Ali Smith: There But For The

(They’re back again, then, her mother said on Friday afternoon when you could smell the smell of people all crushed together again and hear the noise as you came towards that part of the town. Her mother sighed. Why did you sigh? Brooke said. I feel for them, her mother said. For all of them together or for each and every one of them singly? Brooke said. Sort of both, I think, her mother said. Then she said, you’re feeling a bit better yourself, aren’t you? What I am feeling is irrelevant, Brooke said, but if you are feeling for all those people, that is an astronomical amount of feeling. It is an Alps of feeling, her mother said, and what you are feeling is never irrelevant, and I feel an Alps of feeling about that too. There was a bit of shouting from the Milo Masses: Milo, Milo, Never Come Out! Milo, Milo, Never Come Out! and Milo, Milo, Come Out Now! You Are Needed Here — And How! The two shouts mixed into one single noise, like the noise of a small football match. Her father was in a bad mood that day because he had looked up the news online and had read the word Entertainment, and then underneath there had been a piece of news about people digging in a forest for the body of a woman who has gone missing. This had put him into the bad mood. He kept saying the word Entertainment, like the word made him feel sick. Then he said again, like he is always saying, how he felt the Milo Masses were here because TV and the internet were full of nothing but humiliation. God, her mother said, one cheers up then the other goes down in the dumps. I can’t win. All those people, her father said. It’s terrible. They’re here because they feel so disenfranchised. What is disenfranchised, again? Brooke said. It means you don’t have a vote, her mother said. So all the people outside the house outside Mr. Garth’s window feel like they are not allowed to vote in the election? Brooke said. I kind of mean it more metaphorically than that, her father said. As if metaphorically they are not allowed to vote in the election? Brooke said. Exactly, her father said. Mum, Brooke said. Uh huh? her mother said. What is metaphorically, again? Brooke said. An Alps of feeling, her mother said, that’s metaphorical. To describe something indescribable you sometimes translate it directly into something else, or join it with something else so the two things become a new thing, so an Alps of feeling lets you know the size, the huge amount, as big as a range of mountains, of the feeling. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t a real feeling? Brooke said. Sometimes, her mother said, it’s the only way to describe what’s real, I mean because sometimes what’s real is very difficult to put into words. Brooke memorized the word. Metaphorically: another way of describing what’s real.)

The fact is, today the crowd outside Mr. Garth’s room was so big that it was the kind you can get carried along by in a direction you don’t really want to go in. Roll up! Come And See What Can’t Be Seen! The people sitting and standing and playing the guitars and eating their lunches on the big plastic mats that stop the grass becoming mud are back. The foodstalls are back. The Milo Merchandise stall that Mrs. Lee organized is back, with the T-shirts and badges and flags saying MILO-HIGH CLUB and SMILE-O FOR MILO;-), and the Milo Little Ponies for if people bring children. There have been flashing cameras at night for the last few nights, but the crowd has been being good because the police always move in if the crowd is too rowdy. There were TV cameras there this morning because there are two more women who are claiming to be Mr. Garth’s wives, though there are always people pretending to be Mr. Garth’s wives, and after they’d been filmed having a fight about who was the real wife the two wives went walking round the crowd arm in arm. There are TV cameras most days now. There are cameras from America, and there were some French TV people who came for the debate they had before the last time the police moved everybody on, when France was saying that France had a person who had shut himself in first, before Mr. Garth did, so Mr. Garth wasn’t the real original. Also the Psychic who wears the hat and gives people the Milo Messages is back. The people who light the candles and tie ribbons and teddy bears and other things to the fences at the bottom of the gardens under Mr. Garth’s window are back. The people with the banners that say Milo For Palestine and Milo For Israel’s Endangered Children and Milo For Peace and Not In Milo’s Name and Milo For Troops Out Of Afghanistan are back, and probably the man dressed as Batman will be back too who tries to get up on to the flat roof and put his banner up under Mr. Garth’s window. The lady will probably definitely be back who goes round asking everybody how much of Jesus do you need to see to believe in him and who gives out the leaflet with a picture of lambs and the rainbow and the children holding hands. She is always telling people they will die and go to hell unless they do as she and Jesus say. She is always asking Brooke will Brooke help her give the leaflets out.

(Be polite but demur, Brooke’s mother said. Mum, Brooke said, if you can demur. Uh huh? her mother said. Her mother was frowning. She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant. She stopped typing and looked up, looked over at the arch of the window where Brooke was pretending to tightrope-walk the edge of one of the big stones in the floor. Then surely you must also be able to mur, Brooke said. I mur with you about that, her mother said. Brooke curled on the flagstones laughing at the word mur. Her mother came over and tickled her until they were both lying there on the old stone floor, laughing helplessly. You and me, her mother said when they got their breath back, we just made up a word. We so did, Brooke said. Her mother sat up, nodded, ruffled Brooke’s hair, got up off the floor and went back to the admin of phil and lit.)

The fact of the matter is, Brooke spoke to a lady this morning who had paid the Psychic man the £30 for her special channelled message from Mr. Garth in the room. Brooke asked the lady what her special message was. The lady smiled a smile like she knew a secret. She said she couldn’t possibly tell anyone what Milo had meant to say only to her. Then Brooke asked her was she sure, could she know for sure, that the message came from Mr. Garth in the room. And the lady said she was surer of that than of anything else in her life. But that lady doesn’t know. That lady has no idea, like everybody else way way out of the loop, because first, everybody who knows anything knows that Milo isn’t Mr. Garth’s real name. And second, anybody who is anybody in this history knows what the real fact is about Mr. Garth, the one that was making Mrs. Lee cry on the stairs yesterday because all the badges and the T-shirts and the caps and key rings and the inscribed Easter eggs that she organized and invested thousands and thousands of pounds in will soon maybe not be worth money any more.

(No one must know, is what Mrs. Lee said yesterday when they found out. Josie Lee went to get her a Valium. What do you give an elephant who’s cracking up. Trunkquillizers. Joke. It happened yesterday morning. Brooke went in and Mrs. Lee was crying on the stairs. Brooke went all the way up the stairs. The door to the room was open. So Brooke gathered up the The fact is notes, they were all piled neatly up on the sideboard under the clean knife and fork and under them all was the paper aeroplane with the story on it that begins The fact is, like it is a kind of The fact is note! and with Brooke’s name there on the wing of it when she turned it over. She could not see, anywhere in the room, the story she did for Mr. Garth and put under the door on Friday lunchtime, about the journey through time (at the end of which Brooke has given it two endings so there is an alternative). But there did not seem to be any other bits of paper left in the room. Brooke put the ones she’d found, which were hers because she wrote them in the first place, and the plane which Mr. Garth made and wrote on, which was hers to take because it is addressed to her, inside her jumper and tucked her jumper into her belt. Then she came back down the stairs and stood behind Mrs. Lee, who was crying like anything even though she could go and stand in the real room now any time she liked. No one can see by looking, can they? is what Mrs. Lee was saying. No one can tell from the outside, can they? she said wiping her eyes, taking the glass of water and drinking it so fast that she nearly choked.)