There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [45]
And no, the Bayoudes tell them, but they did name her after a film star, Louise Brooks, a star of silent film—
Who did Yorkshire clog dancing, we know, Hannah says—
—who was associated with playing roles full of free will, girls with an ability to survive, or with a profound nonchalance in the face of the horribleness that life can throw at a person, Bernice says.
After a brief astonished silence, Caroline, who is now also quite drunk, says: but then her name would be Louise, wouldn’t it?
Louise Brook, Richard says. Didn’t she win a British rowing medal in the Olympics?
Brooks, Terence says, not Brook.
I thought she was that nanny, the one who shook the baby in America, Hannah says.
Out of nowhere Caroline starts crying and laughing at the same time. She says she wants to make a confession. Her confession is that she’s frightened of flying in aeroplanes. Hannah reaches across the table, knocks over an empty water glass and pats her hand. Jen starts shouting about CBT. Six sessions of CBT will sort you out, she says, only she shouts it, like a mad person, and she shouts it over and over, she has said it about six times, Mark thinks, either that or he is very drunk himself, which can’t be possible since he’s only had one glass and it was only half full. Hannah is shouting too, about how she has rights, and that one of her fundamental rights is the right to be able to take cheap flights, because her parents didn’t have that right, and that flying doesn’t harm the environment nearly as much as they claim. At this point, Hugo and Richard start free-associating a fantasy—Mark watches them slip into cahoots as if they’d not been being the least bit acrid with each other all night, as if cahoots is exactly the same as loggerhead—of filling the windscreen washer-bottles in their cars with urine, so that when they press the button to wash the windscreen the spray coming out of the nozzle and going over the roof of the car will cover any cyclists anywhere near the car with piss.
The Bayoudes exchange looks with each other over the head of their sleeping child.
I am competitive, Richard is saying, I’m not going to hide that fact.
Mark turns to look at Hugo. Hugo stares straight back at him, right in the eyes. It is the most lost look in the world. Mark thinks of Jonathan, and of the moment, after Jonathan had gone, that he understood the nature of Jonathan’s love, when he’d sat one spring afternoon six months after the funeral and worked his way through the video footage Jonathan had taken of their lives together over twenty-five years, and found that whether it showed a lovely view looking out to sea on a holiday, or skimmed along a road out of a car window, or panned round whatever room they happened to be in, the camera eye always came to rest, in the end, for its final image, on Mark himself.
There is something heartbreaking, Mark thinks now, about video’s inferior quality, something human and makeshift in the not-quite-good-enough that it is, the way it’s all that remains, the way it makes what happened so much less. When they’d visited Rome and gone into the pretty little church, empty inside but with the queue of tourists outside it all waiting to have themselves photographed putting their hands into the Mouth of Truth, they’d found, in a glass case, a toothy smiling skull whose forehead was plastered with a name. S. Valentini. Wonder, Jonathan’s voice says behind the image, as the image stays steady on the skull, if we all have our names in there written on us like that, on our foreheads, between the flesh and the bone. Then they both laugh, Mark heard his own laughter meeting Jonathan’s. Then the camera eye, slightly shaky with laughter, comes away from the relic and round to rest on Mark, laughing.
Meanwhile Richard is demonstrating with his hands the goggles the police use to be able to see what the microdrone is seeing. Hugo puts his hands over his eyes too. Jen and Hugo, still with his hands over his eyes, start a conversation about democracy and internet