Ali Smith: There But For The

The fact is, imagine. Brooke closes the History Moleskine and stands up. She looks at her Me To You watch. It is 4.16 pm, or 1616 in 24 hr time. Imagine if all the civilizations in the past had not known to have the imagination to look up at the sun and the moon and the stars and work out that things were connected, that those things right in front of their eyes could be connected to time and to what time is and how it works. She puts the Moleskine in the back pocket with all the The fact is notes folded inside it. She takes the paper plane out from inside the front of her sweater. It is a bit crushed, but it will probably still fly and she has refolded it now three times and it is not too worn, and anyway if she unfolds it again and then forgets how to refold it, the story comes with instructions as to how to do it properly. So she can easily unfold it and read the story on it and then fold it up the same again. In her own story for Mr. Garth, in the first ending, the man on the bicycle has learned from frogs, who know how to develop into frogs from tadpoles, how to transform his bicycle into a Montgolfier balloon, a kind of balloon which did actually exist in real fact, and then he cycles into the cloudy sky over the rooftops of London, even past the big gold clock Big Ben itself which is further down this river if you go on the boat, and on TV they show the film of him they took from the security cameras as the bike disappears round the river bend. In the second ending the exercise bike became a real ordinary bike (that is the only imaginary thing that happens in this ending) and the man just carried the bike through the door and down the stairs and out of the front door and on to the pavement and got on it and cycled out into the road and away among all the other people who are the general traffic of the city of London. Holding in her hand the plane that says on the wing of it in Mr. Garth’s writing

to:

the Brooke Bayoude

Cleverist

she runs across in the sun to the railing. She climbs up and leans over it to see the river. The Thames is brown and green today. It changes what it is every day. No: every minute. Every second. It is a different possible river every second, and imagine all the people under the water walking across to the other side and back to this side in the tunnel right now, because under the surface there is a whole other thing always happening. Brooke looks down at the water then up at the sky, which is blue with clouds today. Then, with the historic river flowing at her back, Brooke sits on the little bit of wall below the railing. She unfolds the piece of paper in her hands and she reads again the story written on it.

Ali Smith is the author of the novels Hotel World —short-listed for both the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize — and The Accidental , which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. She is also the author of several short-story collections. She lives in Cambridge, England.