Ali Smith: There But For The

The fact is, there were whales that got stuck in the harbour in Greenwich in 1273 and in 1658. A fisherman threw an anchor from his boat at the one in the 1600s and it went right through the whale’s nostril

The fact is, bats always fly to their left when they fly out of caves

The fact is, rabbits like to eat liquorice

The fact is, deer know about weddings and about who you will marry

The The fact is notes are all in her own handwriting except for the one which is in the shape of the paper plane and is addressed to Brooke. Anna looked at it before she left and she said that it was definitely Mr. Garth’s writing, though Brooke could pretty much tell from the other notes. It is totally the wrong size for sellotaping into the Moleskine and might need a book or a place of its own in which to be kept. Anna left this morning and so did Mr. Palmer, but they said they’d be back again and they would want to read the final history when she was finished it and they gave her their email addresses. What do you call a Scottish cloakroom attendant? Angus McCoatup. Joke. Anna is from Scotland. The photo queue out in the Observatory yard, for people who want a picture of themselves standing on the Prime Meridian, is pretty long today. Is the Prime in Prime Meridian the same Prime as the Prime in Prime Minister? The election of the new government is next month so all the news and papers are about who looks best on the TV. All the candidates say that they are the man who will win. Even so, nobody knows who will win. The future can’t be seen, not even at an Observatory. Observe a Tory! Joke. According to her mother, the Tories, who have not been in the government since way way back in the twentieth century before Brooke was born, are something to do with history repeating itself. Brooke stands with the toes of both feet on the less visible piece of Meridian, behind the silver structure thing. There is a lot less courtyard space on the east side of the Meridian than there is on the west. I am on the border, she tells herself. She imagines a man like the one at the airport when they came back from the conference her mother was at in Rotterdam, who asked them to step to one side, then to step into an office, and who left her, her mother and her father there in the bare office with the cameras in the ceiling, the table and two chairs (although there were three people including Brooke, though she is a child and so possibly did not fully count) and the screen thing that looks like a mirror but which is a secret wall people can look at you through, and they had to wait for two hours and forty-five minutes and were then let through and were never told the reason why they had to wait. There. She has done it. She has stepped across and hasn’t needed to show any proof of who she is! And again. She has stepped across again and no one has even noticed. She can do it again, and again, back and fore. She is invisible. She is a Free Agent. She jumps over the line from side to side. A lady in the queue laughs at her and films her on a little camera. Then she gives Brooke a thumbs up, as if the film she has taken is a really good one. Brooke waves at the lady. She imagines herself on one side of a border waving and laughing at the people on the other side of it. They are the people who can’t and aren’t allowed to cross it. Then she puts a foot on either side, straddles the divided world. Roll up! See Divided World Held Together By Small But Impressively Strong Ten Year Old Girl Brooke Bayoude Speedy Enough To Run Up Observatory Slope In Under 60 Seconds! That is a sentence full of implied the’s. Roll up: a kind of cigarette that Josie Lee sometimes smokes. But it is also a phrase people used to shout in the olden days to make people, for example the public, be interested in coming to see something fascinating and maybe pay good money. Roll up! See executions of people who are not yet dead! Then Brooke sees a man over at the Talking Telescope fishing in his pockets for a coin for putting into the slot. Roll up! See Man Saved From Wasting Money In Talking Telescope By Speedy Ten Year Old Brooke Bayoude! She is over there in a ji (a ji: less than half a jiffy). Excuse me, she says. The man stops. He turns and looks at her. I just wanted to let you know that the Telescope is a bit truculent and will sometimes eat your money and then not actually speak, Brooke says. The man looks at her like she isn’t there. He puts the pound in the slot as if she hasn’t spoken. He presses a button. The Talking Telescope voice that comes out is the German one. Brooke is polite. She waits till the voice ends. Then she says: In my opinion you were lucky this time. The man steps down from the little footplate and goes off towards the shop. Possibly the man doesn’t understand English, though that is very unlikely since German people can mostly speak English a lot better than English people can speak German. Possibly he did not recognize the word truculent and was therefore put off the rest of what Brooke was saying. Truculent: Brooke can’t remember exactly what it means. She draws an imaginary pencil circle round it in her head to remind herself to check later. The Talking Telescope’s German voice is male. Its French voice is female. Its English voice is male. Is France more female than Germany and England, or was there only a lady French speaker there and no men who could speak French the day they were doing the voice recordings? It is much more worth it putting money in the machine which gives you a printed-out certificate that proves you stood on the Prime Meridian and says the date and the time to several digits for example, if it was 14.29 when you stood on it, it would say 14.29.1234 on 12 April 2010, so that you know the fraction of a second pretty exactly, and also you have something you can take home with you and you can even write your name on in the space left for the name above where the certificate tells you about the crosshairs of the Great Transit Circle Telescope and Longitude 0°. That is what Brooke calls worth it. Whereas even though it talks in all those languages, all the Talking Telescope tells you about in its languages is stuff you can see really obviously with your eyes without needing a telescope to. Then it even tells you to go and listen to the other Talking Telescope round by the statue of General Wolfe. It is a waste of money just to be told to go and listen to another Talking Telescope which also tells you to go and listen to this one in the Observatory yard tell you to go and listen to it ! Brooke puts her eye to the dark little circle which only lights up if you put in the money, and then only sometimes. I SEE NO SHIPS. That was what Admiral Nelson apparently is reputed to have said historically when he put the telescope to his blind eye and because he did the English won the battle. That was shortly before Nelson died on the deck of the ship and said Kiss Me Hardy to Thomas Hardy the famous author. When they brought Admiral Nelson’s body back from the battle in a barrel of brandy or another drink like brandy, there was a queue of people to see him lying in a state and the queue was probably about the same size as the one outside the Lees’ house watching Mr. Garth’s window. The Milo Multitude, her mother calls them. The Milo Masses. Newspapers call it Milo Madness, Milo Mania, Milo Mayhem. Brooke doesn’t think she is in any of the photos the newspapers have printed, though there are some people in some of them that she recognizes, also on the Milo footage on YouTube of when the blind in the window moves a bit and of visitors’ Milo Days Out there are loads of people she knows. Roll up! Roll up! Come And See Invisible Man In Room!

The fact is, ha ha! all those people outside the house and watching YouTube and reading the papers or looking on the net don’t know what the fact about Mr. Garth really is.