by Ali Smith
Who says? Why must it? her mother says.
AUGH, George says too loud.
Don’t, her mother says jerking her head towards the back. Unless you want him awake, in which case you’re in charge of entertainment.
I. Can’t. Answer. Your. Moral. Question. Unless. I. Know. More. Details, George says sotto voce, which, in Italian, though George doesn’t speak Italian, literally means below the voice.
Does morality need details? her mother whispers back.
God, George says.
Does morality need God? her mother says.
Talking to you, George says still below the voice, is like talking to a wall.
Oh, very good, you, very good, her mother says.
How exactly is that good? George says.
Because this particular art, artist and conundrum are all about walls, her mother says. And that’s where I’m driving you to.
Yeah, George says. Up the wall.
Her mother laughs a real out-loud laugh, so loud that after it they both turn to see if Henry will waken, but he doesn’t. This kind of laugh from her mother is so rare right now that it is almost like normal. George is so pleased she feels herself blush with it.
And what you just said is grammatically incorrect, she says.
It is not, her mother says.
It is, George says. Grammar is a finite set of rules and you just broke one.
I don’t subscribe to that belief, her mother says.
I don’t think you can call language a belief, George says.
I subscribe to the belief, her mother says, that language is a living growing changing organism.
I don’t think that belief will get you into heaven, George says.
Her mother laughs for real again.
No, listen, an organism, her mother says –
(and through George’s head flashes the cover of the old paperback called How To Achieve Good Orgasm that her mother keeps in one of her bedside cupboards, from way before George was born, from the time in her mother’s life when she was, she says, young and easy under some appleboughs)
– which follows its own rules and alters them as it likes and the meaning of what I said is perfectly clear therefore its grammar is perfectly acceptable, her mother says.
(How To Achieve Good Organism.)
Well. Grammatically inelegant then, George says.
I bet you don’t even remember what it was I said in the first place, her mother says.
Where I’m driving you to, George says.
Her mother takes both hands off the wheel in mock despair.
How did I, the most maxima unpedantic of all the maxima unpedantic women in the world, end up giving birth to such a pedant? And why the hell wasn’t I smart enough to drown it at birth?
Is that the moral conundrum? George says.
Consider it, for a moment, yes, why don’t you, her mother says.
No she doesn’t.
Her mother doesn’t say.
Her mother said.
Because if things really did happen simultaneously it’d be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of the text have been overprinted, like each page is actually two pages but with one superimposed on the other to make it unreadable. Because it’s New Year not May, and it’s England not Italy, and it’s pouring with rain outside and regardless of the hum (the hummin’) of the rain you can still hear people’s stupid New Year fireworks going off and off and off like a small war, because people are standing out in the pouring rain, rain pelting into their champagne glasses, their upturned faces watching their own (sadly) inadequate fireworks light up then go black.
George’s room is in the loft bit of the house and since they had the roof redone last summer it’s had a leak in it at the slant at the far end. A little runnel of water comes in every time it rains, it’s coming in right now, happy New Year George! Happy New Year to you too, rain, and running in a beaded line straight down the place where the plaster meets the plasterboard then dripping down on to the books piled on top of the bookcase. Over the weeks since it’s been happening the posters have started to peel off it because the Blu-tack won’t hold to some of the wall. Under them a light brown set of stains, like the map of a tree-root network, or a set of country lanes, or a thousand-times magnified mould, or the veins that get visible in the whites of your eyes when you’re tired – no, not like any of these things, because thinking these things is just a stupid game. Damp is coming in and staining the wall and that’s all there is to it.
George hasn’t said anything about it to her father. The roofbeams will rot and then the roof will fall in. She wakes up with a bad chest and congestion in her nose whenever it’s rained, but when the roof collapses inwards all the not being able to breathe will have been worth it.
Her father never comes into her room. He has no idea it is happening. With any luck he won’t find out until it’s too late.
It is already too late.
The perfect irony of it is that right now her father has a job with a roofing company. His job involves going into people’s houses with a tiny rotating camera that’s got a light attached to it which he fastens to the end of the rods more usually used to sweep chimneys. He connects the camera to the portable screen and pushes it all the way up inside the chimney. Then anyone who wants to know, and has £120 to spare, can see what the inside of his or her chimney looks like. If the person who wants to know has an extra £150, her father can provide a recorded file of the visuals so he or she can look at the inside of the chimney owned by him or her any time he or she chooses.
They. Everybody else says they. Why shouldn’t George?
Any time they choose.
Anyway George’s room, given time, enough bad weather and the right inattention, will open to the sky, to all this rain, the amount of which people on TV keep calling biblical. The TV news has been about all the flooded places up and down the country every night now since way before Christmas (though there has been no flooding here, her father says, because the medieval drainage system is still as good as it always was in this city). Her room will be stained with the grey grease and dregs of the dirt the rain has absorbed and carries, the dirt the air absorbs every day just from the fact of life on earth. Everything in this room will rot. She will have the pleasure of watching it happen. The floorboards will curl up at their ends, bend, split open at the nailed places and pull loose from their glue.
She will lie in bed with all the covers thrown off and the stars will be directly above her, nothing between her and their long-ago burnt-out eyes.
George (to her father) : Do you think, when we die, that we still have memories?
George’s father (to George) : No.
George (to Mrs Rock, the school counsellor) : (exact same question).
Mrs Rock (to George) : Do you think we’ll need memories, after we die?
Oh very clever, very clever, they think they’re so clever always answering questions with questions. Though generally Mrs Rock is really nice. Mrs Rock is a rock, as the teachers at the school keep saying, like they think they’re the first persons ever to have said it, when they suggest to George that she should be seeing Mrs Rock, she’s a rock you know, which they say after they clear their throats and ask how George is doing, then say again after they hear that George is already seeing her and has managed to swap PE double period every week for a series of Rock sessions. Rock sessions! They laugh at George’s joke then they look embarrassed, because they’ve laughed when they were supposed to be being attentive and mournful-looking, and can George really even have made a joke, is that done, since she’s supposed to be feeling so sad and everything?
How are you feeling? Mrs Rock said.
I’m okay, George said. I think it’s because I don’t think I am.
You’re okay because you don’t think you’re okay? Mrs Rock said.
Feeling, George said. I think I’m okay because I don’t think I’m feeling.
You don’t think you’re feeling? Mrs Rock said.
If you’re feeling, it’s at a distance? Mrs Rock said.
Like always having the sound of someone drilling a hole in a wall, not your wall, but a wall like very close to you, George said. Like, say you wake up one morning to the noise of someone along the road having work done on his or her house and you don’t just hear the drilling happening, you feel it in your own house, though it’s actually happening several houses away.
Is it? Mrs Rock said.
Which? George said.
Um, Mrs Rock said.
In any case, in both cases, the answer is yes, George said. It’s at a distance and it’s like the drilling thing. Anyway I don’t care any more about syntax. So I’m sorry I troubled you with that last which.
Mrs Rock looked really confused.
She wrote something down on her notepad. George watched her do it. Mrs Rock looked back up at George. George shrugged and closed her eyes.
Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock’s self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there’s an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can the world be this vulgar?
How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?
She didn’t say it out loud, though, because there wasn’t a point.
It isn’t about saying.
It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.
It is last August. Her mother is at the dining-room table reading out loud off the internet.
Meteor watchers are in luck tonight, her mother is saying. With clear skies predicted for the Perseid shower for much of the UK, up to sixty shooting stars an hour should be visible between late Monday evening and early Tuesday morning.
Sixty shooting stars! Henry says.
He runs round and round the table really fast making an eeeee noise as he goes.
Sky News weather presenter Sarah Pennock, her mother says, said showers will fade during the night giving many people a chance to see the astronomical spectacle.
Then her mother laughs.
Sky news! her mother says.
Henry. Headache. Enough, her father says.
He catches Henry, lifts him up and turns him upside down.
Eeeeeeeeeeee, Henry says. I am a star, I am shooting, and turning me upside down will not stop meeeeeeee.
It’s just pollution, George says.
You won’t say that when you see them shooting so beautiful over your head, her mother says.
Fully, George says.
Every meteor is a speck of comet dust vaporizing as it enters our atmosphere at thirty six miles per second, her mother reads.
That’s not very fast, Henry says still upside down from beneath his jumper which has upended and fallen over his face. Cars go at thirty.
Per second, not per hour, George says.
One hundred and forty thousand miles an hour, her mother reads.
Remarkably slow really, Henry says.
He starts singing words.
Cars and stars, cars and stars.
It’s exciting, her mother says.
Really cold tonight, George says.
Don’t be so boring, George, her mother says.
Ia, George says because this conversation takes place when she has started insisting that her mother and father, when they use her name, call her her full name.
Her mother snorts a laugh.
What? George says.
It’s just that when you say that, well. It sounds like you’re saying something funny from my youth, her mother says. It’s how we used to do caricatures of the rich kids. D’you remember, Nathan?
No, her father says.
Yah, George, yah, her mother says pretending to be a posh girl from the past.
George can choose react or ignore. She chooses ignore.
We wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway, she says. There’ll be too much local light.
We’ll put all the lights off, her mother says.
I don’t mean our lights. I mean all the lights of the whole of Cambridge, George says.
We’ll put all those lights off too, her mother says. Brightest around midnight. Right. I know. We can all get in the car and drive out of town to the back of Fulbourn and watch them from there, Nathan, what do you think?
Up at six, Carol, her father says.
Good, okay, her mother says. You stay at home with Henry, and me and George, I mean George yah, will go.
Georgia and I, George says. And I’m not going.
That makes three of you George yahs not going, her mother says. Okay. All three of you plus your father can stay at home with Henry and I’ll go myself. Nathan, his face is going very red, put him down.
No because I want to see the sixty stars, Henry says still upside down. I want to see them more than anyone else in this actual room.
It says here there might even be fireballs, her mother says.
I want to see fireballs a lot actually, Henry says.
It’s just pollution. And satellites, George says. There’s no point.
Miss Moan, her father says shaking Henry in the air.
Ms Moan, her mother says.
Pardon my world-stopping act of political incorrectness, her father says.
He says it gently and means it both funnily and nastily.
I prefer Miss, George says. Till I’m, you know, Doctor Moan.
Too young to know the political importance of choosing to be called Ms anything, her mother says.
She could be saying this to George or her father. Her father is ten years younger than her mother which means, her mother likes to say, that they have been formed by very different political upbringings, the main difference being a childhood under Thatcher versus a late adolescence under Thatcher.
(Thatcher was a prime minister some time after Churchill and long before George was born who, according to one of her mother’s most successful Subverts, gave birth to a baby Blair, someone George actually remembers being prime minister from when she was small, him in a nappy and so on but standing fully-formed and otherwise naked on a shell (not the beach kind, the missile kind) with Thatcher all puffed-out cheeks blowing his hair about and baby Blair with one hand over his crotch and the other coy at his chest and the caption underneath : The Birth of Vain Us. That Subvert, George remembers, was everywhere. It was funny seeing it in all the papers and online and knowing and not being able to tell anyone that it was her mother who’d pressed the button that sent it out into the world.)
What the age difference between her parents means in real terms though is that they’ve split up twice, though twice so far got back together again.
And I suppose the days of you being at least gracious to me about feminism are long gone, but I won’t complain, since it won’t make any difference and since the history of feminism teaches one never to expect graciousness anyway, and when you’re putting that child down, try not to put him down too hard on his head or you’ll break his neck, her mother says without looking up from the screen. And George. Or whatever your name is. If you miss seeing this with me you’ll regret it for the rest of your days.
I won’t, George says.
Not says. Said.
There was an obituary in the Independent, because although George’s mother wasn’t famous like people who get obituaries usually are, and although she didn’t have tenure any more, she still had a quite important job at a think-tank and occasionally published opinion pieces in the Guardian or the Telegraph and sometimes also the American papers in their European editions, and a lot more people knew who she was after it was unveiled in the papers about the guerrilla internet
stuff. Dr Carol Martineau Economist Journalist Internet Guerrilla Interventionist 19 November 1962–10 September 2013 aged 50 years. It says, in the first paragraph, renaissance woman. It says childhood Scottish Cairngorms education Edinburgh Bristol London. It says articles and talks ideology pay ratios pay differentials literal ideological consequences spread of UK poverty. It says thesis backed by IMF recognition inequality and slowdown in growth and stability. It mentions her particular bugbear, chief executive interests workforce kept low-waged. It says discovery three years ago Martineau one of the anonymous influential satire Subverts online art movement thousands supporters imitators.
It says tragic unsuspected allergic reaction standard antibiotic.
The last thing it says is is survived by. That means dead. Husband Nathan Cook and their two children.
It all means dead.
It all means George’s mother has disappeared off, or rather into, the face of the earth.
Every day before work George’s mother, when she was alive (because she can’t exactly do it now being, you know, dead), used to do a keep-fit set of stretches and exercises. At the end of this she would always do a dance round the living room for the length of a song on a playlist on her phone.
She’d started doing this a couple of years ago. Every day she put up with everybody laughing at her doing her moves among the furniture, her headphones bigger than her ears.
Every single day, George has decided, from its first day onwards for this first year in which her mother won’t be alive, she will not just wear something black somewhere on her person but she will do the sixties dance for her in her honour. This is only problematic in that George will have to listen to songs while she does it, and that listening to songs is one of the things she can no longer do without inducing a kind of sadness that actually hurts in the chest.
George’s mother’s phone is one of the things that went missing in the panic and aftermath. It hasn’t turned up, though the house is still full of all her other things exactly where she left them. She will have had her phone with her. It went missing between the railway station and the hospital. Its number has been stopped, presumably by her father. If you ring it now the message you get is the recorded voice telling you this number is currently not in use.