First Person and Other Stories by Ali Smith

know what it is, it’s A Tisket, A Tasket, I Lost My Yellow Basket. And you can’t help it, you lean forward over the piano to speak to the man and you say, did you know that this song was a huge hit for Ella Fitzgerald a mere year before BillieHoliday sang ‘Strange Fruit’? And if you put the two songs together and compare them you get a real picture of race politics and what was acceptable and what was true from that particular time in recent history? Think about it, you say to the man. They’re both all about colour, but one’s about what’s really happening in the world, and the other’s a piece of absurdist nonsense, like a denial that words could ever mean anything, about a girl who loses a yellow basket and doesn’t know where she’ll find it. And guess which one was the huge hit-parade hit and stayed at number one for seventeen weeks?
    So I’m a know-all, I say. Right. I see.
    And the man smiles at you and keeps playing, you say, and then someone else on another piano joins in behind him in a harmony, and then another person on one of the others, until the whole room is a mess of joyful piano harmony, and you go on into the next room where the violins and so on are for sale, you can still hear the pianos in the background, and then three rather beautiful girls on fiddles pick up the tune too, and it’s romantic, the song has turned into a very romantic version of itself. And you tell the girls as you go past, did you know that there’s actually a much less famous follow-up song where Ella Fitzgerald finds her yellow basket again afterall? It’s almost better than the original, well, I prefer it, though it wasn’t such a huge hit at the time. And the pretty violinists nod and smile, and, as if to oblige you, all around you the tune everybody’s suddenly playing is the follow-up tune, the tune you just mentioned, and now the whole shop is resounding with it, the horn department full of people playing trumpets and saxes and clarinets which flash in the lights from the shop ceiling and the noise they make, complementing the pianos and the strings, is as wide as a sky. The trumpet player at the front winks at you and there’s a girl on the sax who winks too. Then you go into the next room and the next room is full of children on kazoos, ocarinas, recorders, glockenspiels, chime bars, castanets, they’re all joining in, playing the same tune, in fact anywhere, everywhere you go, up or down the stairs, from department to department people are playing the same happy tune on every single instrument in this shop, it’s like the whole shop is alive, its walls are moving to the rhythm, and the tune builds and builds, only threatening to come to an end, only fading down, as you walk towards the shop door and reach your hand out to open it. Down, down, down goes the tune, but then, just to see what will happen, you let the door-handle go and you take three steps backfrom the door, and like a joke the music soars out really loud again. And then, on the right rhythm, the perfect final three notes, you open the door, go through the door, shut the door, and the whole thing ends on the single ping of the bell as you close it behind you.
    There, you say. That’s what you’re like.
     
    I am on my feet now. I am furious.
    So, I say. So I’m a naïve know-all boring unbearable self-dramatist who goes around the world thinking I’m really special, really something, really it? And wherever I go I take it for granted that everything in the whole world is nothing but a cutesy orchestra there to perform for me? Just to please me? As if the whole world can be controlled? As if the whole world’s there just to play my own private soundtrack?
    You know I didn’t mean it like that, you say.
    You look cowed. I feel suddenly very righteous.
    And you think I’m the kind of person who’d maunder on, in a situation where it was totally inappropriate, about how one song is really more important than another song because of