How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  Best of all, up at the level of his head, the pillar’s had its top broken off and there’s what looks like a miniature forest growing out of it.

  There are very small people in the background behind the saint’s legs. They’re meant to be small because of perspective but at the same time it makes it look like this man is a giant and sure enough, when you look away from this painting at the others in the room it’s like they’ve all been dwarfed. After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they’re stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing’s a performance.

  Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

  George has now been seven times. Each time she’s visited, the monk has seemed less severe. He has started to look unruffled, like he’s not bothered by anything – the other paintings in the room, the stuff happening in them, the people passing back and fore in front of him every day with all their different lives, the whole rest of the gallery, the square, the roads, the traffic, the city, the country, the sea, the countries radiating out beyond the gallery and away. Look at the wide-open arms of the God up there a bit like a baby in a womb in an old cross section of a pregnant woman’s body, a very old wise baby. Look at the cloth of the cloak of the saint which opens wide too and changes from dark to silver right in the middle of the saint’s body. His pointing finger has stopped being about being told off and started to be about looking up, and not really at the God, which is what the gallery placard says he’s pointing at, but more at the way the blue in the sky gets darker and bluer as it rises, or at the way a forest will grow out of stone, or at how what’s meant to be a torture instrument is really powerless, nothing but a museum piece, a stage prop for some old drama whose horror’s all long gone.

  George has become more and more interested in spite of herself and in spite of how little this picture – or any of the pictures in this room, all made more than five hundred years ago – seems on first glance to have to do with the real world. Now when she comes into Room 55, it’s weird, but it’s like she is meeting an old friend, albeit one who won’t look her in the eye because the saint is always looking off to the side. But that’s good too. It’s good, to be seen past, as if you’re not the only one, as if everything isn’t happening just to you. Because you’re not. And it isn’t.

  A friendly work of art. That was when her mother said the thing about how the art they were looking at was a bit like you. Generous but also, what was it? Something else.

  Sarcastic?

  George can’t remember.

  At first, coming here, she knew consciously all the time that she was seeing a picture her mother never even knew existed or might well have walked past without seeing, like people do, on their way to see the more famous pictures.

  Today what she sees is the way the rockscape on one side of the saint is broken, rubbly, as if not yet developed, and on the other side has transformed into buildings that are rather grand and fancy.

  It is as if just passing from one side of the saint to the other will result if you go one way in wholeness and if you go the other in brokenness.

  Both states are beautiful.

  She looks across at the picture to the left of the saint, past the open door. It’s of a woman sitting on a fancy throne holding a sprig of cherries, by a painter called Cosimo Tura, and it has those little glass or coral balls in it too, on a string above her head. So does the one to George’s left, which is a Virgin Mary and Baby and is by Cosimo Tura as well.

  The coral and glass balls on the St Vincent picture are by far the brightest and most convincing.

  Maybe there was a glass and coral ball school where the painters all went to learn to do these things.

  Today is Wednesday. She is missing double maths, English, Latin, biology, history, double French. Today instead she is going to count the number of people who pass through Room 55 in a given half-hour (she will start at noon) and how many of those people stop to look at the Francesco del Cossa picture and for how long.

  From this she will be able to form a statistical study of attention spans and art.

  Then she will get herself some lunch, then off back to King’s Cross and home in time to be there for Henry getting out of school.

  Then she will slip the bank card back into its place as usual and go out into the garden, if it’s not raining, and say the daily hello and how are you today that she’s pledged to the girl in the yurt. She’ll come in and make supper and hope her father comes home in not too bad a shape.

  It is lovely, being intoxicated, her father said the other night. It is like wearing a whole fat woolly sheep between me and the world.

  The smell of an old sheep in the house, George thought when he said it, its fleece all grassy, matted with excrement, would be hugely preferable to the smell of her father after he’s been drinking.

  It was the weekend. She was watching a film on TV. It was about four teenage girls, friends who’d been devastated to find that they were all going to have to spend their summer holidays in different parts of the world. So they made a pact that they’d share a pair of jeans, meaning they’d send the jeans by post from one to the next to the next and so on as a sign of their undying friendship. What happened next was that the pair of jeans acted as a magic catalyst to their lives and saw them through lots of learning curves and self-esteem-getting and being in love, parents’ breaking up, someone dying etc.

  When it got to the part where a child was dying of cancer and the jeans helped one of the girls to cope with this, George, sitting on the floor in the front room, howled out loud like a wolf at its crapness.

  She decided she’d watch instead one of the DVDs H brought round before she left.

  The league of mothers has got your back, H had said handing her a small pile of films all in different languages which her mother had sorted out, in the moving, for your poor friend who likes the 1960s and who is mourning for real.

  Mourning for real. George liked the phrase. The top one on the pile next to the DVD player had the actress whose picture is on George’s wall in it. It was about some people who go to a near-deserted island on a boat. Then one of them goes missing. She literally disappears. The people spend the rest of the film looking for her and falling in and out of love with each other, but they never find out where she’s gone or what’s happened to her. George watched it without moving from where she was sitting on the floor from beginning to end. Then she ejected it and took the next film off the top of the pile.

  It was called, in French, A Film Like The Others. It had no subtitles and when it started it looked like a bootleg, fuzzy, as if copied from dodgy video.

  Her father came into the room and sat in the chair behind her.

  She could smell him.

  What’s the film, Georgie? he said.

  George was about to tell him the title but then she realized that if she told him what it was called he’d think she was being cheeky. This made her laugh.

  It’s French, she said.

  Nice to hear you laugh, he said behind her.

  The film began with some footage of two young men making very small brick walls. They seemed to be learning how to bricklay, could that be it? Over the top of this a lot of people were speaking in a French which George couldn’t really follow. It seemed to be about politics. Then it cut to some young people sitting talking in long grass. There was footage of what looked like strikes and protests, which made George think about the students here, how long they’d lasted in the university building and the stories that went round school about how rough the police and private security men had been to them, which her mother had made her tell her and some of the telling of which she’d sent out in phrases and paragraphs via Subvert.

  Her father was maundering on now about the film and song which had made her mother decide to call George her name.


  I said but what if you ended up looking like the girl in the film. She’s a bit plain, a bit of a loser. But your mother was right. She liked the notion of an anti-hero. Anti-heroine. She was of the belief that people can be who they really are and still come up trumps against the odds. Including me, I hope. Eh? Eh, Georgie?

  Yup, George said.

  She sighed. She hated the song from which her name had supposedly come.

  Her father started whistling it then singing the bit about how the world would see a new Georgie girl. The people in the film, whose faces you never got to see, just their arms and legs and torsos, sat round and talked about God knows what. The film showed them talking like all that mattered was that they were talking. While they talked they played with stems of the grass they were sitting in. They’d break little bits off it. They’d knot it. They’d split it as if to whistle through it. They’d hold up a stem and burn it with the end of a cigarette as they talked, holding the lit end to it till the bit of grass burnt through and fell off, then starting again further down the stem or with a new bit of grass. Then the film cut to a wall with words sprayed on it. PLUTÔT LA VIE.

  You know, her father said behind her, you’ll be leaving me soon, don’t you?

  George didn’t turn round.

  Purchased that ticket to the moon for me already, have you, then? she said.

  Silence, except for the French people all talking years ago. She turned. Her father looked grave. He didn’t look misted or sentimental. He didn’t even look drunk, though the room round him smelt like he couldn’t not be.

  It’s the nature of things, her father said. Your mother, in some ways, is lucky. She’ll never have to lose you now. Or Henry.

  Dad, George said. I’m not going anywhere. I’m sixteen.

  Her father looked down. He looked like he might start to cry.

  Perhaps the day will come, George thought, when I will listen to my father. For now though, how can I? He’s my father.

  As she thought it, she felt mean. So she gave in, fractionally.

  Oh yeah, and dad, she said. My room’s got a leak.

  You what? her father said.

  He sat up.

  The roof’s been leaking, she said. It’s possible that it’s been like that for some time. It was happening behind posters and stuff so I didn’t notice. Not till earlier today.

  Her father leapt up off the chair.

  She heard him take the stairs two at a time.

  George left the interesting / boring French film running and opened her laptop. She typed in Italian Film Directors. She clicked on Images.

  Up came a photograph of a man in the dark whose face she couldn’t see, wearing a lit-up picture on his chest. No, not a picture. Someone was literally projecting a film on to the man using him as a screen.

  George clicked on the link. It was about a director who’d sat in an art gallery in Italy while an artist projected one of the director’s own films from start to finish on to his chest.

  It said that not long after this art act this man was found dead on a beach.

  It said rent-boy, assignation, murder, conspiracy theory, Mafia, Vatican.

  It had a photograph of people letting off fireworks where his body’d been found.

  She heard her father thumping about upstairs. Imagine if someone projected films on to the side of your house. Would what those films were about affect your living space, she wondered, or your breathing, say, if they projected them on to your chest?

  No, of course they wouldn’t.

  But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.

  George sits among the pictures from all the centuries ago and looks hard at a picture by the painter who disappeared then reappeared centuries later by the skin of his teeth. His teethskin. The painter who wanted more money because he was greedy. Or the painter who wanted more money because he knew his worth. The painter who thought he was better than everybody else. Or the painter who knew he deserved better.

  Is worth the same as money? Are they the same thing? Is money who we are? Is it how much we make that makes us who we are? What does the word make mean? Are we what we make? It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit. We saw the pictures. What more do we need to know? The banking crisis. The food-banking crisis. The girl in the yurt. (She was probably very well paid for it.)

  Consider, for a moment, the moral conundrum.

  She shakes her head, which is like it’s full of rattling hard grimy things like the way her room, in November one afternoon when the wind had lifted the Velux up and open on its own, had filled with grimy sycamore seeds and shreds of wing and old leaf off the trees at the backs of the houses, all over the desk, the bed, the books, the floor, bits of city filthiness scattered all over the last of her clean clothes.

  Galleries are not much like life. They are such clean places, generally. Something about this one that they haven’t thought to mention in any of the brochures or online information, but that is actually a selling point for George, is that it smells nice, at least in this new wing it does, George doesn’t know about the old wing. It smells of wood in here. It can shift from quiet to full quite suddenly. You can be sitting here on the bench and there can be no one in the room but you (and the attendant) though you can always hear the footfall in the other rooms because all the floors throughout are creaky. Then from nowhere a huge group of tourists from Japan or Germany, wherever, will fill the place, sometimes kids, sometimes adults, usually passing time till it’s their turn to see the Leonardo cartoon out in the hall for which there’s usually more of a queue.

  She gets her phone out and texts H.

  – Did you know Leonardo da Vinci was a cartoonist?

  Then she readies her notebook and pen for the statistical experiment.

  H has texted straight back.

  – Yeah and he was so ahead of his time he invented Helix the Cat

  H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse. The day she left she started sending texts. The texts seemed pretty random. They weren’t about where H was or what it was like there or what H was feeling or doing; not once has H mentioned any of the stuff that people are usually meant to tell you. Instead they came, with no accompanying explanation, like information arrows aimed through space at their target, which was George.

  The first one said,

  – His mother’s name was Fiordelisia Mastria

  Then, much later,

  – His father built the belltower of the cathedral

  The next day,

  – He sent a letter on 25 March 1470 to a Duke called Borso d’Este to ask for more money for those pictures you went to see

  After that one, George (who wasn’t replying to any of these because every time she took her phone in her hand to try to, she’d type in half a word or a couple of words then she’d stop and delete it and in the end send nothing) knew they were about the something real between them.

  Two hours after, another text,

  – The Duke wrote on the bottom of it in pencil in Latin, Let him be content with the amount already decided

  Late that night,

  – He left in a sulk and went to work elsewhere

  Then, next day, over the whole day,

  – The 25 March 1470 was a Friday

  and

  – They thought for years all his paintings were done by someone else

  Then H clearly ran out of information about the painter.

  Instead, over the next few days, she fired mysterious little arrows at George in Latin:

  – Res vesana parvaque amor nomine

  – Adiuvete!

  – Puella fulvis oculis

  – Quem volo es

  – Quingenta milia passuum ambulem

  On the second day of the Latin texts, George worked out that I would walk five hundred miles was also the name of the Scottish song by the geeky eighties
twins with the glasses.

  She downloaded it and listened to it.

  Then she’d downloaded the songs called Help!, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Brown-Eyed Girl. She listened to them all. She made up a playlist – the first one she’d made on her new phone – and listed them by their Latin names. When she worked out that Quem volo es was maybe meant to be the song called You’re The One That I Want, she laughed out loud.

  They were pretty good. And H didn’t do Latin so the fact that they were actually quite good Latin meant even more.

  It also means that when she hears songs, just in passing, for instance when she’s doing shopping and they’re played like they always are over the loudspeakers at Asda, she doesn’t mind any more. This is useful. Almost everywhere you go songs are invariably being played and just hearing songs in the air, in shops or cafés or on adverts on TV, has been one of the hardest things to deal with.

  There is also the bonus that these songs H has made her listen to are the kind that play everywhere. But not just that. When you listen properly to them they are also pretty good songs. Even more strange and fine is the fact that someone has wanted her to hear them, and not just someone, but Helena Fisker.

  It is like having a conversation without needing to say anything. It is also like H is trying to find a language that will make personal sense to George’s ears. No one has ever done this before for George. She has spent her whole life speaking other people’s languages. It is new to her. The newness of it has a sort of power that can make the old things – as old as those old songs, even as ancient as Latin itself – a kind of new, but a kind that doesn’t dismiss their, what would you call it?

  George sits in the new wing of the National Gallery in front of an old painting and tries to think of the words for it.

  Their classic status?

  She nods. That’s it. Whatever is happening makes them new and lets them still be old both at once.

  After she’d downloaded the songs, she’d sent her first reply to H.

  Let’s helix again, like we did last summer.

  She followed it immediately with a text saying

  (Helix : Greek for twist.)