There but for The (31 page)

the fact is, that at the top of any mountain you’ll feel a bit dizzy because of the air up there. Cleverness is great. It’s a really good thing, when you have it. But there’s no point in just having it. You have to know how to use it. And when you know how to use your cleverness, it’s not that you’re the cleverest any more, or are doing it to be cleverer than anyone else like it’s a competition. No. Instead of being
the
clever
est,
the thing to do is become
a
clever
ist.
Then Mr. Garth told a great knock knock joke where what you do is you say knock knock and the other person says who’s there? and you say Granny, and the other person says, Granny who? and then you say again, knock knock, and the other person says who’s there? and you say Grandad, and the other person says, Grandad who? and then you say knock knock, and the person says who’s there? and you say Granny again, and you keep going exactly like that, saying Granny and Grandad for a few more times, and then you say knock knock and the person says who’s there, and you say Aunt, and the person says Aunt who? and you say Aunt you glad I got rid of all those grannies and grandads. Brooke laughed until she nearly choked. Then she said, the thing is, I can see the point of a joke, and I can see the point of a fact, but what is the point of a book, I mean the kinds that tell stories? If a story isn’t a fact, but it is a made-up version of what happened, like the one that is a book made up about the real man who tried to blow up the Observatory, I mean, what is the
point
of it? Mr. Garth leaned his head on the handlebars. Think how quiet a book is on a shelf, he said, just sitting there, unopened. Then think what happens when you open it. Yes, but what
exactly
happens? Brooke said. I have an idea, he said, I’ll tell you the very beginning of a story that’s not been written yet, and then you write the story for me, and we can see what happens in the process. Okay, Brooke said. That is a really interesting idea. Yes? Mr. Garth said. Okay. Here goes. There was once a man who lived in a small room and, without leaving that room, managed to cycle his bike three thousand miles. Do I have to remember it exactly word for word, Brooke said, or can it be approximate? It can be as approximate as you like, Mr. Garth said. Yeah but the thing is, Brooke said, if I write it, you have to write one too, where I get to tell
you
how to begin. Okay, Mr. Garth said, it seems only fair. It’s a deal. What’s my beginning? I think it is an idea rather than a beginning, Brooke said. Okay, Mr. Garth said, I’m all ears. All ears! That was funny. Brooke told him about the picture of the man in the telescope book who is all eyes. Is that my beginning? Mr. Garth said, a man covered in open eyes like butterflies? No, Brooke said. This is it. You have to imagine that if you were sitting there where you are, on the bike, and also here in the room with you was another version of you, like, say you but three or four days before you were ten years old, I mean if it was nearly your tenth birthday. I mean if you were in the room and you were exactly the same age as me, and at the same time you’re in the room too, old like you are. I mean older, because you are not old like old people, but you are quite old. I get it, Mr. Garth said. I see, myself then and myself now, yes. So if that really happened in reality, what story would you tell your self and what story would your self tell you? Brooke said. Mr. Garth closed his eyes for a bit of time. Then he opened them very wide. Nearly your birthday, then? he said. It is on Sunday the 11th, Brooke said. I’ll write it for you for your birthday, Mr. Garth said, but you’ll need to bring me some blank paper, can you? Yes, Brooke said, and would you like a biscuit too, the thing is I actually know where Mrs. Lee keeps them. No, Mr. Garth said, I don’t need a biscuit. But I can have one, Brooke said. Yes, Mr. Garth said. Thank you, Brooke said. She went down the stairs and into what was Mr. Lee’s study before he moved house to Bloomsbury. There were still things and furniture and so on waiting for him to come and collect them. She found A4 paper in the photocopying tray on the desk. She took two sheets because she didn’t know how long or short the story would need to be. Then she went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard door above the microwave and climbed up on to the unit next to the waste disposal and opened the plastic box and took one of the teacakes out and put the lid back on the box and the box back exactly where it had been, as if no one had touched a thing. And anyway an adult had said it was okay, so she could.)

The fact is. The fact apparently is. The fact seems to be. The story goes. Once upon a time a man threw a clock out of an upstairs window. Why did the man throw the clock out of the upstairs window? So he could see time fly. But that joke isn’t altogether a very good one, because to be true it should really end like this: so he could see time fall. Brooke turns to the very back of the History Moleskine, which is where she’s decided she’ll put the really good joke Mr. Garth told her after she came upstairs with the paper for him. She writes across the top:
Joke Told By Mr. Garth to Brooke Bayoude Wednesday 7th of April at about 3.30pm or 1530 in 24 hr time.
She underlines this. Then she writes the following.

Mr. Miles Garth—Will you remember me in a months time.

Brooke Bayoude—Yes

MG—Will you remember me in 6 months time.

BB—Yes

MG—Will you remember me in a years time.

BB—Yes

MG—Will you remember me in 2 years time.

BB—Yes

MG—Will you remember me in 3 years time.

BB—Yes

MG—Knock knock

BB—Who’s there

MG—See you’ve forgotten me already.

It is funny sitting here today and wondering where Mr. Garth has gone. He could be anywhere! It is funny thinking of all the people who are watching the window, and of Mrs. Lee going in on Sunday herself to the room and moving the blind a little bit and then jumping away from the window because of the excited noise her just moving the blind a tiny bit made the crowd make. Mrs. Lee had completely stopped crying after that and had come out of the room looking quite happy and making everybody swear all over again on their lives that nobody would tell anybody Mr. Garth was not there any more.

But the fact is it would be amazing if Mr. Garth was, right this minute, standing outside in the crowd himself and looking at the window he is meant to be behind. And imagine if he saw the blind move with everybody else and it was meant to be him moving it!

(What are you doing, Brooksie? her father said on Thursday night. I’m busy, Brooke said. She was on the rug with her back to the radiator. Doing what? her father said. I’m writing a story, Brooke said. What are you doing, Bernie? her father said to her mother. Leave me alone, I’m proofing these exam papers, her mother said. Her father picked a piece of paper up off the table near her mother’s hand. Her mother tried to catch it as he took it. He danced across to the other side of the room. There’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so: Discuss, he said. I wish they’d not used that as the Hamlet question, her mother said, it’d be such a good first-year philosophy general question. There’s always next year, her father said. Next year, yes, her mother said, remember to remind me, Brooke, to use that quote next year. Okay, Brooke said. Her father picked up the copy of Hamlet her mother was checking things in and flicked through it. “As the indifferent children of the earth,” he said. Ha—as if there’s any such thing as a single indifferent child of the earth. Who is it says that, again? her mother asked. Rosencrantz says it, Brooke said. Uh … you’re right, it is, her father said. She’s right. How does she know that? She’s a genius. She takes after me. What are you writing about, spawn of Terence Bayoude? It’s about a man in a room who stays in the room and never leaves it but in that room he has, like, a bicycle, and he cycles three thousand miles on it, Brooke said. What a turn-of-the-century-sounding story, her father said. Like Mr. Garth? her mother said. Sounds more Kafkaesque to me than fin de siècle. Fin de cycle! her father said. Is someone making him do it? her mother said, is it, like, that he has to provide electricity for the whole building by going round and round like a rat on a hamster wheel in a cage? No, Brooke said. He quite likes doing it and nobody is really making him do it. And though he doesn’t ever leave the room, all the same he cycles through Greenwich when it is nothing but a forest, and he cycles up a mountain to the summit, where he learns how to breathe even though it is difficult to there, then he cycles through time past the Queen who causes the uprising and burns London down, past all the people building it up again and past the Queen who is sheltering under the tree in the rain, and he gets off his bike and he takes his mac off and puts it over a puddle for her. What a gent! her father said. Then he cycles so close to the cell window in a prison that he can hear the original frogs talking to the original St. Alfege, Brooke said. What are the frogs saying? her father asked. They are talking in their own frog language, about the weather, and how difficult it is to have frogspawn, and what an interesting experience it is to grow legs when you start off without any, and how nice and damp it is in the cell and how glad they are that they’re there, although they are sorry for him, because he is clapped in irons and not a frog like them, and they answer his philosophical questions with their croaking, Brooke said. But St. Alfege can understand them. And he tells the man on the bicycle what they are saying. What’s going to happen in the end? her father said. I don’t know, Brooke said. But what I want is the bicycle to be able to go across all the rooftops in London at the end, but I don’t know how to get it up there to do that realistically. It sounds like those frogs could talk the legs off a donkey, so maybe they could talk the wings on to a bike, her father said. Yes they could, Brooke said, that is a good idea! But it is no good, because the thing is I also want the story to be true and factual as well as a made-up thing. So you want miraculous talking frogs
and
realism, her father said, a story with more than one ending, maybe. She means she wants a work of the imagination that’s simultaneously rigorously true, her mother said without taking her eyes off her work. See how our daughter takes after me. On the contrary, her father said, she takes after me, she is writing a story with some subtlety, very unlike the ones your mother was championing to me last night. Her father started poking at her mother like he does to make her ticklish. Very unlike what exactly? Brooke said. Terence, I’m trying to work, her mother said but she was laughing. Your mother and I were having an intellectual discussion last night about turn-of-the-century manhood, her father said. It was because your father was annoyed that I was watching a film called Ronin on TV and that I wouldn’t put it off and come to bed, her mother said. It was because your mother said that being blown through the wall by an action hero or, in this case, stalked within a hair’s breadth of your life round a dark parking lot by a man with a gun, was so exciting that she couldn’t come to bed till the film was finished, and when I said that I would tell all her students and work colleagues and employers that she prefers, as examples of turn-of-the-century manhood, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Al Pacino to Proust’s Swann and Joyce’s Bloom, she got quite violent with me and even started hitting me quite hard in the chest area, her father said. If only you were a real man, her mother said, and Schwarzenegger isn’t even
in
Ronin. Yes, but he’s big in A La Recherche, her father said, and one can only thank the great writers for giving us such good role models. Sylvester Swann. Leopold Schwarzenegger. Robert de Bloom. Both her parents were laughing. Brooke looked up from her piece of paper and watched them throwing the words for birds and flowers and Hollywood actors at each other like they were throwing little rocks wrapped as presents. She looked round the room at all the books on all the shelves. A closed book on a shelf sat there quietly, not saying anything. Her mother was shouting about Wesley Snipes. Her father was holding up his hands and laughing. Do you two want to know a really good joke? Brooke said. Go on then, her father said still looking at her mother with love. Yes, her mother said still looking with the same pleasedness at her father. Then they both turned at once and looked at Brooke. Okay, Brooke said. There was once this man. Which man? her father said. I won’t tell you it if you are stupid with interruptions, Brooke said. Okay, okay, her father said, go on. There was once this man, Brooke said, who wouldn’t stop singing. Is this joke about your father? her mother said.
Don’t
interrupt, Brooke said. Very sorry I’m sure, her mother said. Come on. Go on. Okay, Brooke said. Well, this man just sang all the time. Eventually it made them so angry at him singing all the time that they told him he was going to be put in front of the firing squad if he didn’t stop. But he kept on doing it. So the soldiers arrived with the guns, and the man was led out to be executed and tied to the stake and a blindfold was put on him. And the captain said, you can have one last request. So the man said, okay, as my last request I’d like to sing a song. Permission granted, the captain said. So the man began singing. Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine green bottles. Hanging on the wall. Brooke’s father laughed. Her mother laughed. Good one, her father said. Not bad, her mother said, I’ve heard worse.)