There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [27]
(Mark knew that probably the rhyming, which was new, was because this summer he’d looked out some of his old books from back then, the books she’d given him. Possibly it was also because he’d bought online and had been playing on repeat the Ella Fitzgerald / George and Ira Gershwin collection. Faye had had the original LPs. He remembered, now, the shine of them, their paper sleeves, even the feel and the smell of the big square hard-paper box they came in.)
So, Mark said under his breath over the fine view of old / new London. The next morning Kern got up early. He sat in the dark at the window with a piece of paper and a pencil and waited for the bird to come back. And he waited and he waited, as the morning light came up, because he knew that if that bird had come once there was a chance it would come again. And then, sure enough, he heard it again, the bird was there. The bird sang the tune and Kern wrote it down. Then when the bird had finished singing and flown away Kern went downstairs, closed all the doors between his sleeping family and the piano room and roughed out, there and then, the main body of what would become I’ve Told Every Little Star.
(Mark had woken one spring day in his late twenties, on the folding bed in his Kensington basement flat, to a voice in his ear.
Though he hadn’t heard her voice since he was less than thirteen years old, he’d known immediately. Though she was saying very unlikely stuff, as if from a really bad script, or as if she were a posh person pretending to be cockney or were playing the role of a clichéd angry-young kitchen-sink character of the 1950s, it was definitely her. Well, old man, wake up, I mean I don’t mind and I know you’re a queer one pardon my French but even a lah-di-da layabout who thinks the world owes him a living’s got to make ebloodynough to pay the rent, and I mean just look at my fingers, worked and to the bone are the words for it, d’you hear me?
I hear you!
He’d opened his eyes, overjoyed.
No one.
There was no one in the room but him.)
The bird was a Cape Cod Sparrow, Melospiza Melodia. It spawned not just a song but a musical too, about some people who, yes, write a song inspired by hearing a bird sing. Music In The Air; he wrote it with Oscar Hammerstein. And they all lived happily ever after, until they died. And when Jerome Kern was in hospital dying, Oscar Hammerstein came to his bedside, Kern was in a coma, they knew he’d die very soon, and the song Hammerstein sang to his dear friend Kern in the last minutes of his life was I’ve Told Every Little Star, because Hammerstein knew how very fond, among all his compositions, Kern was of that song.
The end. Oh, no, wait. Interesting fact about Melospiza Melodia, and it’s that if it is well fed, the bird, and hasn’t had to worry too much about finding food, it actually produces offspring that sing less than the offspring it produces if the parent bird has been hungrier. And the other thing about songbirds I was remembering to tell you is that it’s now thought by some experts that they sing in their sleep as well as sing while they’re awake. As if their sleeping selves are a kind of being awake, or their wakened selves are a kind of being asleep.
There. That’s it.
The end.
Mark nodded to himself. Then he nodded at the couple and the child to show he wasn’t mad and he’d meant and taken no offence, both. He didn’t wait to see if they’d nod back. He pushed himself off the railing, turned towards the Observatory building and the ragged line of tourists and schoolkids in the yard waiting