by Ali Smith
Ha ha! Emily says.
Nathan has gone bright red. I change the subject, quick.
Tell us about what you think has most changed over the last ten years, I say. The difference between then and now.
The indifference between then and now, he means, Emily says.
Nathan looks wasted. He is far too thin and as dark-eyed as his mother. I realize it’s now the norm for him to look as though he’s permanently flinching.
It isn’t porn, he says.
He looks straight at Emily.
It’s bike gear systems, he says. It’s fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-seven gear systems and speed hubs.
That’s crap, Emily says. I saw. You were watching a porn movie with a gang bang in a prison.
I was not, he says. That’s a YouTube clip of a film star in a foreign film where she goes to prison by mistake and in the cell these men crowd round her and sing a song. And she is really beautiful, and innocent. I don’t mean innocent in a perv way, I mean innocent of the crime she is put in prison for.
He has gone bright red from the neck to the roots of his hair. But he stands up decisively, pushes his chair back, stands up, leaves the room.
Geek, Emily says without taking her eye off the TV.
Emily, that’s enough, Ellie says.
Yeah, well, if he can go to bed so can I, she says. And the difference between then and now is that now I’m supposed to wear clothes that make me look like a prostitute and if I don’t I’m not a proper girl. And now it’s okay to be friends with Hana at school and everything but out in the world I’m supposed to think she’s one of them not us and that her family are them not us too and that if her big brother isn’t a terrorist already then it’s only a matter of time.
She switches the TV off on her way out.
My wife stands up. She stares at the off screen.
The difference, she says in the after-TV silence, is that over the last ten years new communication technology has brought people so much closer together.
She gives no sign that she’s joking. She picks up as many of the things on plates as she can carry, backs out of the room, lets the door fall shut behind her. I hear her putting things away in the fridge. Then I hear her going slowly upstairs.
Chloe has her head down on her arm on the table. Her eyes are shut.
What about you? I say.
The difference between then and now, is, Chloe says. I wasn’t here then, and now I am.
A moment later she’s asleep. I look at the top of her head, at the way her hair knows to shape itself. I pick her up and shoulder her, carry her upstairs, tuck her in.
On my way out of her room I see the beloved DVD on the computer desk. I take it with me and go back downstairs.
I turn the sound down low.
These films are all from the first decade of the last century, the voice-over tells me. They were throwaways, made for a quick buck. It’s a miracle they still exist. ‘Local Films For Local People.’ ‘Come And See Yourself On The Screen As Living History!’ They’d be made in the afternoon and shown that same night in touring fairs or theatres, and the filmmakers would cram as many local faces in as possible so the number of people paying to see themselves would be maximum too.
I switch the voice-over off so I can see better. The first years of the last century flicker away in silence. The films are of happy-looking crowds, schoolyards full of children demonstrating to the camera how healthy and happy they are, workers waving and smiling. There’s quite a bit of poverty. But in film after film of seaside promenades, football matches, people in hats at Whitsun, people at fairs, people rolling Easter eggs down hills, the hundreds and hundreds of dead working people wave their hats and handkerchiefs in circles in the air, wave at the camera, at themselves. The children are especially curious and excited. It strikes me they’ll be cannon fodder for Ypres and the Somme in just a decade’s time.
I get to a film made in North Shields in 1901. It begins with hardy-looking girl-fishgutters, a shot of boats, a large crowd gathered round a harbour. Then, in among the people, a small boy in a flat cap notices the camera and turns towards it as if towards me, here, now, more than a century later sitting in this room of empty chairs in the middle of the night. He resembles Chloe slightly. He disappears out of frame, then ducks back in. That’s what she’d do. He doesn’t wave. He isn’t delighted. He’s questioning, grave. He means business. He wants to know. There is no other way to put it: he is completely alive. The life in him pierces me.
He is ten years old at the turn of a new century and less than a minute long. For as many of those seconds as he gets the chance to, he looks the future in the eye. He walks towards it, holding its eye steady in both of his.
Eve Lacey spoke to me about the way books carry their histories, and about the new history of public libraries.
She’s the current Library Graduate Trainee at Newnham College Library in Cambridge; she’d previously worked in a public library in one of the local villages, a fairly well-heeled place, though even there, she said, the most vulnerable really need and use the library, the homeless and jobless people, along with a real mixture of all the generations, especially elderly people and young mothers with children. She told me about the pressure on the public library service to move from council funding to volunteer status, about the way the community there has rushed to protect and sustain the library, about the inevitable catch-22 downgrading situation when something shifts from public funding to less or no funding, and about the official council letters that circulated concerning desperate money-saving tactics (‘a 1 per cent reduction in pay would save approximately £1.28 million … therefore a 2.4 per cent reduction the necessary £3 million savings … one day of unpaid leave would save £0.4 million … the withdrawal of pay increments for the year would save approx. £1.4 million … stopping the first day of sick pay could save approx. £0.5 million and stopping the first two days £0.8 million’).
She told me about the unbelievable length of the queue of excited local children taking part in the Summer Reading Challenge there, a literacy-encouraging initiative where a child reads a book a week then comes back and tells the librarian about the book; she said the line of children wanting to talk about the books they’d read stretched out the door.
She told me about why the Rare Books Rooms in libraries keep books at a certain temperature – because the leather which binds early books is always trying to get back to the original shape of the animal whose skin it was, and the temperature regulation keeps it book-shape. She told me that 250 Bibles bound in calf leather generally equalled 250 actual calves. She told me that the gilt on the edges of books has antiseptic properties, being part gold, and dust-repelling properties. Proper gilding cleans itself.
Then she and the Librarian, Debbie Hodder, took me through into the stacks of the college library (a library formed against all the odds in the late 1800s – the women who studied at Cambridge, which didn’t admit women as full members of the University till 1948, weren’t permitted to use or access the University’s books; the library is, more than a century later, one of the best-stocked college libraries in the city). They showed me a lock of Charlotte Brontë’s hair coiled inside a ring, told me the library also happens to hold in its collection a tennis dress of the 1890s which looks like it would be incredibly heavy to wear, and they let me see several books, including one called An Elementary Treatise on Curve Tracing, by Percival Frost (1892), which begins: In order to understand this work on the tracing of curves whose equations are given in Cartesian coordinates, all that is required of the student is that he shall know the ordinary rules of Algebra as far as the Binomial theorem, the fundamental theorems of the Theory of Equations, and the general methods employed in Algebraic Geometry.
Inside the front cover of this book there are a couple of pasted-in notices. On the left-hand inside page, the notice reads:
1917
BRITISH PRISONERS
INTERNED ABROAD
This book
is the gift of Miss M. Fletcher
Newnham College Cambridge
and is supplied through the Agency
at the Board of Education
Whitehall London S. W.
On the right-hand inside page, the pasted-in note says in clear handwriting:
If this book is ever returned,
it will be gratefully received,
though not expected.
M. Fletcher, Librarian
Newn: Coll: Cambridge
Jan 1917.
Underneath that, it says, in the same hand:
Returned May 13, 1919.
The definite article
I stepped out of the city and into the park. It was as simple as that.
It was January, it was a foggy day in London town, I’d got off the Tube at Great Portland Street and come up and out into the dark of the day, I was on my way to an urgent meeting about funding. It was possible in the current climate that funding was going to be withdrawn so we were having to have an urgent meeting urgently to decide on the right kind of rhetoric. This would ensure the right developmental strategy which would in turn ensure that funding wouldn’t conclude in this way at this time. I had come the whole way underground saying over and over in my head, urgent, ensure, feasibility, margin, assessment, management, rationalization, developmental strategy, strategic development, current climate, project incentive, core values, shouldn’t conclude, in this way, at this time. But it also had to be unthreatening, the language we were to use to ensure etc, so I went up the stairs repeating to myself the phrase not a problem not a problem not a problem, then stopped for a moment at the Tube exit because (ow) my eye was really hurting, out of nowhere I’d got something in my eye.
It made everything else disappear. I stopped and stood. I blinked. I felt about in one of my pockets, folded the edge of a kleenex into what felt like a point and ran it along the inside of my lower lid. I blinked again and looked to see. The something that had been in my eye was stuck now on the edge of the kleenex. It was tiny, and it might once have had legs, hard to tell now. Maybe its legs were still in my eye; the eye was still stinging a little, still running. Running. Legs. Ha ha.
Urgent. Core values. Shouldn’t conclude.
The eye was still a bit sore. I tried focusing into the distance. What I saw was the edge of the park. Then I saw myself pressing the button on the pedestrian crossing. Then I was crossing the road anyway, between the fast-coming cars, before I changed my mind.
On the wide path on Avenue Gardens I dried a bit of bench with the kleenex I still had in my hand. I sat down and held my other hand over the sore eye. I could hear traffic, background, faded. When my eye stopped stinging, I’d go back.
But it was turning into one of the days in January that spring sends ahead of itself. The fog would burn off. It was burning off right now. It was clearing. I could see. There were magpies. There were pigeons. There were all sorts of birds, everywhere. When was the last time I had looked at a blackbird, or at a robin? When was the last time I had looked properly at anything? There were runners on the park’s paths. There was a cordon of very young schoolchildren out on a trip in the middle of the day. There was a man whistling, walking along holding a can of Skol ahead of himself. He was holding the can like a compass. There was a man in a wheelchair, being wheeled by a boy. The boy looked very like him. There was a man with a camera on a tripod. He was filming a woman who’d stopped to feed a squirrel. There was a woman doing a sideways-stepping walking exercise. There were two joggers and a dog. The dog, keeping the pace beside them, looked full of happiness, and there were patterns everywhere, in the line of benches stretching towards and away from me, in the fountains and the stone urns, in the trees, in the died-back tidied beds of flowers, and that’s when I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years, it’s back when I’m twenty-five, we’ve been together for six weeks, we’ve no money, it’s my birthday and as a birthday present you sit me down and blindfold me. You lead me by the hand, blindfolded, out of the flat to where your old Mini with the holes in its floor is parked. You guide me into the car and then you drive me I have no idea where. There’s a strangeness in every noise. Everything I touch and everything that touches me is so complex that all my senses flare. How closed-in things are when we’re in the car, and is this what open actually means, when you get me out of it, still blindfolded, and lead me up a steep path, into what feels like somewhere whose openness will never end? At the top of this steepness we stop. You take me by the shoulders and turn me. You wish me happy birthday. Then you take the blindfold off me.
It’s light, colour, it’s the top of the hill. It’s the city itself I see under the huge sky.
It was one of the best birthday presents I’d ever been given, I knew now so many birthdays on, twenty-five years later, a different person yet the same person, sitting in the park in the future, one hand over one eye. Where were you now? I wondered. What were you doing right now in the world?
A bee passed me. It was quite a large bee, bright yellow and black. A bee in January? Far too early in the year for a bee to be out, it should be wintering, it would surely die. I’d better go, I thought. I had a (not a problem) meeting to chair, and as clear as day the thought came into my head. I could follow that bee up Avenue Gardens. I could turn left and go to the Rose Garden. I hadn’t been to the Rose Garden for years. There’d surely be some roses out, regardless of January, and I could go and see the little statue of Cupid with his arrows, was I remembering rightly, riding on the back of a stone duck or a goose? Cupid, with the tips of his arrows dipped in honey. And what was that old poem, about Cupid getting stung by a bee and complaining to his mother, Venus, and her holding her sides laughing at him because of the stings his arrows give lovers, and him put out by a tiny bee? Cupid, in a bed of roses, no, Cupid, as he lay among, Roses by a bee got stung.
It was years since I’d thought of that poem.
It was years since I’d thought about any poem.
I would go and look at the little statue to see if Cupid really was sitting on the back of a bird, or if I was just imagining it. When I’d done that I could go to the meeting.
Urgent. The word was a bit shaming when I thought about it. Not a problem. What did not a problem actually mean?
I would go to the Rose Garden. From there I would walk to the boating lake, then up past the sports pitches to the big fountain and round by the zoo.
From there I’d go to the bottom of Primrose Hill, choose a path, any path, and follow it to the top.
*
That was all, the passing thought, the mere slant of the thought of all the different possible ways there are just to cross a park, and that did it, the morning shook its pelt, slipped its rein and did a sideways dash across Regent’s Park – no, not just Regent’s Park but the Regent’s Park, the park, the park that began as a forest whose sky was the tops of its trees, then the park of the left-handed King on horseback chasing the stag (and that’s why the park is the lopsided shape it is, because Henry the Eighth was left-handed, so when he drew over the map of the Abbess’s woods to mark the land he wanted thus, that’s what his hand did, made a great curve there and a straight line there). The park of grazing smutty sheep (it’s Henry James who called them smutty), the park of visions and assignations, fairs and ballads, footpads in their element, prostitutes in their ribbons. The park of the pretty girl out walking among the pretty flowers, taken suddenly and kissed hard on the mouth, pray, alarm yourself not, Madame, you can now boast you’ve been kissed by Dick Turpin. The park with the roofless theatre, A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the midsummer air. The park where the crowds fed as much cake and biscuit as they could to Jumbo, The Biggest Elephant In The World, who’d been sold to America, in the hope it’d make him too heavy to be shipped across the Atlantic.
First it was Cromwell felling the trees for the Navy, 534 acres with 124 deer and 16,297 tree of oak, ash, elm, wite thorn and maple. Then it was Nash, deciding what new trees to use, pair
ing the colours of different kinds of tree to suit his villas. Then they felled the trees all over again for the twentieth-century wars. More than three hundred bombs changed the shape of the place in the 1940s. And now it’s now. The park that began with the lords and the ladies in their carriages. The park that evolved, that learned to open its gates to everybody, to hold all the city’s hundreds of languages, the city’s efflorescence, in the one place. Great forest of wooded glades; the first written description we have of the Forest of Middlesex, which became the Great Chase, the Marrowbone, the Marybone, the Marylebone Pleasure Gardens, the Marylebone Park, the Regent’s Park, where today, like any old day of the week, the day in the park curved itself off like a bird into the air over the six thousand trees, the laughable colours of duck, the black swans in the Rose Garden drinking the earlier drizzle off their own backs, all the people on their way to work who love to walk through the park, the young couple slowing their pace for their old slow dog on the Broad Walk, the man shouting at the woman cyclist and the cyclist giving him the perfectly reversed V sign over her shoulder, the magpies gathering in wait for feeding time over the zoo’s walls, the Primrose Hill bookshop where stray leaves from the park blow in at the door all year round.
The day in the park, like any old day, took its usual bee-line, one never threatened by mere winter (which only makes the fountains more beautiful, the ice forming all down the sides of them), one that always makes something of itself, like the honey the Regent’s Park bees make of their visits to the lime trees in Avenue Gardens, or the honey that tastes of roses in the seasons when the Rose Garden proves good pickings for the bees. Amber Queen. English Miss. Wandering Minstrel. Sweet Dreams. Ingrid Bergman. Anna Ford. Mayor of Casterbridge. Old Yellow Scotch. There are hives all over the park where, right now, the bees would be crowding together to keep the temperature up, would be taking turns to be circled and warmed by all the other bees, would be tending to the year’s future bees in their cells; there are beehives in good quiet places all over the park.