There but for The (29 page)

(Be polite but demur, Brooke’s mother said. Mum, Brooke said, if you can demur. Uh huh? her mother said. Her mother was frowning. She was working at her computer in her office, doing admin, which is short for administration, which is short for migraine-stimulant. She stopped typing and looked up, looked over at the arch of the window where Brooke was pretending to tightrope-walk the edge of one of the big stones in the floor. Then surely you must also be able to mur, Brooke said. I mur with you about that, her mother said. Brooke curled on the flagstones laughing at the word mur. Her mother came over and tickled her until they were both lying there on the old stone floor, laughing helplessly. You and me, her mother said when they got their breath back, we just made up a word. We so did, Brooke said. Her mother sat up, nodded, ruffled Brooke’s hair, got up off the floor and went back to the admin of phil and lit.)

The fact of the matter is, Brooke spoke to a lady this morning who had paid the Psychic man the £30 for her special channelled message from Mr. Garth in the room. Brooke asked the lady what her special message was. The lady smiled a smile like she knew a secret. She said she couldn’t possibly tell anyone what Milo had meant to say only to her. Then Brooke asked her was she sure, could she know for sure, that the message came from Mr. Garth
in the room.
And the lady said she was surer of that than of anything else in her life. But that lady doesn’t know. That lady has no idea, like everybody else way way out of the loop, because first, everybody who knows anything knows that Milo isn’t Mr. Garth’s real name. And second, anybody who is anybody in this history knows what the real fact is about Mr. Garth, the one that was making Mrs. Lee cry on the stairs yesterday because all the badges and the T-shirts and the caps and key rings and the inscribed Easter eggs that she organized and invested thousands and thousands of pounds in will soon maybe not be worth money any more.

(No one must know, is what Mrs. Lee said yesterday when they found out. Josie Lee went to get her a Valium. What do you give an elephant who’s cracking up. Trunkquillizers. Joke. It happened yesterday morning. Brooke went in and Mrs. Lee was crying on the stairs. Brooke went all the way up the stairs. The door to the room was open. So Brooke gathered up the The fact is notes, they were all piled neatly up on the sideboard under the clean knife and fork and under them all was the paper aeroplane with the story on it that begins The fact is, like it is a kind of The fact is note! and with Brooke’s name there on the wing of it when she turned it over. She could not see, anywhere in the room, the story she did for Mr. Garth and put under the door on Friday lunchtime, about the journey through time (at the end of which Brooke has given it two endings so there is an alternative). But there did not seem to be any other bits of paper left in the room. Brooke put the ones she’d found, which were hers because she wrote them in the first place, and the plane which Mr. Garth made and wrote on, which was hers to take because it is addressed to her, inside her jumper and tucked her jumper into her belt. Then she came back down the stairs and stood behind Mrs. Lee, who was crying like anything even though she could go and stand in the real room now any time she liked. No one can see by looking, can they? is what Mrs. Lee was saying. No one can tell from the outside, can they? she said wiping her eyes, taking the glass of water and drinking it so fast that she nearly choked.)

The fact is, Anna knows. Josie knows. Mr. Palmer knows. Brooke knows. Mrs. Lee has sworn them all to secrecy but it is the kind of secret Brooke decided she could tell her parents, so Brooke’s parents know too. But if all the people outside knew, it might make them feel even more metaphorically like they can’t vote in the election. Plus, Mrs. Lee is not the only person who will lose money and maybe some people will lose their jobs because of it, like the Psychic, who has been giving out messages as usual all day yesterday and all morning today like nothing has happened, to all the people paying him, all the people queuing outside his tent with the sign on it which says Personal Messages From Inside: £30.

The fact is, the room is completely totally empty and nobody is in it!

The fact is, Mr. Garth has gone.

History Of What Brooke Bayoude Thinks About While She Runs Across Park Towards University:
Brooke is thinking about a joke about Madonna taking her babies that she has adopted from Africa to Oxford Street so they can be reunited with the clothes they made before she adopted them. It is funny, the joke, when you think about the babies shaking hands with say a cardigan with no hand in it, or a blouse giving the babies a big hug because it is so long since it saw them, but it also makes Brooke feel strange in her stomach. It is like the feeling when she reads a book like the one about the man in the park with the bomb, or thinks a sentence, just any old sentence like: the girl ran across the park, and unless you add the describing word then the man or the girl are definitely not black, they are white, though no one has mentioned white, like when you take the the out of a headline and people just assume it’s there anyway. Though if it were a sentence about Brooke herself it would have to add the equivalent describing word and that’s how you’d know. The black girl ran across the park. It is like in Harry Potter where it says about Angelina that she is a tall black girl and that’s how you know that fact. On the internet it says on one site that there is a reference to a character being black in one of the first Harry Potter books and that this was edited out of the UK copies of the book but left in the copies of the book that got sold to readers who bought it in America. But that fact might not be true, because it is only a fact on the internet.

But the fact is, I am Hermione too, Brooke thinks as she runs across the grass.

The fact is, I can be Hermione if I like. I can even be old-fashioned characters like George out of the Famous Five. I would not want so much to be the one called Anne. I can be Bobbie in the Railway Children book, though they went away from London and I have come to it, but I can still be her if I want, and work out how to stop the train accident from happening. I can be Cinderella. There is more than one tree on One-Tree Hill! The girl ran across the park. Girl Runs Across Park! The girl is Brooke Bayoude, Cleverist.
The
Brooke Bayoude. I can be Snow White if I like and duh obviously I would never be stupid enough to eat the apple, no one would. I can be Anne of Green Gables. Her hair can be the colour of mine if I like.

The fact is, in history a man went down in a kind of machine he invented called a bathysphere to see what colour it was under the sea. There was only one colour, and it was blue. The man wrote about it and he sounded like it made him be very depressed that there was only blue under there. But now they have lights they can take underwater, though before it would have been candles and obviously that would never work. Imagine walking into the sea with candles! Ha ha! But with the lights that they can take underwater nowadays the fish are all darting about in their real amazing colours, orange and yellow and cyan. Brooke Bayoude runs through the gate of the park and down the street. She is running into the past. She is on her way to the place where the man is about to lower his bathysphere into the water. She will shout, Stop! She will say, Look, I’ve brought you these. They are From The Future. Try going down with these fixed on to the front of your bathysphere and see what you will see! It will be like bringing to under the sea the light there is when you go through the railway station at St. Pancras whose roof is all made of iron and glass, and wherever you are going, even if it is nowhere, just to one of the shops to buy a sandwich, the way the blue of it comes in from above makes you look up really high at the roof and then makes you look again at everything else beneath it.

History Of Education Part 1:
Brooke runs past the Stephen Lawrence Building. It is a building named after a boy who was historically murdered. If something is in the past, can it still be in the present or not? It is a philosophical question. If you travelled to the past to make the future better, would you actually be able to? She runs past the library, which has the plaques built into the wall inside where all the people paid money to buy “beds” for old retired sailors, because a lot of the university was once where the old sailors who had served their country well at sea came to live when they were old and had no homes, if they had not actually died in wars. The plaques are not really beds, they are nothing like beds, they are just plaques, dedications, like for dead people. They says things like: Hamilton Canada bed. Lloyds Bank bed. Lloyds bank rupt! ha ha! Joke. One of them is from a man’s mother, in memory of him. It says he died in HMS Pathfinder in 1914, which was historically the first year of one of the World Wars. One plaque says this thing: “They were lovely in their lives.” It means the dead people. The dead people were lovely in their lives. She runs past the building her mother’s office is in. Her mother’s office is a room where a sailor once slept! More than one sailor, to be precise. Outside above the doors to the corridors it says, painted on the stone in the arch, things like Britannia 46 Men or Union 46 Men, which means 46 men could fit into the number of rooms there. Outside in the corridor of the philosophy department there is a little table, and someone has put some good things for playing with on it, like a plastic rabbit standing on top of a drawing of a spiral and a game called Fuzzy Philosophers where you can use a magnet pen to drag iron filings and put hair and a beard on a bare face. She passes the path you take if you’re going to the Painted Hall. In the Painted Hall there is a painting on the ceiling of a lady who is meant to stand for Africa and she is very pretty and on her head she is wearing a hat shaped like the top of an elephant’s head. Joke: a man is standing in the middle of the road. He is spreading elephant powder around. A policeman comes up to him. The policeman says: Excuse me, what do you think you are doing? The man says: I’m spreading elephant powder all over this street. The policeman says: There aren’t any elephants around here. The man says: See? You can’t beat elephant powder. She runs past the huge globes on the top of the main gate of the university. They look like they are wrapped in string, like huge balls of string. But actually the string is meant to be longitudes or latitudes, or trade routes maybe, or maybe it is trade roots, Brooke will ask.

(Mum? Brooke said. I’m really really busy, Brooksie, I’m really having to concentrate, her mother said. Her mother had her worst face on. She was doing an application about funding. What is the application you are doing about? Brooke said. Um, her mother said. It’s for a project we’re calling Tecmessa. Teck mess a, Brooke said. Uh huh, her mother said, she’s a character from tragedy. Tragic application, her father said. It’s about which you would choose, her mother said, if you had the choice of these: you can enjoy a really lovely treat yourself, but because you do someone else somewhere will have to suffer. Or: you can choose to suffer with somebody who’s also having a really difficult time, but because you do, the suffering will be easier for that other person. Okay, Brooke said, can I have some time to think about it before I have to decide? Definitely, her mother said, much better to think about it than not. How long have I got? Brooke said. Ha ha! her father laughed from the sofa, that is the question! And, mum? Brooke said. Mm hmm? her mother said with the leg of her spectacles in her mouth. Did you hear about the optician’s son? Brooke said. Which optician? her mother said. He made a spectacle of himself, Brooke said. Ha ha! her father said. Oh for God sake, her mother said. Terence, I need to work, take this child out. Brooke, I need to work, take that father out. But mum, but can I just ask this one thing? Brooke said.
What?
her mother said. What’s a slave clock? Brooke said. Her mother sat up. Then she sank back into her chair. A slave clock, she said. The Shepherd Galvano-Magnetic clock is apparently a slave clock, Brooke said, but what I want to know is, what exactly is a slave clock? Oh, her mother said, a slave clock, well—. And what I also want to know is, if something is in the past, Brooke said, can it still in any way be happening now? Is the past present in the present, her father said, and is the past present in the future, good questions, Brooke. They’re philosophical questions, her mother said. Are they? Brooke said. Is a rose red in the dark? her father said. If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody there to hear or see, does the bear excrete in the woods and is the Pope a National Socialist? Oh God, her mother said. Now, don’t go bringing God into it too, her father said, cause then we’re really into a whole other World Cup match.)

History Of Religion:
Brooke waits at the lights and then crosses to St. Alfege’s, which is said out loud like St. Alfie’s, regardless of how it looks when it is written down. Philosophy is actually quite easy. She will perhaps study it when she is at university, if she does not become a person who sings in musicals like on Over the Rainbow on Saturdays on BBC1. She runs round to the front of the church. The door is open. The church is empty. Inside she looks up, like she always does, at the painted wooden unicorn rearing his front legs. Unicorns are imaginary. She looks at the picture of General Wolfe in the window. He was something in a war. Then she goes to the table with the historic photocopy on it of the Viking axe head which was once found in the Thames and is from the 11th century, and is now in the British Museum. That makes the British Museum kind of like a sort of river too, full of things that have been found like that in, say, real rivers. The axe head is supposed to be like the one—in fact it might even, it is actually possible, be
the
one—which a kind man who had been baptized by St. Alfege used to kill St. Alfege after a Viking brained him with the head of an ox and pretty much killed him, just not outright. So the kind man hit him in the head with his axe.
Moved by piety to an impious deed
is what it says on the bit of paper under the photo of the axe. The axe blade looks really blunt and rusty. What happened was: Alfege was a man who decided he didn’t want any wordly possessions so he went into a monastery in the 11th century. But the monastery was too full of wordly possessions so then he became an anchorite in a bath, or maybe in Bath. Whichever, so many people came to ask him things, because he was so religious, that he stopped being an anchorite and founded a monastery of his own, and once on his way to somewhere in Italy he was attacked by robbers but the robbers while they were attacking him heard that their village was burning to the ground, and it only stopped burning when they stopped attacking Alfege. Then he was Archbishop of Canterbury (like the author Samuel Beckett who was stabbed to death on the altar) and he converted a lot of Danes. Some of the Danes he didn’t convert took him to Greenwich as their prisoner and they put his feet in irons, the historic kind not the clothes kind, and locked him in a cell full of frogs which was apparently geographically right here where this church is now. The story goes that he conversed with the frogs and the frogs spoke back to him miraculously as if they were all old friends. And even though he could miraculously communicate with frogs and even though he could miraculously burn down places and also miraculously cure a lot of bad stomach problems the Danes had, the Danes still wouldn’t let him free unless someone paid them a lot of money, and no one, not even one of the people who had come to speak to him for advice when he was an anchorite or anything, would pay his ransom for him, so one night the Danes were having a feast and they started for entertainment just throwing the bones they were eating at him, 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? But that is just a lot of rubbish because dead people can’t feel or believe anything. They are just dead, like the old lady, in the ground, or some are ashes if they have been cremated. Brooke leaves the church, past all the stones with the dead people under them in the ground not having to believe or feel. She will bring the pencil back when she is finished using it. She walks past Straightsmouth, then stops. Would it be best to start writing the History Moleskine here or down nearer the River Thames? Which would be the better historic place? The pencil says on it This pencil is made from recycled CD cases NMM London 2007. It was made when she was still only seven and still went to school in Harrogate, not here.