There but for The

by Ali Smith

  The fact is, Brooke is the six hundred and seventy-fifth person clicked into the Observatory today by Mr. Jackson with the people-counting clicker which it is his job to hold. Sometimes when Mr. Jackson is in a bad mood he won’t tell you which number you are. Today he is in quite a good mood. Well, if it isn’t the London Eye, he says. Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks. It is quite busy here today, Mr. Jackson, she says. School holidays, he says. Tends to have that effect. You’re number 675 since my shift started. Brooke says goodbye and thank you. Then she weaves in and out through all the people who are taking photos of things and past the place where the Flamsteed Well was.

  The fact is, the astronomer called Mr. Flamsteed dug a hole that went directly down into the ground 40 m, which is a really substantial depth, and lay on a couch down there to look up at the stars because he thought going as deep down as possible would be a good way to see as high as possible. But it was very damp down there so it was not an ideal way to do it. Brooke passes the last remaining bit of the Herschel Telescope, which the Herschel family all sat inside one New Year because the telescope was actually big enough for them to sit in, because the astronomer called Mr. Herschel believed that the bigger the telescope the further up he’d be able to see. When the family of Mr. Herschel’s ancestors sat in there because the telescope was now no use to anyone and was dismantled, there was actually enough room for them to eat their New Year supper and then they even sang a song inside the telescope! Which is quite cool. Looking through a telescope that big would be like looking at the sky through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. Telescopus: far looker CLEVEREST when they first invented them people were pleased because it was an invention that would be really useful in wars, like CCTV now CLEVERIST this is Brooke’s name in Morse code: Dash dot dot dot. Dot dash dot. Dash dash dash. Dash dash dash. Dash dot dash. Dot. There is a multiple of dashes right at the middle of Brooke’s name. How do Vikings send secret messages? By Norse code. Brooke dashes past the pretty bushes and up the steps and in through the place they sell the guidebooks. The girl called Sophie who works behind the counter waves hello and shouts, where’ve you been? It’s been so long! We were beginning to think you’d moved away! No, I still live here, Brooke shouts and waves back. The woman Sophie is working with does not smile because she is one of the kind of people who don’t talk to children. It is a quite good museum as museums go, though the museum in York, which is near the town where Brooke used to live, has actual old streets downstairs in it with shops with things from the past for sale in them and horses that were once alive. There was a young lady of York. Whose pet pig was made into pork. Though she cried, oh, you’ve minced ’er! They still all convinced ’er. To eat up her pig with a fork. That is one of the limericks she made up with Anna and Mr. Palmer on Friday morning sitting on the wall, the day Anna gave her the Moleskine a couple of days before her birthday and wrote the word History on the sticker in her really nice handwriting. Thought that would cheer you up, Anna said. And I’m officially assigning you the job of Historian. The history of their limerick writing that day is that it was much harder to get Greenwich to rhyme with things but in the end the limerick about it was funnier because of that. There was a young lady of Greenwich. Whose dad said be home before tenich. When she missed the last bus. Her dad made such a fuss. She was never allowed out againich. Mr. Palmer is really good at limericks. Mr. Palmer and Anna have gone now. You won’t miss us, Mr. Palmer said. You’ll be back at school in a few days. Today is Monday, there are six days of holiday left after this day THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST LITTLE PIECE OF it means Brooke will wake up with hope in her for six more days. And when she goes back anyway things will have changed and she will not be cleverest. She will be the Brooke Bayoude, Cleverist.

  The fact is, it is Spring and a lot warmer than it has been though it is still quite cold for April. Brooke wonders if the old lady who died in March is cold in the ground, or if Spring coming means it will be warmer for her down there. But that thought is a lot of nonsense because dead people are dead and can’t feel. It is funny peculiar to think of her down there wherever it is that they put her in the ground in the town she lived in. The people came to take her to a hospital and she died in the ambulance on the way. Money doesn’t matter, she told Brooke one day. She was holding Brooke’s hand. It was when she still recognized Brooke. It was before she stopped being able to recognize people. All sorts of things we think matter don’t, she said, so long as you don’t wake up in the morning with no hope in you. Now Brooke has the note that Mr. Garth passed under the door which meant Mr. Palmer went and found the old lady’s house and asked the neighbours where she was and they said hospital. Brooke got the note from Josie Lee, who Mr. Palmer gave it to, and is going to conduct an interview with Josie to ask her about when she went to the hospital and everything, because it is part of the history of what has happened, and then Brooke will write the record of it. It is a historic document. It is dated December 29 2009. It is sellotaped across two pages of the History Moleskine and Brooke has left blank pages round it. It says in Mr. Garth’s writing: Hello. I’m hoping it will be possible for someone to visit and sit with Mrs. May Young, 12 Belleville Park, Reading, for some of the day on 29 January, on my behalf. Very grateful for your help. Thank you. Brooke also has the very first historic note Mr. Garth pushed under the door. It is not dated. Fine for water but will need food soon. Vegetarian, as you know. Thank you for your patience. It is on the first page of the Moleskine. She has all the The fact is notes. They are not dated either. She is going to sellotape them in. In a minute she will go and sit somewhere and look through the book and choose exactly which page the sellotaping-in of them will start.

  The fact is, the Morse code for Mr. Garth is — — • — • / — — • • — • — • — • • • • and the Morse code for your first name Miles is — — • • • — • • • • • •

  The fact is, there was a London Bridge first built in 1176. It took 30 years to build it. It lasted until 1831. It was over a thousand feet long

  The fact is, a light year is the distance that light travels in a year

  The fact is, that the sun will definitely die and there is nothing we can do about it, but it will not be for quite a while yet and definitely not in our lifetime so there is no point losing sleep over it

  The fact is, the moon is 238840 miles from the earth

  The fact is, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field telescope can reveal stars in a sky when it looks to the Naked Eye like there are no stars in it

  The fact is, the Hubble Space telescope was launched in 1990. It is made of a tube that has a mirror at each end

  The fact is, there was a telescope maker in history who was a woman her name was Mrs. Janet Taylor

  The fact is, the author of the book called Robinson Crusoe had a brick factory where bricks were made that were used in the bricks that made the Greenwich Hospital

  The fact is, the atomic clock that has replaced all the clocks at Greenwich doesn’t keep exact time because it still loses a second every 20000000 years

  The fact is, that the plaster they used in building St. Peter and St. Paul is partly made of horses hair

  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. Ann
a 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.

  (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 hou
se 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.)