There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [93]
and one of the bones was the whole head of an ox. But after he was dead, he carried on causing miracles, like if a dead stick was stuck in the ground and sprinkled with his blood, then the stick when you looked at it the next morning would be covered in leaves. There is a book in this church over by the organ keyboard for people to write things in. Today it says Please help dads friend Tim rest safely in hevean because my family and I miss him much Thanks God Amen. God, please pray for my mum and close friends, for them to stay healthy and be happy Thank you for all the nice things happening in my life. Pray for me to stay in good health thank you. Sat 3rd Dear God—Please help MARIO RINGER be calm / patient whilst he is at home awaiting for his broken ankle (which has been pinned and plated) to be mended Thank you. There it is, the pencil lying longways down the middle of the pages. It is a red one and it says on it Longitude 0° 0 00. It is one of the kind they sell at the Observatory. Brooke knew a pencil would be here. It is why she came into the church. There is nobody else in the church. She is just borrowing it. She turns while she is putting it in her pocket and pulling her jumper over the top of it and pretends while she does this that she is looking at the famous keyboard which is in behind glass or perspex so no one can play with it. It is called a console. This is funny, if you think of a computer console, and also because of the word that means make people feel better. She reads the history of it next to the console on a notice: This eighteenth-century console came from the organ when it was rebuilt in 1910. Experts believe that some of the octaves of the middle of the keyboard are almost certainly from the Tudor period and therefore likely to have been played by Thomas Tallis and the princesses Mary and Elizabeth when they were living at Greenwich Palace. Brooke can imagine them really easily. It was before the Princess was the Queen and wore the red wig and had rotten teeth that went black, and wore so many jewels that she could hardly walk. It is from when her hands were small and were young hands. It is quite easy to imagine her. What is much harder is to imagine all the hands of all the people who will have played this console but who the notice doesn’t mention. There must have been some. Brooke imagines just anybody’s hands playing on the old yellow keys. She imagines wrists on the hands, and then if it is a lady she imagines a sleeve of a dress, blue, and if it is a man a sleeve of a jacket, brown and tweedy. Then Brooke imagines the Queen, but alive right now, and really young. She has just run across the park and sheltered under a tree because it was raining. It was just any old tree. Now her sheltering under it has made it historic, and all the paparazzi people come up from the Lees’ house where there is no point in them being any more, and take photos of it and of Walter Raleigh putting his coat on the puddle for her and her stepping on it, they make her step on it several times over so they can get the best photo. Now the Queen is sitting in front of a screen. There are a lot of courtiers asking her things and she is ignoring them because she is in the middle of playing Call Of Duty. She is aiming her gun at a window and looking through the telescopic sights. That is like Amina, the girl in the year ahead of her at school who everyone knows came from a warzone and is way Christian, and says she became it and believed in God the very moment a bullet that was fired at her missed her. When she talks about it happening she draws a line in the air close to her head for where she felt the bullet go past her. From the moment it missed, she says, she has believed in God. Well duh. But what Brooke wants to know is what about the people who were hit by bullets and died? Does that mean that God didn’t like them? Or that they didn’t believe in Him or It? Or that they believed in the wrong God? Or that they did believe but that God just decided against them? What do the dead people feel about believing in God?