There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [90]
The fact is, the room is completely totally empty and nobody is in it!
The fact is, Mr. Garth has gone.
History Of What Brooke Bayoude Thinks About While She Runs Across Park Towards University: Brooke is thinking about a joke about Madonna taking her babies that she has adopted from Africa to Oxford Street so they can be reunited with the clothes they made before she adopted them. It is funny, the joke, when you think about the babies shaking hands with say a cardigan with no hand in it, or a blouse giving the babies a big hug because it is so long since it saw them, but it also makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man in the park with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it’s there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself it would have to add the equivalent describing word and that’s how you’d know. The black girl ran across the park. It is like in Harry Potter where it says about Angelina that she is a tall black girl and that’s how you know that fact. On the internet it says on one site that there is a reference to a character being black in one of the first Harry Potter books and that this was edited out of the UK copies of the book but left in the copies of the book that got sold to readers who bought it in America. But that fact might not be true, because it is only a fact on the internet.
But the fact is, I am Hermione too, Brooke thinks as she runs across the grass.
The fact is, I can be Hermione if I like. I can even be old-fashioned characters like George out of the Famous Five. I would not want so much to be the one called Anne. I can be Bobbie in the Railway Children book, though they went away from London and I have come to it, but I can still be her if I want, and work out how to stop the train accident from happening. I can be Cinderella. There is more than one tree on One-Tree Hill! The girl ran across the park. Girl Runs Across Park! The girl is Brooke Bayoude, Cleverist. The Brooke Bayoude. I can be Snow White if I like and duh obviously I would never be stupid enough to eat the apple, no one would. I can be Anne of Green Gables. Her hair can be the colour of mine if I like.
The fact is, in history a man went down in a kind of machine he invented called a bathysphere to see what colour it was under the sea. There was only one colour, and it was blue. The man wrote about it and he sounded like it made him be very depressed that there was only blue under there. But now they have lights they can take underwater, though before it would have been candles and obviously that would never work. Imagine walking into the sea with candles! Ha ha! But with the lights that they can take underwater nowadays the fish are all darting about in their real amazing colours, orange and yellow and cyan. Brooke Bayoude runs through the gate of the park and down the street. She is running into the past. She is on her way to the place where the man is about to lower his bathysphere into the water. She will shout, Stop! She will say, Look, I’ve brought you these. They are From The Future. Try going down with these fixed on to the front of your bathysphere and see what you will see! It will be like bringing to under the sea the light there is when you go through the railway station at St. Pancras whose roof is all made of iron and glass, and wherever you are going, even if it is nowhere, just to one of the shops to buy a sandwich, the way the blue of it comes in from above makes you look up really high at the roof and then makes you look again at everything else beneath it.
History Of Education Part 1: Brooke runs past the Stephen Lawrence Building. It is a building