Ali Smith: There But For The

The fact is, Anna knows. Josie knows. Mr. Palmer knows. Brooke knows. Mrs. Lee has sworn them all to secrecy but it is the kind of secret Brooke decided she could tell her parents, so Brooke’s parents know too. But if all the people outside knew, it might make them feel even more metaphorically like they can’t vote in the election. Plus, Mrs. Lee is not the only person who will lose money and maybe some people will lose their jobs because of it, like the Psychic, who has been giving out messages as usual all day yesterday and all morning today like nothing has happened, to all the people paying him, all the people queuing outside his tent with the sign on it which says Personal Messages From Inside: £30.

The fact is, the room is completely totally empty and nobody is in it!

The fact is, Mr. Garth has gone.

History Of What Brooke Bayoude Thinks About While She Runs Across Park Towards University: Brooke is thinking about a joke about Madonna taking her babies that she has adopted from Africa to Oxford Street so they can be reunited with the clothes they made before she adopted them. It is funny, the joke, when you think about the babies shaking hands with say a cardigan with no hand in it, or a blouse giving the babies a big hug because it is so long since it saw them, but it also makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man in the park with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it’s there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself it would have to add the equivalent describing word and that’s how you’d know. The black girl ran across the park. It is like in Harry Potter where it says about Angelina that she is a tall black girl and that’s how you know that fact. On the internet it says on one site that there is a reference to a character being black in one of the first Harry Potter books and that this was edited out of the UK copies of the book but left in the copies of the book that got sold to readers who bought it in America. But that fact might not be true, because it is only a fact on the internet.

But the fact is, I am Hermione too, Brooke thinks as she runs across the grass.

The fact is, I can be Hermione if I like. I can even be old-fashioned characters like George out of the Famous Five. I would not want so much to be the one called Anne. I can be Bobbie in the Railway Children book, though they went away from London and I have come to it, but I can still be her if I want, and work out how to stop the train accident from happening. I can be Cinderella. There is more than one tree on One-Tree Hill! The girl ran across the park. Girl Runs Across Park! The girl is Brooke Bayoude, Cleverist. The Brooke Bayoude. I can be Snow White if I like and duh obviously I would never be stupid enough to eat the apple, no one would. I can be Anne of Green Gables. Her hair can be the colour of mine if I like.

The fact is, in history a man went down in a kind of machine he invented called a bathysphere to see what colour it was under the sea. There was only one colour, and it was blue. The man wrote about it and he sounded like it made him be very depressed that there was only blue under there. But now they have lights they can take underwater, though before it would have been candles and obviously that would never work. Imagine walking into the sea with candles! Ha ha! But with the lights that they can take underwater nowadays the fish are all darting about in their real amazing colours, orange and yellow and cyan. Brooke Bayoude runs through the gate of the park and down the street. She is running into the past. She is on her way to the place where the man is about to lower his bathysphere into the water. She will shout, Stop! She will say, Look, I’ve brought you these. They are From The Future. Try going down with these fixed on to the front of your bathysphere and see what you will see! It will be like bringing to under the sea the light there is when you go through the railway station at St. Pancras whose roof is all made of iron and glass, and wherever you are going, even if it is nowhere, just to one of the shops to buy a sandwich, the way the blue of it comes in from above makes you look up really high at the roof and then makes you look again at everything else beneath it.

History Of Education Part 1: Brooke runs past the Stephen Lawrence Building. It is a building named after a boy who was historically murdered. If something is in the past, can it still be in the present or not? It is a philosophical question. If you travelled to the past to make the future better, would you actually be able to? She runs past the library, which has the plaques built into the wall inside where all the people paid money to buy “beds” for old retired sailors, because a lot of the university was once where the old sailors who had served their country well at sea came to live when they were old and had no homes, if they had not actually died in wars. The plaques are not really beds, they are nothing like beds, they are just plaques, dedications, like for dead people. They says things like: Hamilton Canada bed. Lloyds Bank bed. Lloyds bank rupt! ha ha! Joke. One of them is from a man’s mother, in memory of him. It says he died in HMS Pathfinder in 1914, which was historically the first year of one of the World Wars. One plaque says this thing: “They were lovely in their lives.” It means the dead people. The dead people were lovely in their lives. She runs past the building her mother’s office is in. Her mother’s office is a room where a sailor once slept! More than one sailor, to be precise. Outside above the doors to the corridors it says, painted on the stone in the arch, things like Britannia 46 Men or Union 46 Men, which means 46 men could fit into the number of rooms there. Outside in the corridor of the philosophy department there is a little table, and someone has put some good things for playing with on it, like a plastic rabbit standing on top of a drawing of a spiral and a game called Fuzzy Philosophers where you can use a magnet pen to drag iron filings and put hair and a beard on a bare face. She passes the path you take if you’re going to the Painted Hall. In the Painted Hall there is a painting on the ceiling of a lady who is meant to stand for Africa and she is very pretty and on her head she is wearing a hat shaped like the top of an elephant’s head. Joke: a man is standing in the middle of the road. He is spreading elephant powder around. A policeman comes up to him. The policeman says: Excuse me, what do you think you are doing? The man says: I’m spreading elephant powder all over this street. The policeman says: There aren’t any elephants around here. The man says: See? You can’t beat elephant powder. She runs past the huge globes on the top of the main gate of the university. They look like they are wrapped in string, like huge balls of string. But actually the string is meant to be longitudes or latitudes, or trade routes maybe, or maybe it is trade roots, Brooke will ask.

(Mum? Brooke said. I’m really really busy, Brooksie, I’m really having to concentrate, her mother said. Her mother had her worst face on. She was doing an application about funding. What is the application you are doing about? Brooke said. Um, her mother said. It’s for a project we’re calling Tecmessa. Teck mess a, Brooke said. Uh huh, her mother said, she’s a character from tragedy. Tragic application, her father said. It’s about which you would choose, her mother said, if you had the choice of these: you can enjoy a really lovely treat yourself, but because you do someone else somewhere will have to suffer. Or: you can choose to suffer with somebody who’s also having a really difficult time, but because you do, the suffering will be easier for that other person. Okay, Brooke said, can I have some time to think about it before I have to decide? Definitely, her mother said, much better to think about it than not. How long have I got? Brooke said. Ha ha! her father laughed from the sofa, that is the question! And, mum? Brooke said. Mm hmm? her mother said with the leg of her spectacles in her mouth. Did you hear about the optician’s son? Brooke said. Which optician? her mother said. He made a spectacle of himself, Brooke said. Ha ha! her father said. Oh for God sake, her mother said. Terence, I need to work, take this child out. Brooke, I need to work, take that father out. But mum, but can I just ask this one thing? Brooke said. What? her mother said. What’s a slave clock? Brooke said. Her mother sat up. Then she sank back into her chair. A slave clock, she said. The Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic clock is apparently a slave clock, Brooke said, but what I want to know is, what exactly is a slave clock? Oh, her mother said, a slave clock, well—. And what I also want to know is, if something is in the past, Brooke said, can it still in any way be happening now? Is the past present in the present, her father said, and is the past present in the future, good questions, Brooke. They’re philosophical questions, her mother said. Are they? Brooke said. Is a rose red in the dark? her father said. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear or see, does the bear excrete in the woods and is the Pope a National Socialist? Oh God, her mother said. Now, don’t go bringing God into it too, her father said, cause then we’re really into a whole other World Cup match.)