by Ali Smith
But George watches a dog cross the square through the noise and stop to sniff at something then amble off again as if nothing unusual is happening, so maybe something like this just happens here every week. Then, above the heads of everyone in the city, above the highest-tossed of the flags, church bells here and there announce midnight and as if they’ve been enchanted the next team after that to do a routine does it without drums and bugles but with its musicians humming instead, in tuneful voices and with a gentleness that seems sweet and absurd after the great din of the teams that have gone before.
If only all ceremonials and pomp got hummed like that, her mother says.
Do you remember when
Things were really hummin’.
Full stop.
Is her mother really dead? Is it an elaborate hoax? (All hoaxes, on TV and the radio and in the papers and online, are described as elaborate whether they’re elaborate or not.) Has someone elaborately, or not, spirited her mother away like on an episode of Spooks and now she’s living a life elsewhere under a new name and just isn’t allowed to contact people (even her own children) from her former life?
Because how can someone just vanish?
George had seen her contorted in the hospital bed. Her skin had changed colour and was covered in weals. She could hardly speak. What she did say, in the last part of whatever was happening to her and before they put George outside the door to wait in the corridor, was that she was a book, I’m an open book, she said. Though it was also equally possible that what she’d said was that she was an unopen book.
I a a u opn ook.
George (to Mrs Rock) : I’m going to tell you this thing, and I think after I tell you you’ll suggest I get sent for a stronger type of therapy than the kind you’re giving me because you’ll think I’m completely paranoid and hysterical.
Mrs Rock : You think I’ll think you’re paranoid and hysterical?
George : Yes. But I want to tell you now, before I say it, that I’m neither paranoid nor hysterical, though ostensibly it might sound like I am, and I want to make it clear that I thought it way before my mother died, and so did she, she thought it herself.
Mrs Rock nodded to let George know she was listening.
What George told Mrs Rock then was that her mother was under surveillance and had been being monitored by spies.
Mrs Rock : You believe your mother was being monitored by spies?
That was what counsellors were trained to do, to say back to you what it was you said, but in the form of a question so you could ask yourself why you’d thought or said it. It was soul-destroying.
George told Mrs Rock anyway. She told her about the time five years ago that her mother was walking past the big glass windows of an expensive and stylish hotel in central London. People were having supper in there; the windows were restaurant windows, and her mother had seen, sitting with a group of people quite prominently in one of the windows, a politician or spin person and at this point her mother had been furious at some politicians. George couldn’t remember which politician it was in the window, only that it was one of the politicians or spin people her mother held responsible for something. Anyway her mother had got her lip salve out of her rucksack and then she’d started to write on the glass of the window with the lip salve above this man’s head like a halo (that’s how she described it).
She was writing the word LIAR. But by the time it took to write the L, the I and the A, George said, there were security people coming at her from several directions. So she legged it. (Her words.)
Mrs Rock was writing things down.
After that, George said, two things happened. Well, three. Mail that came to our house for my parents, and even for me and for Henry, it was around the time when he had a birthday, began arriving looking like it had already been opened. It would arrive in these see-through Sorry Your Mail Has Been Damaged bags that the mail people use if something gets ripped. And then someone revealed in the papers that my mother was one of the Subvert interventionists.
One of the what? Mrs Rock said.
George explained about the Subvert movement and how, by using really early pop-up technology pretty much before anyone else was, they’d been able to make things appear on whatever page someone accessed like adverts do now all the time. Except, a Subvert took the form of a random visual or a piece of information.
My mother was one of the original anonymous four people who made up the things to send out, George said. Eventually there were hundreds of them. She was kind of minor to start with, then she got more minor. It’s actually really hilarious because she’s completely computer illiterate. I mean, you know, was.
Mrs Rock nodded.
Anyway, it was her job to subvert political things with art things, and to subvert art things with political things. Like, a box would flash up on a page about Picasso and it would say did you know that 13 million people in the UK are living below the poverty line. Or a box would flash up on a politics page and it would have a picture in it or some stanzas of a poem, stuff like that. Then it got revealed in the papers, George said, that she was a part of the Subvert movement, and then after that, whenever she published anything in the papers about money or economics, the people who disagreed with her called her gauche and politically partisan.
Inside George’s head as she says this her mother is laughing out loud about being called politically partisan. There isn’t a single person in this world who isn’t it, she says. She says it exactly as if she’s singing a pretty tune, tra la la. And gauche, she says, is one of my favourite words. Always be gauche, George. Go on. I dare you.
Mrs Rock : And what was the third thing that made you think your mother was being monitored by spies?
[Enter Lisa Goliard]
George : Oh no, nothing. There were only the two things.
Mrs Rock : Didn’t you say there were two, but then change it to three?
George : For a minute I think I thought there were three. But then I realized I really meant two.
Mrs Rock : And these are the two things that mean you believe your mother was being monitored by spies?
George : Yes.
Mrs Rock : And your mother believed it too?
George : She knew she was.
Mrs Rock : You think she knew she was?
George : We talked about it. All the time. It was a kind of a running joke. Anyway, she quite liked it. She liked being watched.
Mrs Rock : You think your mother liked being watched?
George : You think I’m insane, don’t you? You think I’m just making it all up.
Mrs Rock : You’re worried that I think you’re making it up?
George : I’m not making any of it up.
Mrs Rock : Is what I think, or others think, very important to you?
George : Yeah, but what do you think, Mrs Rock? Are you thinking right now, dear me, this girl needs to be sent for much heavier-duty therapy?
Mrs Rock : Do you want to be sent for ‘much heavier-duty therapy’?
George : I’m just asking you to tell me what you think, Mrs Rock.
Then Mrs Rock did something unexpected. She departed from her usual technique and script and started telling George what she actually maybe thought.
She said that in the ancient times the word mystery meant something we’re unused to now. The word itself
– and I know this will interest you, Georgia, because I’ve gathered from talking to you how interested in meanings you are, she said –
– Well, I was, before, George said.
– you will be again, I think it’s safe to say that about you, though I’m going a bit out on a limb here and taking a risk saying it, Mrs Rock said. Anyway. The word mystery originally meant a closing, of the mouth or the eyes. It meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed.
A closing. Not be disclosed.
George got interested in spite of herself.
The mysterious nature of some things was accepted then,
much more taken for granted, Mrs Rock said. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we’ll probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we don’t, we feel cheated.
Right then the bell went and Mrs Rock stopped talking. She’d gone bright red up under her hair and round her ears. She stopped talking as if someone had unplugged her. She closed her notebook and it was as if she’d closed her face too.
Same time next Tuesday, Georgia, she said. I mean, after Christmas. First Tuesday after the holidays. See you then.
George opens her eyes. She’s slumped on the floor leaning back against her own bed. Henry is in her bed. All the lights are on. She’d fallen asleep and now she’s woken up.
Her mother is dead. It’s 1.30 a.m. It’s New Year.
There’s a noise downstairs. It sounds like someone is at the front door. That’s what woke her.
It will be her father.
Henry wakes up. His mother is dead too. She sees the knowledge cross his face about three seconds after he opens his eyes.
It’s okay, she says. It’s just dad. Go back to sleep.
George goes down the first flight then the next flight of stairs. He will have lost his keys or they will be in a pocket he is too pissed to put his hand in or remember he even has.
She looks through the spy bubble in the door but she can’t see anyone. There’s no one there.
Then the person outside moves back into view to knock again. George is amazed.
It is a girl from school, Helena Fisker.
Helena Fisker with her shoulders dark from the rain, her hair looks quite wet too, is standing on the other side of George’s front door.
She knocks again and everything about George, because she’s standing so close to the door, literally leaps. It is as if Helena Fisker is knocking on George.
Helena Fisker had been there in the girls’ toilets when George was being hassled by the moronic Year 9 girls with their mania for using their phones to record the sound levels of other girls urinating. What happened was: if you were a girl you would go to the toilet, then in the next class you’d go to everybody would be laughing at you because they’d all had the sound of you urinating sent to their phones with a film of the toilet door then the door opening then you coming out. Then Facebook. A couple of them even got put on YouTube and lasted several days there.
All anyone, including the boys, talked about for a while when they talked about someone (if the someone happened to be a girl) was how loud or how quiet her urinating was. This had started a separate mania among all the girls, an existential panic about whether their urinating was silent enough. Now they went to the toilet in twos so that there’d be someone to listen and make sure their urinating wasn’t too audible.
One day George had opened a toilet door and outside it there’d been a huddle of girls she vaguely recognized but didn’t know any of, all crowded round a girl holding up a smartphone.
On cue as if they’d rehearsed, like a little choir, they all started making disgusted noises at her.
But behind them, at the main door, she’d seen Helena Fisker come in.
Most people in the school were pretty respectful of Helena Fisker.
Helena Fisker had been reprimanded, most recently, George knew from people in art, for designing the school Christmas card. She was known for being really good at art. The picture of the robin she’d presented them with was apparently such a cute one that they’d simply let her place the order and stamped the form for the printer. It was paid for and printed up with the name of the school on the back. Five hundred had arrived from the printer in a huge box.
When they’d opened the box they’d found, instead of the robin, a picture of a really ugly massive blank concrete wall in the sun.
Helena Fisker, the story goes, had smiled at the Head as if she couldn’t understand the fuss when she was called to his office and made to stand on the carpet in front of his desk.
But it’s Bethlehem, she’d said.
Now this gang of girls was standing in front of George and filming and squealing at her with no idea that Helena Fisker was standing behind them. Helena Fisker caught George’s eye over the tops of their heads. Then Helena Fisker shrugged her eyes.
Her doing just that knocked everything those girls were saying and doing into the land-of-not-meaning-anything-much.
Helena Fisker reached her hand over the tops of those little girls’ heads and plucked the phone out of the main girl’s hand.
All the girls turned round at once.
Hi, Helena Fisker said.
Then she told them they were a silly little bunch of wankers. Then she asked them why they were all so interested in urine and what their problem was. Then she pushed past them and held the smartphone over the bowl of the toilet that George had just flushed.
All the girls squealed, especially the one whose phone it was.
You can choose. Delete or drop, Helena Fisker said.
It’s waterproof, you ethnic cow, one of the girls said.
Did you just call me an ethnic cow? Helena Fisker said. Great. A bonus.
Helena Fisker slammed the front of the smartphone on the edge of the toilet door. Bits of plastic flew off.
Now we can test your phone’s waterproofing and we can test the school’s policies on racism, she was saying as George left.
Thanks, George had said later when they were queuing up outside history.
She had never actually spoken to Helena Fisker before.
I liked that speech you gave in English that day, Helena Fisker said then. That story you told about the BT Tower.
(It had been George’s turn, in the going-round-the-room order, to give a three-minute talk about empathy. She’d had no idea what to say. Then Ms Maxwell had said in front of the whole class, though in a quiet and nice way, it’s okay if you don’t want to talk today, Georgia. This had made George even more determined to do it. But when she stood up her mind went blank. So she’d said some things her mother was always saying about how near-impossible it was to inhabit anyone else’s shoes, whether they lived in Paraguay or just down the road or were even just in the next room or the next seat along from you, and ended it by telling the story of a pop singer who was having her lunch in the restaurant of the BT Tower when it was called the Post Office Tower in the 1960s and was so outraged at the way the maître d’ was bossing one of the underwaiters around that she took the bread roll she’d just been given off her side plate and threw it at the maître d’ and hit him on the back of the head.)
That’s all she and Helena Fisker have ever said to each other.
A couple of times since that thing in the toilets happened, though, George has caught herself thinking something unexpected. She has caught herself wondering whether those girls, that girl with the phone – if the phone memory had survived – had deleted or maybe kept the film.
If that film still existed it meant there was a recording of her somewhere and in it she was looking straight over their heads into the eyes of Helena Fisker.
George opens the door.
Thought you maybe weren’t in, Helena Fisker says.
I am, George says.
Good, Helena Fisker says. Happy New Year.
Henry sits up in the bed when George and Helena Fisker come into George’s room.
Who are you? Henry says.
I’m H, Helena Fisker says. Who are you?
I’m Henry. What kind of a name is that? Henry says.
It’s the initial of my first name, Helena Fisker says. The people who don’t really know me tend to call me Helena. But I know your sister. We’re friends at school. So you can call me H as well.
It’s the same initial as my first name, Henry says. Did you bring a present?
Henry, George says.
She apologizes. She explains to Helena Fi
sker that since their mother died whenever people come to the house they generally tend to bring Henry a present, sometimes several presents.
Don’t you get them too? Helena Fisker says.
Not as many as he gets, George says. I think they think I’m too old for presents. Or they’re more scared of trying to give me anything.
Did she bring a present or not? Henry says.
Yes, Helena Fisker says. I brought you a cabbage.
A cabbage isn’t a present, Henry says.
It is if you’re a rabbit, Helena Fisker says.
George laughs out loud.
Henry, too, clearly thinks this is very funny. He curls into a laughing ball in the bedclothes.
Your hair’s all wet, he says when he stops laughing.
That’s what happens when you walk through the rain with no hat or hood or umbrella, Helena Fisker says.
George takes her over to the bookcase and shows her the leak and the rain dripping every few minutes on to the cover of the top book on the pile.
At some point, George says, this roof will stave in.
Cool, Helena Fisker says. You’ll be able to look directly out at the constellations.
There’ll be nothing between me and them, George says.
Except the occasional police helicopter, Helena Fisker says. The great lawnmower in the sky.
George laughs.
Two seconds after she does she realizes something and she is surprised.
What she realizes is that she has laughed.
In fact she has laughed twice, once at the rabbit joke and once at the lawnmower.
The thought of it pretty much surprises her into another laugh, this time inside herself.
That makes it three times since September that George has laughed in an undeniable present tense.
The first time H comes to the house again after New Year she hands George the A4 envelope she’s carrying under her arm. She takes off her jacket and hangs it up in the hall.
George holds the envelope back out for her to take.
It’s for you, H says.
What is it? George says.
I brought you some stars, H says. I printed them up off the net.