Ali Smith - There But For The

“They forgot to give me my Senior Calmit, boy!” he shouted. “I never took my Senior Calmit! They forgot to give it me! I feel FANTASTIC. I haven’t felt this good in YEARS. Look!”

His grandfather pointed down at his own lap in the cockpit. He looked back at his grandson with his face full of delight.

“Christ! I wish your grandmother were alive today. I wish she were here right here and right now, son! I’d hold her on my knee and I’d sing her such a fine old love song!”

When they landed, and after his grandfather had badly but very energetically demonstrated a dance by the early film star Fred Astaire, flinging his walking stick from hand to hand and up into the air in front of a crowd of cheering pensioners on the runway, the boy returned his grandfather to the Old School gate to sign him back in. As they drew near, his grandfather grew morose again and began to shake.

“Please don’t grass on me,” his grandfather said. “They’ll double-dose me if they find out.”

Grass on me was old-speak for tell tales or betray.

“Grandad, they probably already know,” the boy said. “If they haven’t seen it on their monitors they’ll have tracked it via their Spirit Levels.”

But if they knew they gave no sign of it, and the boy said nothing, and when the grandfather saw that the boy wasn’t going to say, and that he’d got through the gates without being admonished or injected, he thanked the boy with his eyes.

The boy looked into the old man’s eyes and saw something amazing all right. He didn’t yet know it but he would spend the rest of his life looking back and looking forward in search of it, the still-unpolluted source that feeds into every ruined river.

This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.

would a man in shutting himself in / be asking things to stop or to begin?

Mark’s mother, Faye, had been dead for forty-seven years. Her most recent attention-getting device was rhyme.

Mark walked through the park. He had forgotten how charming it was here. Would he be testing whether he’d be missed / would such inversion mean he’d not exist? this was interesting, because usually she was much ruder and cruder than she was being this morning. Also, it was quite unusual for her to ask questions. Questions demanded an answer, didn’t they? They asked for a response. Unless they were rhetorical questions; true, she often used those (“a rhetorical question is one which does not expect an answer or one whose answer is implied”: The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith’s for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar). Mark went the long way, round and up through the woody place, to get to the Observatory, thinking it might be less steep. No, it was still notably pretty steep. He waited to get his breath back sitting on a bench opposite the place where one of the Astronomers Royal, or was it Astronomer Royals, had dug a well a very long way into the ground. According to the notice, the Astronomer Royal had sat down there under the surface, literally inside the hill, it looked like, watching the sky through a telescope. The well was fearfully deep.

Then Mark walked round the side of the main house, stood for a minute or two in the little Camera Obscura, and right now he was standing just along from the Talking Telescope, leaning against the railing that overlooked the park he’d just traversed traversed ooh I can think of lots that’s worse / than meeting someone for a quick traverse there, that was more like her. He looked down the slope at the trees in their rugged neatness, the paths that met and crossed themselves, so elegant the way they seemed both planned and random, elegant too the white colonnades and all the grand old whitened buildings down at the foot of the park. The new business towers of the city shouldered each other beyond the river at the back of the view like a mirage, like superimposition. Greenwich. Then and now. He hadn’t been here for a long time. He should come here more. He loved it’s no surprise to me that you’re so keen / a place beloved of many an old queen and straight away as if to spite her he thought hard about the actual old Queen, the literal historical Virgin Queen, and the first thing that came to mind was something that had happened when she was the young Virgin Queen, where had he read it? He couldn’t remember, but the writer, whoever he was I hate to be reminding you again / that writers are not fucking always men described Queen Elizabeth the First quite unforgettably, dancing in the great hall in her favourite palace right there, right here in Greenwich all those hundreds of years ago, she was young and beautiful, pale and thin from having been ill, in fact she was convalescing after a lengthy illness, an illness that had at one point been bad enough to endanger her life, and she was enjoying the first real spurt of energy she’d had for months, had been out hunting, had come back flushed and happy and very much wanting to dance. So the hall had filled with courtiers and musicians and she’d dressed up; she looked, the writer said, like a great tulip as she bowed and turned, but her secretary, Cecil, pushed through the ranks of the dancers all round her, he had urgent news, and he told the Queen of England in her ear that her cousin, the Queen of Scotland, had given birth to a son. The Virgin Queen paled with shock, then flushed with shock; she stopped dancing; stood rigid. Then she, who was usually so controlled, so imperious, who was world-renowned for her imperturbability, turned and ran from the hall and all her panicked ladies-in-waiting followed bewildered in a great rush, their dance finery rustling as they ran, and when they reached her private rooms they found her collapsed and sobbing in a chair. “The Queen of Scotland is a mother of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock” cause that’s all girls are good for ain’t it birth / Gawd knows they haven’t any other worth but the point of this story, Faye, is: the next day regardless she was fine again, unruffled, greeting statesmen, doing her queenly political deals much the same as ever, because even when she met her worst fears, even when she met her demons, she was what you’d call a survivor, that old Queen. Out of sheer strength of character she survived, didn’t she, the vicissitudes of history.

There.

That’d annoy her.

It did.

Silence.

Mark heard birdsong, could hear birdsong for several whole seconds, could hear the murmur of the people queuing up behind him at the meridian line, could even make out some of the things they were saying, before she roared back into his right ear with something of the force of a wind tunnel nearly knocking him off balance just wait you little bastard history / that made a fucking dunghill out of me / is waiting round the corner just for you / to turn you into tulip fodder too.

Silence of the grave my arse, he said out loud.

The couple with the small child, who had been standing quite close to him and had smiled genially at him when he arrived, picked up their child and backed away. They stopped and put down the child further along the railing.

He was still waiting to see if there’d be any comment from her about his my arse.

No.

Nothing.

Fine, he thought.

He felt the usual: bullish, and a little disappointed. Me and my shadow. He stuck his finger in his ear and waggled it about to try and shift the wind tunnel effect. It was frustrating. Jonathan, gone for more than five years now, never said a word to Mark. It was only and always Faye. These days it was like being assaulted by a bag lady, an old tramp in a torn coat that’s come through fifty wars, who shouts like she long ago lost her hearing.