by Ali Smith
She looks at the song again.
I don’t think I can translate much more than three or four lines of this into Latin, she says. A lot of it also already looks pretty Greek.
Do the last line first, H says.
She is sort of grinning. She is looking away, still looking at the picture of the ragged man.
The one line we’re not going to need or use and that’s the one you want first in Latin? George says.
I’d just quite like to hear it in Latin, H says.
She is grinning broadly now and still looking away. She sits down on the floor.
She’s waiting.
Okay, George says. But can I ask you something first?
Yep, H says.
It’s a hypothetical, George says.
I’m not much good with them, H says. I’ve been known to faint whenever I see a needle.
George gets off her mother’s chair and comes and sits opposite H cross-legged on the floor too.
If I were to say to you that while my mother was alive she was being monitored, she says.
For health, or? H says. For diet, or what?
George speaks a little more quietly because her father doesn’t like her saying this stuff, she made it up to distract herself from her life and how do you think that makes me feel, George? And you’re making it up to distract yourself from her death. She was being adolescent. So are you. Get a grip. Interpol and MI5 and MI6 and MI7 were not interested in your mother. He has specifically instructed her to stop it, and has been known to lose his head about it if George does mention it, even though he’s being generally self-consciously gentle at most other times, what with everything being so post-death.
By people in, you know. Like on TV, George says. Except not like on TV, there weren’t bombs or guns or torture or anything, there was just this person. Sort of keeping an eye on her.
Oh, H says. That kind of monitored.
If I were to say it, George says. Would you think words like deluded and paranoid and needs to be put on some kind of medication?
H thinks about it. Then she nods.
You would? George says.
Not living in the real world, H says.
Something inside George’s chest falls. It is a relief, after all, the kind of relief where everything feels both bruised and released.
H is still speaking.
More likely that your mother was being minotaured, she is saying.
It isn’t a joke, George says.
I’m not joking, H says. I mean, it’s not like we live in mythical times. It’s not like we live in a world where the police, say, would ever minotaur the people whose son’s murder they were supposed to be investigating, or the press would minotaur famous people or even dead people to make money out of them.
Ha, George says.
It’s not like the government would minotaur us, H says. I mean, not our government. Obviously all the undemocratic and less good and less civilized ones would do it to their citizens. But our own one. I mean, they might minotaur the people they needed to know about. But they’d never do it to ordinary people, say through their emails or mobiles, or through the games they play on their mobiles. And it’s not like the shops we buy things from do it to us either, is it, every time we buy something. You’re deluded and insane. There’s no such thing as a minotaur. It’s mythical. And your mother was, what? Quite a political person? Someone who published stuff about money in the papers? And did disruptive stuff on the net? Why would anyone want to monitor her? I think your imaginings are dangerous. Someone should monitor you.
She looks up.
I’d do it, she says. I’d have done it, if it was you.
If it had been you, George says inside her head.
I’d have minotaured you for free, H says.
She looks George laughingly and seriously right in the eye.
Or maybe, if it were you, George thinks.
She lies down flat on her back on her mother’s carpet. Her mother got this carpet at an antique shop off Mill Road. Well, antique. Junk shop, really.
H lies down next to her so that their heads are level.
Both girls stare at the ceiling.
The thing is, doctor, H says.
George hears her from the miles away where she’s thinking about what the differences might be, and what her mother would have said they were, between antiques and just old junk.
I have this need, H is saying.
What need? George says.
To be more, H says.
More what? George says.
Well, H says and her voice sounds strangely altered. More.
Oh, George says.
I think I might be, by nature, H says, a bit more hands-on than hypothetical.
Then one of her hands reaches and takes one of George’s hands.
The hand doesn’t just take George’s hand, it interlaces its fingers with it.
This is the point at which all the words drain out of the part of George’s brain where words are kept.
H’s hand holds her hand for a moment, then H’s hand lets go of her hand.
Yes? she says. No?
George doesn’t speak
I can slow down, H says. I can wait. I can wait till it’s right. I can do that.
Then she says,
Or maybe you don’t –.
George doesn’t speak.
Maybe I’m not –, H says.
Then George’s father is at the door of the room, he’s been there for God knows how long. George sits up.
Girls, he says. George. You know I don’t want you in there. Nothing’s sorted. There’s a lot of important stuff, I don’t want anything messed with in there. And I thought you were organizing supper tonight, George.
I am, George says. I will. I’m just about to.
Is your friend staying for supper? her father says.
No, Mr Cook, I’ve got to be home, H says.
She is still lying on her back on the floor.
You’re very welcome to stay, Helena, her father says. There’ll be plenty.
Thanks, Mr Cook, H says. It’s really nice of you. I’m expected at home.
You can stay for supper, George says.
No I can’t, H says.
She gets up.
See you, she says.
A minute later she is not in the room any more.
A moment after that George hears the front door of the house closing.
George lies back down flat on the carpet again.
She is not a girl. She is a block of stone.
She is a piece of wall.
She is something against which other things impact without her permission or understanding.
It is last May in Italy. George and her mother and Henry are sitting after supper at a table outside a restaurant under some arches near the castle. Her mother has been going on and on to them (well, to George, because Henry is on a computer game) about fresco structure, about how when some frescoes in a different Italian city were damaged in the 1960s in bad flooding and the authorities and restorers removed them to mend them as best they could, they found, underneath them, the underdrawing their artists had made for them, and sometimes the underdrawings were significantly different from their surfaces, which is something they’d never have discovered if there hadn’t been the damage in the first place.
George is only half listening because the game Henry is looking at on the iPad is called Injustice and George thinks Henry is far too young for it.
What game is it? her mother says.
It’s the one where all the cartoon superheroes have turned evil, George says. It’s really violent.
Henry, her mother says.
She takes an earphone out of one of Henry’s ears.
What? Henry says.
Find something less violent to do on there, his mother says.
Okay, Henry says. If I must.
You must, his mother says.
Henry puts the earphone back in and clicks off the game. He cl
icks on a download of Horrible Histories instead. Pretty soon he is giggling to himself. Not long after that he falls asleep at the table with his head on the iPad.
But which came first? her mother says. The chicken or the egg? The picture underneath or the picture on the surface?
The picture below came first, George says. Because it was done first.
But the first thing we see, her mother said, and most times the only thing we see, is the one on the surface. So does that mean it comes first after all? And does that mean the other picture, if we don’t know about it, may as well not exist?
George sighs heavily. Her mother points across the way, to the castle wall. A bus goes past. Its whole back is an advert for something in which there’s a Madonna and child picture as if from the past, except the mother is showing the baby Jesus how to look something up on an iPad.
We’re sitting here having our supper, her mother is saying, and looking at everything that’s round us. And over there. Right there in front of us. If this was a night seventy years ago –
– yeah, but it isn’t, George says. It’s now.
– we’d be sitting here watching people being lined up and shot against that wall. Along from where those seats for the café bar are.
Uch. God, George says. Mum. How do you even know that?
Would it be better, or worse, or truer, or falser, if I didn’t? her mother says.
George scowls. History is horrible. It is a mound of bodies pressing down into the ground below cities and towns in the unending wars and the famines and the diseases, and all the people starved or done away with or rounded up and shot or tortured and left to die or put up against the walls near castles or stood in front of ditches and shot into them. George is appalled by history, its only redeeming feature being that it tends to be well and truly over.
And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see?
Yeah, but that thing happening. With the shooting. It was aeons ago, George says.
Only twenty years before me, and here I am sitting here right now, her mother says.
Ancient history, George says.
That’s me, her mother says. And yet here I am. Still happening.
But it isn’t, George says. Because that was then. This is now. That’s what time is.
Do things just go away? her mother says. Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can’t see them happening in front of us?
They do when they’re over, George says.
And what about the things we watch happening right in front of us and still can’t really see? her mother says.
George rolls her eyes.
Totally pointless discussion, she says.
Why? her mother says.
Okay. That castle, George says. It’s right in front of us, yes?
So I see, her mother says.
I mean, you can’t not, George says. Unless your eyes don’t work. And even if your eyes didn’t work, you’d still be able to go up to it and touch it, you’d be able to register it being there one way or another.
Absolutely, her mother says.
But though it’s the same castle as it was when it was built way back when, and it has its history, George says, and all the things have happened to it and in it and round it and so on ad infinitum, that’s nothing to do with us sitting here looking at it right now. Apart from it being scenery because we’re tourists.
Do tourists see differently from other people? her mother says. And how can you have grown up in the town you’ve grown up in and not consider what the presence of the past might mean?
George yawns ostentatiously.
Best place in the world to learn how to ignore it, she says. Taught me everything I’ll ever need to know. Especially about tourism. And growing up around historic buildings. I mean. They’re just buildings. You’re always talking such crap about things meaning more than they actually mean. It’s like some drippy hippy hangover, like you were inoculated with hippiness when you were little and now you can’t help but treat everything as if it’s symbolic.
That castle, her mother says, was built by order of the Estense court, the d’Estes being the family who ruled this province for hundreds of years and the people responsible for so much of the art and poetry and music. And therefore for the art and writing and music that followed it, which you and I take for granted. If it wasn’t for Ariosto, who flourished because of this court, there’d be a very different Shakespeare. If there’d even be a Shakespeare at all.
Yeah, maybe, but it’s hardly relevant now, George says.
You know, Georgie, nothing’s not connected, her mother says.
You always call me Georgie when you want to patronize me, George says.
And we don’t live on a flat surface, her mother says. That castle, this city, were built all those irrelevant centuries ago by a family whose titles and hereditaries come down in more or less a direct connection to Franz Ferdinand.
The band? George says.
Yes, her mother says. The pop band whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 brought about World War One.
World War One is like a whole hundred years ago next year, George says. You can hardly call it relevant to us any more.
What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And meant I inherited his weak lungs? Not relevant to us? her mother says. And then the break-up of the Balkans, and the start of the territorial trouble in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the civil unrest in Ireland, and the shifts of power in Russia, and the power shifts in the Ottoman empire, and the bankruptcy, economic catastrophe and social unrest in Germany, all of which played a huge part in the rise of Fascism and in the bringing about of another war in which, as it happens, your own grandmother and grandfather – who happened to be my mother and father – both fought when they were just two or three years older than you? Not relevant? To us?
Her mother shakes her head.
What? George says. What?
A well-heeled Cambridge childhood, her mother says.
She laughs a laugh to herself. The laugh infuriates George.
Why did you and dad choose to live there, then, if you didn’t want us to grow up there? she says.
Oh, you know, her mother says. Good schools. Proximity to London. Buoyant housing market that’d always hold its own in recession. All the things that really matter in life.
Is her mother being ironic? It’s hard to tell.
Very good food-bank system for when you leave school and your father and I can’t afford to send you to university and eat, and for later too for you when you come out of university, her mother says.
That’s such an irresponsible thing to say, George says.
Well but at least it’s new and contemporary, my irresponsibility, her mother says.
The tables round them are emptying. It’s late and quite a bit cooler. There’s been rain beyond the arches while they’ve sat here eating and arguing. Her mother puts a hand into her handbag and pulls out a jumper. She gives it to George to put round Henry’s shoulders. Then she gets her phone out of her bag. She switches it on. Guilt and fury. After a moment, she switches it off. George feels so guilty she is nearly sick with guilt. She formulates, quick, the kind of question she knows her mother likes to answer.
You know that place we went to earlier today? George says.
Uh huh, her mother says.
Do you think any women artists did any of it? George says.
Her mother forgets the phone in her hand and immediately holds forth (just as George knew she would).
She tells George how there are a few renaissance painters they know about who happen to have been women, but not very many, a negligible percentage. She tells her about one called Catherine who was brought up by the court here, in that castle
right there, because she was the daughter of a nobleman and one of the women of the Estense court took her under her wing and made sure she had a superb education. Then Catherine had gone into a nunnery, which was a good place to go if you were a woman and wanted to paint, and while she was there she became a celebrated nun and she wrote books and painted pictures on the side, about which nobody really found out until after she died.
Her paintings are quite lovely, her mother says. And you can actually still see Catherine today.
You mean through sensing her personality by looking at the paintings etc, George says.
No, I mean quite literally, her mother says. In the flesh.
How? George says.
In a church in Bologna, her mother says. When they made her a saint they dug her up – there’s all sorts of testimonials about how sweet the smell was when they dug her up –
Mum, George says.
– and they put her in a box in a church dedicated to her, and if you go there you can still see her, she’s gone black with age and she’s sitting in the box and holding a book and some kind of holy monstrance.
That’s insane, George says.
But other than something like that happening? her mother says. No. It’s pretty unlikely that women worked on much that’s extant, certainly on anything we saw today. Though if I had to, I don’t know, write a paper about it or try to make a thesis about it, I could make a pretty good one about the vaginal shape here –
Mum, George says.
– we’re in Italy, George, it’s all right, no one knows what I’m saying, her mother says drawing a diamond shape at her own breastbone, the vaginal shape here on that beautiful worker in the rags in the blue section, the most virile and powerful figure in the whole room, much more so than the Duke, who’s supposed to be the subject and the hero of that room, and which must surely have caused a bit of trouble for the artist, especially since that figure’s a worker or a slave and also clearly black or Semitic. And how the open shape at his chest complements the way the painter makes the rope round his waist a piece of simultaneously dangling and erect phallic symbolism –
(her mother did an art history degree once)
– and as to the constant sexual and gender ambiguities running through the whole work