Artful by Smith Ali

Author:Smith, Ali [Smith, Ali]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101605837
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Published: 2013-01-23T20:00:00+00:00

I was sitting at home in the study, at the desk. I was two-thirds of the way through Oliver Twist. The bad, lost, poor, desperate, filthy, hopeless girl from the underworld, Nancy, had just met the good, perfect, rich, clean paragon of a girl from the overworld, Rose. Was there such a word as overworld? I picked up your dictionary. Under it were your unfinished talks. The one on the top of the pile was the one called On Edge.

No, there was no word overworld listed in the dictionary. But how could there be an underworld and no overworld? Was it just that Rose’s world is so much more superior to Nancy’s that there’s no need even to label it? Then again, when Nancy comes to the door of the overworld—‘like a corpse come to life again,’ Sikes says of her as she gets ready to go there—and asks to ‘see the lady’ so she can tell her the truth about Oliver, a man asks her what her name is and she says, ‘It’s no use saying any.’

Maybe the languages of underworld and overworld can’t really meet, I thought, opening the old paperback wider, cracking the spine on it, hearing the gum of the binding give. Maybe that’s why you’d been giving me messages in a language I couldn’t speak and I knew for sure you couldn’t speak either.

On top of your unfinished talk about edge there was a folded photocopy. I unfolded it; it was a black and white picture of four young women, all of them very pretty, even beautiful, and all of them leaning on each other in a couple of deck chairs. Two of them were holding up dainty cups on dainty saucers and all four of them in the picture were completely asleep. The caption at the bottom said: Surrealists at Lambe Creek, Cornwall 1937. Clockwise from top left: Lee Miller, Ady Fidelin, Nusch Eluard, and Leonora Carrington.

One day, quite late on, you showed me this photograph; you must have been working on it at the time. You told me about how Lee Miller, the very beautiful woman at the top of the photograph, had started as a Surrealist photographer then in the Second World War had taken photographs all over Britain which still looked like they were Surrealism except now they were realism. Then, you said, she went into France and Germany at the end of the war with the Allies, she photographed the Liberation, she photographed the first ever use of napalm, and she was one of the first photographers into the concentration camps. You went and got a book off the shelf and came back with it. You showed me a pyramid made of shadow, a slit of light in a piece of netting, a woman with a disembodied hand on the back of her head, a typewriter crushed like a concertina. You turned the pages: a dead man in water, a train carriage with bare-chested, loose-armed corpses spilling out of its sliding door.

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