Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking

by Han Smith

Genres: Coming of Age; LGBT Lesbian

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2024

'Tender and merciless . . . a hallucinatory window into what it means to excavate the past in a world committed to its erasure' ABIGAIL SHINN, Goldsmiths Prize Judge

'Kaleidoscopic and beguiling . . . A singular and thrilling debut that shows what happens when objective truth and meaning are drowned in the shifting river of history and politics' ANDREW McMILLAN

'A novel full of hopeful glitter - and one I know I will return to' A K BLAKEMORE, Guardian

'Insightful, affecting and assured . . . Written with a poetry as defamiliarising as it is rich' OISÍN FAGAN

'Strange, intriguing, exhilarating' CAMILLA GRUDOVA

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know.

She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows - almost - about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape.

Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is the story of a young woman coming of age in a town reckoning with its brutal past, for readers of Milkman and A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.

Release date: June 20, 2024

Publisher: John Murray Press

Print pages: 320

Sample

Portrait #1

The haunted

This is the portrait of who she used to be. She was a ­daughter – or rather, she was almost a daughter, because that was just the way things were – and she had always known what kind of cursed place she lived in, to a lesser or greater extent at different times.

She knew broadly, for instance, that her own mother’s grandmother had been sent to the region from a better, cleaner city, in the west of the country and years ago. This was where the story ended: this great-grandmother was dead now and had always been dead, thick in the layers of mothers and past things. She had always been dead but did have something to do with the other woman who lived alone and had no family to visit her on weekends, so that the almost daughter’s family came instead. They had brought her bread, because that was all she asked for, along with potatoes and cheap cab­bageheads and onions. The lonely woman was not dead then but very old and had no whole teeth at the front of her mouth. She presumably had teeth at the back of her mouth, but the almost daughter had always avoided being close enough to be able to check, as doing so caused her a vague, pulsing nausea. On the days when the lonely woman spoke too much, the almost daughter could imagine the saliva pooling and foaming in the throat the voice was coming from, and the sensation would then spread out to her own throat. The room the woman lived in smelled of bare skin, and the onions. There were also days the family had come when the woman did not speak at all, or was howling or was not even dressed.

The almost daughter was aware that, like her mother’s mother’s mother, the old woman had also come from the city further west, and had not necessarily chosen to come. She knew that the place the women had ended up in, or had been sent to – the place that was her own town now – had not been a proper town at the time. The schools that she and her brother attended, and also the factories, and the apartment they lived in, had somehow not existed yet. It was difficult to think a lot about this, but the only reason the buildings were now there and solid, and were full of real things like noise and the lifts, was that people like her mother’s mother’s mother and maybe the lonely woman had been sent and not allowed to return. These people had had to remain for so long that all the blocks and lamp posts and the schools had been built and eventually had become a town. If the almost daughter sometimes did think about this, despite the difficulty and despite the fact that she generally had other things to think or not think, there really must have been a huge number of people sent from wherever else and not let back, if a whole life-sized town had ended up being built. At the same time, if so many people had been sent and then had not been allowed to go back, there must have been something and someone to keep them there, and the something must have been very large and strong, and the someone must have been many people, too. Then there was the question of why they had been sent, and why they were not permitted to go back, and this was where things were even harder to keep hold of. In any case, if it had been important and worth thinking so much about, surely someone would have said it all out loud by now.

But there was also the matter of the haunted fields where the athletics contests were held each year. For the almost ­daughter’s brother this seemed less of a problem, as he was usually actually taking part, in either the long-distance lap run or the hurdle race. One year, he came second in both. The almost daughter was never selected for an event, except once when an error had been made in the high jump and a girl with exactly the same name as hers had qualified, but the error had fortunately been corrected before she had had to sprawl over the pole. Every remaining year, the almost daughter cheered, for her brother and for their school’s other contestants, so it happened that she inevitably heard what the students from other regions said about the fields, in between their own phases of only cheering and shouting. They were the ones who said the word haunted, and sometimes said labour and detained and the other words. They were the ones who pointed to the blunt rows of what had indeed unmistakeably been barracks, before they boarded their buses and left again.

So of course the almost daughter had guessed, though equally naturally, she already knew. Clearly, everybody else knew as well, because why would she – just one boring, almost-person – be special in her guessing or knowing? Still, knowing was slightly different from speaking. Knowing was slightly different, even, from thinking. She sat at the table for dinner every evening with her brother, and with her mother, and her father if he was back from the gas plant, and they discussed when they would visit the lonely woman and bring her the vegetables in bags, until the day they stopped and did not go. The television was always bright and they turned the volume up or down, and they knew and their lips moved on and on. Her own almost face, in a portrait of before.

Portrait #2

Tops of heads

In this portrait, there is an actual portrait. It is the portrait that appeared in the lift in the section of the building the almost daughter lived in, the week before the strange time began with Oksana, the new and wild girl at her school, and all the things that were hidden under other things. It was with her father that the almost daughter first saw the portrait in the lift. There was no immediate logical connection to Oksana.

Her father swore quietly, into his breath. It was not an angry kind of swearing. The mirror in the lift was as scratched and hazed in the corners as it always was, but the portrait of the president was glistening. His skin looked taut-polished and the glass shined it further. The almost daughter’s father re­positioned himself but there was nowhere he could stand where he was not facing either his own reflection or the portrait.

It’s a prank, he said. It’s some kind of joke.

The almost daughter shrugged because this was what she did when she was not sure which words to say.

It’ll be gone tomorrow, either way, said her father.

The next morning, the portrait was very much still there. The almost daughter stepped into the lift with her brother. There was a stain now on the portrait below the nose, where a straight moustache had been added in marker pen, and partially wiped away again.

What the hell, said the almost daughter’s brother. He did not attempt to angle himself to not be looking directly at the portrait.

It’s a joke, said the almost daughter. She told him that this was what their father had said.

Her brother asked what else their father had said.

Nothing, really, said the almost daughter. He said it was a joke, or a prank.

Her brother looked like his face was deciding whether it should be laughing or not. He took a photograph of the portrait with his phone. He started to take one of himself and the almost daughter in front of the portrait as well, but then he dropped his arm down instead. He deleted the original ­photograph he had taken.

Fuck, he said. Whenever they get caught, it won’t be a joke for the imbeciles who thought of it.

The almost daughter shrugged and her brother moved his hands in and out of his pockets until they reached the sound like a sigh at the ground floor. Outside, as usual, the sky was still dark and so it was impossible to see his eyes. When they met his friend by the concrete steps of the old Palace of Creativity and Youth, and for all the rest of the way to school, he said nothing.

The almost daughter saw the portrait in the lift for the last time in the afternoon. She had begun to consider taking the stairs, even past the seventh floor, which stank most, because this would avoid being fixed inside the lift with anyone who might get in as well. At the same time, just as she realised she was calculating this, her thumb had automatically pressed the button, and a strange small section of her mind was less reluctant to find out what might happen if someone did get in. This part of her mind was faintly electric.

At the fifth floor, less than halfway up, there was the jolt-stop that meant the doors would open. Her strange segment of excitement drained back down the shaft.

The almost daughter only knew the woman who entered from seeing her inside the lift, which on all other days, without the portrait, was the same as never properly seeing her at all. The almost daughter would not have been able to recall if she lived on the fourth or the fifth or the sixth floor. She lived somewhere in the blur of the middle and nothing more.

The woman looked past the almost daughter to the portrait. The moustache, the almost daughter saw, had been redrawn, and rewiped, and words around the face had been added, and these had also been scrubbed out again or crossed through. There was a hair-crack in the glass in the bottom left-hand corner.

This was when the sound came that could easily have been something from the lift machinery. It could have been grinding cogs: it rasped and smacked.

The woman had spat. It had come from her throat. She turned and stepped out to the corridor again, and the almost daughter watched the wet projection settle, and then separ­ate. The longest trail seeped down the nose to the mouth. It pleated, and was undeniably mesmerising.

In the evening, the almost daughter’s mother sat in her headphones and spoke to the screen. The almost daughter often watched her doing this while she wrote out her homework or partially read the chapters that she was supposed to be reading. Her mother spoke at the screen and looked into the camera hole and the box beneath the camera hole showed the woman who was in Bristol in England and who her mother was actually speaking to. The woman in Bristol spoke in English and this was to help her mother speak in English. Sometimes, her mother did not speak in English, but said things slowly and blandly, as if to a pet, and this was to help the woman learn, in exchange. The woman in Bristol was the person the almost daughter’s mother had found on a website for her brother, so that she would help him speak in English before he took his exams to go to university. When her brother had said that the idea was idiotic and that he could just as well watch videos and not speak to a stranger, her mother had spoken to the woman instead. It was usually when her father worked late at the gas plant. At first it had been once a month and now it was at least one evening per week.

It is like a play, her mother was saying, in English. No, not play, she said. She shook her head. She typed on the keyboard and then spoke back to the woman. Not play, she said. It is like a game. Like joke.

At night, the videos arrived. The usual ones that came from her class and also the parallel class at the school were of ­animals that spoke in dubbed voices, or of people pouring hot things or cold things down their necks, but the preview images of what had been sent now were very clearly something different. She clicked on the first of them without breathing. She could see that it showed the inside of a lift.

The camera had been placed above the doors, so that the view of the portrait opposite was clear, and the people who stepped into the lift came into the frame with the tops of their heads first. Some of the tops of the heads that shifted in immediately shifted out again. Some faced the portrait for just a few seconds, and then turned their backs on it so that their expressions could be seen, distorted slightly from the angle. Two boys laughed and raised their hands in a salute, and one of them punched the other and he fell into the corner and was laughing still, but looked tired or nervous. Two other boys looked tired but did not laugh. One woman with a baby said: Aha, and one man with a case on wheels next to another man said: Just disrespectful. Disgrace, is what it is.

No one spat and no one marked on moustaches, in any of the videos. The almost daughter clicked on each of them again to check, and it was then that it became properly clear that this was not the lift in her building. She realised this and simultaneously realised that this was utterly obvious, or should have been. The mirrors were different, and the buttons were different, and the acrylic of the flooring was ­differently stained. In one video there was no mirror at all, and in another there was a handrail made of dark wood. All of the lifts were different places, and the lift that would show her brother, and her mother, and her father, and the woman who had spat, and also herself, was not the lift in any single one of the videos.

She checked this just one more time, and then read the comments from the rest of her class. Most had only responded with images that were either the yellow faces or the eyeballs. Some had said: Haha, but none said: Hahahahaha. One said: Too far, and many said: Oh God, and the almost daughter’s deskmate said: Oh no. Her friend, who sat in front, said: Okay, but like that man says, it’s pretty disrespectful, no? After this more had said: Too far, and Fuck.

The almost daughter returned to the top of the messages. The first video was from the person she knew would have sent it, without knowing especially that she had made this prediction. The person was the new girl, Oksana, though the ­second and third and fourth were not from her. These were with messages that said that the clips were forwarded from older ­brothers and cousins.

The almost daughter could hear her own brother in the other room with the computer on. He would come back soon. It was close to 4:30. He was watching other videos that he shouldn’t have been watching. She sent one of the yellow faces and tried to choose which one her brother would pick if his class had also been sharing the lifts, and if these were the videos he had been watching instead of the ones he deleted after watching. She thought of him checking through each of them as well, squinting to recognise their parents or himself, and biting the inside of his cheek flesh like she had.

And then people were sending ferrets and baths of ice again already, and the videos pushed up to the nothing of the phone. The face she sent was an open-mouthed one. There was no face for the mixed wad of spark and dread that had told her in a kind of whisper that the new girl would be linked to the portrait in some way.

Portrait #3

The woman with the cave inside her

This is the portrait of a woman with a cave inside her. In this portrait, the woman with the cave inside her is standing in the approximate centre of the room, and is wearing one sock on each of her scabbed feet. This is good. There is supposed to be one sock on each foot. Why is it good? It does not matter, maybe. What matters is that they are on her feet, one each.

If they are on, and one on each, and it is still the morning, there is a chance for order and calm. There is the possibility that she will, today, remember and have the force to slice things and boil them, or layer them inside the pan, which will not exhaust her even as she lifts it, and she will remember first the butter in the pan. There is of course no certainty – not at all. But the potential has formed, if she has reached this far, that she may in fact recall whether this is a day when the key-click is expected at the door, and that she thus may not be frozen by the click and wait for it to disappear. With the socks and this good start in the centre of the room, not stuck or falling or too close to the window, she will come to the door, and recognise the faces. There is, if not clarity, a distinctness in the socks. She will recognise the faces as people and not ghosts.

She will know the faces as people and not ghosts.

And then no. No. It is not good. She is checking now, and yes, she has done it again. What she has done again is she has failed again. What she has managed is not good after all, and she is the dirtiest failure herself, because look at the colours of these socks more attentively, if this is possible without falling forwards and down. This one on the side of the window, left or right or whichever it is, is the grey sock with the red at the top. On the other side, the left or right other side, the sock is grey but the kind of grey that knows that it once, in another life, was white. It has no red and no other colour. It smells. It smells of her own smell that she hates as much as she hates her own skin and wastage and hands. They are terrible, awful hands to have, and now she sees that she is not wearing other clothes. This is not good and it is not good, or worse, that she even thought that the socks were good. How could she have thought that? She is naked.

She is naked, apart from the two different greys. The one that was white in another life is the one that stinks most of all, and of her. Not in another life at all, just in its own life, but so long ago. She could try again to get dressed, of course, but what is the point? So far and long ago.

The woman with the cave inside her. Hacked inside her and scythed inside her. Gape and another day, another life.

Portrait #4

Below, and history

The portrait from the lift, or from all of the lifts, is ­certainly somewhere in this next portrait too, because it was still somewhere within the almost daughter on the day this is a portrait of: the day that Valya had already decided would change their lives irreversibly, and forever. What Valya was talking about would happen later, but first there was the man with the broken briefcase who came to the school and held up a photograph of a monument that did not actually show the monument. Valya meant her own life, and Elda’s life, and inevitably also the almost daughter’s life.

The man came when the wall bell had rattled for the lunch break and there was groaning and swearing when the history teacher said that everyone should stay behind. She said that it would only take ten minutes. Less, if I can help it, she said.. . .