Free There but for The by Ali Smith Page B

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,