There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [36]
Ha, the child says. Skin of his tail.
Her tail, Miles says. The horse was female.
That’s why the ship is a she, Hugo says. Same as the horse. Females, always a bit fast.
Everybody laughs.
Why is that funny? the child says.
I hope they never reopen that bloody ship, pardon my French, Jan says. The traffic round here, I don’t know what it’s like where you live, Mark and Miles, but it’s really been getting me down lately.
The child assures Jan that the ship will definitely be reopened to the public as soon as they remake it because nowadays you can do pretty much anything including remake something historic after it’s burned down.
Yep-iep, her father says. You can do pretty much anything nowadays. Take film of people who don’t know you’re doing it and even shoot them dead from a helicopter that’s classed as a toy. Anything.
Why has everybody stopped talking? the child says into the silence.
Ah, Miles says and winks at the child. A time to be silent, a time to burn things down, a time to restore them, a time to get drunk, a time to race away from things as fast as you can on your horse, a time to brain the archbishop, a time to make some headway with the starter.
Mark looks down at his plate. He looks at his full wine glass. He looks at his empty water glass. He looks at Miles’s plate. On it is what looks like salad and blue cheese, which is what they’ve also served to the child who is now poking at her plate with a knife and looking suspicious.
A discussion starts about something Caroline has seen on a screen at a train station.
And then I thought, Caroline says, that now that we can do that, morph a tiger first into the shape of a man’s foot and then into the shape of a trainer, I mean now that we have such tamed and, I have to say, beautiful images of something like a tiger and we can do exactly what we like with them, well why would we ever again be bothered about the extinction of real tigers? I stood and watched it happen and it struck me, we don’t and won’t need to see a real tiger ever again now, not now that we’ve got images like that, not really.
That’s moronic, Hugo says.
Caroline rolls her eyes.
Everybody laughs.
Personally I wouldn’t mind if they became extinct, Hannah says. I hate the way they’re always killing deer and zebras and things on the wildlife shows.
The thought made me quite sad, Caroline says. But I mean, I looked at the pictures and, I have to say, I thought it. I mean, we don’t, do we? We don’t need real tigers any more. We’ve finally tamed the wild.
That’s what they want you to think, my darling moron, Hugo says.
Don’t call me a moron, darling, Caroline says.
Way the advert worked on you is the real point, Richard says.
Ah but no it isn’t, though, Caroline says. I can remember that it was an advert for trainers, but I can’t remember which make. So it didn’t work at all, actually, not the way they wanted it to.
Hannah asks the Bayoudes if they’ve ever seen a real tiger at home. Not in Yorkshire, they say. She asks where they’re from originally. They tell her they were living in Harrogate and working at the University of York, which is where they met. They work at the local university, they tell her. Bernice got a teaching post here in the arts faculty and Terence has latterly been accepted as a research fellow.
We had some luck, Bernice says. It’s not easy to get academic jobs in the same place. Terence had a salary in York, so you might say we