by Ali Smith
Her father’d come out to put stuff in the bins. George was in the pergola with no jacket on. He walked up the garden. She turned the screen towards him. As he got closer he slowed down.
Jesus, George, he said. What are you doing?
I wanted to ask mum about it, George said. I meant to. I was going to. Now I can’t.
She explained to her father that she had formerly watched, and intended again to watch, this film of this girl every day to remind herself not to forget the thing that had happened to this person.
But George, her father said.
She told him she was doing it in witness, by extension, of all the unfair and wrong things that happen to people all the time.
George, it’s good of you, her father said. I applaud the sentiment.
It’s not just sentiment, George said.
Honestly George, when I saw you out here watching something I was cheered, he said. I thought, good, Georgie’s back, she’s watching something on the iPad, she’s interested in things again. I was pleased. But sweet heart. It’s appalling, that stuff. You can’t watch that. And you have to remember, it’s not really meant for you. And I can’t even look at it. And anyway. That girl. I mean. It probably happened years ago.
That’s no reason not to do what I’m doing, George said.
She was probably very well paid for it, her father said.
George’s eyes widened. She snorted.
I can’t believe you just said that, she said. I can’t believe I’m even related to you.
And sex isn’t like that. Loving sex. Real sex. Sex between people who love each other, her father said.
Do you really think I’m that much of a moron? George said.
And you’ll drive yourself mad if you keep watching stuff like that, her father said. You’ll do damage to yourself.
Damage has already happened, George said.
George, her father said.
This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can just watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it before clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl. Do you still not understand?
She held the screen up. Her father put the flat of his hand over his eyes.
Yes, but George, her father said. You watching it, whichever way you think you’re watching it or intend to see it, won’t make any real difference to that girl. It just means the number of people watching the film with her in it will keep going up. And anyway, you can’t be sure of, you can never know. There are circumstances –
I’ve got eyes, George said.
Well, okay, well, what about Henry? her father said. What if he saw?
Why d’you think I’m out here in the cold? He won’t. Not because of me anyway. I mean, obviously he’ll have to do his own seeing in his own time, George said. And anyway. You watch stuff like this. I know you do. Everyone watches it.
Oh dear God, her father said. I can’t believe what you just said.
He’d turned his back because the film was still facing him and was still playing. With his back to her he started to complain. Other people’s children, lucky other people, normal children with normal neuroses like always having to have the same spoon to eat with or just not eating at all or throwing up, cutting themselves, whatever.
He was sort-of joking and sort-of not.
George sat back. She clicked the pause button. She waited till her father had left the garden.
She sat with her father that night watching Newsnight, the kind of programme on which massacres and injustices happened every day – if they made the news – then disappeared into old news, just weren’t news any more. Her mother was dead. Her father was asleep. He was extremely tired. He was sleeping a lot. It was because of the mourning. When he woke up he switched the channel over without even looking at George to UK Border Force on the channel called Pick.
Who’d ever have believed it? George’s mother says.
It is a year before she dies. George and her parents are watching rubbish on TV before going to bed, flicking channels before giving in and putting it off.
Who’d ever have believed, she says, when I was growing up, that one day we’d be watching programmes about people being checked and failed at passport controls? When did this become light entertainment?
Six months before she dies and shortly before she gets depressive about her friendship fizzling out with that woman Lisa Goliard, George’s mother comes into the living room. It is a Sunday evening. George is watching a programme about the Flying Scotsman, a train from the past, on TV. But because George came in halfway through this programme and missed the beginning, and because it is an interesting programme, she is simultaneously watching it from the start on catch-up on her laptop.
On one screen the train has just broken the hundred-mile-an-hour record. On the other screen the train has just been superseded by cars. At the same time George is looking up photobombs on her phone. There are some very brilliant and funny ones. There are some you can’t believe haven’t been digitally enhanced, or look like they must have been set up but the people who took them swear they haven’t.
You, her mother says watching her, are a migrant of your own existence.
I am not, George says.
You are, her mother says.
What’s your problem, dinosaur? George says.
Her mother laughs.
Same problem as yours, she says. We’re all migrants of our own existence now. In this bit of the world at least. So we better get ready. Because look how migrants get treated all over the world.
Sometimes your political correctness is so tedious that I find myself fall –, George says.
Then she mimes falling asleep.
Don’t you ever want to simplify? her mother says. Read a book?
I read all the time, George says.
Think about just one thing, instead of fifteen all at once? her mother says.
I’m versatile, George says without looking up. I’m from the versatile generation. And you’re supposed to be the great online anarchist. You should approve of me being so savvy.
Savvy, yes, her mother says. Always be savvy please. I’d need that from any daughter of mine. Otherwise, what with me being so politically correct and everything, I’d be sending you straight to the orphanage.
Properly speaking, that would mean both you and dad would have to die, George says.
Well, one day, her mother says. With any luck later rather than sooner. Anyway. I don’t actually care how many screens you look at at once. I’m just doing my concerned-parent bit. We all have to. It’s in the contract.
Blah, George says. You’re pretending you’re being cool about it now because online interventionism was once perceived for about three months several years ago to be cool –
Thanks! her mother says. Ratified at last.
– but really you’re just as paranoid as everybody else over forty, George says, all sackcloth and ashes and stuck in the past, hitting your chests with a scourge and ringing your little bells, unclean! Unclean! Disempowerment by information! Disempowerment by information!
Oh, that’s good, George, her mother says. Can I have that?
For a Subvert? George says.
Yes, her mother says.
No, George says.
Please? her mother says.
How much will you pay me? George says.
You’re a born mercenary, her mother says. £5.
Done, George says.
Her mother takes a note out of her purse and writes on it in pencil, in the white space between the picture of Elizabeth Fry and the drawing of some of the women prisoners she helped, the words disempowerment by information paid in full.
Then : George spent that £5 note the day after. She liked the thought of releasing it into the w
ild.
Now : George wishes she hadn’t spent that £5 note. Somewhere out in the world, if no one’s rubbed it out and it hasn’t worn off, her mother’s handwriting is passing from hand to hand, stranger to stranger.
George looks at the word GARDEN under DANCE THING, in her own handwriting. The dance bit will take less than five minutes and the film of the girl is forty five minutes long, and she can’t usually bear to make herself watch more than five of those terrible minutes.
Dance thing. Garden. Then Henry standing like a Victorian child from one of the sick sentimental songs about death and orphans, holding his hands in the prayery way in which he’s been holding them since he saw Carols from King’s on TV last week. Then her father trying to pretend he’s not drunk, or getting up still drunk and sleeping it off till lunchtime on the couch, then trying to think up an excuse to go somewhere for the evenings with people who’ll think the only good thing they can do for him is get him drunk, and he won’t be back at work until after the weekend which means five more days of drunk.
It is only about ten past midnight. Hardly any time has passed. The fireworks are still going off sporadically outside. The rain is still drumming on the Velux. But her father is not yet home and probably won’t be for ages and George has decided to wait up for him in case when he gets home he can’t get up the stairs by himself.
There’s a noise outside her door.
It’s Henry.
He is standing in the doorway looking tearful and fevered and bizarrely a little like an illustration of Little Lord Fauntleroy now that his hair is so long.
(He is refusing to have it cut because she always cut his hair.
Henry, she’s not coming back, George has said.
I know, Henry said.
She’s dead, George said. You know that.
I don’t want my hair cut, Henry said.)
You can come in, George says. Special dispensation.
Thank you, Henry says.
He stands at the door. He doesn’t come in.
I’m really awake. I’m really bored, he says
He is near tears.
George goes over to her bed and folds down the covers and pats it. Henry comes into the room, comes over to the bed and climbs in.
Toast? George says.
Henry is looking at the photos of their mother George has put above the bed. He reaches his hand up to one of them.
Don’t, George says.
He is good, because so recently asleep. He turns round and sits down.
Two slices please, he says.
With jam? George says.
No butter, whatever you do, he says.
I will bring you two slices of toast, George says. And after you’ve eaten them you and I together will banish boredom.
Henry shakes his head.
I don’t mean bored, he says. I want to be bored. But I can’t. But I really don’t want to be this thing that I’m having to be instead of being bored.
George nods.
And Henry, she says. Don’t touch those photos while I’m gone. I mean it.
George goes downstairs and makes a single slice of toast. She knifes over it with quite thick butter then puts the butter knife straight into the jam without washing it because no one will even notice. She does it precisely because no one will, because she can leave dregs of butter in whatever jam she likes for the rest of her life now.
By the time she gets back upstairs Henry is asleep. She knew he would be. She takes the photo he’s unstuck off the wall out of his hand (the picture of her mother as a teenager sitting on a statue in a park in Edinburgh right up on the back of the horse of whoever the man is the statue happens to represent) and sticks it back in its place (she has arranged them so that there is no chronology).
She sits down on the floor, leans back against her own bed and eats the toast.
It’s so boring, she says in Italy in the palazzo in the mock-child voice they always use for this game.
Only you would come through the doors of a palace designed especially to dispel boredom and know to say out loud, by some magic understanding of the meanings of things, that you find it boring, her mother says.
But George is playing the what’s-the-point-of-art game. Maybe her mother hasn’t realized she’s playing it.
There’s nobody else in this whole place but us, she says still in the voice. What’s the point, what’s the point of it? What’s it got to do with anything? What’s the point of art?
Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen. (That’s the wording of one of her mother’s most retweeted Subverts.) Obviously. But this is a family game. They’ve played this game for years. It is one of her father’s games, he plays it to make her and her brother laugh whenever her mother makes them all go to a gallery. He pretends to be a slightly mentally challenged person. He pretends it so well that sometimes people in the galleries turn and look at him, or look away in case he really might be mentally challenged.
In this case the art in this room has already made something happen – the literal cheering-up of her mother, who happened last week to see a stray photo in an art magazine of one of the pictures from here, a blue-coloured picture of a man standing dressed in ripped white clothes and wearing an old rope as a belt, at the seeing and liking so much of which her mother literally stopped being sad (she has been in a bad mood for weeks now because of her friend Lisa Goliard disappearing) then announced to the family over breakfast three days ago that they were all going to see that picture for real next week and that she’d booked a hotel.
Nathan, can you take Wednesday to Sunday off? she said.
Nope, her father said.
Fine, she said. I don’t need you to look at pictures with me. George, can you take Wednesday to Friday off school?
I’ll have to check with my secretary, George said, I’ve got a very busy schedule. And I feel it’s my duty to inform you that it’s illegal to take children out of school just for holidays now.
How’s your throat? her mother said.
Really really sore, George said. I think it’s an infection. Where are we going?
Somewhere in Italy, her mother said. Henry, how’s your throat?
My throat is very well, thank you for asking, Henry said.
Henry, your throat is really sore, George said.
Is it? Henry said.
Otherwise you can’t come to Italy, George said.
Is it good there for throats? Henry said.
Now, in the palazzo, when George says the supposed-to-be-funny thing about what’s the point of art, Henry says, as if he thinks she means it too,
It’s really pretty.
Henry is gay. He must be. Though it’s true, this is a really pretty room. At least, that part up at that end there is, it’s spectacular, or maybe it’s just better lit than the other parts of the room. Her mother is off the whole length of the place towards it. It is like her mother has been struck by – what? Lightening. Her mother has lightened up since the minute they landed in this country and the plane door opened and the warmer air came in.
The moment they walked into this room she lightened even more.
Though it is embarrassing and excruciating when someone won’t play your game George gets over herself. She slips into her real self again.
Is this the place you were talking about in the car? she says. The moral conundrum?
Her mother says nothing.
She is looking.
George looks too.
The room is warm and dark. No, not dark, it’s light. Both. It’s like a huge dark dance hall with a lit-up picture that goes round some of its walls. There is nothing else in the room, except some low benches on which to sit and look at the walls, and over in the far corner a middle-aged lady (attendant?) on a folding seat. Apart from that, there is just the picture. It is impossible to see it all at once. Half the room is covered in it. The other half has faded picture, or no picture. What there is, though, is so full of life happening that
it’s actually like life, at least those bits are at the far end. And the people in the broad blue stripe which goes all round the middle of the wall, all through the middle of the picture splitting it into an above and a below, look like they’re floating, or walking on air, especially in that brighter part.
It resembles a giant comic strip. Except it’s also like art.
There are ducks. There’s a man with his fist round the neck of a duck. The duck looks really surprised, like it’s saying what the f–. Above the duck’s head there’s another bird just sitting there completely free. It’s sitting next to the man and it’s watching him throttling the duck as if it’s quite interested in what’s happening.
This is only one detail. There are details like it everywhere. There’s a paddling dog. George stares at its genitals. In fact, look at the largeness of the testicles on all the creatures who have them everywhere in the picture, except the one creature you’d expect it on, the bull. He doesn’t seem to have any.
Then there’s a monkey hugging the leg of a boy, who regards it with snobby disdain. Over there there’s a very small child in a cap, in yellow, reading or eating something. An old woman holding a piece of paper is being attentive to the child. There are unicorns pulling a chariot here and lovers kissing there, and people with musical instruments here, people working up trees and in fields there. There are cherubs and garlands, crowds of people, women working at what looks like a loom up there, and down here there are eyes looking out of a black archway while people talk and do business and don’t notice the looking. There are dogs and horses, soldiers and townspeople, birds and flowers, rivers and riverbanks, water bubbles in the rivers, swans that look like they’re laughing. There’s a crowd of babies. They look haughty. There are rabbits, or hares, no, both.
The buildings in the picture are sometimes beautiful and sometimes broken open, there are broken road slabs and bricks, broken arches up against fine architecture and plants growing through the whole and broken buildings everywhere.
It is impossible, though, not to keep looking then looking back again at the blue-coloured stripe which runs like a frieze round the room between the upper part and the lower parts of the picture and in which the people and the animals seem to float free. The blue calls your eyes every time. It gives you a breather from the things happening above and below it. In the blue there’s a woman in a beautiful red dress just sitting in the air above a cheeky-looking goat or sheep. There’s the man in the white rags. That’s the man who was in the picture her mother saw at home. He’s why they’re here. Along from him, on the other side of the woman floating above the goat, there’s a young man or a young woman, could be either, dressed in beautiful rich clothes and holding an arrow or a stick and a gold hoop thing, like everything’s nothing but a charming game.