by Ali Smith
I fold down the page at this story. I get some work things ready for tomorrow and call you, tell you as usual that I’m off to bed, that if you don’t come now so I can put the lights out and get some sleep I’m going to leave you.
When we’re in bed I hand you the book, open at the story. You read it. You look pleased. You read it again, leaning over me to catch the light. I read my favourite bit over your shoulder, the bit about the shining loveliness of the tree, and the god, powerless, adorning himself with its branches. You fold the page down again, close the book and put it on the bedside cabinet. I switch the light off.
As soon as you think I’m asleep, when I’m breathing regularly to let you believe I am, you get up. After I hear the gentle shutting of the door, I slide myself out of bed and into my clothes and I go downstairs and out the back door too. This first night I wish I’d pulled on a thicker jacket; in future I will know to.
When I get to the house with the tree I see you there in the dark under it. You are lying on your back on the ground. You look like you’re asleep.
I lie down next to you under the tree.
paradise
The good people of the town are asleep in their beds. The bad people of the town are asleep in their beds. The tourists are asleep in their bed-and-breakfast beds in the town’s bigger houses on the more genteel streets with their scent of high fir hedge, average price per person per night between £20 and £30, higher for en suite, higher for a guest house, a good bit higher for a hotel. Out down the empty loch road, and the monster deep asleep in the bed of the loch, the hills and the sky are beginning to appear again upside down in the water. It is half-past two in the morning and it is light.
Not that the light ever really went away; between eleven last night and two this morning the thin line of blue, which in midsummer means dark, never quite settled on any of the horizons round the town, and this is tourist heaven now regardless of foot-and-mouth, this is the place which will be reported later this year in the broadsheets as the biggest grossing tourist attraction in the UK because of its splendid scenery, its welcoming folk, its clean air and its light like this in the middle of the night, mundane and uncanny, prowling out as only light can, the big-pawed hulk of it unstoppable over the fields and the single track roads and the disinfected cordoned-off woods; unstoppable round and behind and over the out-of-town tree that not many tourists ever know about or find, the one by the well at the side of a back road, whose branches and trunk and roots have been hung (and all the other branches for yards around it in the roadside wood, all weighed down too) with the rags from shirts, coats, underwear, skirts, curtains, anything that can be ripped, and socks, hats, handkerchieves, scarves, things left by people making wishes they think will have more chance of coming true if they’ve ripped something up, something close to them, something they wear or something someone they love wears, and taken it there and hung it on a tree.
The woods are deserted. There is nobody on the road. The rags sway slightly, like terrifying leaves.
Across the farmland, over the firth and down into the town there is nothing but the noise of wakened birds. At the top of the birdsung High Street, inside the concrete box put there by the police, which, when locked from the inside, has no way in from the outside, the boy who’s been curled on its floor since three men he didn’t know chased him down the road after the club shut, all of them after him along the late night pavements and past the multi-storey and the night-blank shops and across the pedestrian precinct shouting how they were going to beat him to fucking death, standing round the security box kicking its door and battering it, breaking what sounded like bottles on it, then everything going quiet, and then the noise of birds, has stopped shaking and has finally fallen asleep. Inside the box it is always light. The light in there is vandal-proof. On the wall there’s a screen and a button for audio/visual communication with a police control room and the boy, who knows better than to ever press such a button, is asleep below the screen, hunched up against the wall of the box with his arm over his eyes.
On the pavement by the door of the box the broken glass is glinting. Up above the town early morning seagulls glint their white underbellies as they cross the sky, and the roofs of houses and the steeples of churches glint, and down there the black river glinting; not yet three a.m. and it’s light as daylight now over the town flanked by its new supermarkets, nestled in the curve between its bridge from south to north and its hospital and its cemetery where, the story goes, years ago two men once spent a Saturday night against the gravestones getting drunk, and just when they’d run out of drink a door handily opened in the side of the hill and in they went to a room whose walls were tall, made of packed earth with torches of burning peat stuck in them for light, and there were huge vats of whisky and beer and it was all free, and they had a great time carousing all night with the young and happy well-dressed strangers clinking their mugs and glasses, and were pretty pleased with themselves for finding a new pub and making such grand new friends until all at once without any warning the great turf door flung itself open again and the hill flung them out, sober, into the light of morning, and since it was a Sunday they made their way into town to go to church. But the town was changed, it was new, things were unrecognizable, and it was when they got to the church, as they walked together up the aisle past the pews packed with strangers, good townspeople who had been in their beds asleep all night, that the two men crumbled away from the head down till nothing was left of them but two smoking piles of ash on the stone floor of the church, and that’ll teach them not to drink on a Saturday night so close to a Sunday and especially not in a cemetery.
Now in the twenty-first century, under the shifting summer leaves of the perennials in the cemetery of this presbyterian town, the Victorian and Edwardian angels have been pockmarked with pellet dents. Some have wings snapped in half or broken right off; bits of stone wing litter the grass. There are spent cartridges by the decorous peeping naked toes of one, more cartridges in the grass by the stone plinth on which another sits, a chalice in her hands and her nose shot away. The occasional angel has been hit right in the eye or in the middle of the forehead.
Lucky for the company that it was Kimberley McKinlay who was the duty manager on the night shift tonight when they came into the place wearing the hats over their faces with the eyeholes cut in them. It has all been recorded on the closed-circuit; the one at the front has the shears, the one in the middle has the saw, the one behind him has the leafblower kind of thing with the flex and the plug, you can see it trailing, and even more clearly you can see it jerking about in the air later when he waves the stick part of it at Rod who’s on security tonight, though God knows what else he thought he was going to be doing with it, a leafblower for God’s sake. But it is definitely threatening behaviour, especially the one with the shears, who came right up to the counter and jumped over it and threatened Michael Cardie who was on customer serving and pinned him to the wall, the blades open at his neck like a pair of scissors.
Would you like fries with that? is what Michael Cardie actually said to him, probably out of nerves, when he was pinned to the wall. Michael Cardie was pale and shaking afterwards. Kimberley sent him home early. She thinks he will be going up to the hospital getting treatment for shock for weeks to come after tonight. Kimberley herself will maybe get a medal. An OBE. ABCG. ABBC Digital. But no, because one day she really will be on the lists at New Year for her services to mankind, maybe when she’s sixty, with her picture in the Highland News and everybody knowing because it will tell them in the paper how years ago, before she was the person she is going to become in her life, when she worked as the duty manager at the burger place at Tesco Village, there was absolutely no spitting allowed on the platelets of the flamegriller when it was her shift, absolutely none of that wanking into the mayonnaise bucket, and if it had been useless Kenny Paton who was on tonight it would all’ve been a different story, and apart from that, apart from tonight, honestly you really don
’t want to be eating anything from there the nights he’s manager and all those boys sitting around on night shift bored out of their heads because Kenny Paton thinks the world owes him a living and never gets anyone to do anything properly.
In fact Kimberley McKinlay makes a point of dumping the old mayonnaise bucket no matter who’s been on the shift before her, regardless of whether it’s Kenny Paton or not. It is not real mayonnaise. It has some of the things in it that are in mayonnaise plus some preservatives and a sugar substitute. It tubes and spreads more easily than actual mayonnaise does. It doesn’t stick to the equipment. It cleans off more easily. She begins every shift the same way; it is a ritual; she dumps the old bucket outside with the day’s grease vats and takes the lid off a new bucket out of the stores. That way she can be absolutely sure. She has thought before now of reporting Kenny Paton, but she would never grass so it won’t be her who reports it. The duty manager from hell. She won’t be it. He’s it. The nights he’s on and someone feels peckish at half-past one in the morning they should leave the car in the garage and stay at home and if they’re hungry eat some toast; there should be a phoneline they can call to let them know whether it’s him who’s on so they’d know not to bother coming out the bloody road all the way to Tesco Village just to eat wank and not know it, that’s what Kimberley thinks on her way home at half-past seven in the morning, blinking in her car at the bright light of day after a night of the fluorescent light at work, you never know what it’s like outside since there’s no windows. It could be raining or snowing or sheep and pigs could be falling out of the sky, you’d never know till you came out of work and found your car covered in them, and it’s a beautiful summer morning today, the car starts easily when she turns the key, it’s going to be hot later, it’s going to be a real beauty and she’ll be asleep all through it aye well that’s life and work for you isn’t it.
The pay is £420 a week before tax, for managers, with increments. It’s not a hard job. Not many people want to eat fast food in the middle of the night though Kimberley can imagine it’s different in the south where there are more people who are stupider about what they do with their time and money and digestive systems. She knows she wouldn’t want to. You get the occasional mad person, but not that many mad people have cars, thank God, or are bothered to walk out as far as Tesco Village. You get sad persons and lonely persons. You have to know how to deal with it. You have to keep the druggies out of the toilets in the winter but in the summer there are a lot less of them. You get drunks, loud fourteen-year-olds who should be in their beds, you get couples either snogging or arguing and the call-girls meeting the men who they make money off in the Tesco car park. You get homosexuals that have nowhere else to go. Kimberley is always throwing them out. You get bored taxi drivers. She might marry a taxi driver one day, you’d get peace from each other with a man with a job like that. You get people from the supermarket on the three nights it stays open. Very occasionally you get a family with kids at four in the morning wanting all the breakfast items. But usually it’s dead. There’s an after-cinema rush from the multiscreen, an after-pub rush of people who shouldn’t be driving, then the long dead stretch for hours.
Except that there’s never nothing to do, there’s cleaning to do so get cleaning, because when Kimberley first started here on the night shifts she went in circles from the stores to the kitchen to the food area to the till area out to the customer area then the wiping down of the seating, especially the difficult dipped places in the plastic where the food congeals on the seats that are shaped like the monster’s humps and head, she was scraping it out of the monster’s eyes and tail-spikes on her first night; they are lucky to have those monster seats, actually, since the burger places up and down the country are usually not differentiated at all. The manager then, whose name was Tony, who is running something important at head office in London now, noticed her initiative and how she did the display stuff up at the ceiling level which is always covered in bits of food and small dead insects and fluff and grit, it’s through the air-conditioning that it gets up there, she still likes to clean it, it is very satisfying and that’s how she got promoted, she got his job, one of the first females to manage a night shift for the company, she is a test case, maybe she will get an even better job like him after this though there’s no way anyone on the company’s going to know about this, she’s telling no one, and there’s absolutely no way anyway that she’d move down there, no way on earth, it’d have to be an important job up here.
Leave him alone, Kimberley McKinlay roared at the one with the shears when she came flying out of the stores to see what was going on out the front, apparently she was roaring like a lion in a rage as she came, she can hardly remember, that boy Dallas told her later she was shouting how the blades were filthy and he’d to get them away from the food area, and if he harmed the paintwork there’d be her to answer to, and how he could be giving Michael Cardie tetanus if he cut him with rusty blades. Imagine herself like that, roaring like a lion. Kimberley remembers the lions at the circus at Bught Park when she was a child, going round swiping at each other with their paws in a seethrough tube that ran round the ring by the feet of the audience. She drives the long straight route back into the town with both the visors down, shielding her eyes with her left hand and feeling the serious frown on her face; she is young, she is driving as fast as her car will go, she is ready for anything and she is a person capable of serious anger. She wonders, when cars come towards her and pass her and she can see the strangers in them for the moment it takes two cars to flash past each other on a road, so fast that all you catch is a glimpse of face, what the people in those cars would think if they knew, and there is a kind of a pleasure all the same in knowing that they never will.
In they came to rob the place and she apparently stood square in front of the tills with her arms folded (she can’t remember that). They wanted the money. You’re getting no takings from here, she said, all you’ll get from here is something off the menu and you’ll pay for it before you get it too, and I’m only telling you one more time, get those gardening things out of here, they could be covered in e.coli and there’s no gardening tools allowed in this restaurant, if you’re wanting anything to eat you’ll have to leave them outside the door.
They had the woolly hats with eyeholes in them pulled over their faces so nobody would know who they were but when one of them heard her say that it made him laugh inside the wool like he couldn’t help it, it was the one with the saw, and when his arm went down to his side she noticed his other arm, that it had a false hand on the end of it, a hand that wasn’t real, that’s when she recognized him, it was Jason Robertson from Kinmylies who lost his arm in that motorbike accident and he scarred up his face too, she knew him from five years ago from when they were at school, everybody knew who he was after that happened. Are you not Jason Robertson? she said, and the one with the shears swore and the other one waiting at the door with the leafblower threw the leafblower down and said I told you to put your fucking jacket over it. So one of these boys would be Rich Riach, since him and Jason Robertson were always hanging about together, and there was something familiar about the one with the shears, she was right, it was him under that hat with the holes in it, but she still has no idea who the other one at the door was, they called him Kevin, or maybe it was Gavin. Rich she remembers wasn’t really called Rich, really he was Gordon Riach from the houses over the other side of the canal. He was good at football back then. He was still holding Michael Cardie against the wall with the shears with one hand; with the other he had lifted half the hat over his face, up above his nose, and was getting a cigarette out of a packet with his mouth.
There’s no smoking in here, you, Kimberley said.
Rich Riach dropped the cigarette out of his mouth when he opened his mouth to swear at her. Then he couldn’t hold Michael Cardie against the wall and reach the cigarette he’d dropped. Jason Robertson was looking at Kimberley. She could see his eyes through the
holes in the wool.
I’m not Jason Robertson, he said.
I knew you at school, Kimberley said, and saw his eyes check her name badge.
Kimberley McKinlay, he said.
I wasn’t in your class, she said, you won’t remember me.