Spring Read online

  Ali Smith

  * * *

  SPRING

  Contents

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Acknowledgements and thanks

  About the Author

  Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, How to be both, Shire, Artful, There but for the, The first person and other stories, Girl Meets Boy, The Accidental, The whole story and other stories, Hotel World, Other stories and other stories, Like and Free Love.

  By the same author

  Free Love

  Like

  Other stories and other stories

  Hotel World

  The whole story and other stories

  The Accidental

  Girl Meets Boy

  The first person and other stories

  There but for the

  Artful

  Shire

  How to be both

  Public library and other stories

  Autumn

  Winter

  To keep in mind

  my brother

  Gordon Smith

  and for

  my brother

  Andrew Smith

  to keep in mind

  my friend

  Sarah Daniel

  and for

  o bloomiest!

  Sarah Wood

  He seems to be a stranger, but his present is

  A withered branch that’s only green at top.

  The motto: in hac spe vivo.

  William Shakespeare

  But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,

  perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare

  branches of the hazel-trees, or

  would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime. –

  Rainer Maria Rilke / Stephen Mitchell

  We must begin, which is the point.

  After Trump, we must begin.

  Alain Badiou

  I am looking for signs of Spring already.

  Katherine Mansfield

  The year stretched like a child

  and rubbed its eyes on light.

  George Mackay Brown

  1

  * * *

  Now what we don’t want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition. What we want is people in power saying the truth is not the truth. What we want is elected members of parliament saying knife getting heated stuck in her front and twisted things like bring your own noose we want governing members of parliament in the house of commons shouting kill yourself at opposition members of parliament we want powerful people saying they want other powerful people chopped up in bags in my freezer we want muslim women a joke in a newspaper column we want the laugh we want the sound of that laugh behind them everywhere they go. We want the people we call foreign to feel foreign we need to make it clear they can’t have rights unless we say so. What we want is outrage offence distraction. What we need is to say thinking is elite knowledge is elite what we need is people feeling left behind disenfranchised what we need is people feeling. What we need is panic we want subconscious panic we want conscious panic too. We need emotion we want righteousness we want anger. We need all that patriotic stuff. What we want is same old Scandal Of The Alcoholic Mothers Danger Of The Daily Aspirin but with more emergency Nein Nein Nein we need a hashtag #linedrawn we want Give Us What We Want Or We’ll Walk we want fury we want outrage we want words at their most emotive antisemite is good nazi is great paedo will really do it perverted foreigner illegal we want gut reaction we want Age Test For ‘Child Migrants’ 98% Demand Ban New Migrants Gunships To Stop Migrants How Many More Can We Take Bolt Your Doors Hide Your Wives we want zero tolerance. We need news to be phone size. We need to bypass mainstream media. We need to look past the interviewer talk straight to camera. We need to send a very clear strong unmistakable message. We need newsfeed shock. We need more newsfeed shock come on quick next newsfeed shock pull the finger out we want torture images. We need to get to them we need them to think we can get to them get the word lynching to anyone not white. We want rape threats death threats 24/7 to black/female members of parliament no just women doing anything public anyone doing anything public we don’t like we need How Dare She/How Dare He/How Dare They. We need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they’re silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it’s new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we’re saying while we’re saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean. We need a good old slogan Britain no England/America/Italy/France/Germany/Hungary/Poland/Brazil/[insert name of country] First. We need the dark web money algorithms social media. We need to say we’re doing it for freedom of speech. We need bots we need cliche we need to offer hope. We need to say it’s a new era the old era’s dead their time’s over it’s our time now. We need to smile a lot while we say it we need to laugh on camera ha ha ha thump man laughing his head off hear that factory whistle at the end of the day that factory’s dead we’re the new factory whistle we’re what this country’s needed all along we’re what you need we’re what you want.

  What we want is need.

  What we need is want.

  That time again, is it? (Shrugs.)

  None of it touches me. It’s nothing but water and dust. You’re nothing but bonedust and water. Good. More useful to me in the end.

  I’m the child who’s been buried in leaves. The leaves rot down: here I am.

  Or picture a crocus in snow. See the ring of the thaw round the crocus? That’s the door open into the earth. I’m the green in the bulb and the moment of split in the seed, the unfurl of the petal, the dabber of ends of the branches of trees with the green as if green is alight.

  The plants that push up through the junk and the plastic, earlier, later, they’re coming, regardless. The plants shift beneath you regardless, the people in sweatshops, the people out shopping, the people at desks in the light off their screens or scrolling their phones in the surgery waiting rooms, the protesters shouting, wherever, whatever the city or country, the light shifts, the flowers nod next to the corpseheap and next to the places you live and the places you drink yourselves stupid or happy or sad and the places you pray to your gods and the big supermarkets, the people on motorways speeding past verges and scrubland like nothing is happening. Everything is. The flowerheads open all over the flytip. The light shifts across your divides, round the people with passports, the people with money, the people with nothing, past sheds and canals and cathedrals, your airports, your graveyards, whatever you bury, whatever you dig up to call it your history or drill down to use up for money, the light shifts regardless.

  The truth is a kind of regardless.

  The winter’s a nothing to me.

  Do you think I don’t know about power? You think I was born green?

  I was.

  Mess up my climate, I’ll fuck with your lives. Your lives are a nothing to me. I’ll yank daffodils out of the ground in December. I’ll block up your front door in April with snow and blow down that tree so it cracks your roof open. I’ll carpet your house with the river.

  But I’ll be the reason your own sap’s reviving. I’ll mainline the light to your veins.

  What’s under your road surface now?

  What’s under your house’s foundations?

  What’s warping your doors?

 
What’s giving your world the fresh colours? What’s the key to the song of the bird? What’s forming the beak in the egg?

  What’s sending the thinnest of green shoots through that rock so the rock starts to split?

  It is 11.09 on a Tuesday morning in October 2018 and Richard Lease, the TV and film director, a man most people will best remember for several, well, okay, a couple of, critically acclaimed Play for Today productions in the 1970s but also many other things over the years, I mean you’re bound to have seen something he did if you’ve lived long enough, is standing on a train platform somewhere in the north of Scotland.

  Why is he here?

  That’s the wrong kind of question. It implies there’s a story. There’s no story. He’s had it with story. He is removing himself from story, more specifically from story concerning: Katherine Mansfield, Rainer Maria Rilke, a homeless woman he saw yesterday morning on a pavement outside the British Library, and over and above all of these, the death of his friend.

  Scrap all the stuff above about him being a director you’ve heard of or not.

  He’s just a man at a station.

  So far the station is at a standstill. Delays mean there’ve been no trains coming into or going out of this station, not for the time he’s been standing on its platform, which is sort of like the station is meeting his needs.

  There’s no one else on the platform. There’s no one on the platform opposite.

  There will be people here somewhere, people who work in the office or look after the place. Surely people are still paid to look after places like this in person. There will be someone watching a screen somewhere. But he’s seen no actual people. The only other person he’s seen since he left the guest house and walked along the high street is someone moving about in the open hatch of one of those coffee trucks outside the station, one of those Citroën vans, someone serving no one.

  Not that he is looking for anyone. He isn’t, and nobody’s looking for him, nobody that matters.

  Where the fuck is Richard?

  His mobile is in London, in a half-full coffee tumbler with its lid on in a waste bin in a Pret a Manger on the Euston Road.

  Was. He has no idea where it’ll be by now. Rubbish depot. Landfill.

  Good.

  Hi Richard, it’s me, Martin Terp’s due here any minute, can you give me an approximate arrival time for you? Hi, it’s me again Richard, just to let you know Martin’s just arrived at the office. Any chance you could give me a call and let me know when we can expect you? Richard, it’s me, can you call me? Hi Richard, me again, I’m just trying to reschedule this morning’s meeting given that Martin’s only in London till tonight, he’s not back in town till next week, so give me a call and let me know about this afternoon will you? Thanks Richard, I’d appreciate it. Hi Richard, in your absence I’ve rescheduled us for 4pm, can you confirm when you get this message that you got this message please?

  No.

  He is standing in the wind with his arms folded holding his jacket against him to stop it flapping (cold, no buttons, buttons lost) and looking at the little white flecks in the platform tarmac under his feet.

  He takes a deep breath.

  His lungs hurt at the top of his breath.

  He looks to the mountains at the back of the town. They are really something. They are really bleak and true. They’re everything that a mountain can mean.

  He thinks of his own place in London. Dust particles will be hanging in the sun coming through the cracks in the blinds, if it’s sunny in London right now.

  Look at him, storying his own absence.

  Storying his own dust.

  Stop it. He’s a man leaning on a pillar in a station. That’s all.

  It’s a Victorian pillar. The pillar’s ironwork is painted white and blue.

  Then he steps back under the bit of see-through roof over the platform, goes a bit closer to the buildings to get out of the wind.

  Some of those mountains over there have what looks like raincloud over their tops, like their tops are veiled. The cloud the other way, direction south he’d say, looks like a wall, a wall lit from behind. The cloud over the mountains, north, northeast, is mist.

  It’s why he’d got off the train here: the train had pulled towards this station and there’d been something clean about the mountains, clean like swept clean. They had something about them that accepted the fact of themselves, demanded nothing. They just were.

  Sentimentalist.

  Self-mythologizer.

  The automaton voice above his head now apologizes again for the fact that no train is currently arriving at the station or leaving from the station.

  Almost nothing is happening, give or take the automaton announcements, a few birds crossing the sky, the rustle of the early autumn leaves, the weeds and the grass in the wind.

  A man standing at a station looks at the mountains all round him in the distance.

  Today they look like a line drawn freehand by a huge hand then shaded in below, they look like something asleep and waiting. They look like the prehistoric backs of imagined sleeping sea-beasts.

  Story of mountains.

  Story of myself avoiding stories.

  Story of myself getting off a fucking train.

  He shakes his head.

  He was a man on a railway platform. There was no story.

  Except, there is. There always fucking is.

  Why was he on a station platform? Was he waiting for a train?

  No.

  Was he going somewhere? For what reason? Was he meeting someone off a train?

  No.

  Then why was the man on the railway platform at all if it’s not about getting or waiting for a train?

  He just was, okay?

  Why? And why are you using the past tense about yourself, you loser?

  Loser, yes. That’s fair. Something had been lost. Something is.

  What is? What exactly?

  Well, I don’t know how to describe it.

  Try.

  (Sighs) I can’t.

  Try. Come on. You’re supposed to be Mr Drama. What does it look like?

  Okay. Okay, so, so imagine someone or something, some force or other, bearing down on you head first and going through you from head to foot with, with an apple-corer, so that you’re still standing there as if nothing’s happened whereas actually something has, what’s happened is you’re a hollow man, there’s a hole all through you where the core of you once was. Will that do?

  Self-indulger. Dross. Tom and Jerry cartoon self. What, you want sympathy for your own hollowness? your, what? lost fucking fruitfulness?

  Look, I’m just trying to put what I’m feeling into words, a feeling that’s not easy to describe, into –

  Don’t story yourself to me, you waste of –

  time in his life when he was able to love, literally be in love with, be at actual soul level happily infatuated with something like the simplicity of a lemon. Just any lemon, in a bowl, or on a market stall, or in a net with other lemons waiting to be bought at a supermarket. There was a time in his life when such a thing had filled him with joy.

  But now it was as if such simplicity had, without him even noticing it happening, grown very small and far away and him on the deck of an old ocean liner heading towards rough sea and waving like a madman back at a shore which, like a time when there’d been a steady kind of joy in something like the simplicity of a lemon, had disappeared, vanished completely, was no longer visible to the eye.

  Is no longer.

  Loser.

  When he thinks about the first time he met Paddy, what comes into his head is a black and white image from near fifty years ago of some teethmarks in a piece of chocolate, a piece grown so old already by the time he saw it that it had literally whitened, especially at the place where the impress of the row of little teeth was. The teeth were Beatrix Potter’s. Beatrix Potter had at some point taken a bite out of the chocolate then put it down and forgotten about it in the shed wher
e she wrote and illustrated the books about the charming English animals wearing the Edwardian clothes and being good and bad and stupid, the duck flattered by the fox, the squirrel who eats so many nuts he can’t get out of the hole in the tree trunk; she had bitten into a pre-war chocolate bar and the impress of her teeth had outlived her, there in the hut, for decades after her death in 19-whatever.

  He’d been assistant to one of the assistant directors, one of his earliest jobs. It was the first one he worked on scripted by Paddy.

  Her script had turned a mostly uninspired shoot into a thoughtful film. More, she’d written the shots about the teeth in the chocolate into the script, so in the end they had to use the shots.

  He’d got her address off someone and contacted her when they offered him his first solo. He’d bought her a whisky in the Hanged Man. He’d just turned twenty one. He’d never bought anyone a whisky in a pub before, let alone a woman, let alone a glamorous older woman like her.

  – Because I’m Irish?

  – Because you’re good.

  – As it happens, I am, you’ve got that dead right. I’m very very good at what I do. Now, what about you, are you good? I only want to work with the very good.

  – I don’t know yet. Probably not. I’m more the self-serving type. But you got it, the teeth in the chocolate. You wrote it in.

  – Yeah, you’ve a good eye. I’ll give you that. And you’re very young. So a lot’s still possible. And you want me to work with you so much because I wrote something into it that meant they had to use your shots. Is that it?

  – Truthfully? It’s your script that got me this job.

  (She shakes her head, looks away towards the pub door.)

  – But also, you made that film better. Your script made something real happen.

  – Real, is it?

  (Pause. Cigarette, inbreath, outbreath smoke.)