by Ali Smith
(and a women’s studies degree)
– at least the part of it that this particular artist seems to have produced, well. Or if we want to be more detailed about it. The way he used that figure of the effeminate boy, the boyish girl, to balance the powerful masculine effect of the worker, and how this figure holds both an arrow and a hoop, male and female symbols one in each hand. On this alone I could make a reasonably witty argument for its originator being female, if I had to. But as to likelihood?
How does she even remember seeing all these things, George thinks. I saw the same room, the exact same room as she did, we were both standing in the very same place, and I didn’t see any of it.
Her mother shakes her head.
Slim, George, I’m sorry to say.
That night in their hotel room before they go to bed her mother is brushing her teeth in the bathroom. This hotel used to be someone’s house in the years when people made frescoes. It is called the Prisciani Suite and was the actual house of someone who had something to do with the making of the frescoes at the palace where they went to see the pictures earlier (it says so at the door in a long information panel which George, who doesn’t speak Italian, has tried to decipher). There are still some bits of the original frescoes the man from back then will have lived with on the walls of this room – George has even touched them. They go right the way up the wall, up past the mezzanine where Henry is asleep above them on a small single bed. You can touch them if you like. Nothing says not to. Pellegrino Prisciani. Pellegrino, like the bottles of water, she’d said. And the bird, her mother’d said. What bird? George had said. The peregrine falcon, her mother’d said, pellegrino means a pilgrim, and at some point it also morphed into what we know as the name of the bird.
Is there anything her mother doesn’t know about?
The hotel is full of art. Above the bed she and her mother will sleep in is a modern piece by an Italian artist from now. It is shaped like a giant eye but with a propeller at one end like an aircraft, except the propeller looks like it’s been made with giant sycamore seeds. The strip of metal or whatever it is that’s meant to be the pupil has a snail shell stuck to the upper curve of it and the whole thing moves very slowly in the air above the bed so that it almost seems possible the snail might also be moving, even though it’s obvious it’s not. There is a panel on the wall about the artwork. Leon Battista Alberti regalo a Leonello d’Este un manoscritto in cui compariva il disegno dell’occhio alato. Questa raffigurazione allegorica rappresenta l’elevazione l’intellettuale : l’occhio simbolo della divinita, le ali simbolo della velocita, o meglio della conoscenza intuitiva, la sola che permette di accedere alla contemplazione e alla vera conoscenza. Leon Battista Alberti, whoever he was, regaled Leonello d’Este (important if he was an Este since they were, George has gathered, like the royals of Ferrara) a manuscript in which, something about comparing, and design, and some words George doesn’t know. But that one, occhio, might be eye or eyes, not just because the artwork is obviously an eye, but because of the word oculist. A refiguring allegory and represent and intellectual elevation, the eye symbolizes divinity, something symbolizes velocity, blah, intuition, permitting, contemplation –
George gives up.
Her mother’s phone, in its pouch, is on the bedside table.
Guilt and fury. Guilt and fury.
There is something her mother doesn’t know about, George thinks looking up at that eye.
The giant eye turns on its own in the air above the bed and George glows and fades below it like her whole self is a faulty neon.
George is tired of art. She is fed up of its always knowing best.
I want to come clean about something, she says when her mother comes out of the bathroom.
Uh huh? her mother says. What would that be?
It would be something I did that I shouldn’t have done, George says.
What? her mother says stopping halfway across the room, the moisturizer jar in one hand and its lid in the other.
I’ve been feeling bad for months, George says.
Her mother puts the stuff in her hands down and comes over and sits on the bed next to her.
Sweet heart, she says. Stop worrying right now. Whatever it is. Everything is forgivable.
I don’t know that this is forgivable, George says.
Her mother’s face is all concern.
Okay, she says. Tell me.
George doesn’t tell her mother about the time she looked at the phone and saw the text conversation about losing your voice and the carvings of angels. But she does tell her about the day when her mother’s phone had flashed on, on the sideboard in the kitchen, and George had seen the name Lisa Goliard lighting it up.
Uh huh? her mother says.
George decides to leave out the bit it said about her mother’s eyes.
It said How you doin what you doin where are you & whenll we meet, George says.
Her mother is nodding.
And the thing is, George says. I sent a reply.
Did you? her mother says. A message from you?
A message from you, George says.
From me? her mother says.
I wrote it pretending to be you, George says. I’ve been feeling really bad about it. I know I shouldn’t have looked. I should never have invaded your privacy. And I know I shouldn’t have pretended to be you under any circumstances.
What did I say? Can you remember? her mother says.
By heart, George says.
And? her mother says.
I’m ever so sorry Lisa but I am very busy spending quality time with my family and am so taken up with all the loving things happening with my husband and two children that I’m afraid I won’t be able to meet with you for some considerable time, George says.
Her mother explodes into laughter. George is stunned. Her mother is laughing like it’s the funniest thing she’s heard in a long time.
Oh you’re a beauty, George, you really are, you’re a perfect beauty, she says. Did she write back?
Yes, George says. She wrote back and said, like, Are you all right you don’t sound like you.
Her mother slaps the bed in delight.
And I wrote back, George says, and said I am very well thank you just very busy with important and time-consuming private family matters but so busy that I no longer have much time even to look at this phone. I will be in touch with you so please don’t get in touch with me. Goodbye for now. And then I deleted my messages. And then I deleted her messages.
Her mother laughs so loudly and so delightedly that Henry, asleep above them, wakes up and comes downstairs to see what’s happening.
When they’ve got Henry back to bed and settled again they get into bed themselves. Her mother puts the lights off. They listen for Henry’s breathing to regulate. It soon does.
Then this is the story her mother tells her quietly in the dark:
One day I was waiting at a cash machine in King’s Cross and there was this woman ahead of me, about the same age as me.
As I am, George says.
George, her mother says. Whose story is this?
Sorry, George says.
She gave me a smile because we were both waiting our turn. The bag she had at her feet was open, it was full of things that interested me, rolls of artisan paper and a big ball of green yarn or wool or gardening string, and a great many pens and pencils and some metal tools and rulers. Anyway her turn came and she was putting her numbers in and then she started patting all her pockets and riffling through that open bag and looking at the ground all around her feet and I said, are you looking for something? can I help? And she clapped her hand to her forehead and she said when did I become the kind of person who panics about where her bank card is when she’s at a cashpoint in the middle of getting money out of it when the card is right there in front of her, it’s just that she’s forgotten she’s actually put it into the machine? Which made me laugh because I recognized myself in it. And we had a chat and I ask
ed her about the rolls of paper in her bag and she told me she made books, one-offs, like artworks, books that were themselves also art objects. You know me. I was interested. We swapped emails.
About a fortnight later there was a message from this woman in my inbox, all it said was : what do you think? and when I opened the attachment it was some photos of a beautiful little book, all colours and swerving written lines and figures, sort of like if Matisse had written it, and I wrote back and told her I really liked it, and she emailed me back saying but should I be doing something different with my life? and I was struck by the intimacy of the question, from a stranger to a virtual stranger. I wrote back and said, do you want to do something different with your life? Then I didn’t hear anything and I forgot about her again. Until one day she left me a voicemail inviting me to lunch, which was odd because I didn’t remember ever giving her my phone number, you know me, I never give it out. The voicemail said she had something to show me and invited me to come to her workshop first.
It was pretty exciting going there. There was lots of printers’ type, drawers of it open and half open, and inks and paint everywhere, and machines for cutting, and an old press, and bottles full of who knows what, fixatives, colours, I don’t know. I loved it.
The thing she wanted to show me was a glass box. She was making a set of books for a commission for someone who wanted her to make three of these books then deliver them to him sealed in a glass case. So these books would be full of beautifully decorated pages that no one’d ever be able to look at, without breakage at least.
And she sat there and said, so my quandary is, Carol, do I even bother to fill these books with beautiful text and pictures or do I just rough up their edges so it looks like there’s something in them, you know, wear them out and smudge them about a bit so it looks like they’ve been well worked, and deliver them to him and get paid and get away with doing much less work myself? Do I choose to be a charlatan or do I make quite a lot of work that the risk is no one will ever even see?
We went for lunch and we got quite drunk. She said, this is exciting for me because I get to watch you eat, and I said, what? really? something like that excites you?
But all the same. How flattering. Someone wanted to watch me eat.
Weird, George says.
Her mother smothers a laugh to herself.
I liked her more and more, she says. She was repressed and respectable and anarchic and rude and unexpected, she was trivial and wild both at once, like a bad girl from school. And she was lovely. She was attentive, sweet to me. And there was something, some glimmer of something. She’d look at me and I’d know there was something real in it, and I liked it, I liked how she paid attention to me, my life. Like she personally cared how I was feeling from day to day or what I was doing from one hour to the next. And she did kiss me, once. Properly, I mean against a wall, a real kiss –
Oh God, George says.
That’s exactly what your father said, her mother says.
You told dad? George says.
Of course I did, her mother says. I tell your dad everything. Anyway sweet heart, after that I knew it was a game. You always know where you are after a kiss. It was a pretty good kiss, George, I liked it fine. But all the same –
(I will never forgive her, George is thinking)
– I knew after it something didn’t quite ring true, her mother says. She was always so curious, about where I was, what I was doing, who I was doing it with, who else I was meeting up with or working with, especially that and what I was working on, what I was writing about, what I thought about this or that, it was constant, and I thought, well, that’s a bit like love, that obsessiveness, when people are in love they need to know the strangest things, so maybe it is love, perhaps it just feels this odd to me because it’s the kind of love that can’t be expressed unless we both choose to really mess up our lives. Which I’d no intention of doing, George. I know how good my life is. And, I presumed, neither had she, any such intention, she has a life too, a husband, kids. At least I think she does. At least, I saw some photos once.
But then there was the day I went to see her in her workshop without telling her I was coming, and I knocked on the door and a woman came to the door, she was wearing overalls, and I asked for Lisa and she said who? And I said Lisa Goliard, this is her bookmaking workshop, and the woman said, no, that’s not my name, I’m whatever, and this is my bookmaking workshop, can I help you? And I said, but you sometimes let your workshop to other printers or bookmakers, yes? and she looked at me as if I was crazy and said she was really busy and was there anything she could help me with, and it’s as I was walking away that it came to me that the whole time I’d known Lisa, which was by then a couple of years, I’d never see her once make or do anything in that workshop. We’d just sat around in it, talking. I’d never seen her write anything, or bind anything, or print anything, or cut anything.
And then when I got home I looked her up online and there were the same couple of web pages that I’d looked at before, a page still saying Site Coming Soon and a link to a bookseller in Cumbria, but not much else. In fact nothing else. Not a trace.
She almost didn’t exist, George says. She only just existed.
Not that an absence online means anything, her mother says. She definitely existed. Definitely exists.
If this was a film or a novel, she’d turn out to be a spy, George says.
I know, her mother says.
She says it quite happily in the dark next to George.
It’s possible, she says. It’s not at all impossible. Though it seems improbable. It wouldn’t surprise me. I did meet her rather oddly, it did all happen very oddly. It’s as if someone had looked at my life and calculated exactly how to attract me, then how to fool me once my attention was caught. Quite an art. And she’s quite a nice spy. If she is one.
Is there such a thing as a nice spy? George says.
I wouldn’t have said so before, her mother says. We even had conversations about it, we had a running joke. I’d say, you’re in intelligence, aren’t you, and she’d say I’m afraid I can’t possibly answer that question.
Did you tell her you’d rumbled her workshop? George says.
I did, her mother says. I told her I’d gone and it hadn’t been her workshop the day I went. She laughed and said I’d met the other person who worked there occasionally, and how this person owned the building and was fearful that the authorities, the council, would know she was letting space to other people so always swore no one used it but her whenever she was asked. And when she told me that, I thought, well, that’s perfectly feasible, that explains that, and at exactly the same time I could feel myself thinking, well, that explains that away. I think this double-think is the reason I started to see much less of her.
But George, what I’m about to say, I don’t expect you to understand it till you’re older –
Thanks, George says.
No, her mother says. I’m really not being patronizing. But understanding something like what I’m going to say takes having a bit of age. Some things really do take time. Because even though I suspected I’d been played, there was something. It was true, and it was passionate. It was unsaid. It was left to the understanding. To the imagination. That in itself was pretty exciting. What I’m saying is, I quite liked it. Even if I was being played. And most of all, my darling. The being seen. The being watched. It makes life very, well I don’t know. Pert.
Pert? George says. What kind of a word is pert?
The being watched over, her mother says. It was really something.
But by a spy and a liar? George says.
Seeing and being seen, Georgie, is very rarely simple, her mother says.
Are, George says.
What? her mother says.
Are very rarely simple, George says. Did you tell dad she was a spy? What did he say?
He said (and here her mother puts on a voice that’s supposed to be her father), Carol, nobody is monitoring y
ou. It’s a sub-repressed expression. You’re attracted to her middle-classness. She’s attracted to your working-class origins. It’s a classic class-infatuation paranoia and you’re both making up an adolescent drama to make your own lives more interesting.
Does dad not know about how there are no longer just three but a hundred and fifty different social classes to which it can be decided that we belong? George says.
Her mother laughs in the dark next to George.
Anyway, sweet heart. Games run their course. I got a bit tired of it. I stopped being in touch with her back in the winter.
Yeah. I know, George says.
I was a bit down about it, her mother says. You know?
We all know, George says. You’ve been awful.
Have I? her mother says and laughs gently. Well, I missed her. I still miss her. It felt like I had a friend. She was my friend. And God, George, something about it made me feel permitted.
Permitted? George says. That’s insane.
I know. Allowed, her mother says. Like I was being allowed. It made me laugh, when I realized it. Then it made me feel rather, well, special. Like a character in a film who suddenly develops an aura of light all round her. Can you imagine?
Frankly? No, George says.
Can we never get to go beyond ourselves? her mother says. Never get to be more than ourselves? Will I ever, as far as you’re concerned, be allowed to be anything other than your mother?
No, George says.
And why is that? her mother says.
Because you’re my mother, George says.
Ah, her mother says. I see. Anyway. I quite enjoyed it, while it lasted. Am I mad, George?
Frankly? Yes, George says.
And at least now I know why the texts asking why I wasn’t in touch stopped coming. Ha ha! her mother says.
Good, George says.
How funny, her mother says.
Your Lisa Goliard, or whoever she really is in the real world when she’s not pretending to be someone else, can fuck off back to spy-land, George says.
There is a short disapproving silence in which George senses she’s gone too far. Then her mother says