There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [49]
Say that the berries on a tree fermented / say that some birds ate them got drunk demented / couldn’t fly straight flew straight into instead / wall of an office block and fell down dead / down on the pavement people undeterred / stepping over the mound of broken bird Mark sat on the bench on a Thursday in October in 2009. Forty-seven years ago today, to the day, he is standing in the lounge of Aunt Kenna’s house. It is a couple of days since he was moved in. He has drawn the short straw. David got Aunt Hope, his father’s other, nicer, sister, and was moved in to Aunt Hope’s house on the other side of town a couple of days ago too.
Everything is so neat it’s a kind of proof, though he’s not yet sure what of. The sizes of the chairs in the lounge, new to the backs of his legs, are a kind of proof. The foreign fall of the cloth on the table is proof. The dark wood furniture in the room is proof. The wooden curve on the side and the top of that cabinet thing where Aunt Kenna keeps the drinks, and which gives off the smell of acridness and plush when you open it, which you can only do if Aunt Kenna doesn’t know it’s what you’re doing, is proof.
His suitcase is in the spare room.
The note his mother left is in the suitcase.
In a house-move roughly seven years from now, when Mark will drop in to pick up the stuff that’s still at his aunt’s, and which his aunt has packed in bags for him, the note will get mislaid, and will be given away to a junkshop in the ribbing of what Kenna thinks of as an anonymous old suitcase. Because this happens at a time in his life when Mark is angry with his mother for doing what she did, he will decide not to go after it, not to go to the junkshop to try to find it again. By the time he is ready to want it again, the note, Aunt Kenna is dead and there’s no way of finding out even which shop she gave the suitcase to all those years ago.
It says, in the dash of her handwriting, on a sheet of Basildon Bond:
Button up your overcoat.
Take good care of yourself.
You belong to me.
That’s all. Nothing else. It isn’t addressed. His father doesn’t know about it. Nobody knows about it. Mark found it on the desk of the open bureau, detached it from the pad along with the three sheets underneath which bear the imprint of the words and packed it without showing anybody.
Her writing is her.
Even the imprints.
He will never know whether this note was meant for him, or David, or for them both, or for nobody at all, just his mother scrawling down something she might want to think about later.
His aunt has an ancient pug called Polly. The pug’s face looks ruined, melted. It looks like what Mark thinks the word tragedy would look like if it were a physical reality, a thing not just a word.
Right now the pug is sitting lumpy in the doorway, looking out on to the yard where Mark’s aunt is what she calls dealing with a fledgling thrush which has fallen out of a nest, can’t fly, and has been there, square, dense, idiot, all afternoon, on the cobbles. There are lots of cats round here so his aunt is putting it out of its misery before a cat does.
But Aunt Kenna—, Mark said.
Aunt Kenna waved him away.
It was the pug found it first; Mark saw it circle the bird, curious, benign. It was so tired, the baby bird, of just sitting there on guard, that its eye kept lidding over.
Will the bird’s parents, which are clicking and squawking above the yard, miss it when it dies?
Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling.
But Mark has seen the pug, on a walk, pick up a stone in its mouth and carry it for a little of the walk before putting it down, and then on the way back home again stop to find the same