There but for The (26 page)

fact is, London might not always be here! There have been times in the history of London that London practically stopped existing! Brooke stands next to the Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic Clock. She holds her sides. It is what you do when you are getting your breath back. Then she feels her jeans pocket to check for the Moleskine book. Moleskine books are notebooks that were famously used by famous authors like Ernest Hemingway and Bruce someone. She can feel the edge of the sticker Anna stuck on its cover. The word HISTORY is in her pocket. That is quite cool! For example there is when Queen Boudicca burned London to the ground which was to do with a tribe called the Iceni tribe and the uprising they were part of. If you were being witty with words that is what you could call what Brooke just did right now when she ran up the slope: up-rising. To be more literal she did it a moment ago and it took under a minute yip yip! Brooke Bayoude Fastest Runner In World Coming In Well Below 60 Second Mark. You can leave the word the out of Fastest Runner In World and in other places because it is a headline kind of thing and people will understand that the word the is there even if it isn’t actually there. It means the word the is implied. But it would obviously have been a lot faster than 54 seconds if she hadn’t had to dodge a lot of people. A lot of people have decided to visit the Observatory today due to it being the Easter holidays. The Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic Clock is a slave clock. A slave clock is a clock driven by a master clock, whose mechanism is elsewhere from the slave clock. The Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic Clock also has 23 hours marked on it instead of just the normal 12, like it is a double-length clock plus an 0 at the top where 12 midnight and noon would be, to make 24. It means that sometimes it is actually nothing o’clock. Nothing o’clock! What time is it? It’s a quarter past nothing. It’s half past nothing. Doctor, Doctor, I think I’m a clock. Well, don’t go getting all wound up about it. Joke from the days before watch batteries and digital. Brooke’s own watch is new. It is a Me To You watch. The picture on it is of a bear holding out a flower so that every time you look at the time it is as if the bear would like to give you the flower. It was from her mother and father on her birthday and it came with an actual bear that has been made to look like it is old though it isn’t, it is new with a pretend patch sewn into its face with big stitches. This is because old-looking things are more lovable. The bear is called Tatty Teddy. 54 seconds is Brooke’s first up-slope score (according to the watch) since she became ten. She has been ten for one day. She became it on Sunday 11 April. Ten on eleven April twenty ten. It will be particularly good next year because she will be 11 on 11.4.2011! Last year at school Brooke told Wendy Slater that there is a whole other range of numbers other than the usual ones that come after twenty-nine, that go twenty ten, twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. Wendy Slater believed her and
altered her homework accordingly
is what the letter home said about it THINK YOU’RE SO CLEVER Brooke’s class has had Mr. Warburton as its teacher now for two years.
There is no doubting Brooke’s intelligence. Her verbal dexterity is notable and she is wonderfully imaginative and of course we do not have a problem with that or either of these things. But sometimes her infectious imagination can be vertiginous for her peers
THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST vertiginous: makes you feel dizzy.

But the fact is, Greenwich, right now, with all the buildings down there that people come here specially to look at, and the towers that are from now, and the old buildings that are historical, was once, way back in time, quite bustling and so on exactly like it is bustling today. But then out of nowhere and in a way no one could have predicted it all just stopped being bustling, not just when Queen Boudicca set fire to London and burned it down, but also when the Roman Empire began to not be an empire. Then, for some reason that is historical, London stopped being a port that was important—ha! the im
port
ant
port
stopped being im
port
ant. Greenwich was very im
port
ant back then, historians know now, because it had a temple and a shrine and so on.

The fact is, they found a coin and an artefact, or artefacts.

The fact is. The arte-fact is. Brooke bends down to do up her lace. The arty-fact is, there was a picture of a man’s head on the coin, and it was one of the things they found that prove that a Romano-British temple was here once. The picture is of the head of Flavius Constans who was an emperor and the coin is dated the year 337 and then the history of Flavius Constans is that he was murdered in the year 350 which is actually only thirteen years after his head was on a coin! So people in authority should be more careful because having your head on a coin doesn’t mean you are immune to history like people are immune to things they have been inoculated against by a doctor. Just because someone is in authority, for example in charge of you, and can get you by the arm when no one will know so that your arm afterwards really hurts, and shout in your ear, so loud so that it feels like a slap and your ear can feel the words in it for quite some time after, it doesn’t mean history won’t happen back to them.

The fact is, when someone shouts like that at you it is like a passenger-carrying hot air balloon filling with the hot air that’s supposed to send it into the sky but instead it is being inflated dangerously fast inside a very small room so that its sides and top press against the walls and ceiling which means that either the walls and ceiling will have to give way or the balloon that is your head will explode. The balloon that is your head is metaphorical. This does not mean that it is not real. It is just a way of saying something that is difficult to say.

(Brooke’s mother and father called her through to the kitchen. Her father was standing by the window, holding the two letters. Her mother was sitting at the table. She patted the chair next to her, which meant she wanted Brooke to come and sit there. Brooke stayed standing where she was at the door. She looked down and at the same time sideways at the letters out of the slant of her eye, because it is possible to look like you are looking down but actually be looking up. She could see the school letterhead on the top of one of the letters. Brooke, her mother said, we can sort out whatever it is if you tell us but we can’t if you don’t. We’re not angry, her father said, we’d just like to know why. Brooke shrugged one shoulder then the other. Later, her mother took her in her arms and sat her on her knee. I know something’s wrong, she said, I know my girl and I know when she’s sad, we can’t have this, your father is very worried. Brooke didn’t say anything. Later, her father took her for a walk down by the river. Want to go through the tunnel? he said. Brooke shook her head. I thought you liked the tunnel, her father said. Brooke stared at the slapping brown surface of the water. It shifted about like thousands and thousands of little shoves. You’ve got to start behaving better, her father said, your mother is very worried, all this not coming out of your room, not turning up at school, where do you go? what’s the problem? You can tell me. Her father looked at the water too as he said it. Then he said, or you can maybe tell your teacher, if you don’t want to tell me THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST WELL WAIT AND SEE MISS CLEVER-CLEVER WHATEVER YOUR STUPID NAME IS BECAUSE BEING CLEVER IN MY CLASS IS ALL VERY WELL BUT IT MEANS NOTHING IN THE REAL WORLD WHICH YOU’LL FIND OUT THE HARD WAY YOU’RE A LITTLE PIECE OF NOTHING YOU LITTLE PIECE OF SHIT then her father said, okay, imagine it isn’t me asking you. Imagine you are here with yourself, only yourself is my age, she’s old and wise and not nine any more, and imagine that you can say anything you like to yourself, about anything, and if you imagine that, then what would be the thing you would most need to tell her? Then there was a long time when nobody said anything. Then Brooke said, Dad? Yes? her father said and his face was waiting and serious. I think actually I
would
like to go through the tunnel after all, Brooke said. Her father nodded. He took her by the arms and he swung her into the air and carried her into the tunnel dome. They went down in the lifts. There weren’t very many people in the tunnel because it was the middle of the afternoon. He and Brooke did the whistling thing, where one of you goes way ahead of the other and then listens for the really good way that whistling sounds bouncing off the tiles down there, which is especially good when you can’t see the person who’s whistling or tell what direction the whistling is coming from. By the time they got to the other end and went up in the lift and patted the old one-eyed dog that sits on the grass at Island Gardens and looked at the view of the buildings and so on from the other side of the river, her father had forgotten what he was asking on the other side before they came down into the tunnel. So it was okay.)

So. So the fact is, at the end of the 4th century Greenwich was covered in the kind of plant life and so on that grows over the places no one goes to or uses. Probably there was a lot of ancient wildlife which came when that happened, the equivalents of frogs and hedgehogs and the kinds of things that come and inhabit wild places like on Springwatch on TV. On that programme they tell you how to make a wilderness in your garden so that live things will come and visit it or even decide to make their homes there. Some of them can be quite rare like the bird that is called a willow warbler which used to be widespread but now there are hardly any. But the point is, places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just
disappear.
And if it could happen then it could happen now or any time, because there is a historical precedent, which is not the same as President Obama which is a different spelling though also a precedent of president at the same time! which is quite cool and witty when you think about it THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST

the fact is, actually, it is okay to be clever. It is more than okay, to. It is cleverist, to be. Brooke Bayoude: Cleverist. CLEVERIST. So all these people here today looking at Greenwich, London, and thinking that history is past and over, that all it is is grass mounds in the ground where the Anglo Saxon men were buried once with all the shields and the music of the spears, should look again. Just look! It is called the Observatory here after all! ha ha! There is a picture of a man at the front of the telescope book at home. The man who is from the year 1660 has his whole body covered in eyes that are open. There is an eye on his foot and an eye on his knee. There are some all up his leg and his arm, and one on his shoulder, one on his wrist and one on his hand. The hand with an eye on it is pointing at the sky, where another hand, without an eye on it, is coming out of a kind of cloud of light and words are coming out of the fingers of the upper hand. The upper hand! Joke. The man who is looking at the word-hand has open eyes on his stomach even. The eyes cover him like butterflies would if butterflies ever landed all over you all at once. Imagine if your whole body
was
covered in butterflies and the butterflies were eyes, opening and closing their wings like eyelids and all seeing at the same time at different heights and angles. Would we see things from all their different sides at once? Would that make what we see have a different dimension inside our brains? In that telescope book there is also a picture of a Greenwich pensioner sailor from the old days hiring out his telescope to people and underneath the picture it says that probably the people are so keen to look through it because he has it pointed at Execution Dock. Because people actually paid money to a pensioner sailor to watch somebody be executed through a telescope! A person on Execution Dock would probably be being hanged, not guillotined, because the guillotine was not used in England although there was a way to execute called the Halifax Gibbet in England in history which was a bit like the guillotine. The point of the guillotine was that it was used so people would have a clean and quick death. It was popular in France, and 16,500 people were historically executed on one in what is now Europe where you go on the Eurostar to, in the 1930s and 1940s, though not since as far back as 1967 when the last person was guillotined somewhere. Brooke can’t remember where. She will have to check her facts. The problem with reading facts on the internet and sometimes in books, is that sometimes you might not be reading the true facts.

The fact probably is, a man was sent to prison in France for slapping the face of the head of a person who had just been beheaded to see if the face was still alive after the head was cut off!

The fact probably is, too, that in Halifax you could be sent to the Halifax Gibbet if you stole thirteen and a half old pence, and Halifax is not very far from York, where there is a house where a lady lived who was pressed to death by big stones. Brooke knows this because she has visited the lady’s historic house where there is a museum.

But the fact is, how do you know anything is true? Duh, obviously, records and so on, but how do you know that the
records
are true? Things are not just true because the internet says they are. Really the phrase should be, not the fact is, but the fact seems to be.

The fact seems to be, someone tried to blow up this very Observatory right here in 1894! It is a fact, apparently, that he didn’t damage the Observatory but instead he just blew his own stomach out right here in this park! There was a hole where his stomach should be and one of his hands exploded off, when the bomb exploded in that very same hand he was holding it in, well, the moral of the story is, don’t hold bombs in your hand, duh obviously. In fact a two inch piece of bone from inside the hand was found near the Observatory wall after that man died but the Observatory itself was not damaged by it or anything. Brooke puts her hands where her own stomach is and feels for what she can’t see inside herself. The man was apparently still alive when the people found him, and he could still speak apparently. Doctor Doctor, I feel a little empty inside. Doctor Doctor I really need a hand. !!! No, but it will have been really horrible. That man, therefore, could have literally actually in reality basically reached his own hand through the hole in himself and out the other side (meaning the hand he still had, obviously, not the one that got exploded off). So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well. As an example of this: from up here you can see some of Greenwich—but not all of it. You can’t see all the people who still don’t know what in fact in reality has happened, still waiting there outside for Mr. Garth to come out or not come out. They are invisible for the simple reason that the place and the people are behind the trees and buildings so you can’t see them from here. It is a matter of perspextive. You can’t see the theatre, or even its roof, where the man called Hugo who was there the first night Mr. Garth shut himself in is doing the monologue. A monologue is a play with just one person in it. The title of the actual play is Miles To Go Before I Sleep, because Miles is Mr. Garth’s first name, although all the people outside call him Milo. It is meant to be about Mr. Garth and what is happening inside the room.