimmed along Bath Road for a bit, first one way, then the other, until at one point the address label at the top of the photograph told me that though I was still on Bath Road I was no longer in West Drayton and that I was now in Harmondsworth.
Harmondsworth. Something inside me chimed a kind of harmony. It took me a moment, then I remembered why: Harmondsworth is the place all the old Penguin paperbacks declare their place of issue. It was where the original Penguin copies of, for instance, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which caused all the excitement and led to the obscenity trial, will have issued from in 1960, the place where the thousands of copies sold after the trial will have been issued too. And all the other Penguin Lawrences. I looked across at where L was, on my shelves. Almost all my Lawrence books were Penguin books. Pretty much all the Lawrence I’d ever read had come, one way or another, from this very place I happened to be looking at.
I stood up, pushed back my chair. I got my old copy of St Mawr / The Virgin and the Gypsy off the shelf. Oral French. I turned the page. Harmondsworth.
It was a ridiculous, glorious connection, and one that somehow made me bigger and truer than any false claim being made against me. It also made me laugh. I laughed out loud. I did a little dance round the room.
When I’d stopped, I closed the book and put it back in its place on the shelf. I stood at my desk for a moment. I reread the letter. I girded my loins. I sat down to reply.
Dear Barclaycard,
This is just to thank you and Lufthansa for the reminder that nothing in life is ever secure.
Thank you also for allowing me to find out how easy it is to be made to seem like a liar when you aren’t one.
Thank you, too, for introducing me to a whole new kind of anxiety, a burning and impotent fury which I truly believe has helped me understand, just for a moment, a sliver of what it must have felt like for a couple of writers I like very much from the first half of the twentieth century to have suffered from consumption. The experience has certainly brought a new layering of meaning to the word consumer for me.
Yours faithfully,
A. Smith.
PS. If Lufthansa ever tell you where that ticket I didn’t buy was for, just out of natural curiosity, I’d love to know.
It felt good when I wrote it.
When I read it half an hour later I knew it was too anal, like an awful comedy letter someone would send in to a consumer rights programme on Radio 4.
I deleted it.
I wrote the kind of letter I was supposed to write, in which I simply denied knowledge of the transaction Lufthansa claimed I’d made. I sealed the envelope and I put it on the hall table for recorded delivery tomorrow.
Then I went to bed, put the light out, slept.
Meanwhile, in my sleep, the freed-up me’s went wild.
They spraypainted the doors and windows of the banks, urinated daintily on the little mirror-cameras on the cash machines. They emptied the machines, threw the money on to the pavements. They stole the fattened horses out of the abattoir fields and galloped them down the high streets of all the small towns. They ignored traffic lights. They waved to surveillance. They broke into all the call centres. They sneaked up and down the liftshafts, slipped into the systems. They randomly wiped people’s debts for fun. They replaced the automaton messages with birdsong. They whispered dissent, comfort, hilarity, love, sparkling fresh unscripted human responses into the ears of the people working for a pittance answering phones for businesses whose CEOs earned thousands of times more than their workforce. They flew inside aircraft fuselages and caused turbulence on every flight taken by everyone who ever ripped anyone else off. They replaced every music track on every fraudster’s phone, iPad or iPod with Sheena Easton singing Modern Girl. They marauded into porn shoots and made the girls and women laugh. They were tough and delicate. They were winged like the seeds of sycamores. There were hundreds of them. Soon there would be thousands. They spread like mushrooms. They spread like spores. There would be no stopping them.
Meanwhile, that snake that Lawrence threw the log at disappeared long long ago into its hole unhurt, went freely about its ways, left the poem behind it.
Meanwhile, right now, the ashes of DH Lawrence could be anywhere.
Local councils, under the pressure of draconian and politically expedient cuts, don’t like to say that the libraries they’re closing are closing. They say they’re ‘divesting’. They now call what used to be public libraries ‘community libraries’. This is an ameliorating way of saying volunteer-run and volunteer-funded.
Just in the few weeks that I’ve been ordering and re-editing these twelve stories for this book, twenty-eight libraries across the UK have come under threat of closure or passing to volunteers. Fifteen mobile libraries have also come under this same threat. That makes forty-three – in a matter of weeks.
> Over the past few years, just in the time it’s taken me to write these stories, library culture has suffered unimaginably. The statistics suggest that by the time this book is published there will be one thousand fewer libraries in the UK than there were at the time I began writing the first of the stories.
This is what Lesley Bryce told me when I asked her about libraries:
The Corstorphine public library was a holy place to me. It was an old building, hushed and dim, like a church, with high windows filtering dusty light on to the massive shelves of books below. And the library had its own rituals: the precious cards (only three each), the agony of choosing, and the stamping of dates. The librarians themselves were fearsome, yet kind, allowing the child me to take out adult books, though not without raised eyebrows. My parents were readers, but we did not have many books in the house, so the library was a gateway to a wider world, a lifeline, an essential resource, a cave of wonder. Without access to the public library as a child, my world would have been smaller, and infinitely less rich. All those riches, freely available, to everyone and anyone with a library card. All children should be so lucky.
There’s a great kids’ library at the end of our street now where we live, in Notting Hill, soon to be sold, along with the adult one, though they claim to be rehousing it nearby.
The ex-wife
At first I thought it was just that you really liked books, just that you were someone who really loved your work. I thought it was just more evidence of your passionate and sensitive nature.
At first I was quite charmed by it. It was charming. She was charming.
But here are three instances of what it was like for me.