There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [101]
are sorry for him, because he is clapped in irons and not a frog like them, and they answer his philosophical questions with their croaking, Brooke said. But St. Alfege can understand them. And he tells the man on the bicycle what they are saying. What’s going to happen in the end? her father said. I don’t know, Brooke said. But what I want is the bicycle to be able to go across all the rooftops in London at the end, but I don’t know how to get it up there to do that realistically. It sounds like those frogs could talk the legs off a donkey, so maybe they could talk the wings on to a bike, her father said. Yes they could, Brooke said, that is a good idea! But it is no good, because the thing is I also want the story to be true and factual as well as a made-up thing. So you want miraculous talking frogs and realism, her father said, a story with more than one ending, maybe. She means she wants a work of the imagination that’s simultaneously rigorously true, her mother said without taking her eyes off her work. See how our daughter takes after me. On the contrary, her father said, she takes after me, she is writing a story with some subtlety, very unlike the ones your mother was championing to me last night. Her father started poking at her mother like he does to make her ticklish. Very unlike what exactly? Brooke said. Terence, I’m trying to work, her mother said but she was laughing. Your mother and I were having an intellectual discussion last night about turn-of-the-century manhood, her father said. It was because your father was annoyed that I was watching a film called Ronin on TV and that I wouldn’t put it off and come to bed, her mother said. It was because your mother said that being blown through the wall by an action hero or, in this case, stalked within a hair’s breadth of your life round a dark parking lot by a man with a gun, was so exciting that she couldn’t come to bed till the film was finished, and when I said that I would tell all her students and work colleagues and employers that she prefers, as examples of turn-of-the-century manhood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Pacino to Proust’s Swann and Joyce’s Bloom, she got quite violent with me and even started hitting me quite hard in the chest area, her father said. If only you were a real man, her mother said, and Schwarzenegger isn’t even in Ronin. Yes, but he’s big in A La Recherche, her father said, and one can only thank the great writers for giving us such good role models. Sylvester Swann. Leopold Schwarzenegger. Robert de Bloom. Both her parents were laughing. Brooke looked up from her piece of paper and watched them throwing the words for birds and flowers and Hollywood actors at each other like they were throwing little rocks wrapped as presents. She looked round the room at all the books on all the shelves. A closed book on a shelf sat there quietly, not saying anything. Her mother was shouting about Wesley Snipes. Her father was holding up his hands and laughing. Do you two want to know a really good joke? Brooke said. Go on then, her father said still looking at her mother with love. Yes, her mother said still looking with the same pleasedness at her father. Then they both turned at once and looked at Brooke. Okay, Brooke said. There was once this man. Which man? her father said. I won’t tell you it if you are stupid with interruptions, Brooke said. Okay, okay, her father said, go on. There was once this man, Brooke said, who wouldn’t stop singing. Is this joke about your father? her mother said. Don’t interrupt, Brooke said. Very sorry I’m sure, her mother said. Come on. Go on. Okay, Brooke said. Well, this man just sang all the time. Eventually it made them so angry at him singing all the time that they told him he was going to be put in front of the firing squad if he didn’t stop. But he kept on doing it. So the soldiers arrived with the guns, and the man was led out to be executed and tied to the stake and a blindfold was put on him. And the captain said, you can have one last request. So the man said, okay, as my last request I’d like to sing