There but for The

by Ali Smith

  unfair and unnecessary.

  A friend asked if we aren’t

  tempted just to go ahead and

  use brute force and break down our

  beautiful and authenticated c17th

  door and send in the police or

  someone who would simply

  remove “Milo.” I am a peaceable

  person who abhors violence of

  any sort so I am uneasy when

  I consider we may have to resort

  to force. But we do not know

  when our home will feel

  like home again. Even

  though we knew our family

  unit to be strong we never

  expected it to be so thoroughly

  tested. Who knows what the

  future holds? Every new day

  I wake full of the possibilities of

  change. I am determined to

  remain philosophical about it,

  and keep urging my family

  likewise. But all the same,

  I for one know that I will

  never see dinner parties

  in quite the same light again.

  Mark folded it up again and put both pieces of paper back in his inside pocket. “Milo.” Miles gloriosus. Sweet mild-mannered Miles in a room five steps wide and seven steps long, and in there now for months.

  (Three or four months back, one Saturday in June, Mark goes to a matinee of The Winter’s Tale at the Old Vic. The play has been sold out for weeks but he manages to get a last-minute seat in the back of the stalls. The production is good; Simon Russell Beale believably madder and madder as Leontes, and the young woman, whoever she is, as Hermione, quite captivating, and as the afternoon passes and the story unfolds the play seems actually to be working. He sits up in his seat, excited. It’s a hard one to get right, The Winter’s Tale, but when it’s right, he knows, the coming-to-life of the statue at the end is one of the most moving things theatre can produce.

  It happens: the wronged queen comes back from the dead. She moves, she steps forward, she takes the hand of her husband, she turns towards her lost-and-found daughter Perdita, about to speak for the first time ever to her child, and someone’s mobile phone goes off at the front of the stalls. Beebedee beebedee bedee beep. Beebedee beebedee bedee beep. Beebedee beebedee bedee beep.

  The actress playing the queen takes her daughter’s hands as if nothing had happened and continues her speech through it.

  Minutes later the play ends.

  Perfect timing, Mark says to the stranger on his left, the man he happens to be sitting next to, as the curtain comes down.

  It was, the man says.

  God, Mark says shaking his head.

  But I mean it, the man says. It really was. I’ve often heard phones going off in the theatre or the cinema, but that was the best time I’ve ever heard it happen. Right at the moment when, there on stage, someone really needs to speak to someone, there it is, the same need in the audience watching it happen on stage.

  Well, Mark says thinking to himself that the man he’s chosen to speak to is an idiot to need such things explained. I take your point. But.

  Ah, the man says. But?

  There’s a world of difference, Mark says, between Hermione and Perdita and what they’ve got to say to each other and whatever that person in the audience was going to hear in his or her ear, Hi I’m on the train, or Can you pick me up at half past five, or Can you pick up some cat-litter or Nurofen or whatever.

  Reason not the need, the man says. Need not the reason. We don’t know. We simply don’t know. All we know is—someone wanted to speak to someone else. That’s more than enough. Doesn’t matter how quotidian it is, it’s still all we have at the end of the day.

  He says all this mildly.

  He says the word quotidian with no self-consciousness.

  The way he says the phrase at the end of the day somehow makes it not a cliché, makes it mean that days end and that it might matter that they do.

  You don’t think it ruined it? Mark says.

  I think it made it better, the man says.

  Astonishing, Mark says.

  Yes, the man says. The play can still astonish, even though we think we know it, no matter whether we’re seventeenth century or twenty-first. And I always feel a bit sorry for the daughter, who never gets to speak back. What’s that last thing she says, when she believes the statue’s still a piece of art and not her mother at all? She’s happy to be a bystander, a looker-on, and she’ll gladly be exactly that, for twenty long years, she says, if she can just stand there for each of those years and appreciate this semblance, this combination of stone and paint that resembles the mother she never knew. Then, suddenly, from nowhere, it’s not a statue at all, it’s real, it’s her real mother, miraculous, alive, right there in front of her. And then the play’s over, and we never get to hear what she thinks.

  So that phone going off, Mark says. Perdita phoning Hermione.

  Another way to see it, the man says.

  Mark laughs. The man is delightful. By now they’ve moved with the crush of the crowd out of the dark into the light and the foyer. They go out through the same exit. They stand for a moment in the surprising warm of the evening. It is lovely. It is summer. The man, Mark notices, is wearing a very nice dark linen suit and an expensive-looking shirt. He smells nice; Mark realizes that this man’s aftershave has kept him company through all the madness and all the seasons all the way to the reconciliation.

  He turns to Mark, almost as if he is going to bow. He smiles. This is him saying goodbye. Off he goes. His back is a proof of his completeness. He disappears in among the meaningless backs and fronts of other people.

  Mark stands in the sun for a moment and into his head comes the moment in the play where the mad king asks the Delphic oracle for the truth, and the feather pen stands up on the table with no one holding it, by stage-trickery, by magic, and begins to write by itself.

  Then he runs and catches the man up at the pedestrian crossing. He is out of breath from the short run. He asks the man, between breaths, if he’d like to go for a drink.

  Why not? the man says.

  He holds his hand out.

  Miles, he says.

  Mark, Mark says.

  They shake hands.)

  The Observatory was behind and above Mark now. He turned and looked at it and loud as day, loud as Faye but why would someone choose to disappear / and why would someone choose to do it here?

  Here was where, not that long ago, men who didn’t yet know the half of it sat in a freezing shed with the roof open to the sky all night, night after night, charting the light given off by stars—stars that were maybe already dead. Here was all about the visible-invisible borders, the thin lines between here and gone, then and now, here and there, random and meant, big and small. Infinite riches, little room. Here all the clockmakers in history had been confounded, until one of them finally clocked it—ha!—and found that the solution to keeping time when you were at sea lay in the very smallness of things, that a tiny watch mechanism was better than a thirteen-foot-high pendulum in the middle of the ocean any day.

  He waited for a comment to come from Faye, something about size mattering.

  Nothing.

  Silence.

  He imagined Faye locked in a little room. Imagine trying to contain an erupting volcano in a bedsit. Imagine that Icelandic singer, what was her name, Björk—but squashed inside one of your average kitchen units. The force would be explosive.

  The force had been explosive.

  For all the years you’ve lived, for all that jizz, Faye said cocky in his ear, you’ve no idea what real explosion is, have you, old man?

  Finished with the rhyming, then, Faye? he said.

  I’ll rhyme when I like, she said. And scan.

  (Well, it’s for fun, mainly, the man called Terence tells the child. But it�
��s for serious too. It’s a very clever thing.

  Are you lecturing me, by the way, would you say? the child says.

  You asked, the man says laughing. I’m answering.

  The child is his daughter. She’s just asked what the point of rhyme is. They’re all standing round the table looking to see which little folded piece of cardboard says whose name. In the place where Miles is supposed to sit the card says the words Mark’s Partner.

  Hugo picks it up and looks at it, looks at Mark, raises his eyebrows, puts it down.

  There is wine already poured in glasses at each of the set places. Mark panics. White wine gives him terrible migraine and there’s nothing on the table but white. There are five bottles of red, opened, full, over there on the sideboard. But the bottles have an untouchable air. And he doesn’t want to ask; already there’s been a fuss about drinks because Miles is driving and has refused to drink. We can organize you a taxi, the woman whose house it is, Jan, keeps repeating. No, really, Miles keeps saying, I’d prefer not to.

  Terence and Bernice Bayoude; these are the names of the child’s mother and father. Mark says the names over to himself a couple of times. There is no name card on the table for the child; the child wasn’t expected. The people who are giving the dinner party are pretending that there’s no problem about her being here but being arch and polite about setting her a place and finding a seat the right height for her.

  Milton calls rhyme a troublesome modern bondage, Bernice says.

  Gosh, aren’t you clever? Jan says.

  What’s that about bondage? the reedy-looking man who came with the blonde woman says.

  Preface to Paradise Lost, Bernice says. He calls rhyme the invention of a barbarous age.

  Well, you’ve upped the stakes, Bernice, Jan says. Nobody’s ever mentioned Milton at one of our dinner parties before. Esoteric, is that the word for it, Hugo?

  It’s also for helping memory, the father says to the child, since it’s much easier to memorize something that rhymes.

  Well I know that, I mean, duh, the child says. Obviously.

  Don’t say duh, Bernice says. Do say obviously.

  Mark laughs. Bernice shoots him a glad look, a little secret handshake in a room full of strangers—which is what this room is, for Mark too, a room full of strangers except for Hugo, who, though he isn’t one, is doing his best to act like one.

  And not just memory, Terence is saying, but it also makes people feel safe, comforted, because when things rhyme it reminds them of their childhoods, and over and above that it’s also like rhyme is saying, hey, things are good, they’re all right, they’re in some kind of harmony, they may even be funny.

  You are lecturing me, the child says. I resist all attempts at lecturing and indoctrination.

  Terence turns, shrugs his shoulders at Mark and Miles and Bernice.

  Damn, he says. Another self-made freethinker.

  And when I look back on this evening in a week and a month and a year and a day, I will remember every single thing about it, the child says.

  No you won’t, her father says.

  I will, actually, the child says.

  Physiologically impossible, Brooksie, her father says.

  Yes, but you can’t tell me what I’ll remember and what I’ll forget, the child says.

  That’s true, Bernice says. But. The whole point is, we can forget. It’s important that we forget some things. Otherwise we’d go round the world carrying a hodload of stuff we just don’t need.

  In any case I intend to remember it all, the child says. I shall therefore go out of my way to do this particular thing.

  Terence takes her by the collar, pulls her back, picks her up, swings her into the air and sits her on his knee.

  That’s a different matter, Brooksie, he says. Memorizing is conceptually and physiologically different from remembering.

  Duh, the child says.

  She gives the word her most intelligent inflection.

  Brooke, her mother says.

  Obviously, the child says.

  She says it as though it means duh.

  The conversation about rhyme and memory has arisen because a moment ago Mark asked the child what books she likes reading. Mark is usually more uneasy around children, who always make him feel like his best behaviour isn’t quite good enough, because they are so true, like little truth detectives. But this child is a charming and quite unthreatening one. Have you ever read Struwwelpeter? he’d asked her. The story of Augustus who would not eat any soup? Or A Book of Nonsense? Have you ever read Edward Lear’s limericks? There was a young lady of Norway. Who casually sat in a doorway.

  Then while the child and the others have this conversation, Mark sits in amazement as his own mind unfurls and one after the other like little falling-open scrolls he finds line after rhyming line inside his head. Augustus was a chubby lad. Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had. When the door squeezed her flat she replied, what of that? That courageous young lady of Norway.

  My head is full of poems from fifty years ago, things I haven’t thought for years and didn’t even know I still knew, he says to Miles.

  ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves, Miles says sitting down across from him.

  I know that one, Hugo’s wife Caroline says. Hello Mark. I’m glad they’ve put me next to you.

  Did google twitter in the blog, Miles says.

  Yes, Caroline says. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how very visionary he was. Imagine inventing all those words, words we use every day now. Brilliant.

  She holds her full glass of white up for clinking.

  To you, she says. And to—Miles, was it?

  It was and is, Miles says.

  I’m glad. How long have you two been together? she says.

  About three and a half hours last Saturday and (glancing down at his watch) twenty minutes tonight, Miles says. Oh no, we stayed and had a drink last Saturday too. Four and a half.

  We’re not actually what you’d call together, Mark says.

  Oh, she says.

  She puts down her glass. She looks a little affronted.

  Everybody is sitting down now except the woman whose house it is, Jan. Mark goes round the table naming everybody to himself. Start with Caroline on his right, then Hugo, uh, Hannah the blonde, then Miles. Then, is it Eric, the grey man? then Bernice, then the child, then the space where Jan will sit, then Terence, then directly on Mark’s left what’s his name, reedy man, microdrone, Richard.

  Richard is the person Mark most hoped he wouldn’t be put beside, apart from Caroline obviously (duh). Through in the sitting room, all through drinks, Richard had talked about his job.

  Well, it’s police we’re doing the main selling to at the moment, he said. Though we’re pretty much open to bona fide offers from anywhere.

  Loves his work, Rich, Hugo said.

  What’s not to love? This thing markets itself, Richard said. Hardly like work at all.

  What’s a microdrone? Bernice had said.

  Richard then described the versatile smallness, the engine size, the battery voltage, the weight that means they’re not illegal and don’t need clearance from Civil Aviation, the adaptability, the camera type, the HD quality, the facial recognition range (fifty-five yard), the mph (fifteen, in this particular model, though others are even more phenomenally nippy), the flying range (five hundred yard), the flying time (thirty-minute, we’re working on that), the relative silence, the way they can be operated from inside a van or even in some cases from home, the training time (fifteen-minute) involved for the first-time user, and the way that even if some yob wings them with an air rifle they’ll still function pretty well all said and done.

  What he hasn’t said is how cute they are, Richard’s partner Hannah said. I want one for our boys. Like little toys.

  Actually classed as toys, Richard said. Which is why they don’t need clearance. Fantastic for football matches, protest meetings, you name it. />
  And then there’s Project Anubis, eh, Rich? Hugo said.

  Yes, Richard said, well, no point in being naïve about it, it’s a nasty old world out there and it strikes me all sensible people will feel the same way as I do about it and if they don’t they ought to. And what I always say is, what a relief it’ll be when it comes to conflict, combat, and it’s robots who’ll do the work and so on. Efficiency is one fantastic thing, but the psychological liberation is a whole other massively important knock-on effect. To kill without actually having to. Hand to hand combat, gone in the wink of an eye.

  I don’t understand, Terence said.

  I always think when we have this conversation, and we have it every time we all have supper together, Hugo said, that it’d be a lot more useful if our great minds were put to the task of sorting our genetics out. I’m only forty-five but I’m telling you, it’s making me think, being forty-five.

  Well, as long as something’s making you think, Bernice said.

  Touché, Hugo said.

  Project what did you call it? Bernice said. Anubis?

  Yeah, Anubis, it’s just one of several levels of drone development, Richard said. Obviously the targeting specificity has been in development all along, alongside the surveillance aspect, and drones are already used widely in conflict situations. But right now we’re emphasizing the surveillance aspect for the domestic market.

  Project Anubis, Terence said.

  Anubis is the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, Bernice said.

  Is it? Richard said. Ah. Right.

  Jackal-headed, Bernice said.

  And they look so like toys, Hannah said and looked delighted. Unbelievable!

  Unbelievable, Bernice said.

  Nasty old world out there, Richard said. No point in pretending otherwise.

  The Bayoudes exchanged glances.

  Now at the table, while they wait for the first course and Mark sits and worries about what he’s going to do with the wine in front of him, microdrone man asks him what he does for a living.

  I’m a picture researcher, currently, Mark says.

  Right, Richard says.

  For BBC magazines. You know, thematically stranded in association with programmes and so on, Mark says. I source pictures for them.