There but for The (27 page)

(The man called Hugo was sitting there on the stage when the audience members came in and sat down. He sometimes waved to them and sometimes acted like they weren’t there. When the play began, you couldn’t tell that it had begun, and then suddenly it just had. He did a lot of talking to himself and to the audience about how he had shut himself in the room because he wanted to be an actor and be on TV and the Stage but he had Failed in his life. There was a lot of sitting in the play, and some standing up, and then sitting down again. He sat on the bed and spoke, and then he stood behind a chair and spoke, and then he sat on the chair and spoke, and then he sat down on the floor and spoke. There was a great deal of speaking. He had pretend long hair and a pretend long beard like a wizard. He did not look anything like Mr. Garth. Brooke and her mother and father went on Friday night. It was an Alps of boredom. Brooke fell asleep in the second half. Then Brooke and her mother and father were on their way out of the theatre and they met Mrs. Lee who goes to see it every night and matinee because she has something to do with it. She told them for ages, again, about how realistic it all was and how she went and stood on the stage sometimes before or after the audience was allowed in and imagined she was in the actual real room in her house, and sometimes she could actually believe that she was, that’s how real it was. She told them again how the people doing the play even sent to Amazon.co.uk to get some of the very same DVDs that were in the actual room, with the same pictures on the covers, to make it be true and lifelike. He doesn’t look anything like Mr. Garth looks in the room, Brooke said. Well, none of us knows for sure, do we, Brooke? Mrs. Lee said, and the performance, every night, virtuoso! Mrs. Lee shook her head as if there was something she was looking at that she couldn’t believe. It was kind of you to put the tickets aside for us, Brooke’s mother said, especially with the run being sold out like it is. Then Mrs. Lee spoke some more about how the play was transferring soon to a real theatre. This
is
a real theatre, Brooke said. You enjoyed the play, didn’t you? Mrs. Lee said to Brooke. I found it weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Brooke said. Mrs. Lee laughed. A bit over her head, Mrs. Lee said over Brooke’s head to Brooke’s parents. It is so not over my head, Brooke said. We all enjoyed it very much, thank you, Brooke’s mother said. We certainly did, Brooke’s father said. Then the Bayoudes said goodbye to Mrs. Lee and left the theatre. They stood outside and waited to cross the road. Virtuoso, Brooke’s father said. Virtue so-so, Brooke said. Her parents laughed so much that she thought about saying it again but people tend not to laugh so much the second time you make a joke. It wouldn’t be virtuoso of her if she did. It would actually be a bit virtue so-so if she did! Why is the theatre always sad, Brooksie? her dad said taking her hand as they crossed the road. Joke or do you really mean it? Brooke said. Joke, her father said. I give up, why is the theatre always sad? Brooke said. Because the seats are always in tears, her father said. It was a good joke when you knew that it was about the other spelling of the word tears: tiers. Tiers: rows of seats on a slant.)

The fact is, Mrs. Lee’s husband isn’t living at the Lees’ house any more. Josie Lee has to go to Bloomsbury to visit him since that’s where he’s moved to. Hugo who is in the play now lives in the Lees’ house because it is so close to and handy for the theatre. Is that a kind of history too? She will write it in the Moleskine. But history usually only records the Abbots and Kings and the Dukes and so on fighting over who gets to own a park like Greenwich Park and who gets put in jail because someone else wants what they’ve got so just sticks them in the jail and leaves them to rot and goes and takes it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t record all the histories. On the contrary.

(Take One-Tree Hill, for instance, Anna said when she gave Brooke the Moleskine for her birthday. Look how many trees are really on that hill. Lots more than just one tree. Look at Queen Elizabeth’s Oak. We all know the story, or we can find it out really easily if we don’t know it, about how it was already old and hollow when Queen Elizabeth the First sheltered under it when all of a sudden she was caught in the shower of rain. And we know that it only finally fell over about twenty years ago, when the people who decided they were going to conserve it stripped off all the ivy then found out, when they did that, that it was that ivy that had actually been holding it up in the first place, and then while they tried to fix it into place forever with a piece of metal they knocked the tree completely down by mistake. Ha ha! Brooke said and Mr. Palmer laughed too. They all laughed for ages. It was funny. What if Queen Elizabeth the First had been there and had seen those things happen? Off with their heads, probably! But think of all the other trees in the park too, Anna said. They all have histories.)

The fact is, every tree that ever lived or lives has a history just like that tree has. It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.

The fact is, history is actually all sorts of things nobody knows about.

(One evening about suppertime Brooke was worrying about what would happen if the walls and the roof just fell in, the ceiling just collapsed on top of you. Instead of worrying, she took the book down off the shelf, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. It was about Greenwich and the man blowing himself up in the park! Then Brooke found this thing: from p63 to p245 in this particular book there were pencil circles round certain words. Ostentatious. Transcendental. Ergo. Maculated. Physiognomy. Propensity. Pensively. Finessing. Brooke went through to the kitchen. Why did you put circles round some of the words and why did you choose these particular words to do it to? she asked her father. Her father was doing something with a packet. What words? he said. Brooke held the book up open at page 63. Her father put the spoon and packet down and flicked through the book. Interesting, he said. He looked inside the front of the book and showed Brooke where someone had written in pencil the price £2.50. Yep, he said, it’s second hand. Second hand! this was funny. First: because of the clocks and watches at the Observatory in the museum which have second hands, and second: in a sort of weird way because of the man with the hand that exploded off his arm. First hand. Second hand. It’ll be whoever owned that book before us, he’ll have done it, her father said. Yes, but it could have been a girl or a woman who owned the book before us, Brooke said. Very true, her father said. Which do you think it was? Brooke asked. I don’t know, her father said, there’s no way of knowing. There must be a way of knowing, Brooke said. She did a little dance leaning on the table. Her father gave her back the book. He began reading the side of the packet, which was something to do with rice. Unprecedented. Intimated. Brooke went back through to the front and sat on the rug and made a list on a piece of paper of all the words with pencil rings round them. Pristine. Unscrupulous. Then she went back through to the kitchen. What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don’t know, Brooksie, he said, I don’t remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you
knew,
you just
knew
by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you’d decided to buy it. But dad, why do you think a person who first owned this book would have circled these exact words? she said. Her father was holding a saucepan under the tap but not turning the tap on. Hard to say, he said. Augment, Brooke said. She flicked further through the book to find another one. Emulation, she said. They’re easy to say. Her father laughed. No, I didn’t mean it literally, he said, I meant it’s hard to say why he, or she, did it. Ah, Brooke said. Maybe the person was circling the words he or she didn’t understand or know the meaning of, her father said. Yip yep, Brooke said, that is a possibility. She went back through to the front room. She climbed up on to the sofa, balanced on her knees on its high back and reached down the big dictionary. Expedient: suitable or appropriate. Coruscation: glittering, a sudden flash of light. Augment: to increase, make larger. She knew already what lucid meant. Then she looked at the list of words on the page to see if the person who had circled them was maybe making a code out of, say, their first letters, because the book after all was about spies and spying, at least this is what it said in the writing on the back cover that it was about. Tempppf. Or maybe the code was hidden in their last letters. Lodyyyyg. That one looked a bit like the language called Welsh.

But the fact was, in reality, it was a mystery as to what had happened with this book and why. It was something Brooke would simply never know and she simply had to settle for that fact, her mother told her a couple of nights later when she was in bed and thrashing about and pulling up all the covers, and couldn’t sleep at all for the very much wanting to know. It was her third night of not getting to sleep because of it. It was nearly 2am. Count backwards from five hundred, her mother said. Count sheep. But it wasn’t that kind of a not-sleeping night. It was a different kind of not-sleeping from the kind where all the dead people from history line up instead of sheep, looking with sad long faces and queuing for miles and miles at a gate too high for them to jump over, so many there’s no way you could count them. Queuing for Miles! it would have been good if all these people went and queued outside Mr. Garth’s window and not at the end of Brooke’s bed! all the people who died in Haiti when their houses fell on them, just collapsed out of nowhere, and all the people who died in the tsunami, who got swept away, children as well, and the people whose aeroplane crashed into the sea, and the boy who was ten who was executed because he stole a loaf of bread because he was hungry, and the boy who was stabbed to death outside a school just because he was black, and the girl whose body was dug up in a back garden who had been murdered by the man, and all the people killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Darfur and Sudan, and they were just the ones at the front of all the people who had died when they weren’t meant to in all the other historic wars, and even the children who had died because they were being made to work in factories or clean chimneys in Victorian times or who were executed to death for things like stealing less than fourteen pence. You don’t need to say executed to death, her mother said then, because to death is implied in executed. Her mother was getting impatient. But the Secret Agent awakeness about the words was a much more annoying kind of awakeness. There was no one to say sorry to in the Secret Agent awakeness. The person who somebody should be saying sorry to was Brooke! for making her not be able to know what the answer to why the words were chosen was! Brooke had to decide, her mother was saying now, again, that if she wanted to read that book and not be annoyed by the not-knowing, she would either just have to persuade herself, right now, to put up with the not-knowing, or she would have to make the active decision to rub out the circles that made the words stand out for whatever their unknowable reason was, and then she’d be able to read the book without it annoying her. Brooke put her head under the pillow. It defeats the purpose, she said under there. She wondered if her mother could hear what she’d said from under the pillow. Her mother was saying something. Brooke couldn’t hear properly. She took the pillow off her head again. My special eraser from the office tomorrow, her mother was saying, the really good one, will that do? Thank you, Brooke said. It will have to do. Her mother kissed her goodnight and switched off the light and drew the door over. But inside Brooke’s head what she thought as she closed her eyes knowing she would not sleep, was: it will not do. She opened her eyes and saw the ceiling above her.)

The fact is, Brooke is the six hundred and seventy-fifth person clicked into the Observatory today by Mr. Jackson with the people-counting clicker which it is his job to hold. Sometimes when Mr. Jackson is in a bad mood he won’t tell you which number you are. Today he is in quite a good mood. Well, if it isn’t the London Eye, he says. Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks. It is quite busy here today, Mr. Jackson, she says. School holidays, he says. Tends to have that effect. You’re number 675 since my shift started. Brooke says goodbye and thank you. Then she weaves in and out through all the people who are taking photos of things and past the place where the Flamsteed Well was.

The fact is, the astronomer called Mr. Flamsteed dug a hole that went directly down into the ground 40 m, which is a really substantial depth, and lay on a couch down there to look up at the stars because he thought going as deep down as possible would be a good way to see as high as possible. But it was very damp down there so it was not an ideal way to do it. Brooke passes the last remaining bit of the Herschel Telescope, which the Herschel family all sat inside one New Year because the telescope was actually big enough for them to sit in, because the astronomer called Mr. Herschel believed that the bigger the telescope the further up
he
’d be able to see. When the family of Mr. Herschel’s ancestors sat in there because the telescope was now no use to anyone and was dismantled, there was actually enough room for them to eat their New Year supper and then they even sang a song inside the telescope! Which is quite cool. Looking through a telescope that big would be like looking at the sky through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. Telescopus: far looker CLEVEREST when they first invented them people were pleased because it was an invention that would be really useful in wars, like CCTV now CLEVERIST this is Brooke’s name in Morse code: Dash dot dot dot. Dot dash dot. Dash dash dash. Dash dash dash. Dash dot dash. Dot. There is a multiple of dashes right at the middle of Brooke’s name. How do Vikings send secret messages? By Norse code. Brooke dashes past the pretty bushes and up the steps and in through the place they sell the guidebooks. The girl called Sophie who works behind the counter waves hello and shouts, where’ve you been? It’s been so long! We were beginning to think you’d moved away! No, I still live here, Brooke shouts and waves back. The woman Sophie is working with does not smile because she is one of the kind of people who don’t talk to children. It is a quite good museum as museums go, though the museum in York, which is near the town where Brooke used to live, has actual old streets downstairs in it with shops with things from the past for sale in them and horses that were once alive. There was a young lady of York. Whose pet pig was made into pork. Though she cried, oh, you’ve minced ’er! They still all convinced ’er. To eat up her pig with a fork. That is one of the limericks she made up with Anna and Mr. Palmer on Friday morning sitting on the wall, the day Anna gave her the Moleskine a couple of days before her birthday and wrote the word History on the sticker in her really nice handwriting. Thought that would cheer you up, Anna said. And I’m officially assigning you the job of Historian. The history of their limerick writing that day is that it was much harder to get Greenwich to rhyme with things but in the end the limerick about it was funnier because of that. There was a young lady of Greenwich. Whose dad said be home before tenich. When she missed the last bus. Her dad made such a fuss. She was never allowed out againich. Mr. Palmer is really good at limericks. Mr. Palmer and Anna have gone now. You won’t miss us, Mr. Palmer said. You’ll be back at school in a few days. Today is Monday, there are six days of holiday left after this day THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST LITTLE PIECE OF it means Brooke will wake up with hope in her for six more days. And when she goes back anyway things will have changed and she will not be cleverest. She will be
the
Brooke Bayoude, Cleverist.