Free There but for The by Ali Smith

hundreds of years ago, she was young and beautiful, pale and thin from having been ill, in fact she was convalescing after a lengthy illness, an illness that had at one point been bad enough to endanger her life, and she was enjoying the first real spurt of energy she’d had for months, had been out hunting, had come back flushed and happy and very much wanting to dance. So the hall had filled with courtiers and musicians and she’d dressed up; she looked, the writer said, like a great tulip as she bowed and turned, but her secretary, Cecil, pushed through the ranks of the dancers all round her, he had urgent news, and he told the Queen of England in her ear that her cousin, the Queen of Scotland, had given birth to a son. The Virgin Queen paled with shock, then flushed with shock; she stopped dancing; stood rigid. Then she, who was usually so controlled, so imperious, who was world-renowned for her imperturbability, turned and ran from the hall and all her panicked ladies-in-waiting followed bewildered in a great rush, their dance finery rustling as they ran, and when they reached her private rooms they found her collapsed and sobbing in a chair. “The Queen of Scotland is a mother of a fair son, and I am but a barren stock” cause that’s all girls are good for ain’t it birth / Gawd knows they haven’t any other worth but the point of this story, Faye, is: the next day regardless she was fine again, unruffled, greeting statesmen, doing her queenly political deals much the same as ever, because even when she met her worst fears, even when she met her demons, she was what you’d call a survivor, that old Queen. Out of sheer strength of character she survived, didn’t she, the vicissitudes of history.
    There.
    That’d annoy her.
    It did.
    Silence.
    Mark heard birdsong, could hear birdsong for several whole seconds, could hear the murmur of the people queuing up behind him at the meridian line, could even make out some of the things they were saying, before she roared back into his right ear with something of the force of a wind tunnel nearly knocking him off balance just wait you little bastard history / that made a fucking dunghill out of me / is waiting round the corner just for you / to turn you into tulip fodder too.
    Silence of the grave my arse, he said out loud.
    The couple with the small child, who had been standing quite close to him and had smiled genially at him when he arrived, picked up their child and backed away. They stopped and put down the child further along the railing.
    He was still waiting to see if there’d be any comment from her about his my arse.
    No.
    Nothing.
    Fine, he thought.
    He felt the usual: bullish, and a little disappointed. Me and my shadow. He stuck his finger in his ear and waggled it about to try and shift the wind tunnel effect. It was frustrating. Jonathan, gone for more than five years now, never said a word to Mark. It was only and always Faye. These days it was like being assaulted by a bag lady, an old tramp in a torn coat that’s come through fifty wars, who shouts like she long ago lost her hearing.
    This is going to sound weird but does she ever “speak” to you in any way? he’d texted David when mobiles were new and exciting, in a flurry which had simulated, for a little while, regular contact. David, with the annoying casual savvy of the younger sibling, had texted a whole long message back in roughly the same time it had taken Mark to remember which button to press to make a space between the words this and is. Evn f she did i woulnt answr blve me lfs so much bttr without it U R INSANE mark well spos ive knwn *that * snce I sw u that brkfst tm whn i ws 7 & u wr 12 & u apolgizd 2 th *toast * cz u hd chsn *cornflkes* ! ;-) David would never be so uncool as to use a semicolon properly in a text, or an apostrophe. Mark missed David. They weren’t much in touch now because David’s wife didn’t like Mark. This was because Mark had taken her side when she’d