Ali Smith - Artful

Then we’d pass through that, me on your arm, and into a dark room, three dark walls, one lit bright wall — the light would be coming from behind the wall, and I’d go to the wall and I’d cut through the wall with, I don’t know, there’s bound to be something back in the junk room I could use, an old penknife, something with an edge. I’d get through it anyhow. It’s only a screen. There, beyond it, in a pure white space, you’d be standing like a figure in a holy picture. You wouldn’t be broken any longer, or torn, or rotten, you’d be whole, beautiful, light would be coming off your head like off the heads of Renaissance saints in paintings, great lines of gold, you’d be haloed in a kind of golden light like in the song by Beyoncé where she sings how she can see the person’s halo and that person is her saving grace.

That’s how cheap I am. That’s how far I am from Michelangelo’s Dream. That’s what the mouth in the hand on the end of my too real arm would be doing, singing some trivial junk like Doris Day’s Let the Little Girl Limbo, or something by Beyoncé. Everywhere I’m looking now. I’m surrounded by your embrace. Standing in the light of your halo.

Is that what liminal is? the light that came off you when I first saw you, that day when you walked past me? Because you were lit, you were lit by something, and it wasn’t the usual kind of light, and you were so beautiful I almost had to leave that room, I swear your beauty was changing the surface of my skin.

Halo halo halo, what’s goin’ on ’ere then? I woke up and it was all a dream. No. More like: I never went to sleep and it was all still real.

So much for my Harpo Marx coat. Imagine Harpo Marx as the guide to the real twentieth-century underworld. Like Harpo Marx crossing a Brueghel painting. And so much for my Artful Dodger pockets. If I remembered rightly, what was about to happen to him any minute in the story was that he’d mean less than a snuffbox and they’d send him off to sea. Transported, that’s the word for it.

I picked up my copy of Oliver Twist to flick forward and see — and the book fell apart in my hands. So I spent some time trying to stick its pages and spine back into readable form with cellotape. It wasn’t till I was about to get into bed and was plugging my phone in to recharge that I saw I’d missed a message.

It was the counselor. Hello, she said, please accept my apologies for calling you, again this is rather unprecedented, but I just wanted to let you know as soon as I could that your language, the language we spoke about, is a real one, and it does seem to be Greek. Epomony is Greek for patience, as in having patience. Guide a ruckus seems to mean little donkey. Spoo yattacky means small sparrow. Trav a brose is a phrase that means move on, go on, proceed, go to the front of things. There’s one word my husband says is untranslatable, what it really means is a ball of rags or cloths tied together to make a football, but by someone too poor or hopeless to be able to buy a real ball, so in human terms it means an outsider, a fool, a person on the edge of things, someone a bit too simple who won’t fit in, or an old-fashioned word like mooncalf. Clot so scoofy. And just one more thing. He says they’re all songs, your words, and that they’re all associated with one particular Greek actress.

Then she said a name I couldn’t make out. Then she said goodbye, and the answerphone voice told me to press a number on my phone if I wanted to save the call for seven days.

I listened to the message again. A donkey? a sparrow? a mooncalf?

I got in on my side and put my head back onto the pillow. I stretched an arm and a leg over to your side of the bed. Then I moved my whole self to the middle of the mattress, actually the best place in the bed for a good night’s sleep.

I closed my eyes.

Patience.

There’s always a first day in late winter — usually near the end of January though it depends how hard the winter’s been — when the bare trunks of the trees shine green and the buds on the ends of the branches glow slightly brighter than the rest of the tree. It’s the day the sapwood starts up working again, the xylem sap filling the trees’ arteries, well, what trees have instead of arteries, with the fluids and minerals stored all winter in the roots.

Sapwood is the lighter, outer wood of a trunk, bound round the darker inner heartwood — which is formed of dead used-up sapwood. It’s how trees grow.

Then there’s always a first day in February when the daylight has so banked itself up against the dark that you can’t not notice.

Then it’s spring, March about to be April, the gardens throwing off a swath of winter-spring flowers, and then it’s the first Monday after the clocks go forward, and it’s light at seven o’clock. Who am I talking to? Who am I telling this to, the story that this year on that first light evening I was sitting in the front room watching a dvd of Oliver! and when Mark Lester, who’s been sold by Harry Secombe to Leonard Rossiter the undertaker, gets locked in a roomful of coffins, when he sits among the coffins singing the song about where is love, does it fall from skies above, is it underneath the willow tree that I’ve been dreaming of, when he goes to the barred window high in the wall of the cellar, sings his song leaning against it and then suddenly, unexpectedly, it gives — at that moment, this year, I realized that it was past seven o’clock and it was light outside again?

Off he goes to Covent Garden, to find all its fruits, all its flowers amazing to the eye after the workhouse and the undertaker’s, but above all to coincide with Jack Wild, the Dodger, who works out it’ll probably be to his advantage to befriend this runaway, so he steals a bread roll from a passing baker’s tray, breaks a bit off for himself and throws the bulk of it to the hungry boy. Then the Dodger offers him accommodation, tells him to consider himself at home, one of the family, and leads him in such a merry dance that at the end of it the whole of London is up on its feet in an open festival of color and choreography.

This song and dance was, I knew when I was a child and saw this film, what happiness looked like, what happiness would be. Even now whenever I saw it again, moments of it still happened fresh to the eye, as if for the first time, though I’d seen the same thing so many times over. Like when the Dodger welcomes Oliver into the song, encourages him by singing the first half of a line and waiting to hear the new boy sing back the other half, which he does, like a question — like an answer met with a question: I knew this scene by heart but I’d never quite noticed that before.

You could so write about Oliver! I’d said to you when you were writing the last couple of those talks — well, when you were trying to, but were, you said, stuck, blocked. It wasn’t surprising you were finding it hard, you weren’t very well, and I’d come through to tell you to go easy on yourself. But saying that would have been like saying — well, I stood in the doorway and instead I said: you could so write about Oliver! in On Offer. He’s on offer, in the film. There’s a whole song about it. Boy for Sale. The price keeps coming down because nobody’ll take him, and in the end when the undertaker gets him he’s a bargain.