Ali Smith - There But For The

Consider the fabric of things the vast / dustbin of detail who knows what will last / nothing left but rough wool skin moment touch / who knew so little would become so much Mark sat in the park. It is more than fifty years ago. He and his mother are making a dash through London on a day when the rain makes the pavements greyer, the wind makes the litter more littery, a rough spring day. His mother’s sleeve on her tweed dogtooth coat, the one with the big lapels, is turned back on itself at the cuff and the rough cuff is rubbing his wrist as they hurry along. The wisps of her hair beyond her hat are wet, pretty in the rain. She is telling him things as they walk-run, turning to tell him things even on the move and when they pass men the men turn their heads and look at her. Mark is proud. She is clever and quick, she is beautiful, his mother, she is like a bird both clipped and winged, and when she passes people notice, and when she laughs out loud in the street people stop and stare.

It’s genius, old man, she says hauling him along and reeling off, like magic spilling behind her, like that dancer Isadora’s scarves that streamed behind and caught in the wheel and killed her, rhymes by one of her favourites, he rhymes sour with Schopenhauer, Freud with avoid, salmon with backgammon, civil with drivel, yes-men with chessmen, solemn with spinal column, Irving Berlin with pounding on tin, he rhymes word with absurd, and hurled with world. Now Porter has wit, but is shifty, a little seamy, I know, and I couldn’t not love him for it, Mark. But Ira, he’s kind, he’s always kind, and for genius to be kind takes a special sort of genius in itself, Mark old man, come on, we’re late (they were always, she was always, gloriously, just a little late, it made everything worth hurrying for), and his brother dead, imagine, he must feel like half a person, imagine it, try, him still in the world and his other half, the tune half, gone so young, only a bit older than me, and I know you think I’m old, but I’m not old, old man. I’m not old at all.

His mother says the rhymes out loud in the street, in the rain, to the rhythm of her walk. It is because she loves songs. She does, she loves them. The bedtime stories she tells him, after David’s been settled and she comes for the marvellous twilight time to his room, are all song-stories. She comes into the room and she sits on the bed and she says something like, are you ready? Then I’ll begin. Once a baby boy was born with no fingers on his left hand, imagine, just a stump for a hand. And when the baby had grown into a boy, the boy’s mother encouraged him to learn piano even though he hadn’t any fingers on that hand. And he got so good on the piano that when he grew up and was a man, he found he was a musician, and he wrote songs, and what’s more, having a stump was an asset when people got drunk if he was playing piano in a bar. He not only played piano, he landed some great knock-out punches with it. The end.

Then, sitting on the end of the bed, she sings When The Red Red Robin, which is a song this man who only had half his fingers really did write. She sings it slow and lullaby-like even though it’s meant to be fast, and then she turns out the light and leans over him with a kiss, and turns to go. One more, please, Mark says, please, when she’s at the door. So she comes back and sits on the edge of his bed in the half-dark and she sings another song by the man with one hand. Side. By. Side.

But the Gershwins! she shouts now as she dashes along past the shops, pulling him in her wake, rain all over their faces and his bare knees numb with the rain, her hand holding his all paint and the smell of the stuff she uses to try and wash it off. In the rain, in the middle of dull Holborn, with the people and the cabs and the buses going past and the shabby weather round them, she is singing above his head and the words are about how they’re writing songs of love, but not for her. A lucky star’s above, but not for her.

What, if anything, did Mark remember of all this, more than fifty years after it happened?

He remembered the blur of a grey London day and his hand in his mother’s hand.

He remembered she was wearing a coat whose cuff was folded back.

He remembered the feel of the cuff of this coat as they moved, as it rubbed against his wrist.

Say that the line we walk is very fine

Mark sat on the park bench, way in the future. Last week he’d read in the paper about the twenty-fourth copycat suicide in a French telecom company, where suicide was now being treated as a contagion.

What about that, then, Faye?

Say that the concept’s part of our design

On the one hand, nothingness; on the other, birds that sang in their sleep.

On the one hand, nothing; on the other, a feeble attempt at it, rhyme.

On the one hand, nothing; on the other, but here’s something, Faye, I read it in a book and I knew you’d like it. It’s about the song called For Me and My Gal. It took three grown men to write that song. And one of the three was Jewish, well, maybe more than one was, I can’t remember, but this one definitely was. And he fell in love with a girl and wanted to marry her, and she wanted to marry him too. So he takes her to the rabbi, to get married in the synagogue, this was in New York, and the rabbi says to her, are you a good Jewish girl, my child? and she says o yes, your worship, I am that, and he says to her, what was your mother’s full name, my child? And she says, my mother’s name was Emma Cathleen Bridget Hannigan Flaherty O’Brien, your worship. And the rabbi sent them away with a flea in their ear. So they went and got married at City Hall instead. Anyway, the girl’s name was Grace, and Grace’s favourite song all her life was this one her husband had helped write, and when she died he had the title of it engraved on her headstone. For Me and My Gal.

The end.

Nice one, Faye, what do you say?

Say that your own heart’s keeping time for mine

He sat forward on the bench. He stood up. Half past four.

He left the park.

He walked past a pub, caught sight of his reflection in the glass of its window.

Old man.

The front door of the Lees’ house was wide open. A girl with a clipboard and a man carrying a camera rig were standing in the doorway. The cameraman was gesticulating at a man in a van parked at the kerb. The girl with the clipboard was speaking to Jen Lee, who was also in the doorway and who, just at that moment, caught sight of Mark at the foot of the steps and looked away as if either she had no idea who Mark was or she was making it clear she didn’t want to have to deal with him now.

Hello!

Mark looked down.

It was the child, the Bayoude child.

Oh, hello, he said.

I remember you, she said.

I remember you too, Mark said. Something happening?

It’s Channel 4, she said.

Right, Mark said. How’s your dad and mum?

They’re very well, thank you, the child said. They got your nice card saying thank you for the book and everything. We have it up all the time, on the mantelpiece, in the front. It is an honour kept only for very special cards.

That’s lovely, Mark said. I’m honoured.

Yes, you are, the child said.

Oh, hello Mark, Jen called down now. How are you?

She was free; the clipboard girl had come down the steps to the van and was unloading a heavy-looking tripod. The cameraman had disappeared, probably inside.

I don’t think they’ll need to speak to you, she said. I think we’re pretty much giving them what they’re after.

Good, Mark said. Well. I was just passing. I was just up at the park for the afternoon, and was just, you know, passing.