There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [52]
Consider the fabric of things the vast / dustbin of detail who knows what will last / nothing left but rough wool skin moment touch / who knew so little would become so much Mark sat in the park. It is more than fifty years ago. He and his mother are making a dash through London on a day when the rain makes the pavements greyer, the wind makes the litter more littery, a rough spring day. His mother’s sleeve on her tweed dogtooth coat, the one with the big lapels, is turned back on itself at the cuff and the rough cuff is rubbing his wrist as they hurry along. The wisps of her hair beyond her hat are wet, pretty in the rain. She is telling him things as they walk-run, turning to tell him things even on the move and when they pass men the men turn their heads and look at her. Mark is proud. She is clever and quick, she is beautiful, his mother, she is like a bird both clipped and winged, and when she passes people notice, and when she laughs out loud in the street people stop and stare.
It’s genius, old man, she says hauling him along and reeling off, like magic spilling behind her, like that dancer Isadora’s scarves that streamed behind and caught in the wheel and killed her, rhymes by one of her favourites, he rhymes sour with Schopenhauer, Freud with avoid, salmon with backgammon, civil with drivel, yes-men with chessmen, solemn with spinal column, Irving Berlin with pounding on tin, he rhymes word with absurd, and hurled with world. Now Porter has wit, but is shifty, a little seamy, I know, and I couldn’t not love him for it, Mark. But Ira, he’s kind, he’s always kind, and for genius to be kind takes a special sort of genius in itself, Mark old man, come on, we’re late (they were always, she was always, gloriously, just a little late, it made everything worth hurrying for), and his brother dead, imagine, he must feel like half a person, imagine it, try, him still in the world and his other half, the tune half, gone so young, only a bit older than me, and I know you think I’m old, but I’m not old, old man. I’m not old at all.
His mother says the rhymes out loud in the street, in the rain, to the rhythm of her walk. It is because she loves songs. She does, she loves them. The bedtime stories she tells him, after David’s been settled and she comes for the marvellous twilight time to his room, are all song-stories. She comes into the room and she sits on the bed and she says something like, are you ready? Then I’ll begin. Once a baby boy was born with no fingers on his left hand, imagine, just a stump for a hand. And when the baby had grown into a boy, the boy’s mother encouraged him to learn piano even though he hadn’t any fingers on that hand. And he got so good on the piano that when he grew up and was a man, he found he was a musician, and he wrote songs, and what’s more, having a stump was an asset when people got drunk if he was playing piano in a bar. He not only played piano, he landed some great knock-out punches with it. The end.
Then, sitting on the end of the bed, she sings When The Red Red Robin, which is a song this man who only had half his fingers really did write. She sings it slow and lullaby-like even though it’s meant to be fast, and then she turns out the light and leans over him with a kiss, and turns to go. One more, please, Mark says, please, when she’s at the door. So she comes back and sits on the edge of his bed in the half-dark and she sings another song by the man with one hand. Side. By. Side.
But the Gershwins! she shouts now as she dashes along past the shops, pulling him in her wake, rain all over their faces and his bare knees numb with the rain, her hand holding his all paint and the smell of the