The fact is, every tree that ever lived or lives has a history just like that tree has. It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.
The fact is, history is actually all sorts of things nobody knows about.
(One evening about suppertime Brooke was worrying about what would happen if the walls and the roof just fell in, the ceiling just collapsed on top of you. Instead of worrying, she took the book down off the shelf, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. It was about Greenwich and the man blowing himself up in the park! Then Brooke found this thing: from p63 to p245 in this particular book there were pencil circles round certain words. Ostentatious. Transcendental. Ergo. Maculated. Physiognomy. Propensity. Pensively. Finessing. Brooke went through to the kitchen. Why did you put circles round some of the words and why did you choose these particular words to do it to? she asked her father. Her father was doing something with a packet. What words? he said. Brooke held the book up open at page 63. Her father put the spoon and packet down and flicked through the book. Interesting, he said. He looked inside the front of the book and showed Brooke where someone had written in pencil the price £2.50. Yep, he said, it’s second hand. Second hand! this was funny. First: because of the clocks and watches at the Observatory in the museum which have second hands, and second: in a sort of weird way because of the man with the hand that exploded off his arm. First hand. Second hand. It’ll be whoever owned that book before us, he’ll have done it, her father said. Yes, but it could have been a girl or a woman who owned the book before us, Brooke said. Very true, her father said. Which do you think it was? Brooke asked. I don’t know, her father said, there’s no way of knowing. There must be a way of knowing, Brooke said. She did a little dance leaning on the table. Her father gave her back the book. He began reading the side of the packet, which was something to do with rice. Unprecedented. Intimated. Brooke went back through to the front and sat on the rug and made a list on a piece of paper of all the words with pencil rings round them. Pristine. Unscrupulous. Then she went back through to the kitchen. What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don’t know, Brooksie, he said, I don’t remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you’d decided to buy it. But dad, why do you think a person who first owned this book would have circled these exact words? she said. Her father was holding a saucepan under the tap but not turning the tap on. Hard to say, he said. Augment, Brooke said. She flicked further through the book to find another one. Emulation, she said. They’re easy to say. Her father laughed. No, I didn’t mean it literally, he said, I meant it’s hard to say why he, or she, did it. Ah, Brooke said. Maybe the person was circling the words he or she didn’t understand or know the meaning of, her father said. Yip yep, Brooke said, that is a possibility. She went back through to the front room. She climbed up on to the sofa, balanced on her knees on its high back and reached down the big dictionary. Expedient: suitable or appropriate. Coruscation: glittering, a sudden flash of light. Augment: to increase, make larger. She knew already what lucid meant. Then she looked at the list of words on the page to see if the person who had circled them was maybe making a code out of, say, their first letters, because the book after all was about spies and spying, at least this is what it said in the writing on the back cover that it was about. Tempppf. Or maybe the code was hidden in their last letters. Lodyyyyg. That one looked a bit like the language called Welsh.
But the fact was, in reality, it was a mystery as to what had happened with this book and why. It was something Brooke would simply never know and she simply had to settle for that fact, her mother told her a couple of nights later when she was in bed and thrashing about and pulling up all the covers, and couldn’t sleep at all for the very much wanting to know. It was her third night of not getting to sleep because of it. It was nearly 2am. Count backwards from five hundred, her mother said. Count sheep. But it wasn’t that kind of a not-sleeping night. It was a different kind of not-sleeping from the kind where all the dead people from history line up instead of sheep, looking with sad long faces and queuing for miles and miles at a gate too high for them to jump over, so many there’s no way you could count them. Queuing for Miles! it would have been good if all these people went and queued outside Mr. Garth’s window and not at the end of Brooke’s bed! all the people who died in Haiti when their houses fell on them, just collapsed out of nowhere, and all the people who died in the tsunami, who got swept away, children as well, and the people whose aeroplane crashed into the sea, and the boy who was ten who was executed because he stole a loaf of bread because he was hungry, and the boy who was stabbed to death outside a school just because he was black, and the girl whose body was dug up in a back garden who had been murdered by the man, and all the people killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Darfur and Sudan, and they were just the ones at the front of all the people who had died when they weren’t meant to in all the other historic wars, and even the children who had died because they were being made to work in factories or clean chimneys in Victorian times or who were executed to death for things like stealing less than fourteen pence. You don’t need to say executed to death, her mother said then, because to death is implied in executed. Her mother was getting impatient. But the Secret Agent awakeness about the words was a much more annoying kind of awakeness. There was no one to say sorry to in the Secret Agent awakeness. The person who somebody should be saying sorry to was Brooke! for making her not be able to know what the answer to why the words were chosen was! Brooke had to decide, her mother was saying now, again, that if she wanted to read that book and not be annoyed by the not-knowing, she would either just have to persuade herself, right now, to put up with the not-knowing, or she would have to make the active decision to rub out the circles that made the words stand out for whatever their unknowable reason was, and then she’d be able to read the book without it annoying her. Brooke put her head under the pillow. It defeats the purpose, she said under there. She wondered if her mother could hear what she’d said from under the pillow. Her mother was saying something. Brooke couldn’t hear properly. She took the pillow off her head again. My special eraser from the office tomorrow, her mother was saying, the really good one, will that do? Thank you, Brooke said. It will have to do. Her mother kissed her goodnight and switched off the light and drew the door over. But inside Brooke’s head what she thought as she closed her eyes knowing she would not sleep, was: it will not do. She opened her eyes and saw the ceiling above her.)