Frontispiece

And I was wondering, the man says. I wonder if your friend, I mean your neighbour, is it – Ashley?

It is Ashley, his mother says.

She says it like she owns Ashley.

I wonder if Ashley is finding language difficult, the man says, because there is so much to say.

You mean feeling getting in the way of language? Charlotte says.

She says it beautifully.

(Robert opens his mouth and the whisper comes out.) Yes.

What’s that, Rob? his sister says.

For the last little while she’s been eyeing him, incredulous. She raises one eyebrow. Then she glances from him to Charlotte and back to him and she raises the other eyebrow too.

Because, because, Ashley’s book is actually about that. I mean language, Robert says.

Book? his mother says.

She’s writing a book, Robert says. Or she was.

Ashley’s writing a book? his mother says.

How do you know? his sister says.

I’ve read it. Some of it, he says.

Ashley? his sister says. Let you read a book? That she’s writing?

It’s about lexicons, he says. In politics. The chapters have words or phrases as their titles.

Like what? his mother says.

Humbug, he says. Girly Swot. The People’s Government. Big Ben’s Bongs. It has a section at the back where it defines words. An Updated Lexicon. It looks at the meanings and histories of words like letterbox and, eh, bumboys.

The word comes out of his mouth before he can stop it. He blushes. His sister sniggers.

Bumboys? Charlotte says. What does she write about that?

Like how, he says. The first half of that word is a word that means uh (oh no)

buttocks.

His sister sniggers at him again.

You’ve gone bright red, she says.

Keep going, Charlotte says.

How it also means like worthless, he says, or not working properly, or a person that’s lazy or irresponsible or homeless. So that the word in the end doesn’t just mean gay, because it carries all the other subcurrent meanings too.

Subcurrent. Fantastic, Charlotte says.

There’s a chapter about the word fantastic as well, he says. About how in politics they keep saying everything’s fantastic just now, how it’s going to be fantastic, and about how that’s a word that’s always about triggering fantasy.

And also a chapter about how people in politics talk about what’s happening in World War 2 terms all the time to make people be loyal and take sides and get with the patriotic spirit.

What’s this book called? his mother says.

The Immoral Imagination, he says.

His mother makes a scornful noise.

Well, there you go. There’s no such thing as the immoral imagination, she says. Because there’s no such thing as the moral imagination. The very idea that the imagination is anything to do with morality is spurious.

Well, the man says.

We can imagine anything, Charlotte says. But every human act, including the act of the imagination, bears a moral context.

Yes, Robert says. It does, mum.

That’s not the same as saying the imagination is moral or immoral in itself, his mother says.

It’s assuming we live at all by any code of ethics, Charlotte says.

Robert nods very vigorously.

His sister looks at him and laughs.

The imagination is as free as the wind, his mother says.

Yeah, but the wind isn’t free, his sister says. It’s driven by climate shift and now by climate damage.

Okay, not the wind, but as free as, as the free-est thing you can imagine that isn’t the wind, his mother says.

Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it, Charlotte says. It depends what you can imagine. And that does tend to depend on the Zeitgeist of the time, and who and what are influencing a mass imagination.

!

She is so clever it makes Robert feel weak. He sits straight like a choirboy in a church, one whose voice will never break and leave him with

no singing voice. He is wearing those choirboy smocky clothes. They are bright white. He has never felt so humble. He has never felt so clean, from the top of his head right down to his toenails. He has been washed clean in light. He understands now why porn isn’t at all the same thing as love. You could never do those things so unthinkingly, so humiliatingly, to someone so, so – truly adored.

Adored! Did he ever think in his life he would have a use for such a word?

His mother is still going on.

The imagination can and does do anything it likes and everything it likes, she says.

It can’t, Robert thinks. It shouldn’t.

Like Robert with the bike seats? his sister says.

Robert the choirboy is mortified inside his imaginary smock.

Bike seats, Charlotte says.

She looks at his sister then at Robert. His sister waves her bandaged hand like a little caveman club at him, a mummy’s stump. Robert looks down and away. His head feels very hot.

Mmphgm, he says.

Yeah, and anyway how come he knows anything about anything Ashley’s doing? his sister says. Ashley won’t even let him in the house. I bet he’s making it up to get attention.

I’m not, he says. I’m not making anything up. I took some photos on my phone of some of the pages of her book. This is what she says about the word letterbox.

He scrolls his phone, finger-widens a photo and reads out the following in his best newsreader voice.

Letterbox is a word compiled of the two words letter and box.

A very banal opening, his mother says.

The word letter comes from Middle English via Old French, from Latin origin, littera, meaning an alphabet letter, and litterae, meaning an epistle. It means several things, from a symbol, and part of an alphabet, and something written to represent sound, to a written message, one that’s often sent by post. It can also refer to literature and learning, particularly scholarly achievement, and to precision, especially in matters of law, as in the phrases to the letter and letter of the law. The word box is originally derived from both Greek and Latin, pyxis and buxis. It usually means a

four-sided receptacle for holding anything, sometimes with a lid; or a small set-apart seating area in a theatre; or an enclosure that’s small; or the seat for a driver on a coach; or a shield for the genitals of someone playing cricket; or a –

he blushes

vagina;

his face is burning

or a coffin; or the name for a small evergreen tree or hedge. Different derivation gives it as a thump or blow on the head, or the act of hitting with a fist, as in to box, and to box can also mean to enclose or make enclosed, to shut in.

Oh for God sake, his mother says.

Is there more? Charlotte says.

He nods.

In British usage, letterbox means a hole in a door or a box placed outside a house as a secure point either for collection or delivery of mail, or a place, compartment or slot whereby mail that’s either being delivered or waiting to be delivered can be deposited and picked up safely by either deliverer or recipient. Other words like it are pillarbox (so called because of the shape of the collection box) and mailbox. In more recent years it has also come to describe an aspect ratio for films transferred to video that recreates widescreen format on a small screen.

Facile, his mother says.

Does anyone want me to keep going? he says.

Me, Charlotte says.

The iconic UK status of the letterbox is made clear in a publication like The Postman and the Postal Service, one of the Ladybird People at Work series from the 1965 UK Ladybird ‘Easy Reading’ imprint of books for children. (This book was reissued in 2016 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Royal Mail.) It featured on its cover a painted illustration of a postman emptying the contents of a bright red letterbox with the royal insignia on the front into a brown sack. He is standing near the kerb next to another British classic, a red Mini van (a typical post van of the time). Behind him, beyond a hedge and some fencing, is a typical British suburban house. Inside, the book featured illustrations of things from the first horsebacked postmen to the apparatus invented in the c20th to collect mailbags from moving trains; it detailed the purchasing of

stamps, the mailing of a letter, the sorting, the delivery; it explained why letterboxes are painted the royal colour, red, and how Royal Mail got its name. In 1983 the Ladybird imprint published another book, The Postal Service, in its People Who Help Us series. This was a more modern look at a modern postal service, full of images showing the work of a dedicated community for the wider community. It explained and celebrated the astonishing and quotidian achievement of getting the written message from place of sending to place of delivery as speedily as possible via a national institution working at its best to deliver on every level, and to connect people for every imaginable reason. One of its central symbols throughout was the bright red Royal Mail letterbox.

I mean, very informative, his mother says. But hardly publishable.

You haven’t heard the last bit, he says. About what the iconic British letterbox means right now in the updated lexicon.

Go on, Charlotte says.

In summer 2018, after a disagreement with the then UK prime minister, a backbench MP who’d resigned from his post as Foreign Secretary – a man who just under a year later would become UK prime minister himself

– wrote an article he published in the Evening Standard where he stated that though he personally declared himself not intolerant enough to believe Muslim women who wore full face veil burqas should be banned from wearing what their religion often required of them, all the same he thought it ridiculous of Muslim women to choose to go around looking like letterboxes. Their choice of clothing, he said, didn’t just make them resemble letterboxes but also bank robbers.

He was paid £275,000 for the article, which he wrote in breach of ministerial code, and which was cited in the following days as the reason for a quadrupling of anti-Muslim attacks and incidents in the UK.

In the run-up to the UK general election of 2019 he repeatedly refused to grant that there’d been anything harmful, irresponsible, or troubling in the message sent by his rhetoric. This was at a time when attacks on people with Islamic beliefs across the world were rising, with first America then India closing borders to Muslims, India legislating against Muslims and orchestrating attacks, beatings, lynchings, arrests and killings of Muslims and the recent cordoning off of the whole of Kashmir, alongside a massive coordinated international right-wing militarization, and, in

China, a simultaneous instigation of ‘re-education’ detention centres for Muslims.

Wow, Charlotte says.

Kudos to Ashley, his sister says. Can I send that to Ayat?

No, Robert says.

Updated Lexicon? Charlotte says. Is that what she calls it?

Yes, Robert says.

Thank you for reading it out, Charlotte says.

S’okay, Robert says.

Why can’t I? his sister says. She told me a horrific thing, about a man who stopped her mother in the street outside their dry cleaners and pretended he was trying to post a letter into her eyes then tried to get everyone passing in the street to laugh. Nobody did. He just looked like a lunatic. But it’s what actually happened to them after that article. It made mad people go even madder.

Be really good material for Art in Nature, the man says.

It would, Charlotte says.

I’ve also got photos of the humbug, piccaninny and die in a ditch pages here if anyone’d like to see or hear them, Robert says. They’re really interesting.

I would, his sister says.

I meant anyone other than you, Robert says.

Do you think Ashley’d mind if you forwarded some of these to us?

Charlotte says. Have you got an email address for her?

She won’t mind, Robert says. You don’t have to ask her. I can forward them right now if you tell me your phone number.

Probably best we ask her first, Charlotte says.

His sister laughs under her breath.

So, Charlotte says. Ashley started writing a book about words. Then she stopped being able to speak words. Is that it?

In exactitude, Robert says.

Ashley, his mother says. Writing a book.

She shakes her head dramatically, ie like an actress would. His mother is an educated elite. She thinks books are her thing, her personal possession that nobody else has the same right to as she does.

She must like you a lot, Robert, if she’s let you read it and photograph it, Charlotte says. She must really trust you.

His sister laughs out loud.

Robert doesn’t care because Charlotte has just said his name.

Ashley hates him, his sister says.

Writing isn’t an easy thing to do, the man says.

Arthur and Charlotte speak from real experience. They’re both real writers, his mother says.

Online, mainly, the man says.

They’re here doing medical research, his mother says.

Well, no, Charlotte says. More like reportage.

About the mist that came in on Worthing beach and hurt everybody in the eyes and made people sick, his mother says.

In August, Charlotte says. And the sewage spills over the last few years.

When they closed the front and the pier and they moved everyone off the beach.

His sister is scrolling her phone.

Tea cosy, his sister says. I’m going to text Ashley and ask her if she’ll write about that. The prime minister said at the start of the week that CO2

emissions were cladding the world like a tea cosy.

Which demonstrates exactly how un-urgent he thinks things are and wants other people to think, Charlotte says.

Ashley’s phone is broken right now, Robert says. It can’t get texts.

(But it’s all right. His sister has already forgotten about talking to Ashley about tea cosies.)

And also, she says. Someone here tell me. What exactly is skunk?

You know what a skunk is, his mother says. God help us, probably someone somewhere is eating one right now and starting a new Asian virus.

Nobody laughs.

My mother the racist, his sister says. And I’m not talking about a skunk, just skunk. I don’t mean the spliff kind. It says here some soldiers have just spent the morning spraying a street where Palestinian people live with it.

With skunk. What exactly is skunk?

It must be something that smells foul, Charlotte says.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world, the man says.

Wittgenstein. I think.

(The man is a member of the educated elite.)

Wittgenstein, wonderful, his mother says. Isn’t he?

You very much remind me of my Aunt Iris, the man says to his sister.

Who? his sister says. Me?

She was at Greenham, he says. She was on the first ever anti-nuclear peace march to Aldermaston. She ran a commune near Porton Down, protested against and did research and drew public attention to biological warfare, nerve gas and tear gas manufacture, hidden poisons people weren’t being told about. She’s just back from Greece, again. She’s been working in the crisis in the Mediterranean.

She’s quite a woman, Charlotte says.

What’s Greenham? his sister says.

Famous activist university, Charlotte says.

Don’t be sarky, the man says. Iris is the reason the phrase salt of the earth has any salt in it. At all.

No, she’s quite a force, Iris, Charlotte says.

We need a whole new education, his sister says. The past’s the past.

What’s coming’s stuff we can’t even imagine.

She’s even more like Iris than I thought, the man says.

Are you writing a book? Robert says.

He is saying it to Charlotte, not the man. But because he still finds it hard to look at Charlotte he can’t be sure she knows he was speaking to her until she replies.

No, she says. We’re not really that kind of writer.

We’re. Plural. Robert’s chest twinges.

We’re the online sort, the man says. We run a website called Art in Nature which provides thoughtful analysis of the shapes things take in art and nature and, yeah, things like language too, and the structure of the ways we live, and so on.

We’re We

Does that pay very well? his mother asks.

Charlotte and the man say it hardly pays at all but it’s got thousands of hits and is on a steady upward trend so at some point maybe it will, and that at the moment they’re living off an inheritance. Charlotte explains that she’s also becoming really fed up of the net and the way it’s taken over everybody’s lives. The man she’s with looks pained when she says this.

Good. Things are uneasy between them.

I keep saying, the man says. A person who helps run an online analysis can’t do it by boycotting going online.

Hits, his sister says.

She starts telling the story of the teacher at Robert’s school getting hit in the head with a brick because she sent kids home saying foreign words from other countries to their parents.

(But his sister doesn’t know the story. It’s Robert who knows the story.

He was there. She wasn’t. He was one of the kids watching when it happened.

Someone’s father: You’re using words on purpose that people don’t know the meanings of. You’re teaching our offspring foreign words.

The teacher: But rancour is just another word for anger. I suggest we stop the anger.

The father: If we want to be angry we’ll be it in the Queen’s English. You don’t have the right to use words from other languages any more.

The teacher: The word Bildungsroman just means a story of a person’s personal development. It’s crossed over into English from German and now it’s an English term. If you’re going to write about this famous English novel in an exam, you have to know the word Bildungsroman.

The father: You’re doing it again.

The teacher: Look. It’s just a fact. A story about learning how to live and maturing into adulthood is called a Bildungsroman.

Which is when the brick got thrown and the police got called.) It was about a word a class was being taught because of the book David Copyfield, Robert says.

David Copperfield! his mother says. That’s it! Sacha, that’s it! Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life! First lines of David Copperfield. Or whether that station will be held by anybody else.

It’s hero, though, isn’t it? Charlotte says. Whether I’ll turn out to be the hero.

Yes, I know, but we did our own version, his mother says. Back in the 80s. Feminist. We took it round schools. Back in my acting days. We called it The World As It Rolled, I don’t know why we did, if I ever knew why it’s gone. It was all about what happened to the female characters from the book.

It opened with us all saying that line, those lines, in chorus, and we were all holding copies of the book and riffling through the pages. Whether I shall turn out to be the heroine of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

His mother talks on and on about times she had when she was acting when she was young, because the visitors are shortly going to be driving

somewhere she once had an idyllic summer acting in.

Funny, she says. I hadn’t thought about it for years, until this morning.

And then we were watching TV and I saw this woman on screen that I knew, back then, years ago, and then after you went to school, Sacha, I was sitting here and thinking and I remembered all sorts of people and things I’d forgotten. I remembered I had the loveliest time in Suffolk one summer. And you’re off there right now.

Suffolk? Robert says. Is that near Norfolk?

It is, Charlotte says. Right next to it.

She smiles at him.

Because she does, he gets the words of his next sentence mixed up.

Is Cromer the place near? he says.

His sister laughs her speculative laugh again.

The man who came with Charlotte has tracked down someone who used to know his dead mother and they’re going to visit the person there.

I’m so sorry. When did she die? his mother says.

They start talking about when the mother died etc which was ages ago, like over a year ago.

She was a person who never compromised, never much gave herself away, the man says. So it was surprising that she left a request like this, something so specific.

She left a note with her lawyer, Charlotte says, that she wanted Art to track down his family, remember her to them and pass on a memento.

Not someone she ever mentioned, the man says. Not that I recall. Anyway I looked him up, I found some info for him because he was a songwriter in the 1960s, and it so happens he’s still alive. So we’re off to meet him.

What’s the sea on the coast you’re going to? his sister asks.

The North Sea, Robert says.

Is the North Sea actually I mean water-wise in any real way different from the Channel? his sister says. Or is the sea round Britain all the same water and only different because of the names people give it?

His sister is an ignoramus.

It’s a good question, Charlotte says.

Robert readjusts his face to look like he also thinks it’s a good question.

Oh, lovely Suffolk, his mother says. Cornfields high. The cornheads swinging like their own golden wave of the sea. Blue sky above, sea beyond.

The gold against the blue.

Bit early in the year for the corn, the man says.

I felt immortal that summer, his mother says.

Sounds like quite a summer, Mrs Greenlaw, Charlotte says.

Call me Grace, his mother said. Ah, now. Thereby hangs a tale. Back in those days we so much wanted to go brown that we’d spray ourselves with olive oil out of a plant-spray bottle then let the sun fry us deeper and deeper brown. How stupid we were. But what summers. They were wonderful. The smell of cut grass.

His mother is infantile.

Old Robert [Greenlaw] (silently): summer can fuck off, it’s never as good as you think it’ll be, usually shit weather and even if it is hot now hot just means a whole other kind of shit weather in which it’s too hot to do anything, and the leaves hang off the trees going a duller filthier colour by the week and everywhere smells of shit and sick, all the litter bins smell of off milk, the whole season is like the smell round a rubbish truck as it moves through the city and like you’re stuck on a bike behind it going way too slowly down a too-narrow street.

New Robert (out loud): Einstein. He went there.

Einstein? To Suffolk? Charlotte says.

Norfolk, Robert says. In person. In the year 1933.

Then someone else says something else. Charlotte turns to the something else.

The visitors are getting ready to go. They stand up in a valedictory way.

Robert’s insides become a struggling bird.

But it’s been really lovely to meet you all, the visitors say.

She is going. She is leaving.

Electro minus magnetism.

His chest starts to hurt.

He can feel his eyes grow round.

He now knows a pure and inarguable thing about the infrastructure of everything. When two particles are entangled then a change to one no matter where the other particle is in the universe will mean there’s a change in the other.

But how do the particles know? How do they know whether entanglement has or hasn’t taken place?

It is someone maybe 30 years old.

He is Robert, 13.

There is no way.

Not for several (at least 3) years.

Not that he is thinking of anything bodily anyway.

This is a pure love.

It is the first time Robert has ever thought of the world in terms of there being more than himself in it.

So how do you find the person you found if you lose the person after finding them and then there are a lot of long dark years between you?

If Einstein holds a mirror up to look at his own face and travels at the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second, and the light leaves his face at the same speed, can Einstein ever catch up to the light leaving his own face?

It is the thought of the light leaving Einstein’s face in the famous mirror experiment.

It is terrible.

It is one of the most terrible thoughts Robert has ever tortured himself with, the light leaving the face of Einstein. He has lain in bed at night and agonized at the idea.

But up to now, up to today, he had never truly understood, more truly he’d understood nothing, about what the words and the realities – light, speed, energy, mirror, face – really meant and mean.

The light is leaving.

It is leaving Robert’s face.

—

Half an hour later and the light is still here.

Phew.

!

She’s standing right here. He wouldn’t even have to reach to touch her.

(As if he’d ever.)

It’s weird but they’ve all ended up standing crowded together into the place between the outer door and the inner door and everybody (except Robert, who is shifting his attention from one conversation to the other) is talking at once, even the man who doesn’t say much.

The man is speaking about someone who has the word hero as his literal first name. He’s in a prison close to here, near the airport. The man went and met him, Charlotte went too, the day before yesterday. He’s telling his sister how hard it is to get in to see someone held in the prison at the airport and

how ironic it is that someone called Hero is imprisoned, and at the same time that the person called Hero is truly heroic in the way he deals with being imprisoned though he’s innocent.

He got beaten up by government thugs in the country he ran away from because he wrote a blog about something governmental he disagreed with, the man says. Then he had to get out of the country because he heard they were coming to kill him for writing a second blog about being beaten up by government thugs.

Meanwhile his mother is showing Charlotte the electricity meter cupboard, the door of which is still off its hinges leaning up against the coat-stand, and has started telling her about when she came home to find their front door ajar, was coming back from the shops and saw it wide open though she knew she’d double locked it when she went out. She thought one of the kids must’ve come home early. But no, there was a bailiff and a locksmith and two men from SA4A POWER in the doorway.

They forced your door? Charlotte says. And entered your house without permission?

They wouldn’t let me into my own house, his mother says. I live here, I said. Who are you? They said was I Mrs Nureyev. Nobody of that name lives here, I said. How long have you lived here? they said. Since round about the time you were born, I said. They showed me letters they had copies of, saying a Mr R Nureyev lived here. They told me they were replacing our meters with prepay meters because Mr Nureyev hadn’t paid his bills for over a year.

Charlotte glances at Robert.

It wasn’t me, he says.

I showed them on my phone my own SA4A POWER account, his mother says, fully paid up as always, and they didn’t believe me. Even when I phoned SA4A POWER and had one of their robot voices on the phone verifying me as a customer. Because somewhere in their computer files they had the imaginary Mr R Nureyev, who of course doesn’t exist, never existed except at the Royal Ballet, listed as living here too. The bailiff and the SA4A man literally blocked the door, I mean stood in the doorway and blocked it with their arms. Finally, but only when they’d finished what they were doing, they accompanied me into my own house again and waited on either side of me while I went through the bureau and got the house deeds out and showed

them our name. And they said, you’re clearly not a Mr Jeffrey Greenlaw, and threw me out of my own house.

So I called Jeff. But even when he came round and showed them his passport they refused to remove their new meters and put the old meters back. They got into their SA4A POWER truck and left.

Plus they really messed up the paintwork, see, here and here, and this was last September. I’m still arguing about it with SA4A automatons.

Art used to work for SA4A, Charlotte says laughing. Didn’t you?

Charlotte is lovely when she laughs. Robert sees the man go red round the neck, up to his ears.

Then he worries about whether his own ears have been doing anything he himself can’t see and others can.

They paid very well, the man says.

SA4A are the company that bus whole busloads of homeless people from other cities into this city, his sister says.

They do what? the man says.

A friend of mine told me, his sister says. They bus them down from places in the north because people tend to give more money here than they do in some other places, which means the government doesn’t have so many dead people on the streets.

Sacha, his mother says. That can’t be true.

Horse’s mouth, his sister says.

The government would never allow that to happen, his mother says.

Robert follows his sister quite often and knows that she hangs out sometimes with an old homeless guy in town. He thinks she may well even be sleeping with him. He hasn’t said anything to her. He is keeping it as a bartering tool in case he needs it. Any fragility his sister has is money in the bank to Robert [Greenlaw].

– never saw or spoke to a real human being the whole time I worked for them, the man is saying.

He has the canvas bag that Robert looked in earlier over his shoulder. He shifts its weight every few minutes.

What’s in the bag? Robert says.

It looks heavy, his sister says.

It is, the man says.

That’s Arthur’s memento mori, Charlotte says. Show them, Art. The thing we’re delivering today.

The man gets the stone out of the bag.

Wow. Very big marble, his sister says. For a very big game of marbles.

It is actually a marble, I mean, it’s made of it, marble, Charlotte says.

It’s the thing my mother was talking about in her will, the man says.

Except, when we first read it, the will, we’d no idea what she meant. A smooth round stone among my possessions. We couldn’t find anything like it. My aunt, Iris, she’d been living with my mother for a while, I asked her, but she was none the wiser. Then I took all my mother’s things out of her wardrobe, I was taking them to the charity shop, and I found it under a lot of shoes. I’ve been carrying it around. I quite enjoy feeling the weight of it.

Bit of a masochist, Charlotte says.

Robert has seen the word masochist many times on the porn sites and ABUSEHEAP.

He blushes.

Not at all, the man says. But I’ll be sorry to let it go. I’ve liked having it about my person. It reminds me. All the things I didn’t realize. Things I never knew about her.

Robert exchanges a look with his sister. She obviously thinks it’s weird too.

Memory. It can be heavy, Charlotte says.

Other times, so light, his mother says.

Anyway, we’re off to pass it on, her memory. The stone. Like she asked, the man says.

They all go silent for a moment.

They stand at the open front door.

They still don’t go.

It feels miraculous.

If Robert were younger he’d think there was some forcefield involved whereby nobody could leave the house until the curse was solved or the destiny was met or the whatever was fulfilled.

Whatever, they just stand, even though the front door’s open, they’ve got their coats on, Charlotte is dangling a car key. They just stand, they stand and they stand, all of them, in the cold, between the inner and outer doors.

Which side’s your ex’s house on? Charlotte asks. And Ashley?

His mother nods her head towards his father’s front steps.

The guy on the other side, there, she says pointing the other way. Last summer he called me to the back garden fence on his side and he said, can I

talk to your husband? I said what about. He said, I want to ask him about your trees. I said, I’m in charge of my garden, not my husband, you can ask me. He said, no, I’ll wait to speak to your husband. So I phoned Jeff, it was a Saturday, he was home, he came round. And the man shouted past me to him, though I was standing there too, and he said, I want to ask you to cut down your trees. We said why? It’s not like the trees were doing anything, blocking or overhanging his property or anything, nowhere near the sewers, they’re just lovely old trees, an ash, a rowan, the apple tree. And he said, the thing is, I don’t get much time, I work a lot, I only get a few hours a week in which I can do stuff in the garden, and I want you to cut down your trees so I can plant my trees. And we said, we’re not stopping you planting your trees, go ahead, what’s the problem? And he said, I don’t want to look out of my window and see trees that aren’t mine.

His mother and Charlotte and the man all talk about how complex being a neighbour is.

Then Charlotte says she’s had a thought, about Ashley.

There’s a filmmaker who made a film, years ago, in the middle of the last century, a really good one, she says. It’s about trauma I suppose, and it’s really startling. The thing is, it’s very much about not talking. About two men who are friends and are both deaf mutes, who can’t talk like everyone else does, so instead they find their own ways to. One’s thin and tall, one’s small and squat, they couldn’t be more different, but they couldn’t be more connected.

She tells them it was made just postwar, the early 50s, a British film, the two men wandering and living and working in a bomb-blasted landscape in London near the docks.

And the film says all these complicated things, and it does it without saying a word, she says. Wait. Art. Lend me your phone. It’s Free Cinema, British. She’s Italian, she was the only woman to make one of the founding films of the movement, Mazzetti, uh huh, Lorenza Mazzetti, here it is – oh. Oh no.

She looks at the phone screen.

She just died, she says.

Oh, his mother says. Oh dear.

A month ago, at New Year, Charlotte says. In Rome. It says here she was ninety two. Oh.

Charlotte looks dismayed.

Oh dear, his mother says again. Is it someone you know?

No, Charlotte says, no, not personally. Not at all.

But a good long life, his mother says. Ninety two. I mean.

An amazing life, Charlotte says. Lorenza Mazzetti. Truly.

She gives the man back his phone.

The film’s called Together, she says.

She looks at Robert.

You tell her, she says. I mean Ashley. You tell her about it, it’s a powerful story, and it might just, you know. Make a difference. You tell her for me.

Don’t forget.

I will, Robert says, I’ll tell her as soon as I see her. I won’t forget.

Lorenza. Mazzetti. Together.

It’s true that the arts can often be a help, his mother is saying. Not always, though. I mean, some of the finest words in the world have passed through me, and out again like so much excess vitamin c. But that’s when I was young and foolish, and I thought it was just words, for effect, what you said out loud so you could watch the power you have over others when you make them feel. I played a dead person, a dead person who comes back to life. Every second night, for a fortnight. From town to town, that summer. In Suffolk.

That immortal summer you had, the man says.

Then Robert says out of nowhere:

Can I come? To Suffolk?

Don’t be silly, Robert, his mother says.

Why not? the man says. If you’d like. There’s plenty of room.

Nice idea, Charlotte says. Why don’t you all come?

Excuse his rudeness, his mother says. He can’t go to Suffolk with you.

He’s got school.

Yeah, I’d like to go somewhere, his sister says.

We can easily fit you all in, Charlotte says.

His mother starts to laugh.

I’m just laughing at hearing my daughter say she’ll travel anywhere in a car, she says.

It’s electric, his sister says.

Though when I say all, I don’t think we could fit Ashley and your ex husband in too, Charlotte says.

Bonus, his mother says. Be nice, a bit of space. Lovely thought. Kind of you. But we can’t. Look at Sacha’s hand.

My hand’s fine, his sister says. It wants to go.

No, no. I can’t possibly do anything so spontaneous, his mother says.

Why not? the man says. You only live once. Or twice in your case. Every second night for a fortnight.

Everybody laughs. The man looks very surprised then pleased.

But we hardly know each other, his mother says.

I have an ethos, the man says. It’s this. Time spent exchanging life and times with complete or comparative strangers can sometimes work out rather well. In some cases, it can even be life-changing.

Yes! his mother says. It’s true!

She blushes.

Both Robert and his sister notice.

No, I’ve got to get them to school, she says. And where would we stay?

And what about – what about everything?

I can’t go back to school today with my hand like this, his sister says.

Then you can’t go to Suffolk either, his mother says.

Saturday tomorrow, Charlotte says. You could stay over, somewhere near the sea, take the train back at your leisure.

But we live right next to the sea, his mother says.

It’s a different sea, his sister says.

More or less, Charlotte says.

But you’ve things to do, family things, his mother says. We can’t intrude.

I’m going to meet a complete stranger, the man says. For an hour or so.

Anyway. You could do what you liked. You could peel off at any point on the journey, anywhere you fancy the look of.

Where exactly are you going? his mother asks.

The man says the name of a place Robert has never heard of.

No, I don’t know it, his mother says.

Charlotte says the name of another place Robert has never heard of. His mother acts like she’s having an orgasm.

That’s it! It exactly! his mother says.

Is that where you were immortal, then? the man says.

It is, his mother says. What an amazing thing. And you’re going there, of all places. Today.

His mother is flirting with the man.

Come too. You can tell us about your immortal summer. On the way.

Summer on the way, even in February, the man says.

Is the man flirting with his mother?

Nicely put, his mother says.

He’s a writer, Charlotte says. And you, she says (putting a hand for a moment on Robert’s shoulder and sending something like an electric shock through Robert), can tell us all at last the story of the hourglass and the glue.

The story of the what? his mother says.

Charlotte knows.

She knows he is ruinous.

His heart falls inside him like a stone falling through deep water.

Then Charlotte winks at him.

In the blink of her eye the world is made possible all over again.

His mother forgets to ask about glue (thank God) and starts to wax lyrical about being young and spontaneous and having conversations about time and the nature of the imagination at half past ten in the morning and going on road trips.

She sends him and his sister inside to pack things for overnight.

I’m really sorry, he says to his sister on the way upstairs. I didn’t know it’d hurt. Please don’t tell.

You’re dead, his sister says. My hand’s going to be scarred for life.

Stitch in time was a really witty thing to say, he says. (Appeasement.) And at least now you will never forget me. Every time you look at it you’ll think of me. The scar I mean.

You’re a silly little wanker, she says. And what the fuck have you done with the remote?

I posted it, he says.

You what? she says.

I put it in an envelope, he says, and put some of dad’s stamp collection on it –

The presentation stamps? she says. Which set?

The war folder. Four of the Star Wars 2015, three of the Dad’s Army, he says.

He’ll kill you, she says. He will. Where the fuck did you send it?

Deception Island, he says.

You posted it to an imaginary place? she says.

Deception Island’s real, he says. I looked it up, I looked up what is the most remote place on earth, and it’s one of the places that came up, it’s a hollow island in Antarctica, like an island with a hole in the middle of it like

the top of a volcano. That’s because it is the top of a volcano, and nobody lives there because the volcano might go off, there are these old whaling stations from like a century ago, they’re all collapsed in on themselves. The beach is covered in whale bones. Nothing there, birds, gulls and petrels.

Penguins. Seals and their babies.

You posted a lump of plastic to some place where it’ll sit and never rot and be a piece of rubbish for ever because there’ll be no use for it there? she says. And some plane’ll have to cross the world to deliver it just because of some stupid whim of yours?

He shrugs.

You’ve lost your mind, his sister says. Who did you send it to?

Mr WH Alebone, he says.

His sister stops in the middle of the stairs and has to hold on to the banister with her unbandaged hand because she is suddenly laughing so much.

One of the best things ever, to be able to make your sister laugh like that.

1 May 2020

—

Dear Hero,

—

You don’t know me, we are strangers. A while back some friends told me a little about you being in detention. It made me want to write just saying hi and sending you a friendly word or two.

First and most, I hope you are well in this terrible time.

I am sending this letter via my friends. They told me you got here by being sealed inside a box in transit for more than six weeks, that you are qualified as a microbiologist, and that when you arrived here you ended up wrapping fridges in plastic in a warehouse.

They also told me that you aren’t one of the detainees let out because of health reasons in March and that you have been in the detention centre now for nearly three years.

They told me not just how you taught yourself English from a dictionary so small that it fits into the palm of your hand, but that the last time you wrote to them you talked about insomnia, cumulo nimbus clouds, the atmosphere, and the problem of trying to look through a window that is opaque, that you really like birds and wildlife but that the window in the cell you live in is opaque plastic, not glass, and doesn’t open.

I’m 16 and live in Brighton, roughly thirty miles from where you are if you’re still in detention.

I go to a great school – when it’s not closed because of the virus. I love it. I’m really missing it. Now I know how much I love learning. Now that I’m not getting to learn in the way we were.

I’ve got a little brother. He drives me crazy, particularly right now because he hates lockdown so much. Our mother keeps telling him he has to stop being so animalistic and apply logic. Talking of animals, I’m planning to study to be a vet when I leave school, so if I get qualified in veterinary studies I’ll be able to look after my brother. Joke! No but in reality I care a lot about wildlife, the environment means everything to me, and the way it is being harmed is what gives me insomnia.

Though considering the iniquity of your own situation, I really don’t have a right to not sleep well.

I was thinking, what will I write to Hero about that could be of use to him?

So I’m going to write about the swifts.

You probably know already they’re the birds that live some of the year in Africa and some of the year here and in other places in Europe and Scandinavia. They are about to arrive here again any day, at least I hope they are. Last year they arrived May 13th. In Brighton we’re among the earliest to see swifts returning to the UK. My mother has this saying, about the swifts being what make a summer happen: ‘it’s when the swifts arrive and when the swifts leave that marks the start and the end of a summer.’ Apparently her mother said it, and her mother’s mother said it. I think that makes swifts a bit like a flying message in a bottle. There’s a poem by the poet Emily Dickinson that I like. It says (though it says it more poetically than I am here) what would happen if you split a lark open? I have a vision that if you were to open a swift, metaphorically of course, the rolled-up message they carry inside them is the unfurled word

SUMMER.

In case you don’t know, they’re the birds that look like black arrows high in the sky. They are in fact a kind of grey colour, with a bit of white under their chin, and beautiful tiny heads shaped like crash helmets, wise eyes like black beads.

Their latin name is apus apus, which is something to do with how they look like they don’t have feet. Actually they have very small feet evolved for clinging to buildings or rocks, they are built to be aerodynamic which means in the end they need big feet less than other birds, they are quite small in frame but their wings are the biggest in ratio to the size of their body of all of the birds in the air because they spend a massive amount of their lives on the wing.

They feed while they’re flying, they eat flies and insects and have adapted to sorting the ones that sting from the ones that don’t – for example they can actually tell drones from other bees. I mean the bee kind of drone, not the camera and bombing machine. They drink rain on the wing or descend to skim the surface of a river without landing, and they even sleep on the wing – their brains can shut down on one side so they get some rest while the other side stays awake.

But what is also pretty amazing is that they can fly 3,000 miles in five days, if they don’t get put off course by bad weather, and they know where they are going pretty much as soon as they’re born, by means of earth’s

natural magnetism, and that the average journey they make is between 12,000

and 13,000 miles and look at the size of them, they’re such little birds.

I am watching the sky for them to arrive every day. As if this year hadn’t been bad enough, there’s been reports from Greece that a high wind killed off thousands of them on their way north at the start of April.

Why would we ever imagine that anything in the world takes a shape more important than the eye or the brain or the shape in the sky of a bird like that.

Well Hero, I think that is way more than enough for one letter. I hope I haven’t bored you. I wanted to send you an open horizon and this is one of the things that has kept me sane in this time when we are all in lockdown.

But lockdown is nothing compared to the unfairness of life for people who are already being treated unfairly.

I will write again soon.

I know we have not met or anything but with respect I very much hope you are okay.

I also know your window isn’t that good, but I think sometimes you get to go outside into a yard?

If you see a swift in the sky, it’s carrying a message from a stranger who wishes you well and is thinking of you.

—

Friendly greetings.

—

From

—

Sacha Greenlaw