How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  Back came a text that pierced whatever was between the outside world and George’s chest. In other words, George literally felt something.

  It’s good to hear your voice

  What is great about the voice of that singer called Sylvie Vartan (whom George, apparently, may even resemble a little) is that there’s almost no way it can be made gentle, or made to lie. Also, although it was recorded decades ago, her voice is always, the moment you hear it, rough with its own aliveness. It is like being pleasurably sandpapered. It lets you know you’re alive. When George wants something fierce and sad in her ears she listens to the song where Sylvie Vartan howls like a wolf on the words dreamed and read in French. One day last week with this song on repeat in her ears she cycled out towards Addenbrooke’s which is the place her mother died, then way past the hospital and out into the countryside because on her way to London, the morning before, she’d seen from the train a metal structure, a sculpture thing shaped very like a double helix.

  It was a DNA structure after all, a sculpture of one, and it marked the start of a cycle trail you could follow for two miles along the little different-coloured rectangles painted on the tarmac, each standing for one of the 10,257 components there are in a single human gene.

  She sat in a clump of grass at the side of the path in the early spring sun. The grass was wet. She didn’t care. There were bees and flies out and about. A small bee-like creature landed on the cuff of her jacket and she flicked it away with a precise flick of her thumb and first finger.

  But a fraction of a second after she did she realized the impact her finger must have had on something so small.

  It must have felt like being hit by the rounded front of a giant treetrunk that’s been swung through the air at you without you knowing it was coming.

  It must have felt like being punched by a god.

  That’s when she sensed, like something blurred and moving glimpsed through a partition whose glass is clouded, both that love was coming for her and the nothing she could do about it.

  The cloud of unknowing, her mother said in her ear.

  Meets the cloud of knowing, George thought back.

  So she cycled the length of the single gene holding her phone camera out and towards the ground. She took a photo of the other double helix sculpture that marked the end.

  She looked at the picture on her phone then back up at the artwork itself.

  It resembled a joyful bedspring or a bespoke ladder. It was like a kind of shout, if a shout to the sky could be said to look like something. It looked like the opposite of history, though they were always going on at school about how DNA history had been made here in this city.

  What if history, instead, was that shout, that upward spring, that staircase-ladder thing, and everybody was just used to calling something quite different the word history? What if received notions of history were deceptive?

  Deceived notions. Ha.

  Maybe anything that forced or pushed such a spring back down or blocked the upward shout of it was opposed to the making of what history really was.

  When she got back to the house she downloaded the film and the photos and she sent them.

  When you come back we will cycle the length of one thirty-thousandth of the human genome, she wrote. If we ever want to cycle the whole thing it will take us four years, that’s if we do it without stopping and unless we split the task and do half each, which will mean it will take two years each but be a lot less interesting. It will be like cycling round the earth 15 times, or seven and a half if we do half each.

  Halfway through writing this email George noticed that she’d used, in its first sentence, the future tense, like there might be such a thing as a future.

  !

  And did you know (you probably did) that Rosalind Franklin nearly didn’t get credited for the double helix discovery? Though she took the original X-ray that meant Crick and Watson could make their discovery, and was clearly on the way to the same discovery herself. And that when Watson saw her giving a talk about her research he thought she ought to have been warmer and more frivolous in her lecture about diffraction (!) and that he might have been more interested in what she was saying if she’d taken off her glasses and done something with her hair. So we need to add a whole new verse to that wrecking ball song. It is only sixty three years ago that this happened, and that’s less than the age of your grandmother and only eleven years before my mother happened. It is the kind of historic fact that opposes the making of true history. Anyway in the film here the green bars are for adenine, the blue for cytosine, the green for guanine and the red for thymine.

  Oh yeah and also, if you remember. You asked, and te semper volam.

  Please remember, she thought as she sent it.

  Sardonic! That was the other word, along with generous, that her mother’d said she was. Not sarcastic.

  When I remember, it is like an earthquake, Henry said yesterday. Sometimes I don’t remember, for almost all day. And then I do. Or I remember maybe a different thing that happened. Like when we went to that shop and bought the pipe that when you blew down it the very long bubbles came out of it.

  Henry is doing a project on earthquakes and tsunamis at school. The schoolbook from which he is making his drawings and getting his facts has a picture on its cover of a motorway that looks like it’s been lifted by a giant hand and put back down on its side instead and all the trucks and cars have slid off it and are on their roofs, wheels-upward, at the foot of it.

  Strange, but the photo is beautiful. The photos all through this book are beautiful, of roads with crevasse cracks splitting through them, of a clock face at the top of a tower split in half so only the roman numerals for seven to eleven survive and the rest of the face is just sky. There is one picture of a small girl holding a teakettle and standing against a backdrop of aid tents. It’s a natural disaster and it looks a bit like a fashion shoot. Well, almost all photos of roughed-up places, so long as there are no actual dead people in them, look like a fashion shoot.

  Sooner or later, George’s mother said in her head, the ones with the dead people in them will look like a fashion shoot too.

  Fashion shot. Ha ha.

  That would make a good Subvert.

  George saw that her little brother, sitting at the breakfast bar over his earthquakes and tsunamis book, was hanging his head like a done flower.

  She pulled up a chair beside him.

  You’re a rift, she said.

  I’m a what? he said in a little voice.

  You’re a fault, she said.

  I am not, he said.

  You are, you’re a San Andreas fault. You’re a tectonic plate, she said.

  You’re a tectonic plate, he said.

  Sticks and stones may break my bones, she said. But names will never harm me. You’re a drifting continent.

  You’re a drifting continent, he said

  You’re a drifting incontinent, she said (though the subtlety of this pretty much went over Henry’s head). You’re a Richter scale. A scaly Richter. A nidiot.

  Sticks and stones, Henry said.

  He was singing now to himself with his face sad.

  May break my bones. Sticks and stones.

  George went out to the garden. She collected some pebbles and bits of hedge, a few twigs. She came back into the kitchen and she flung them at Henry. Little twigs and leaves stuck in his hair. Gravel went everywhere, into the sugar, the butter, the cutlery drawer.

  Henry looked at the debris all round and all over him and then up at her in astonishment.

  Did your bones break? she said. Well?

  She tickled him a bit.

  Is that one broken? she said. Is that one? That one?

  It worked. He lightened, he gave in, he laughed and twisted in her arms.

  Good.

  She scooped the gravel out of the butter and sugar with a spoon. She wiped the twigs and leaves and grit into a J-cloth and cleaned the table. She made them eggs for supper. (Eg
g on poplar. Like something made in a chic restaurant. What would it taste like? Think of all the paintings made with all the eggs laid all the hundreds of years ago and the blips of life that were the lives of the warmblooded chickens who laid them.)

  Henry was still finding the sticks and stones joke funny, and she was still finding the grit in his hair, when she bathed him and put him to bed.

  The earth is made of rock. It is more than four and a half billion years old. Five hundred years is a nothing. It is about the length of an eyelash. Less.

  At level four to five, things fall off walls and shelves.

  At level six, walls themselves fall.

  There are thousands of earthquakes all over the earth, every year, most so small no one notices them.

  But these are the signs for which people have learned to watch. Dogs will bark. Frogs will leave the area. The sky will fill with strange lights.

  Mrs Rock, George had said the last time she’d seen Mrs Rock, I am between you and a hard place.

  Mrs Rock almost smiled.

  So I have decided to veer towards you rather than towards the hard place, George said.

  Mrs Rock looked slightly panicked.

  Then George told Mrs Rock how she was sorry she’d lied.

  That day when I said the word minotaur then pretended you’d misheard me, George said. You didn’t mishear me. I did say it. Then I pretended I didn’t. And I just wanted to say so, and to apologize. I was being difficult. And also, I know I must have seemed highly paranoid in some of the things I’ve said to you over the past weeks, particularly about my mother and so on. I’ve been making up narratives. I know that now.

  Mrs Rock nodded.

  Then she told George that the story of the minotaur was one about facing what mazes you. She made it very clear that she was using the word maze, not amaze. Then, when you’d faced it, she said, the thing to do to get out of the labyrinth was to go back the way you’d come, follow your own thread, the thread you’d left behind you, and that this had a lot to do with knowing where we come from and what our roots are –

  I disagree with your interpretation, George said.

  Mrs Rock stopped. She looked amazed (or perhaps mazed) that someone had interrupted her.

  George shook her head.

  It just needs the twist in the plot. It needs the outside help, George said. If a girl hadn’t given Theseus the ball of string, chances are he’d never have got out of there. He’d probably still be in there today and that minotaur’d still be demanding and eating the required number of Athenian virgins.

  Yes, of course, Mrs Rock said. But it’s also possible, Georgia, that it means, metaphorically speaking –

  Aw Mrs Rock, to tell you the truth, I’m so, so tired of what stories are meant to mean, George said. My mother, on the morning of the day she died, annoyed me. She was calling me her little prince, because of that new royal baby and me happening to have the same name, both my parents started doing that last summer. All of which meant that I shied away from her when she tried to kiss me on my way out the door to school. Then the next time she came home was two weeks after and it was in the form of bits of rubble in a cardboard box, which my father put in the passenger seat of his work van then drove round town stopping to leave handfuls of her in places she’d really liked. Only outdoor places, though, so as not to be too shocking or too illegal. Though he did put some of her in his pocket and take her to London, where he went looking specifically for cracks and crevices in the outsides and the insides of the buildings of her favourite art places and theatre places and work places. Into which he pressed, with his thumb, some of my mother. And there’s still quite a lot of her left in the box so that this summer we can take her to Scotland and abroad, to some of the other places she liked. The thing being. What I mean is. It’s not very metaphorical, if you’ll forgive me, Mrs Rock.

  Silence.

  (What you might even call a stony silence.)

  Had George really said all that out loud?

  No.

  Phew.

  George had said only the first sentence out loud. She hadn’t said anything past the words what stories are meant to mean.

  But think of her mother. Think of her smiling, looking the minotaur in the eye and – winking.

  Think of her father taking what was left of the shape her mother had when she was alive and driving round in the rain to find the places she’d want to be.

  This thought of her father freed for George a moment of future-tense vision, by chance a summer vision, in which she will come home from school or London one day in a couple of months’ time and find him standing on the front lawn with the hose in his hand and what turns out to be a Beethoven symphony playing into his ears through the precious Bose headphones nobody else is allowed to touch, while he conducts a spray of water con brio then andante over the green of the new grass he’s had put in.

  But back to now, or rather then, and Mrs Rock still a bit in shock at having been interrupted.

  Mrs Rock brought her eyebrows down from the top of her head, where they’d gone. She placed a look on her face to show that she was waiting a moment to see if George was going to say anything else.

  George placed a look in the same way on her own face to let Mrs Rock know she wasn’t going to say anything.

  Mrs Rock breathed out slowly. She leaned forward. She told George she was glad George had told her the truth about saying that word and pretending she hadn’t. Then she settled back into her chair, because George had stayed silent so far at least, and started on about the Greek notion of the truth-teller.

  This, Mrs Rock said, was a very important figure in Greek life and philosophy, usually someone with no power, no social status to speak of, who’d take it upon themselves to stand up to the highest authority when the authority was unjust or wrong, and would express out loud the most uncomfortable truths, even though by doing this they would probably even be risking their life.

  Upon himself or herself, George said. He or she. His or her life. And, just to say, I find this second allusion, or example or illustration, much more effective than your minotaur one.

  Mrs Rock put her pencil down on the desk with a click. She shook her head. She smiled.

  Georgia, she said. As I’m sure you’re aware. You can be a little draconian at times.

  I’ll take that as a compliment, Mrs Rock, George said.

  Yes, Georgia, you may. Same time next Tuesday, Mrs Rock said. See you then.

  George opens her notebook. It’s nearly noon.

  This is the point in this story at which, according to its structure so far, a friend enters or a door opens or some kind of plot surfaces (but which kind? the one that means the place where a dead person’s buried? the one that means the place where a building’s to be built? the one that means a secret stratagem?); this is the place in this book where a spirit of twist in the tale has tended, in the past, to provide a friendly nudge forward to whatever’s coming next.

  George is ready and waiting.

  She plans to count the people and how long and how little time they spend looking or not looking at a random picture in a gallery.

  What she doesn’t know yet is that in roughly half an hour or so, while she’s collating final figures (a hundred and fifty seven people will have passed through the room altogether and out of this number twenty five will have looked or glanced for no longer than a second; one woman will have stopped to look at the carving of the frame but not looked at the picture for longer than three seconds; two girls and a boy in their late teens will have stopped and made amused comments about St Vincent’s knot of monk hair, the growth like a third eye at the front of his forehead, and stood there looking at him for thirteen full seconds), this will happen :

  [Enter Lisa Goliard]

  George will recognize her immediately even from having seen her only once in an airport.

  She will walk into this room in this gallery, glance round for a moment, see George, not know George from Adam, then
come and stand in front of George between her and the painting of St Vincent Ferrer.

  She’ll stand right in front of it for several minutes, far longer than anyone except George herself.

  Then she’ll shoulder her designer bag and she’ll leave the room.

  George will follow.

  Standing close to the woman’s back, so long as there are enough people to camouflage her (and there will be), she will say the name like a question (Lisa?) on the stairs, just to make sure it’s her. She will see if the woman turns when she hears the name (she will), and will pretend when she does by looking away and making herself as much like an ordinary disaffected teenage girl as possible that it wasn’t her who said it.

  George will surprise a talent in herself for being surreptitious.

  She will track the woman, staying behind her and aping the ordinary disaffected teenage girl all the way across London including down into the Underground and back up into the open air, till that woman gets to a house and goes in and shuts its door.

  Then George will stand across the road outside the house for a bit.

  She will have no idea what to do next or even where she is in London any more.

  She will see a low wall opposite the house. She will go and sit on it.

  Okay.

  1. Unless the woman is some kind of early renaissance specialist or St Vincent Ferrer expert (unlikely, but possible) there is no way she’d ever know about or think to make the journey specially to see this painting out of all the paintings in the whole of London. This will suggest that for her to have known anything about it, including the basic fact of its existence, she must still have been tailing, one way or another, George’s mother – unless she’s tracking George right now – at the time they went to Ferrara.

  2. George’s mother is dead. There was a funeral. Her mother is rubble. So why is this woman still on the trail? Is she tracking George? (Unlikely. Anyway, now George is tracking her.)

  3. (and George will feel her own eyes open wider at this one) Perhaps somewhere in all of this if you look there’s a proof of love.

  This thought will make George furious.

  At the same time it will fill her with pride at her mother, right all along. Most of all she will wonder at her mother’s sheer talent.