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Ali Smith

There But For The

for Jackie Kay

for Sarah Pickstone

for Sarah Wood

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS

I’m indebted for sources of some of the stories about songs in this book to America’s Songs by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser (Routledge, 2006). I’m also indebted for information used in the first section to Caroline Moorehead’s Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Chatto and Windus, 2005).

Thank you, Cherry. Thank you, Lucy.

Thank you, Xandra, and thank you, Becky.

Thank you, Sarah and Laurie.

Thank you, Mary.

Thank you, Kasia.

Thank you, Andrew, and thank you, Tracy, and everybody at Wylie’s.

Thank you, Simon.

Very special thanks to Kate Thomson.

Thank you, Jackie.

Thank you, Sarah.

THERE BUT FOR THE

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.

— George Orwell

For only he who lives his life as a mystery is truly alive.

— Stefan Zweig

I hate mystery.

— Katherine Mansfield

Of longitudes, what other way have we,

But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?

— John Donne

Every wink of an eye some new grace will be born.

— William Shakespeare

~ ~ ~

The fact is, imagine a man sitting on an exercise bike in a spare room.

He’s a pretty ordinary man except that across his eyes and also across his mouth it looks like he’s wearing letterbox flaps. Look closer and his eyes and mouth are both separately covered by little grey rectangles. They’re like the censorship strips that newspapers and magazines would put across people’s eyes in the old days before they could digitally fuzz up or pixellate a face to block the identity of the person whose face it is.

Sometimes these strips, or bars, or boxes, would also be put across parts of the body which people weren’t supposed to see, as a protective measure for the viewing public. Mostly they were supposed to protect the identity of the person in the picture from being ascertained. But really what they did was make a picture look like something underhand, or seedy, or dodgy, or worse, had happened; they were like a proof of something unspeakable.

When this man on the bike moves his head the little bars move with him like the blinkers on a horse move when the horse moves its head.

Standing next to the sitting man so that their heads are level is a small boy. The boy is working at the grey bar over the man’s eyes with a dinner knife.

Ow, the man says.

Doing my best, the boy says.

He is about ten years old. His fringe is long, he is quite long-haired. He is wearing flared jeans embroidered in yellow and purple at the waistband and a blue and red T-shirt with a Snoopy on the front. He forces the thing off the man’s eyes so that it flicks off and up into the air almost comically and hits the floor with a metallic clatter.