by Ali Smith
the shortlist season
It was the turn of the century, and the turn of the season again. I had been to the bank and now I was at a loss, so I crossed the park to get to the contemporary art gallery where an exhibition which had been written up in all the papers as culturally important was still showing.
The city was blowing about that day in the dregs of a storm which was happening (or had maybe already happened) thousands of miles away across the Atlantic; in the far distance over the park a tractor was spreading fertilizer on its lawns against the damage that winter would do. I walked under the trees. Leaves, fast and hardened, scuffed against my head and grazed my face. In front of me on the path a man was collecting fallen leaves; he looked ridiculous, large for the machine he sat on which was whirring at the too-high pitch of a full domestic vacuum cleaner as he sucked leaves up through its nozzle, and more were falling behind him, in front of me, on the paths he’d already cleared. Leaves blew round us like birds, or painted snow. When I reached the gallery I had to brush smaller leaves off my shoulders.
Outside the front door a man was talking to some younger men. The wind blew his hair the wrong way and he held it in place with one hand, waving his other hand about. The younger men’s deference to him and the angle of his back, the bend of his head on his neck, all meant the man was an authority on something. Of course, it has its own inherent narrative, he was saying, but its narrative is.
Its narrative is. But I don’t know what. I couldn’t make out the rest, and if I’d walked any more slowly or turned to stand and listen then the three men would have sensed me and I would have made them uneasy. Someone, a mad person maybe, or at least a slightly dangerously incalculable person (the city being full of them) would have been listening in to their private conversation in an uncalled-for way. Wind-charred now in the warm gallery foyer I pulled my sweater over my head, and it was a little irritating to me, the fact that I could so easily have seemed mad or like one of those incalculable people to them. Mostly though, I thought with my mouth full of wool, I was irritated because I wouldn’t, because I won’t – ever – know what came after that man’s is, or what exactly it was he was talking about, what he meant by saying the words he did, what he knew the inside story to be.
There were leaves caught in the hood of my sweater. Something fell out. When it hit the floor it bounced quite high and made a surprisingly sharp noise for such a small thing, and I picked it up. It was a sycamore seed, its single propeller was veined like a kind of skin and made the seed surreal: a small flying hazelnut, a wing with a shrunken head attached, a fish almost all fin. But the gallery assistant behind the postcard counter was watching me with a kind of interest so I put the seed back inside my sweater with the leaves, folded it over my arm and listened politely as he told me that entry was free, handouts about the exhibition were also free and illustrated catalogues were £16.50.
Usually the people who work behind the counters of galleries like this one are supercilious about the people who come to see the art, but this assistant was new, still unjaded, keen. I let him tell me all of it, the price of the smaller postcards, the price of the larger ones and the ones with three-dimensional effects, and the fact that the posters were sold out but the reorder would be in any day. I opened a display catalogue at a photograph of two cups of coffee on a coffee table; I flicked through it, closed it and put it back on the pile of other catalogues sealed inside cellophane. The assistant was holding out a piece of paper. It was a competition leaflet with a picture of a car on it, organized, it said, in tandem with the exhibition. If I filled in my name and address, allowed a car company to put my name on a mailing list for junk mail and could say in no more than ten words why I thought modern art mattered, I might win a car. You can fill it in later, the assistant told me, and leave it here on your way out. Or you could fill it in now if you like. You could borrow my pen.
He was beginning to annoy me. He was smiling a great deal. He was acting as if he knew me. I put the leaflet in my pocket, thanked him and took a handout.
Or maybe if I had stopped to listen to those three men talking outside, I was thinking as I pushed through the swing doors to the exhibition, maybe they wouldn’t have been uneasy at all, maybe they’d have been secretly pleased, because it is always nice, one way or another, to think that someone somewhere is listening. Maybe they’d have smirked self-consciously and nodded to me to join their group, made space for me. The man holding forth might even have conceded to explain. What I’m talking about is. Or: I’m referring to the manner in which the. Who knew? I went round the gallery and looked at the pictures, the sculptures and the installations.
They had been created by male twins now in their forties, who’d been born siamese but separated soon after birth. The twins and their art were very fashionable; this exhibition, it announced on a board on the wall, had placed them on the prestigious shortlist of a current art award. Broadsheet newspapers were full of authoritative lists and shortlists just now; the best films and pop songs and historical moments of the century, the best music of the year, best novel, best poetry collection, best art. Papers had been running pictures of these twins taken just after they’d been separated and of them as they were now, beside pictures of their sculptures or paintings and stills from their videos. The odds on them winning the art award were short, something like 3/1. I walked around the rooms in the too-hot gallery; though there were several people walking and stopping like me we were all respectful, subdued, like people generally are at a gallery, as if in a church or a bookshop. But I was sweating. Sweat was running down my back; I could feel it the length of my spine. I put my hand behind my neck just under my hairline and it came away wet. I stood in the middle of the gallery and looked at the sweat on my fingers.
It was because of the change in temperature between outside and in, or the larger temperature changes that happen in the change of a season. Or maybe, I thought as I laughed at myself inside my head and wiped my hand on my shirt, the reason I was sweating was because I would never know how the man at the door had finished his sentence. I felt a little dizzy. I felt weak. I began to wonder whether I’d caught some horrible flu virus, or something worse, something with no name which was right now multiplying itself through the inside of me. I glanced at a man who was going past me looking at the art in the wrong direction, the other way round from the way suggested by the arrows stencilled at the front door. For instance, he looked fine. He didn’t seem to be sweating. He didn’t even look hot. Nobody else in the room looked hot.
I stopped beside a sculpture of a coffee table with cups on it which were half-full of something rust-coloured, a folded newspaper placed next to them. The cups had what looked like perspex fixed over their tops and the newspaper’s pages were stapled together with thin metal staples all the way round it. I walked on. I could feel my legs beneath me. I kept walking at the right art gallery pace; I didn’t want to seem unusual to anyone. The only sound in the rooms was occasional and came from the video installations; it was an intermittent grinding noise, like teeth in the mouth of a sleeping person recorded very close-up, or something industrial. The video screens took up three walls of a darkened room; I watched for a while but couldn’t tell what it was I was looking at. On all three walls there was something red and dark and its surface shifted, shone dully; perhaps it was the massive inside of a mouth, a tongue laid flat on a palate bone. Now I could feel my mouth, cavernous, and the way my jaw raised its bone up and became the bottom row of my teeth. I came out of the dark. I concentrated on the paintings instead.
They were uniformly huge and square, each reaching from the skirting board up to the edge of the ceiling and each pair filling a wall as if this gallery, designed at the turn of the last century, had been planned especially to fit these paintings. They were all in pairs. The first of the pairs was of something recognizable and domestic, say a teapot or a dog. The second was a near-empty canvas, cleanish, always smudged at the centre like the painter had touched it ther
e by chance with a hand not clean enough. The images together would be titled: Teapot, 1 & 2 or: Dog, 1 & 2.
I got it. It didn’t exactly take long to get. It was all about alienation and distance, wasn’t it? I had only had to walk once round the gallery, which is pretty small, to get it, but I walked round a couple more times just to prove to myself that in this sweating state I could. After the third time I stopped and sat breathing on a stool in the corner, the kind that the art gallery attendants usually sit on.
The two paintings opposite me now were called Road, 1 & 2. The one on the left was of an empty tarmacked road leading into middle distance with plain grass verges on either side of it. The one on the right was another canvas left almost completely empty behind its glass, just the clay-coloured smudge at its centre resembling grime or a mistaken touch. On the front of the free handout it told me that the twins liked to paint two identical works then slowly, painstakingly, to remove all paint from one of the paired canvases except for a scant trace at the centre of the gone image, and as soon as I read this I remembered I’d already known that this was what the twins did, that I had read about this process in a Sunday newspaper or somewhere similar.
I felt shopsoiled, cheated on by my own memory. I sat back on the stool, leaned my weight into the wall behind me and closed my eyes. Then I remembered: the last time I had visited an art exhibition, several months back, I had also felt so unwell that I had had to sit down. It had been at a bigger, grander gallery in the middle of the city. At the very top of the building, up several flights of stairs and along a corridor lined in marble so glassy you could see yourself reflected from the feet up as you walked along it, there were three rooms filled with the small, relentless, brightly coloured pictures a painter had used to record the various stories of her life and her family’s lives in Berlin in the thirties and forties before her death, inevitable, pregnant and statistical. That day, I recalled now, I had been able to look closely at only three of the hundreds of her paintings before feeling the floor under my feet start to shift and creak like the whole of the gallery beneath us – beneath all these people wandering round the rooms and listening to the story of the paintings on the hired gallery CD machines hung at their waists, the CDs whirring in small circles unimaginable to anyone when the pictures were painted – was a ship on a pitching ocean and us in its crow’s-nest swaying and dipping.
I had rocked in one place on my heels and toes to keep myself upright, my face disinterested, until someone, a lady, pushed herself up off the padded seat in the middle of the floor, and her getting up made room for me. Then I had sat in the same room and counted the strips of wood in the floor, examining the varnished dust and stuff trapped in the spaces between them, the paintings still there, raucous colour hovering above my eye-line, until the bell for closing rang and a man in a uniform came round telling everybody to leave, and I could go.
Perhaps it was art that made me sweat. Perhaps sculptures and pictures were inherently bad for me. I suppressed a laugh. It was funny. Earlier that morning I had been to the bank which gave me my mortgage; for some reason the woman behind the counter there is always telling me stories of infirmities and deaths. She is always having inconclusive tests, usually for something frightening. Perhaps, I thought to myself, I could have tests for art intolerance, like patch tests. We have the results, the doctor would say. You are sensitive to dust-mites, the hairs of cats and horses, shellfish, metals related to nickel, and several forms of cultural expression. I would breathe a sigh of relief. I would discover, not too late, that my life could have been symptom-free and simple all along, a matter of deep, healthy, fluid-free breaths if only I’d known to not go near art. After that I would visit theatres and galleries and cinemas and bookshops drowsily, in the haze of antihistamines, my senses so blunt that I wouldn’t care in the slightest what the inherent narrative was or might be.
I always seem to get that woman serving me at the bank. Canadian, dark and thin, she has frail unsunned skin; her face through the saliva-specked double-reinforced glass is always pale. That morning, before I had felt so suddenly at a loss and had decided to take the day off work and spend some time at the contemporary art gallery, she told me a sad story while she added up my cheques. A bank colleague, only thirty-three, in fact only thirty-three last week. Year and a half ago a lump in her arm size of a small satsuma. Size of a clementine. Operated on. Given the all-clear. Six weeks ago terrible headaches. Went back to hospital. Riddled all through. Died yesterday. Only thirty-three. Imagine. Divorced. Daughter aged four who had said to other bank colleague called Mary who was visiting, Mummy is in the hospital and might not be coming back.
I nodded from the other side, said things, signed the paying-in slip, put it in the hollow space banks have for passing things through. My heart had grown bulky inside me one more time; one more time I was resolving behind my sympathetic face to change my branch. The woman was pressing something up against the inside glass layer at me, a grainy photograph, faxed or photocopied, of some people smiling at a party or in a pub. That’s the woman who died on the right, she was saying; did I recognize her? The faces were inky and shadowed and the picture bleeding to white in the several folds and creases in the copy; it had been through many hands. So do something frivolous, the woman had shouted after me through the glass as I left the bank. Be sure and do something frivolous today.
Something frivolous: I had gone to an art gallery. I was sweating. I was sitting on a stool in an art gallery with my eyes shut.
I opened them and I saw a small girl of perhaps three or four smiling at me. When I smiled back, she stopped smiling and hid round the back of the legs of her mother who was standing in the middle of the room talking in a polite hush to another woman. The child swung round her mother’s legs, pinning them both with her arms. She let go. She flung herself into the middle of the floor. She jumped from square to square of stone. She ignored Road 2 and stood in front of Road 1. Launching herself at the road as if she were about to run down it, she hit the picture, flat, with the weight of her whole body. The picture shuddered on the wall. The child made an amazed noise. She stood back and touched her nose.
Ow, she said.
Oh God, the mother said. Oh God, Sophie. Oh.
She turned to me. I’m so sorry, she said. I’m sorry. She just. Sorry.
No, I said, I’m not the. I mean. I’m –.
I stood up. Now the mother was rubbing with a tissue at the two clear prints her daughter’s hands had made on the glass. She was laughing, embarrassed, swearing under her breath. Sophie, she said.
No, I said. Don’t – Please don’t touch the paintings.
Oh, the woman said. Right. I’m sorry.
She stepped back, stood holding the tissue in the air, not knowing what to do. She put it in her bag. She turned, pretty and flustered, and exchanged a glance with her friend who was holding the child by the shoulders and smiling, eyes lowered not to laugh, looking down at the top of the child’s head. The child was singing something impenetrable, doing a dance again.
It’s okay, I said. It’s just that we can’t, you know, have anyone touching the paintings.
I’m really sorry, the woman said again. Come on, Sophie, we’ve to go now.
Both women made to gather the child into an anorak.
No, you can remain in the gallery, I said. It’s fine. But just, well. Just don’t let it happen again.
The woman relaxed. She was thanking me. But a real attendant was coming over, so I smiled what I imagined was a stern, official, goodbye kind of smile to the women, and turned to go. So that they wouldn’t realize, I stopped the attendant as he passed and asked him quietly when the gallery closed. The women behind me with the child would think he was giving me orders about work, or perhaps that I was giving them to him.
The attendant looked at me with the eyes and the hauteur of someone who knows everything there is to know. But it was all right. He didn’t know anything. The gallery closes at six tonight, he said.
/> Thanks, I said. And when does the exhibition finish?
This exhibition closes on the thirtieth, he said.
I strolled through the room whose walls could have been the insides of someone’s mouth, and out the other side. I pulled my sweater on over my head. I didn’t care. I was feeling better. I would go for a walk. I would throw myself into the day. I was inspired, I was calm; calm as good suburban turf and every bit as green I would saunter across the Thames swinging my arms, the water swirling and sucking beneath me and the policemen down in the drowning-station arguing with each other over their mugs of sweetened tea.
As I left the gallery I heard someone calling behind me. Maybe I’d been found out. Someone was running and it was after me; as he neared I could hear he was quite short of breath. It was the assistant who had told me what was free and what wasn’t when I’d first gone in. Maybe he wanted my leaflet back, completed, with the ten-word-phrase on it, modern art is important to me because. I tried quickly to think something up.
He ran strangely, his hand clenched out before him. Wait, he called as he ran. Wait. You dropped these. They fell out.
He looked desperate and pleased, filled with terrible import, like a messenger bringing good news about a medieval battle in a play or a film. I felt in my pocket for my wallet, but it was there. I wondered what else it was I could have dropped. I looked to see.
His hand was full of broken leaves and seeds with unlikely wings.
the heat of the story
It was midwinter. Everything was dead.
Three women came in late to Midnight Mass, their stilettos tapping on the flagstones halfway through the first reading. They came up the aisle slim-hoofed and coughing like winter deer.
They crushed with no apologies into a pew that was already packed with people. They were drunk; you could tell it. You could smell it five rows away, alcohol and worn perfume. One was young, one was older than her, and one was older than both of them. The too-bright, half-unbuttoned clothes of the youngest one were useless for this time of year, or for any time of year; the orange and metallic-blue raw and her neck and shoulder bare; and all three women dishevelled in the same liquid happiness, leaning up against one another, stamping their feet and rubbing their hands warm. Noise rose off them and hung sheer as nylon in the high roof cavity of the church over the heads of the good-coated congregation.