There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [24]
But if they knew they gave no sign of it, and the boy said nothing, and when the grandfather saw that the boy wasn’t going to say, and that he’d got through the gates without being admonished or injected, he thanked the boy with his eyes.
The boy looked into the old man’s eyes and saw something amazing all right. He didn’t yet know it but he would spend the rest of his life looking back and looking forward in search of it, the still-unpolluted source that feeds into every ruined river.
This story is true and happened once in the future long ago.
would a man in shutting himself in / be asking things to stop or to begin?
Mark’s mother, Faye, had been dead for forty-seven years. Her most recent attention-getting device was rhyme.
Mark walked through the park. He had forgotten how charming it was here. Would he be testing whether he’d be missed / would such inversion mean he’d not exist? this was interesting, because usually she was much ruder and cruder than she was being this morning. Also, it was quite unusual for her to ask questions. Questions demanded an answer, didn’t they? They asked for a response. Unless they were rhetorical questions; true, she often used those (“a rhetorical question is one which does not expect an answer or one whose answer is implied”: The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith’s for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar). Mark went the long way, round and up through the woody place, to get to the Observatory, thinking it might be less steep. No, it was still notably pretty steep. He waited to get his breath back sitting on a bench opposite the place where one of the Astronomers Royal, or was it Astronomer Royals, had dug a well a very long way into the ground. According to the notice, the Astronomer Royal had sat down there under the surface, literally inside the hill, it looked like, watching the sky through a telescope. The well was fearfully deep.
Then Mark walked round the side of the main house, stood for a minute or two in the little Camera Obscura, and right now he was standing just along from the Talking Telescope, leaning against the railing that overlooked the park he’d just traversed traversed ooh I can think of lots that’s worse / than meeting someone for a quick traverse there, that was more like her. He looked down the slope at the trees in their rugged neatness, the paths that met and crossed themselves, so elegant the way they seemed both planned and random, elegant too the white colonnades and all the grand old whitened buildings down at the foot of the park. The new business towers of the city shouldered each other beyond the river at the back of the view like a mirage, like superimposition. Greenwich. Then and now. He hadn’t been here for a long time. He should come here more. He loved it’s no surprise to me that you’re so keen / a place beloved of many an old queen and straight away as if to spite her he thought hard about the actual old Queen, the literal historical Virgin Queen, and the first thing that came to mind was something that had happened when she was the young Virgin Queen, where had he read it? He couldn’t remember, but the writer, whoever he was I hate to be reminding you again / that writers are not fucking always men described Queen Elizabeth the First quite unforgettably, dancing in the great hall in her favourite palace right there, right here in Greenwich all those hundreds of years ago, she was young and beautiful, pale and thin from having been ill, in fact she was convalescing after a lengthy illness, an illness that had at one point been bad enough to endanger her life, and she was enjoying the first real spurt of energy she’d had for months, had been out hunting, had come back flushed and happy and very much wanting to dance. So the hall had filled with courtiers and musicians and she’d dressed up; she looked, the writer said,