A.L. KENNEDY has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards, including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in London and is a part-time lecturer in creative writing at the University of Warwick. @Writerer a-l-kennedy.co.uk
Also by A.L. Kennedy
Looking for the Possible Dance
So I Am Glad
Everything You Need
Paradise
Day
The Blue Book
Doctor Who: The Drosten’s Curse
Serious Sweet
Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains
Now That You’re Back
Tea and Biscuits
Original Bliss
Indelible Acts
What Becomes
All the Rage
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
On Bullfighting
On Writing
Uncle Shawn and Bill and the Almost Entirely Unplanned Adventure
Uncle Shawn and Bill and Pajimminy-Crimminy Unusual Adventure
The paperback edition published in 2019 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
First published in Germany in 2016 by Karl Rauch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Düsseldorf
canongate.co.uk
Copyright © A.L. Kennedy, 2016
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 387 1
eISBN 978 1 78689 388 8
For V.D.B
Contents
This is almost, but not quite, the whole of the story about a remarkable, wise little girl. She was called Mary. Everything I will tell you here began when Mary went walking in her garden on one particular afternoon.
Mary was a little bit taller than the other girls her age and had brownish crinkly hair. She was quite thin, because she didn’t always have exactly enough to eat. She liked honey and whistling and the colour blue and finding out.
She lived in a city filled with very many different kinds of people. Its very many different kinds of people made it a very wonderful place, full of interesting songs and stories, foods and clothes and conversations. Nevertheless, the people in charge of the city were not overly fond of people and so some of the apartments in which the very many different kinds of people lived were often dry where they should have been wet, or wet where they should have been dry, or just cold and dark and supplied with especially listless electricity. In order to enjoy the sky, which was free to them and as large as can be, the people in the wet and dry houses would fly kites from their roofs. Some looked like birds of paradise, some looked like fish and some looked like wonderful serpents.
Other houses – like the ones owned by the people who ran the city – were luxurious and stretched into the sky with great towers much higher than the kites. These apartments contained beautiful pools to swim in, or to keep fish, or perhaps vast tanks containing large reptiles like crocodiles and blue iguanas. And they had larders as big as living-rooms and living-rooms as big as meadows and probably meadows in their basements that were as big as small counties with jewelled rollercoasters and golf courses made of cake.
Mary knew about all this. She knew about all kinds of things and was very clever. Standing in her garden – which was on a rooftop and a bit bigger than a big tablecloth – she could look one way and see the very many sad, tiny houses of the squashed-in people. If she looked the other way, she could see the tall, sparkling buildings full of crocodiles and meadows. The building where she lived was only a little bit squashed. And its pipes only leaked on Mondays and Wednesdays and at weekends, and when they did her mother would put metal basins under the drips and the metal would ring like small bells – or maybe more exactly like small, wet bells – when the water hit them.
Mary’s flat was just the right size for her mother and her father and herself – which was all there was. Sometimes she wanted a little brother or sister to play with, but then she would remember that a little sister might get jealous of her cleverness, or be interested in ballet dancing which would be noisy, or woodcarving which would be messy. Mary was sleeping in a bedroom that was supposed to be a store cupboard and if she had to share it with a sister then it would seem crowded. And maybe her new sister would snore, or have very long and pokey feet.
A little brother might eventually grow up and stop lying in his baby crib wriggling his fingers and might want to run about – and their garden was too small for running about. The people who were in charge of the city and who didn’t very much like people hadn’t made many parks for children to play in, or for adults to sit down in and eat ice cream and tell each other how wonderful their children were (or how terrible their children were, depending). Mary thought the people who ran the city probably weren’t interested in parks, because they could enjoy their own waterfalls and perhaps swim with their own crocodiles and make treehouses and swings in the thick rooftop forests she could see if she stared very hard all the way from her garden up to the shining towers.
People who came to visit the city would talk about it in the way that adults do in front of children, saying just what came into their heads and imagining that someone as small as Mary would not be able to understand them, or pay attention. They would
