Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

Later, back at home, the Eminent Critic sits working on his laptop at his kitchen table.

‘ Creation ,’ he types, ‘is easily this year’s most arresting new work. Ostensibly – and indeed ostentatiously – silent, it does in fact speak eloquently to us, sharply interrogating (with Smart’s characteristic astringency) the idea of “nature” as something prior to and outside of social discourse. Smart has deliberately chosen the most tritely conventional of subjects – cherry blossom – and has transformed it into a complex, maddeningly ambiguous statement precisely by not transforming it at all !’

As he continues to tap at his keyboard you can see on the screen the following text, under a standard Microsoft toolbar:

‘by insisting on his own complete absence, Smart, almost teasingly, invites us to question what precisely it is that makes this work so unmistakably and triumphantly a work of art. The caption? The gallery setting? The funding – both from public and private sources – that made the work possible? The fact that Julian Smart is a recognised artist? The’

He takes a break in mid-sentence, wandering across his large and well-stocked kitchen to pour himself a glass of red wine. As he stands sipping at it, he flips idly through the TV guide from Saturday’s paper. He is still thinking in prose.

‘But that only opens up another whole line of questioning, of course. What makes Julian Smart an artist? Who gave him this licence?… Mmm, must watch that. Last episode too… Ultimately it is critics who are the arbiters. Indeed it is perfectly possible to argue that we are the actual creators of art.’

Stark shadows give his face a certain mythic quality, like the famous poster of Che Guevara, though nothing like as handsome.

Two weeks after the show, on a frosted door marked ‘Headmaster’ the pot-bellied silhouette of Mr Roberts holds the receiver of a phone in one hand, the rest of the phone in the other, while the coiled flex dangles in between.

‘Is this Mr Julian Smart? Yes? Well, we’re not happy, Mr Smart. We are not happy about this at all. The agreement was that the tree would be returned unharmed !’

Inside the room he is pacing about with beads of sweat on his forehead. Behind him are shelves lined with lever arch files with labels like ‘Literacy Strategy’, ‘Sex Education Guidelines’ and ‘Promoting Creativity’.

You can see the tree in the playground through the window.

‘Our parents are very distressed. Many of them grew up with that tree themselves…’

From the far side of the metal railings you can just see Mr Roberts’ upper half as he paces his office.

In front of him is the tree, completely bare, apart from a few shrivelled leaves.

‘…would never have agreed in the first place…’ he’s saying.

A jet passes overhead.

‘Well, I’m sorry, mate, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do.’

Julian Smart is sitting at a table outside a café. He looks defiantly across at Wendy as he slips his phone back into his jacket pocket.

‘What does he think I am? Some kind of plant resurrectionist?’

Smartly Dressed Professionals chat at the tables around them. Cars and pedestrians hurry by.

‘And what a ridiculous fuss anyway! Anyone would think I’d murdered one of the kids .’

Wendy’s face looks troubled. ‘Yes but…’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake, don’t you start! It was only a bloody tree. There are trees everywhere. But just for a moment there that particular tree got to be a unique and famous work of art .’

We see Julian’s lean and handsome face reflected in the window of the café. A single thought hovers in the bubble above him.

‘And there are pretty women everywhere too.’

Mr Roberts sits down wearily at his desk, passing his hand over his face.

I stand with my back to my window watching my story churn out of the printer.

Your doorbell rings.

There was a delicious, agonising goodbye in Ellie’s car, with gentle hands, and moonhoney, and lips still warm from the night, but at last reluctantly they had to heed the honking taxis and the shouting man.

The car door closed. Space and time opened up between them. Thomas watched Ellie rejoin the stream, waved and blew kisses, then turned to hurry into the station, feeling for his ticket in his jacket pocket.

‘I really must catch this train,’ he’d told her. ‘I wish I could stay longer with you, I truly do, but I need to be there for this meeting.’

And yet, when it turned out he’d got the time wrong and that his train was already pulling away, he found he didn’t care that much about the meeting, or mind that the hour and a half he now had to wait would be on his own when it could have been with Ellie. He phoned his work to apologise – really it was no big deal at all – then bought some coffee and sat on a kind of gallery above the platforms, under Victorian arches of iron and glass, with four or five big intercity trains beneath him, lying side by side beneath their power lines like metal whales.

What could be better than the solitude of a railway station at half past 9 in the morning, he thought? It was beautiful as a cathedral, but a cathedral whose god was real and performed miracles many times in every hour. It was a temple of power and speed.

The caffeine lit him up, transforming his veins into branching fingers of contentment. He watched the pigeons, the electric trolleys, a giant electric advertising hoarding that changed every ten seconds: girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit – girl – car – beach – cartoon rabbit…

Another train came hissing to a standstill right below him. For two seconds it just stood there, and then suddenly, all along its flank, doors slid simultaneously open to disgorge a crowd of people with bags, suitcases, baby buggies, bicycles, who began at once to hurry towards the city. In poured another crowd, equally keen to get away.

For some reason, the image came into his mind of a great sphere hanging up there at the mouth of the station where the trains came and went. One side of the sphere was in sunlight where he couldn’t see it, the other within the shadow of the station roof.

10.58! Jane jumped out of a taxi with a badly packed bag in her hand. Oh for God’s sake keep the bloody change then, you crook. Which bloody platform? Which bloody train? Why don’t they fix that bloody departure board? God damn it if I have to sit around here and wait for the next train I swear I’ll bloody kill someone.

She was angry . She was riding a great red horse with teeth of steel and people had better stand back because it could bite and kick and shoot out gamma rays from its hell-fire eyes. Platform 9! Okay, now run . She’d finally done it after threatening it so many times that she herself ceased to believe in it. She’d ditched the bastard, she had crawled out of the hole, she’d let the red horse loose from the catacomb where it had champed in the darkness for so long. And, look, it was twelve feet tall, strong as a tank, lethal as a bloody bomb.

‘Hurry up please, miss, we’re about to go.’

I am fucking hurrying, you stupid man. I am in fact running as you may possibly have observed.

And don’t call me ‘miss’.

God will you look at this shower in here with their smartphones and their bloody tablets.

Where am I going to sit?

Miss . Patronising git. Miss . What does he know about my marital status? Mind you he’s right. I am single now. I’m bloody single and that’s the way it’s going to stay for a long long time.