There but for The

by Ali Smith

  That didn’t scan at all well. She was upset. Interesting, though, that she’d taken to iambic pentameter. A very cultured lady, Faye. She’d been making her bed in his ear, pouring her lovable poison into it now, for longer than she’d actually lived on this earth.

  Ironic, Mark said out loud. Actually very sad.

  The couple along the railings exchanged worried looks and shifted a little further off. It didn’t do to speak to yourself, or your dead, out loud. It was inappropriate. Mark turned towards the grassy slope where, historically, for centuries, the boys had dragged the girls up to the top only to drag them down the steepness of it at the kind of full speed that threw clothes and modesty into disarray and called for a lot of screaming. Over the centuries spectators had gathered at the top and the bottom of the slope just to watch this happen.

  This world, Mark said under his breath, is insane. I’m sorry. Here’s something you might prefer to hear. The song called Let It Snow Let It Snow Let It Snow was actually written in the hottest days of August. But it’s not a great story because I’ve forgotten the names of the people who wrote it. Here’s another one. This is how Jerome Kern came to write I’ve Told Every Little Star.

  (Mark knew, obviously. He knew she was dead and gone, bone and dust in a box in the ground on top of the boxes of dust and bone that were what was left of her own parents, in a grave he never visited any more, in a pretty spot in Golders Green cemetery.)

  So Jerome Kern was in bed, Mark said under his breath. It was early in the morning, he’d woken early, and so had his wife, her name was Eva. And lying there in the early morning light they heard a bird outside their window sing a tune over and over. It was a really pretty tune, they both thought so, and Kern told his wife that when they got up he’d compose a song round it. So he hummed it to himself to memorize it and went back to sleep. But when he’d wakened, and breakfasted, and sat down at the piano, of course the tune was completely gone, he couldn’t remember it at all.

  (Mark knew that probably the rhyming, which was new, was because this summer he’d looked out some of his old books from back then, the books she’d given him. Possibly it was also because he’d bought online and had been playing on repeat the Ella Fitzgerald / George and Ira Gershwin collection. Faye had had the original LPs. He remembered, now, the shine of them, their paper sleeves, even the feel and the smell of the big square hard-paper box they came in.)

  So, Mark said under his breath over the fine view of old / new London. The next morning Kern got up early. He sat in the dark at the window with a piece of paper and a pencil and waited for the bird to come back. And he waited and he waited, as the morning light came up, because he knew that if that bird had come once there was a chance it would come again. And then, sure enough, he heard it again, the bird was there. The bird sang the tune and Kern wrote it down. Then when the bird had finished singing and flown away Kern went downstairs, closed all the doors between his sleeping family and the piano room and roughed out, there and then, the main body of what would become I’ve Told Every Little Star.

  (Mark had woken one spring day in his late twenties, on the folding bed in his Kensington basement flat, to a voice in his ear.

  Though he hadn’t heard her voice since he was less than thirteen years old, he’d known immediately. Though she was saying very unlikely stuff, as if from a really bad script, or as if she were a posh person pretending to be cockney or were playing the role of a clichéd angry-young kitchen-sink character of the 1950s, it was definitely her. Well, old man, wake up, I mean I don’t mind and I know you’re a queer one pardon my French but even a lah-di-da layabout who thinks the world owes him a living’s got to make ebloodynough to pay the rent, and I mean just look at my fingers, worked and to the bone are the words for it, d’you hear me?

  I hear you!

  He’d opened his eyes, overjoyed.

  No one.

  There was no one in the room but him.)

  The bird was a Cape Cod Sparrow, Melospiza Melodia. It spawned not just a song but a musical too, about some people who, yes, write a song inspired by hearing a bird sing. Music In The Air; he wrote it with Oscar Hammerstein. And they all lived happily ever after, until they died. And when Jerome Kern was in hospital dying, Oscar Hammerstein came to his bedside, Kern was in a coma, they knew he’d die very soon, and the song Hammerstein sang to his dear friend Kern in the last minutes of his life was I’ve Told Every Little Star, because Hammerstein knew how very fond, among all his compositions, Kern was of that song.

  The end. Oh, no, wait. Interesting fact about Melospiza Melodia, and it’s that if it is well fed, the bird, and hasn’t had to worry too much about finding food, it actually produces offspring that sing less than the offspring it produces if the parent bird has been hungrier. And the other thing about songbirds I was remembering to tell you is that it’s now thought by some experts that they sing in their sleep as well as sing while they’re awake. As if their sleeping selves are a kind of being awake, or their wakened selves are a kind of being asleep.

  There. That’s it.

  The end.

  Mark nodded to himself. Then he nodded at the couple and the child to show he wasn’t mad and he’d meant and taken no offence, both. He didn’t wait to see if they’d nod back. He pushed himself off the railing, turned towards the Observatory building and the ragged line of tourists and schoolkids in the yard waiting to straddle the meridian line, and all the people, one after the other, doing just that and having their picture taken by people holding cameras or phones well away from themselves. That was how people focused these days.

  I’m standing on time! a girl said and toed the line. How cool is that?

  I’m standing on not-time! her friend said jumping backwards away from the meridian.

  Someone was talking, a youngish man in a T-shirt and fleece. He was a teacher, presumably, from the words he was using: last warning, confiscate, crisps.

  If you take them off her, are you going to eat them yourself, do you know what I’m trying to say sir? a girl said.

  No, Melanie, because crisps are sprayed with chemicals then fried in huge vats of fat, and I like to eat healthily, the man said.

  These are healthy, sir, the girl with her hand in the crisp packet said. It says on the packet less fat and natural ingredients in it sir innit.

  The three girls standing with the crisp packet girl all burst out laughing. In it innit! they said. Innit in it!

  Because we learned on Tuesday, didn’t we, the teacher said, that it’s random. And about longitude and latitude and fixed points, he said. To know where you are when you’re at sea and there are no landmarks. But who can tell me why it was decided to put it here? Jacintha, mobile off. Off. Off or confiscated. You choose. Thank you. Someone tell me why the experts at the time chose Greenwich. Rhiannon? Why Greenwich?

  Because they had to put it somewhere so they could get on with the other important calculations about time and, and things like time and the sea and that, cause they needed something better than the thing called reckoning with that throwing logs tied to rope off moving ships, and on land too because like, that, Yarmouth being ten minutes ahead of Greenwich and in other places it could be noon in London and half past eleven in the place you’d just travelled to on a train, a girl said.

  Thank you, Rhiannon, the teacher said. Very good. Except it’s dead reckoning.

  Ow! Rhiannon said when the girl standing behind her poked her hard in the back and said the word dead. Please sir, one of the bad girls said. The earth’s wobble is what happens when Rhiannon Stoddart walks to the shops.

  And Greenwich, the teacher said, was where the experts who met decided to put it because of the important work they’d already done here. Now, the meridian runs north to south and if you stand on one side of it, you’re officially in the west, and if you stand on the other it’s the what? Matthew, if you make a racially unpleasant comment like that again there’ll be serious trouble. I mean it. I’m talk
ing exclusion, Matthew. Now apologize. Not to me, to Bijan. Okay, Bijan? Right. Where were we? On one side the west, and on the other? Come on.

  The kids stood bored and hangdog, yawning and squirming, their sweatshirts knotted round their waists. Above them, the domes of the Observatory: they all looked up when they were told to. The original domes, the teacher told them, were made of papier-mâché. A murmur went round the boys about the domes resembling big and small breasts. The teacher admonished. Two girls made outraged-sounding noises. They pointed at the notice which apologized that the time ball wasn’t functioning today. One of the girls called out. Sir, when exactly did your time balls drop?

  Nought degrees, the teacher was saying. Who can tell me about nought degrees?

  If it’s not degrees you want to know about, sir—, one boy said.

  Yes, Nick—? the teacher said.

  Then what is it, sir? the boy said.

  This made Mark laugh. The group of girls saw him laugh and stared at him, then laughed nastily themselves, but at Mark.

  I don’t follow you, Nick, the teacher said.

  If you follow Nick, sir, we’ll report you to the authorities, another boy who was standing far out enough on the edge of the group not to be heard by the teacher said.

  His friends sniggered.

  Then this same boy, while the teacher talked on about what universal day was, and how many degrees made a day, an hour, half an hour, a minute, cast an unmistakable sheep’s-eye glance at Mark. When Mark caught the stare and didn’t look away, the boy spoke with an insolence that was cutting.

  That old man, look at him, he wants it.

  The friends round him sniggered again.

  But even well after the sniggering had died away the boy continued to hold the stare. In it there was a perfectly judged balance of rejection and invitation. The boy was an expert. He looked all of thirteen. He was far too young to be acting so knowing. Mark stilled a wild laugh in his chest. He shook his head at the boy, but to make sure the boy wasn’t offended he winked first. When he shook his head the boy looked down and away, and Mark did too, and moved off, out round the school party, back down through the gate and towards the park.

  The slope down was painful to the knees, more painful than the climbing of it had been. Greenwich, the teacher was saying behind him as he went, and Greenwich, and again Greenwich.

  Greenwich then: the word, white on black on the label of the 45 in his hands, Mark just thirteen years old himself: London American Recordings 1963 Then He Kissed Me (Spector, Greenwich, Barry) The Crystals.

  Greenwich now: the word that had caught his eye when he was in a café skimming their copy of one of the weekend papers on Sunday, Observer, Guardian, whichever, and when he looked properly he saw the picture and recognized the woman, the one from the dinner party.

  The column was the Real Life column, where real people told the paper about a real experience; usually something like Dolphins Carried My Baby To Safety or I Woke Up One Day Not Remembering Who I Was or My Life Was Ruined By An Over The Counter Cold Remedy or I Was Mugged By My Own Brother. Mark had waited till all the serving people were out of earshot and then had torn the page out, folded it and put it in his pocket next to that chap Miles’s note. That night in the bath he decided: on his next day off, Thursday, he’d go to Greenwich and slip the page under Miles’s door in case nobody else had thought to show it to him. And it would be nice, too, to spend his day off in Greenwich, see the place again, maybe visit the park.

  But when he’d got to the Lees’ house and knocked on the front door this morning there’d been no one home. Well, presumably Miles was in, but he wasn’t about to open the front door to anyone, was he?

  He had the article in his inside jacket pocket now, folded, along with Miles’s note, well, he was assuming it was from Miles, it couldn’t really be from anybody else, though it wasn’t signed. He’d found it in there, a plain piece of foolscap folded twice, when he’d got his wallet out to buy a train ticket the Sunday after the dinner party. The handwriting was new to him. It was intelligent, slightly forward-slanted, neatly spaced down the page rather like a poem might be though it wasn’t one. It was quite clear. Only one word was difficult to decipher.

  He stopped on the slope. People went past him; a couple of people speaking French. Mark took both folded pieces of paper out of his pocket.

  Below the words REAL LIFE: An Uninvited Stranger Lives In My Spare Room, was the picture of Mrs. Lee in profile, standing beside a door, looking rather tragically down at its handle. The caption read: Genevieve Lee recounts what it’s like living twenty-four-seven with an uninvited stranger.

  I had always loved living here

  in our gracious old historic

  Greenwich town house. From

  practically the first day my

  husband Eric and I and our

  young daughter moved in, it

  seemed to me to be asking to

  be a really sociable space. I don’t

  think it’s an exaggeration to say that

  among our friends we’re renowned

  for our hospitality. Until June

  this year we were forever having

  people round for interesting

  soirées and sending them

  home happy after a meal I’d

  have taken great pains to cook

  to perfection each time.

  We had no way of knowing that

  this one dinner party, however,

  would turn out so dramatically

  differently from the others. That

  particular evening in June

  I had planned a menu including

  a seared scallops with chorizo

  starter, a main course of lamb

  tagine and a dessert of crème

  brûlée with home-made

  chilli-vanilla ice cream. One of

  our guests brought his own

  guest, a man who seemed perfectly

  genial and normal and didn’t in

  any way arouse our suspicions

  or give any clue as to what was

  about to happen. He wasn’t

  poor, didn’t seem in distress,

  and the fact that he was a

  vegetarian, though it was a

  surprise, was absolutely no

  problem.

  In the middle of the party this man,

  we’ll call him “Milo,” left the

  room and went upstairs. While

  we merrily continued with our

  dinner party downstairs he was

  actually barricading himself into

  one of the rooms in our house.

  The next morning we woke up to

  a fact that we have lived with

  since that day. A stranger is

  living in our house against

  our will.

  It has now been three months,

  and it is simply an experience

  unlike any I have hitherto

  had. The man has made himself

  incommunicado for an

  unfathomable reason

  in our spare room with my

  rowing machine and my husband’s

  wine-making kits and DVD

  collections of sci-fi classics

  of the fifties and sixties,

  a room which we were about to

  turn into a badly needed study

  for our daughter who has

  important school exams this

  coming year. He never speaks

  and only once in the whole time

  has sent us a written message,

  about the food we provide free for

  him; it is one of the little ironies

  of the situation that for “Milo”

  the dinner party he came

  to as our guest has never

&
nbsp; ended. Looking back now it is

  also ironic to remember

  myself hearing the creak of his

  footsteps on our stairs as I

  prepared the dessert that first

  night not knowing what was really

  afoot.

  It is strange having a stranger

  in the house with you all the

  time. It makes you strangely

  self-aware, strange to yourself.

  It is literally like living with

  a mystery. Sometimes I stand

  in the hall and listen to the

  silence. It sounds uncanny

  and feels like I imagine

  being haunted must feel like.

  Sometimes the water flushing

  or “Milo” moving about

  in the middle of the night

  wakes me or Eric and we

  have the realization, all over

  again, that we are not alone.

  Sometimes I sit outside the door

  behind which “Milo” is sitting

  and just say over and over to myself

  the word: Why? Perhaps in

  some ways metaphorically we

  are all like this man “Milo”—all of

  us locked in a room in a house

  belonging to strangers.

  Except that this is our house

  which makes it all seem