There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [0]
Copyright © 2011 by Ali Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton, published by the Penguin Group, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd., London.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Nanada Music, B.V., c/o Tier Three Music (ASCAP) for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Ding-A-Dong” by Dick Bakker, Will Luikinga, and Eddy Ouwens, copyright © Nada International C.V., administered by Nanada Music, B.V. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Ali.
There but for the / Ali Smith.
p. cm.
eISBN 978-0-307-37998-6
1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. Personal space—Fiction.
3. Social interaction—Fiction. 4. Dinners and dining—Fiction.
5. Greenwich (London, England). 6. Identity (Psychology)—Fiction.
7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR6069.M4213T47 2011 823'.914—dc22 2010051377
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
First United States Edition
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments and Thanks
Epigraph
The fact is
THERE
There was once
BUT
But (my dear Mark)
FOR
For 29 January
THE
About the Author
Also by Ali Smith
for Jackie Kay
for Sarah Pickstone
for Sarah Wood
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS
I’m indebted for sources of some of the stories about songs in this book to America’s Songs by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (Routledge, 2006). I’m also indebted for information used in the first section to Caroline Moorehead’s Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Chatto and Windus, 2005).
Thank you, Cherry. Thank you, Lucy.
Thank you, Xandra, and thank you, Becky.
Thank you, Sarah and Laurie.
Thank you, Mary.
Thank you, Kasia.
Thank you, Andrew, and thank you, Tracy, and everybody at Wylie’s.
Thank you, Simon.
Very special thanks to Kate Thomson.
Thank you, Jackie.
Thank you, Sarah.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.
—George Orwell
For only he who lives his life as a mystery is truly alive.
—Stefan Zweig
I hate mystery.
—Katherine Mansfield
Of longitudes, what other way have we,
But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?
—John Donne
Every wink of an eye some new grace will be born.
—William Shakespeare
The fact is, imagine a man sitting on an exercise bike in a spare room. He’s a pretty ordinary man except that across his eyes and also across his mouth it looks like he’s wearing letterbox flaps. Look closer and his eyes and mouth are both separately covered by little grey rectangles. They’re like the censorship strips that newspapers and magazines would put across people’s eyes in the old days before they could digitally fuzz up or pixellate a face to block the identity of the person whose face it is.
Sometimes these strips, or bars, or boxes, would also be put across parts of the body which people weren’t supposed to see, as a protective measure for the viewing public. Mostly they were supposed to protect the identity of the person in the picture from being ascertained. But really what they did was make a picture look like something underhand, or seedy, or dodgy, or worse, had happened; they were like a proof of something unspeakable.
When this man on the bike moves his head