Part 3

chosen to wear 1940s schoolboy clothes to launch his first songs into popular culture and what this had meant for his subsequent lyrics, chart positioning and cultural legacy.

Charlotte. Nothing more than an alone again naturally no matter how I try why oh why oh why sort of revolutionary.

For instance, the only word she’d really heard, really recognized, in that typical Iris outpouring was the word blast. She recognized the word because just then it was a bit like there’d been a bomb blast very near her head, one that had knocked her senses and all her cognitives sideways, leaving her lopsided, strangely deaf, nothing to say.

I’m so sorry, Iris, she said. I’m feeling very much at a disconnect right now.

Nothing’s not connected, Iris said.

Iris is Art’s aunt. Charlotte’s not related to her. She’s a seasoned lefty activist. She won’t tell Charlotte how old she is, but she must be in her eighties. Greenham, Porton Down; she apparently also used to help run a sort of commune in this very house, years ago. Then someone chucked the commune out and left the house uninhabited and rotting.

Then Art’s business-minded mother, Iris’s sister, who’d liked it here, bought the empty falling-down house for herself and renovated it. Iris is always exclaiming about walking into walls that didn’t exist when she first lived here.

Then Art’s mother died, left the house and contents to Art with the proviso that Iris can live here till she dies.

Then Art and Charlotte moved their Art in Nature team down here to live here too. Free lodgings.

Now that everything’s changed she and someone else’s aunt are the only people living in this cavernous house. They each have a floor of it to themselves. The floor Charlotte’s room is on has six other bedrooms on it.

Charlotte hasn’t seen anything else of the house, or of this floor, except this room and the bathroom next door to it, for three days now. I’ll be back in a minute, Charlotte had said to Iris. That was three days ago.

Every night Iris knocks on the door and leaves a plate of food and a jug of water outside.

The first night she said,

are you running a temperature?

No, Charlotte said from the other side of the door.

A cough? Iris said.

No, I’m fine, Charlotte said. I really am. I’m not ill.

So this isn’t a case of you isolating because you’re feeling ill? Iris said.

No, Charlotte said. It’s a case of me isolating because I very much want to be an isolate.

Okie doke, Iris said. Tell me if you feel ill or have any of those symptoms. Or any symptoms at all. Or if you need anything. I’ll check in on you every day, if that’s okay. Take your time.

Charlotte thinks Iris looks a bit like what a hedgerow would look like if an animator for a film made up a character who was meant to be a hedgerow.

Her hair is wild. She looks out through it with the bright eyes of a bird. She partly brought Art up, from what Charlotte can gather.

She never talks about herself. She says things like this instead: Yes, it’s surreal for us here right now. But it’s never not a state of emergency somewhere. We’re naive if we think life normally isn’t as surreal as fuck for most people scraping a living on this earth.

Charlotte can’t take it right now.

Also, when an old person swears like that it’s actually sort of shocking. It has revealed her own prurience to Charlotte, who’d also, till now, always thought herself an activist. Until she met the real thing, that is.

Call me Ire. My name’s the only ire left in me. I’m way beyond anger now.

Is it something about how equipped, how practical, how sorted Iris is that has defeated, stunned stone dead, the calm-hearted activist in Charlotte?

Charlotte, when she first got back here from Suffolk, had told Iris about Art falling in love.

She and Iris had both laughed, both fond. Like they were like each other.

Then she’d told Iris – foolishly, her selfish self knows now – about Art and herself going to visit the detainees in the SA4A Immigration Removal Centre and how a clever and thoughtful young virologist being held indefinitely there had taken pains to explain to them, and this was back in early February when nobody much was taking the virus seriously in England, about the dangerous-sounding virus that was beginning to take hold in various countries and had reached England via the airport right next to the Immigration Removal Centre they were sitting in now, from which the planes that took off over their heads made the room they were sitting in literally shake every few minutes, and the virus was apparently now also present in

the city just down the road from here where they were about to go and stay for the night.

He told them that if the virus happened to get into this centre he was being held in then all the detainees would catch it because the windows are made of a combination of perspex and metal bars, none of them openable to the outside world, the only air in there the recycled old air filtering through the place’s ventilation system.

Iris’s eyes had lit up.

They’ll quietly let them out, she said. They won’t want detained people dying and becoming a bad publicity story.

Then a week ago a news story broke about the government release of a few hundred illegal immigrants thought to be most medically vulnerable to such an outbreak.

They won’t be the only ones, Iris said. That’s just the iceberg’s tip. And released to where? To what? Where will they go?

I don’t know, Charlotte said.

A lot of vulnerable innocent people will be homeless soon, Iris said, with no money and no family, and they’ll desperately need somewhere to stay.

I guess so, Charlotte had said.

We have thirteen empty bedrooms now your Art in Natures have gone, Iris said, and three large public rooms. That’s a possible sixteen separate rooms for people. I’ll ask Artie if it’s okay with him. I’ll ask him if we can use his room too. That’s seventeen.

(It was in the first days of Art being away elsewhere with other people.) Ask him if you can use his room for what? Charlotte said.

The only two things we’d have to sort out, Iris said, before people arrive I mean.

What people? Charlotte said.

Because I think we’ll have enough food for everyone for a couple of months, Iris said.

(Iris still works three times a week at a wholesale local healthfood place and the barn is already full of sacks of things like lentils and rice, Iris being generally of a state of emergency mindset.)

No, the real problem, Iris said, will be the increased load of shit, what to do with it.

Shit? Charlotte said.

Sewage is something Chei Bres has always had a problem with, Iris said, when there’s more than a few people living here.

What’s Chei Bres? Charlotte said.

(She thought it was maybe the name of the revolutionary group Iris lived with here in the 1970s and 80s.)

Chei Bres is this house’s old name, Iris said. It’s Cornish for house of thought, house where gestation takes place. House of the mind and house of the uterus. And when my sister renovated it what she forgot to renovate was the sewage system. Not that I’m speaking ill of my beloved dead. But for all her brilliance she could never be bothered to go deeper into anything than she had to. Including this house’s foundational infrastructure. We had overcrowding sewage problems when just two of us lived here. So. First thing we’ll need is a septic tank bigger than the one we’ve got.

Charlotte had nodded calmly at everything Iris was saying.

Simultaneously she saw herself driving as fast as she could down to the Asda in town and packing the back of the car with tins of anything she could get and as much toilet paper as she could buy then phoning her old landlord to see if she could rent her flat back again and, even if she couldn’t, driving at over the limit speeds back to London to find somewhere like it as fast as possible.

Why toilet paper?

Because it’s what everybody in Australia had panic-bought.

So, logically, it’d be the thing that would run out first.

You’d always need toilet paper.

And why her old flat or something like it?

Because her old flat was a one-person flat and there wasn’t room in there for anyone else. Or their shit.

She stood up and stretched.

Back in a minute, she’d said as if she were merely going through to the toilet.

She’d nipped upstairs to get her jacket and her wallet and her laptop and her toothbrush etc.

She’d slipped quietly out the back door.

She’d come round the side of the barn where nobody from the house can see you, and she’d opened the car door.

She’d sat in the driver’s seat with the door still open.

But instead she’d opened her laptop and typed in septic tank suppliers cornwall.

Then she’d gone back into the house and given Iris a number to ring for someone to come with a digger.

At least she’d done that.

There’d still been some life in her then.

That’s the thing about Iris. She’s always unfailingly dauntingly right.

I wish they’d stop using war language, war imagery. This isn’t a war.

The opposite of a war is happening. The pandemic is making walls and borders and passports as meaningless as nature knows they are.

That evening, as they’d watched half an hour of the endless newsfeed, Iris, Charlotte said. You’re the endangered age. You have to isolate.

That’ll be the day, Iris said. Isolation spells d, e, a, t and h to me. But don’t worry, I’ve no intention of dying any time soon. And there’s no such thing as the endangered age. We’re all the endangered age now.

You’re being stupid, Charlotte said. Your good intentions mean nothing.

Not up against a virus.

Grant me some common sense, Iris said. We’re all walking the line now, the line between one era and another. And you know how the old song goes, don’t you?

Which old song is that, then? Charlotte said.

The one people ceremoniously sing, all across the world, when we’re passing from one time to another? Iris said.

She sang a little of the song people sing at New Year when they’re all holding other people’s hands with their arms crossed over themselves.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere, she sang. And gie’s a hand o thine.

My trusty fear? Charlotte said.

It doesn’t mean fear. It means a friend, that word, Iris said. And I know, I know full well that we can’t literally give a hand. What we have to do is work out how to give as much of a hand as we can in all the other possible ways.

My trusty fear.

A friend.

Charlotte went out of the room with the television in it. She sat on the stairs with something inside her as numb and dead as a, a what?

A toilet roll.

She hit herself hard with her own hand, with her fist, in the chest.

It hurt.

Good.

She did it again.

How do you jolt a dead self back to life?

She heard Iris coming through. Iris touched her lightly and affectionately on the head as she passed; she was carrying a lot of laundry under one arm and she had a screwdriver in her mouth.

She dropped the laundry in the hall, went to the front doors and started doing something to the lock on the inside door.

What Iris was doing, Charlotte saw, was taking the lock off.

She slid the Yale apparatus out of its slot and let it fall on to the floor.

Then she went to work on the outer door too.

Are you replacing them? Charlotte said.

There’ll be no locking anyone in here, not in any lockdown of ours, Iris said. Not for people who’ve been locked up for so long.

Charlotte’s inner toilet roll blanched even whiter.

Shall I put that laundry in the annexe for you? she said.

It’s clean, Iris said. But if you want to be really helpful you can bring me all the T-shirts you can find in the house.

Why? Charlotte said.

Masks, Iris said. I’ve twelve of my own here. We’ll need between thirty six and forty. Thirty six at the least, two each so everybody’s got a spare.

Including you and me. Bring the kitchen scissors. I’ll show you.

Charlotte went upstairs like a person going upstairs to look for T-shirts.

Back in a minute, she said.

She went into her room.

This was three days ago.

She’d shut the door.

She’d got one of the chairs and wedged its back right under the handle so nobody could open it from the outside.

She pulled down the blind.

Then she went and sat on her bed.

She got into the bed.

She pulled the covers right up over her head because a line of light was still getting in at the edge of the blind.

She put her own arms round herself.

—

A text arrives on Charlotte’s non-web phone.

It’s from Art.

It’s later on the same day that he finally phoned and they argued.

It says:

Forgot to tell you this tale. Remember the Greenlaws from Brighton who we took with us to Suffolk? Today a parcel arrived addressed to Daniel. There was a very small violin case in the parcel and inside the violin case there was a very small violin.

Remember the kids? The boy who was really infatuated with you?

He sent a note. Dear Mr Gluck, thought you might like a small present from the past. Best wishes from your sister, Robert Greenlaw. The little violin is really beautiful. Daniel can’t remember what it’s about but he likes the violin a lot, it has delighted him. He has it on the bed next to him.

But I bet the boy’s mother and father don’t know he sent it. Have you got an email or an address? We need to check with them.

Charlotte reads it again.

Best wishes from your sister, Robert Greenlaw.

She smiles.

She reaches and puts on a light next to the bed.

Here’s some of what she remembers from the time she drove that family to the hotel they all stayed in, just after the visit to Mr Gluck.

The boy: Why did he call the stone a child?

Their mother: He’s old. Old people get very addled.

The boy: I don’t think he seemed at all addled.

Their mother: He was so addled he thought you were a girl.

The girl: You look like a girl.

The boy: He just thought for a minute I was someone he knew, that’s all.

It wasn’t about being a girl or boy. He wasn’t addled when we talked about Einstein.

Charlotte: When did you talk about Einstein with him?

The boy: He knew loads about Einstein. He knew about how Einstein played a violin when he was a child and he knew how much Einstein liked Mozart. And he told me what Einstein means in German. It’s not just a name, it’s two words. It means, literally, one stone, or a stone. So then we talked about Einstein’s stone theory and he knew about that too.

Charlotte: What’s Einstein’s stone theory?

The boy: It’s about how reality isn’t what we see or what it seems, and you can prove it, and how susceptible the mind is and how we make stuff up all the time about reality, by lining up different coloured stones in a geometric shape and counting them. Then you add some more stones, yeah?

But when you count them again it’s like you didn’t add anything because the number seems to add up to the same as it was before.

Their mother: Now I’m the one that’s addled.

The boy: And we also talked about how particles meet, I mean when two meet each other, and how something changes in both of them. And after that, even if the particles are nowhere near each other, if one changes, the other does too.

The girl: Yeah, like when Arthur met Elisabeth. Oh my God. Did anyone else see?

Their mother: Oh, I saw.

The girl: Charlotte, did you see?

In that room that afternoon with the old man in the bed, a bright and charming old man who didn’t seem to remember Art’s mother but who took Art’s hand in his and wouldn’t let it go, Charlotte had seen the woman called Elisabeth see Art.

She had seen Art see the woman back.

Well, Art said in bed that night in Suffolk. Because we’ve, we’ve a lot in common.

It wasn’t an answer to a question she’d asked. Charlotte hadn’t said anything. He’d simply begun to try to explain or articulate something out loud, to himself really more than to her. But she sensed, she knew, that she was meant to ask, meant to engage with his engaging. So she did.

Like what? she’d said.

Well, for one thing. We both grew up with absent fathers, he said.

Charlotte lay on her back and looked at the plaster decoration round the light fitting in the ceiling. Fruits and flowers round the source of light.

How does it feel? she said.

It just, feels, well, right, he said.

Right, Charlotte said.

Like a very long view has opened in front of my eyes with a sky that goes on for miles across a sort of summer landscape, he said.

Uh huh, she said. Right.

It’s like, I just, know, he said.

You just know what? Charlotte said.

I’m supposed to be with her, Art said.

Like you used to say you knew about me? Charlotte said.

Aw, Art said. I always knew, we always both knew, that I was pushing it when I told myself that about us.

True, Charlotte said.

I’m not pushing it when it’s about her, he said. It feels quite different. It’s amazing. It’s shocking. It’s lovely. It just, well, is. Where are you going? It’s half eleven. Why are you getting dressed?

I just feel like going for a walk or something, she said.

You want me to come too? he said.

No, no, it’s fine, she said. I just feel like getting some air.

Are you taking the car key? he said.

I might go for a drive, she said.

Will you be long? he said.

No, she said.

When she’d got back after driving around, the bed was empty. It was still warm from him when she got into it.

He’d left a note on her bag.

Am over at Elisabeth’s. You take the car tomorrow. I’ll get myself home when I’ve worked out where I am and what I’m doing.

Charlotte sits in the pool of light six weeks later, a lifetime later, and reads the text about the violin again.

She laughs out loud remembering.

The boy. The boy who stuck glass to his sister’s hand so she’d break it and cut herself.

She remembers him saying, when they drove past a lighthouse on their way to the hotel, that Albert Einstein had once had an idea that a spell of enforced solitude – like lighthouse keepers had to endure as their everyday job – would be a good thing for young people who had a scientific or mathematical bent, because it would give them the chance to be uninterruptedly creative.

Don’t believe anything he says, his sister, Sacha, said.

It’s true, the boy said. Einstein did say it. He made a speech at the Royal Albert Hall and he said it then.

Yeah, sure he did, his sister said. Charlotte, Robert wants to tell you all about Einstein.

In October 1933, the boy said. I can prove it. I can. It’s in a book. I have the book with me.

She remembers he did have the book with him. In fact he had the book with him and nothing else.

His mother told them that night in the hotel pub when they were eating supper that her son had packed an overnight bag with no pyjamas in it, no toothbrush. All that was in it was a book about Albert Einstein.

Yeah because he’s travelling light, his sister said. I mean literally, at the speed of.

At which point the two kids, who’d been fiercely arguing about everything, both fell about laughing at the joke with a pleasure, an infectious delight, the kind that made everyone in that restaurant turn towards their table, not in a way that meant they wished they’d be quieter or were finding something intrusive, but in that way where something warm happening will unite a room of strangers.

Charlotte sits up.

She gets up.

She takes the pillow off the chair by the window and leaves it on the floor. She takes the chair over to the desk. She puts on another light.

God, this room could do with a clean and an air.

She goes back over to the window and opens it.

Better.

She picks up Art’s T-shirt. She puts it back over the back of the chair. She sits down.

At the desk she starts composing a text back to Art on her James Bond phone.

Was thinking about that time we were walking around north of kings cross not long after we first met, summer afternoon, and we saw the things arranged on the wall outside that block of flats with the sale sign next to them and you bought the ceramic dog, it said £3.50 on it do you remember, and you gave the man a fiver and told him to keep the change.

What she’d thought at the time was, this man is a fool. He was buying rubbish. Someone either very young or very useless had made it, white and yellow baked clay, body bent in the middle, shapeless paws and a dog head you could see thumbmarks in on both ears.

Over time she’d come to love that ceramic dog.

Not that she’d ever have admitted it to Art.

I think you buying that was the point at which I, too, knew we weren’t really meant as lovers but that I did love you anyway, she thinks.

She doesn’t write that down. She deletes the bit of text she’s already composed.

I’m terrified. Plus I’m having weird dreams. I had a dream where pain all over my body turned into paint all over my body.

She writes none of that.

What she writes instead is this:

I’ve an email for the greenlaws somewhere. I’ll look it out. I wonder if ashley started speaking again or not. More than ever i want to send her a link to that lorenza mazzetti film. I will now.

Thank you for pigeon story. I will write about it and send you the piece i write tomorrow. Anyway my story for you about what i saw today is that i went online and looked at some photos of some of the places we’ve been in our time, all in lockdown, all looking you know as if a hand has come out of the sky in each place and gathered everybody up and away or like the living people have just been photoshopped out and it struck me it was like how in very early days of photography anything that was moving used to disappear because camera exposure took so long, like horses or traffic or people walking along. They became evanescent and vanished altogether or turned into a ghosty blur. Then i found some lockdown pictures of that street we stayed in in paris in montmartre do you remember the bed creaked so neither of us got any sleep so we sat up instead and watched the new day come up? Anyway i gasped out loud when i saw the street because the street has been being used as a location for a film set in the 1940s and when the lockdown came in they stopped filming there and just left it all done up like occupied paris all the fronts of the buildings with brown facades. The very few people in the photos looked like ghosts from modernity visiting the past wearing puffa jackets and facemasks and the occasional 21st century couple walking a little paris dog. So then i looked up the film that’s been stopped by the lockdown. It’s called adieu m.

haffmann and seems to be a story of a jewish jeweller who has to hide to survive so hands his shop over to a younger assistant. The assistant asks the jeweller to help him and his beloved have a child. Stage play first, acclaimed in france and when i looked it up too voila this coincidence. The stage play was written by a man called jean-philippe daguerre. So. I began to wonder if the contemp playwright daguerre is maybe related to louis

daguerre inventor of daguerreotype the man who took some of the earliest photographic images ever in many of which that vanishing effect happened. One of his most famous photos is of boulevard du temple late 1830s taken at busy time of day and almost every moving or living thing is gone except a man standing having his shoes shined. Everyone else disappeared! It says online that’s the very first living person ever photographed. All because he stood still. Yeah i thought but all the other gone people are still there too. We just can’t see them. That is the thing from today that i wanted to tell you. You know how people keep saying about this time we’re in now, oh well, we are where we are. It’s more like we are where we aren’t.

It has taken her an hour to write that text on her Quantum of Solace phone.

She presses send.

Her phone in her hand goes blank and switches itself off.

What?

What the fuck?

She switches it on again.

The text has disappeared.

It hasn’t been saved.

She checks in the sent folder.

It’s not there either.

She laughs out loud.

It is where it isn’t!

She starts all over again.

Just tried to text you a really long text but james bond phone confiscated it. Here’s a shorter one instead. Got an email *somewhere* for greenlaws. Let’s also contact ashley who wrote the letterbox thing and ask her to let us use her writing. We could start an imprint. Art inertia. Ha ha.

I mean real books as well as online. We can use it to report on what language was and is doing to us, what it did in the run-up to now, and what it’s doing in the process of what’s happening now to us all. *Good to talk.

I’ve been freaking out for a couple of days but i’m back now.* Thank you for pigeon with unwieldy twig and the urge to put things together. I’ll send my thoughts on it tomorrow and maybe also on the boy sending the violin.

It is a lovely story. Plus i wd like to write a piece or two about mazzetti the filmmaker and post online, what do you think. Also we must start to lobby.

Iris says a german artist she knows told her he looked in his bank account

and found €9,000. €9,000! Where did it come from? From the german government to all that country’s artists and arts workers no strings attached. Piece on art in nature about that too i think.

There.

She presses send.

It goes.

It seems to have gone safely.

It’s in the sent folder.

She takes the T-shirt off the back of the chair and puts it over her nose. It smells of Art, of wood shavings, vinegar.

She smiles.

Best wishes from your sister.

Imagine opening a parcel and inside it there’s a violin case, but a very small one. Like the child of a violin case. Inside that, a small violin, like the child of a violin. It’d have that soft cushion stuff lining it over the fitted shape for holding and protecting the violin. It’d all smell of rosin, and wood, and of those two things coming together.

She gets up off the bed.

She takes the chair away from the door. She opens the door. She looks down.

Soup in a bowl at her feet.

Iris left it there, must be two hours ago.

But there’s still a modicum of warmth in it.

She sits down in the threshold.

It does taste fine.

—

When she got downstairs in the hotel that night, no idea what to do with herself, no idea where she was off to or where she’d end up, only knowing she had to start out on a path for herself or there’d be no path, she saw that the Greenlaw family was still sitting in the pub part of the restaurant.

Grace was texting somebody or reading something on her phone. The kids were, yes, arguing.

Virtue signalling, the boy said.

Better than corruption signalling any day, the girl said back. And I want and need as many languages as I have selves. So should you.

I only need English, the boy said. Needing or knowing anything more is unpatriotic.

Stooge, the girl said. That’s you all over.

What’s me all over? the boy said. You’re a stooge. You’re a scrooge.

You’re a humbug. Shut up.

Retarded, the girl said. By what you think is your own initiative and which you imagine is keeping you safe. Oh, hi Charlotte.

Oh, the boy said. Hi.

Charlotte sat down at the table. Grace nodded to her and then to the half empty bottle.

Help yourself, she said.

She’ll drink the whole bottle if you don’t, the girl said.

I’m on holiday, Grace said. It’s what adults do.

Yeah some adults, the girl said.

I won’t, but thank you, Charlotte said.

She shakes the car key.

Are you going? the boy said.

Maybe, Charlotte said. Depends. What are you two fighting about?

We weren’t fighting about anything, the boy said.

We were, the girl said. First he made me feel like I was going to throw up by telling me about how maggots can jump in the air.

They can, the boy said. They can do somersaults into the air thirty times their own bodylength. They are like little acrobats.

Then he said there was no point in learning different languages from other countries any more, the girl said.

What, like French and German? Charlotte said.

Or even from our own country, the girl said. Like Welsh. Like Ashley speaks.

Languages, Charlotte said, don’t exist singly. They’re like family. They all feed into each other all the time. There’s no such thing as an isolated language.

The boy went red.

Oh I was just devil’s advocating, he said. I don’t really think it. In exactitude I think other languages are cool. I just didn’t want her to think she had the monopoly on, on,

On what? the girl said.

On me, he said.

He stared at the car key on the pub table.

We’re off really early tomorrow morning, Charlotte said. Before you’re up. 6am or so.

Definitely before we’re up, Grace said.

Oh, the boy said.

So I was about to go to bed, Charlotte said, but it struck me. We still haven’t been, Robert, to where you said you wanted to go.

The Einstein place? Robert said. Really?

Depending, Charlotte said. On one or two things. The first, whether your mother says it’s okay for you two to come, because it’s ten past ten now, quite late to go anywhere. The second, on how far it actually is from here.

You’re going to pander to him? Sacha said.

If it’s not far, Charlotte said. Whoever’d like to come.

Robert leapt up almost sending his chair over. He ran out of the pub and they heard him clattering up the wooden stairs towards the rooms.

I’m not coming, Grace said. Count me out. I’m fully committed to communing with Val here.

Friend on your phone? Charlotte said.

Val Policella, Grace said. How’s your hand, Sacha?

Same as it was the last time you asked, Sacha said.

We changed the bandage, Grace said. It was getting grubby.

Sacha held her hand out so Charlotte could see.

Is it painful? Charlotte said.

Only when Robert asks me if it is, Sacha said. Then it’s really really painful.

He can go if you go with him, Grace said.

There’s no way I’m going, Sacha said.

Robert burst back into the room waving an open book. He slammed the book down on the table sending the wine bottle rocking.

Roughton Heath, Charlotte said. Am I pronouncing it right?

Ruffton, Sacha said. Rowton. Pity nobody at this table speaks English.

But we don’t need to know how to say it to go there. Do we? Robert said.

You can’t go unless I go too, mum says, and there’s no way I’m going, Sacha said.

Robert, you know it’s a heath, Grace said. You know there’ll be nothing to see. It’ll be dark. It’ll be a lot of bushes and trees in the dark.

Still, Charlotte said. You can say you’ve been.

But only if I say I’m going, Sacha said. And I’m not.

You know my little brother is totally infatuated with you? she said from behind Charlotte in the driver’s seat half an hour later, when they stopped on a verge, its grass silver in the headlights, to let Robert empty his bladder into a hedge.

Her voice was serious.

He’s really easily hurt, she said.

Charlotte switched the little light above the rear mirror on and turned to look at Sacha.

When I was a bit younger than you, Charlotte said, I had an American cousin who came to stay. I still have her, I suppose, somewhere in the world, but I don’t know where, I’ve never seen her since. She came to stay with us for a summer, she was seven years older than me, I was ten. And I thought she was the best thing since sliced everything, the best most exciting person I’d ever met. And she knew I did. And she was kind to me.

My father and mother afterwards always remembered her visit as this terrible time, and my cousin as scandalous, as trouble, coming home at four in the morning covered in lovebites from the nightclub in town, a wild child they were scared to have to be so responsible for. For years I’d hear them talking about someone and a terrible time that this someone gave them, and I’d no idea they meant my cousin. It’s only later in my life I realized that’s who they were talking about when they said those things. My glamorous kind funny cousin. I think now that the fact that she was kind to me changed my life dramatically.

Uh huh, Sacha said as if saying I’m listening.

If people think you like them, Charlotte said, well, it can go either way.

There’s a lot of powerplay in liking and being liked. Such a powerful connection, it’s a chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller. That’s always the choice we’ve got.

Uh huh, Sacha said.

That’s why we’re on the Einstein trail at eleven o clock on a Friday night, Charlotte said.

My brother’s had a lot of trouble with online bullying, Sacha said.

Ah, Charlotte said.

It’s pathetic, really, Sacha said. Some thug at his school found out he won prizes for singing when he was a little kid. He did, he had a really amazingly high singing voice and it made him a kind of local celebrity. When they found

out, they started to make fun of him about it. Then they started taking the piss out of how clever he is then all these kids on social media and a bunch of people who trolled into the thread kept telling him to commit suicide.

Christ, Charlotte said.

So they moved him to a new school, Sacha said.

Thank goodness, Charlotte said.

But someone at the first school wrote to someone at the new school, Sacha said, and then it all started happening there too.

Tell you what, Charlotte said. I wish I had a sister like you.

What’ve you got? Sacha said. Have you got brothers?

Charlotte laughed.

I’ve got Arthur, she said.

You’re not related to him though, Sacha said. He’s not your actual family.

Do you think you have to be related, to be family? Charlotte said.

I think it helps, Sacha said. And hinders.

Robert got back in the car.

What? he said. What are you talking about? Are you talking about me?

Tell Charlotte about when you did the Facial Rec project, Sacha said.

No, Robert said.

Go on, Sacha said. It was really good. He did this project called F-ART, where he made a poster-screenprint series at school by mapping facial recognition technique faceprints like stars across a night sky, only he made them look like the linked-up drawings of constellations, you know, the ones where lines go between the stars to try to make pictures so you can see it’s a bear or a plough or Orion. Except, his constellations were all faces, he did one for me, one for our mother, one for our father, he wrote our names underneath each pattern –

But not Ashley, Robert said.

– then across the bottom of the pictures he wrote the slogan, CHANGE

FRT TO ART, Sacha said.

That’s fantastic, Charlotte said. Why not for Ashley? I thought you were friends with Ashley.

Yeah, that’s right. Big friends with Ashley, Sacha said.

Ashley and I weren’t speaking to each other on friendly terms at this point in the trajectory of our very recent friendship, Robert said.

Anyway, the point is, he got into trouble from the school, Sacha said.

They said he was only doing the screenprint series to get a rude word pinned

up repeatedly on the walls of the art classroom. But I’m telling you. They were really beautiful. Revolutionary. I think that’s why they wouldn’t put them up.

Charlotte told the kids she once had an idea that she’d like to hack Facebook and replace everybody’s faces and bodies in their photographs with the faces and bodies of Pokémons. They both laughed out loud at that, leaning forward, hanging off the front seats from the back seat like much smaller children. Sacha said that her own revolutionary plan in Christmas week was to smash the glass doors of office buildings all round the city so homeless people would have somewhere warm and sheltered to stay in.

That’s because she’s got the hots for a homeless guy in town, and he’s a really old guy, in his thirties or forties, Robert said. OW.

It’s not the hots, Sacha said.

Just the warms? Charlotte said.

She wants to warm his heart, Robert said. Or his something. OW. She definitely gives him more than money. OUCH.

What about you, Robert? Charlotte said. Any plans to change the world?

I’m a realist, Robert said.

What does that mean? Charlotte said.

It’s a thing that can’t be done, Robert said.

Defeatist, Sacha said.

Yeah and you with your the day will come when we’ll all be wearing leaves instead of clothes vision of the world, Robert said.

It will, Sacha said. We’ll have to change everything. And leaves really matter. They’re how we get oxygen.

Overweening pride, Robert said.

What is? Charlotte said.

To think an individual can change the world, Robert said.

That’s an overweening kind of a thing to say on an Einstein-themed roadtrip, Charlotte said.

Yeah, but that was, I mean, he was Albert Einstein, Robert said.

And you’re Robert Greenlaw, Charlotte said.

Here lies Robert Greenlaw, Brother of the great Sacha Greenlaw, Sacha said.

Yeah, cause that’s what it’ll actually say on my gravestone, Robert said.

Robert Greenlaw. Pity him. He was once somebody’s brother.

Robert Greenlaw, Sacha said. He was once somebody’s brother. Pity her.

Robert Greenlaw, Robert said. Renowned for making a fortoon. And his sister, Sacha Greenlaw. Renowned for spending a fortoon giving it to homeless people to buy boots.

I told you, he had his boots stolen, Sacha said.

That’s your excuse, Robert said.

People always steal homeless people’s shoes, Sacha said. It’s one of the cruel things that happens to homeless people quite often.

Or it’s the thing homeless people say to get you to give them more money, Robert said.

What’s a fortoon? Charlotte said.

A cartoon-sized fortune, Robert said. Are we here?

Charlotte has stopped the car in the dark in the middle of nowhere.

Look, she said.

She pointed to the satnav.

Off to the left of the cursor that meant their car the screen had the words ROUGHTON HEATH on it.

She switched the headlights off.

They all got out.

They stood around.

The moon was bright.

What they could see in the moonlight was a spread of undifferentiated darkness.

Why did he come here again? Sacha said.

It says in the book, Robert said, that the Nazis were distributing posters with his picture on them and the words Not Yet Hanged underneath. And he was in Belgium and someone told him the Nazis knew where he was and were coming for him. So he took up an offer of a hut on this heath from an upper class English guy in politics who’d started off being very right wing and thinking Hitler was a good thing, then changed his mind and invited Einstein to stay with him and live in a hut on the heath. So Einstein did, for, like, a month, and gamekeepers guarded him, and he spent the time in solitude and worked on theories, and then a month or two later he went to America.

And that month when he was living here he used to go to the post office in the village and buy sweets. Can we go to that post office?

They got back in the car.

They drove to where the satnav told them Roughton Post Office was.

They peered at it through the car windows.

Do you think it’s the same one as it was in 1933? Robert said.

Hard to say, Charlotte said.

They drove up the road a little further and stopped next to a shut pub.

Look, Charlotte said. Robert.

She said it quietly because Sacha was asleep, curled into herself with her bandaged hand at an angle away from herself.

Near the shut front door of the New Inn there was a circular plaque, like a blue plaque. It had Einstein’s name on it.

She got out of the car. Robert did too. They both left the doors a little open so as not to wake Sacha.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

fleeing Nazi persecution stopped off en route for America to live in a hut on Roughton Heath, September 1933

Underneath, it said the plaque had been made by the Eastern Daily Press and the Norwich School of Art & Design.

Art and design and the fourth estate, Charlotte said. Here’s to them.

Do you think he came to this place? For a beer? Robert said.

I’ve a feeling that if he did, Charlotte said, then this pub would have a sign up saying Albert Einstein fleeing Nazi persecution stopped off en route for America at this pub for a beer, September 1933.

But he could’ve, Robert said. It says in the book nobody in the village knew who he was. He could’ve come here for a beer and people might just not have known it was him.

That’s possible, yes, Charlotte said.

Possible, Robert said. Possible possible possible.

He walked purposefully about back and fore in front of the front door of the shut pub saying the word possible.

Do you think I’m traversing some of the same ground he did? he said.

Why do you like Einstein so much? Charlotte said.

Apart from that he was one of the most brilliant minds that ever thought about anything on this planet? Robert said. Because he has a face like a lamb.

Ah, Charlotte said.

Because he was truly in love with the universe, Robert said.

Yes, Charlotte said.

Because he wanted to understand the architecture of light, Robert said.

The architecture of light, Charlotte said. I like that. That’s like the name of a poem.

Is it? Robert said.

Yes, Charlotte said. Did you think that up?

I don’t know, Robert said, I might’ve read it somewhere. It doesn’t sound like me. And if you and me, I mean I, were standing on the edge of a black hole. Which we’re not. But if we were to stand on the edge of a black hole.

And say you happened to be standing closer to its edge than me.

Okay, Charlotte said.

And then we both came back down to earth, Robert said. Then I would’ve got older faster than you would’ve, because I was standing further away from it, and by the time we got back to earth we might’ve been able to catch up on an age difference.

That’s very interesting. Thank you for telling me, Charlotte said.

They decided to walk as far round the outside of the building as they could to maximize the possibility of walking where Einstein possibly once walked.

While they did, Robert told Charlotte about the day he saw a man, not an old man, he was quite a young man, stumble when he came out of a Wetherspoons, because he was so pissed, and fall flat on the pavement then crawl on all fours all the way to the seafront with his trousers and underpants down around his ankles.

And it wasn’t even a Friday, or a Thursday, Robert said. It was only a Monday. He wasn’t even with any other drunk friends or having a good time.

He was just pissed. And you could, you could, everybody could, see all of him.

Ah, Charlotte said.

Primal, Robert said.

Good word for it, Charlotte said.

I don’t want to live in a world like that, Robert said.

We’re certainly living in one where the primal and the public have been getting more and more fused together, Charlotte said.

Yeah, Robert said.

He said it sadly.

But if we don’t attend to the primal stuff inside us all, Charlotte said, where will it go?

I don’t know, Robert said. Into our bones?

I think it surfaces so we have to decide what to do about it, Charlotte said. So, there’s that man you saw. And then there’s, well – you said it.

There’s also the people who study all their lives to understand the structure of a shaft of sunlight.

But what if you’re a mix of all of the things. And it’s not possible to be just one of them? Robert said. What does that make you?

Human? Charlotte said. Like, you know. Someone who’d stick a glass thing to his sister’s hand? With superglue?

It wasn’t just glass, Robert said. It was so much more than just a glass thing.

What was it, then? Charlotte said.

It was time, Robert said.

Time, Charlotte said. Is that the gift we get to give to others, then?

Robert shrugged.

Don’t know, he said.

Me neither, Charlotte said. What would Einstein say?

He’d say, Robert said, that the human species got our best intellectual tools from looking at the stars. But that this doesn’t make the stars responsible for what we do with our intellects.

Wow, Charlotte said. Robert. What a great thing to say.

Is it? Robert said.

Pleasedness radiated off him.

But I didn’t say it, he said. Einstein did.

But you said it now, Charlotte said. You said it for now. You said it like, I don’t know, like you hit the target. Knockout punch. Perfect timing. Hole in one.

Black hole in one, Robert said.

They stood under a night sky in a car park where Einstein himself perhaps maybe possibly once stood and looked up at the lit pinpoints in the dark that meant the ancient and original and already dead stars, till Robert’s sister, waking up and seeing them wave to her, pulled her coat round her shoulders, got out of the car and came over to where they were standing in the cold and they all looked up together to point out which constellations they knew the names for and to guess at the ones they didn’t.

1 July 2020

—

Dear Sacha Greenlaw,

—

Thank you very much for writing to me. It was very kind of you.

Thank you for telling me many things about the bird.

I write to you today because I have seen this bird and its family in my sky. I want very much to tell you.

Our friends Charlotte and Arthur gave me your two letters. I really enjoyed them very much. Thank you for telling me stories of your life. Thank you for imagining my life. Thank you for allowing me to imagine your life.

Thank you for telling me legends of the hero name. Thank you for the funny poem.

My name in Vietnamese English is ANH KIET. I cannot do a thing I need to do on the computer keyboard for the E in KIET to be correct, which requires a hat above it like a roof and also a small dot like a full stop beneath. In Vietnamese my name is like a picture of a figure with wide shoulders, or a house with two wide strong roofs, with one roof placed on top of the other roof. The words of my name when they are separate mean ANH: brother / you

KIET: masterpiece

When they are together they make a meaning like the English word hero. I am not a hero! I am not a masterpiece! But I am a brother.

I am living now in a house with 15 other released people and our mutual friend Charlotte and her Aunt Iris. They are very, very kind. The immigration removal centre unlocked its doors and placed us out on to the road in a dark night. It was raining heavily so we went to the airport and slept on seats in Departures. We called on a phone to a friend. We are lucky. They came to find us. Friends drove us here in three trucks that sell coffee, very handy for the long trip!

My small medical abilities help a little if people get sick. One man to the hospital and died. But now everybody here at the house is well. I also help keep neat and flourishing the flowers in the summer garden. I am a good gardener. I did not know it about me! I am a new man. The garden is very beautiful here. In one place in it they are hundreds of older roses. They make me very happy.

Your letters make me very happy. Thank you for the bird messages. Bird of all nations. It looks like something created with only the ash after a fire, like a delicate gesture of ash. But truly it is as strong as the anchor that holds a boat in the sea.

I hope with my heart you and your family are well at this time.

I agree there is more summer to come and there will be more weeks of your bird in my sky. This makes me very happy.

The bird that I see in the sky, the bird of your kindness in your letters to me, will fly to you in your sky in the shape of members of its family. They will bring with them my very best and warmest good wishes. Health and luck for you and your family and your friends and your loved ones,

—

to my friend Sacha Greenlaw

—

from your friend and brother

—

ANH KIET / Hero