How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  Remarkably slow really, Henry says.

  He starts singing words.

  Cars and stars, cars and stars.

  It’s exciting, her mother says.

  Really cold tonight, George says.

  Don’t be so boring, George, her mother says.

  Ia, George says because this conversation takes place when she has started insisting that her mother and father, when they use her name, call her her full name.

  Her mother snorts a laugh.

  What? George says.

  It’s just that when you say that, well. It sounds like you’re saying something funny from my youth, her mother says. It’s how we used to do caricatures of the rich kids. D’you remember, Nathan?

  No, her father says.

  Yah, George, yah, her mother says pretending to be a posh girl from the past.

  George can choose react or ignore. She chooses ignore.

  We wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway, she says. There’ll be too much local light.

  We’ll put all the lights off, her mother says.

  I don’t mean our lights. I mean all the lights of the whole of Cambridge, George says.

  We’ll put all those lights off too, her mother says. Brightest around midnight. Right. I know. We can all get in the car and drive out of town to the back of Fulbourn and watch them from there, Nathan, what do you think?

  Up at six, Carol, her father says.

  Good, okay, her mother says. You stay at home with Henry, and me and George, I mean George yah, will go.

  Georgia and I, George says. And I’m not going.

  That makes three of you George yahs not going, her mother says. Okay. All three of you plus your father can stay at home with Henry and I’ll go myself. Nathan, his face is going very red, put him down.

  No because I want to see the sixty stars, Henry says still upside down. I want to see them more than anyone else in this actual room.

  It says here there might even be fireballs, her mother says.

  I want to see fireballs a lot actually, Henry says.

  It’s just pollution. And satellites, George says. There’s no point.

  Miss Moan, her father says shaking Henry in the air.

  Ms Moan, her mother says.

  Pardon my world-stopping act of political incorrectness, her father says.

  He says it gently and means it both funnily and nastily.

  I prefer Miss, George says. Till I’m, you know, Doctor Moan.

  Too young to know the political importance of choosing to be called Ms anything, her mother says.

  She could be saying this to George or her father. Her father is ten years younger than her mother which means, her mother likes to say, that they have been formed by very different political upbringings, the main difference being a childhood under Thatcher versus a late adolescence under Thatcher.

  (Thatcher was a prime minister some time after Churchill and long before George was born who, according to one of her mother’s most successful Subverts, gave birth to a baby Blair, someone George actually remembers being prime minister from when she was small, him in a nappy and so on but standing fully-formed and otherwise naked on a shell (not the beach kind, the missile kind) with Thatcher all puffed-out cheeks blowing his hair about and baby Blair with one hand over his crotch and the other coy at his chest and the caption underneath : The Birth of Vain Us. That Subvert, George remembers, was everywhere. It was funny seeing it in all the papers and online and knowing and not being able to tell anyone that it was her mother who’d pressed the button that sent it out into the world.)

  What the age difference between her parents means in real terms though is that they’ve split up twice, though twice so far got back together again.

  And I suppose the days of you being at least gracious to me about feminism are long gone, but I won’t complain, since it won’t make any difference and since the history of feminism teaches one never to expect graciousness anyway, and when you’re putting that child down, try not to put him down too hard on his head or you’ll break his neck, her mother says without looking up from the screen. And George. Or whatever your name is. If you miss seeing this with me you’ll regret it for the rest of your days.

  I won’t, George says.

  Not says. Said.

  There was an obituary in the Independent, because although George’s mother wasn’t famous like people who get obituaries usually are, and although she didn’t have tenure any more, she still had a quite important job at a think-tank and occasionally published opinion pieces in the Guardian or the Telegraph and sometimes also the American papers in their European editions, and a lot more people knew who she was after it was unveiled in the papers about the guerrilla internet stuff. Dr Carol Martineau Economist Journalist Internet Guerrilla Interventionist 19 November 1962–10 September 2013 aged 50 years. It says, in the first paragraph, renaissance woman. It says childhood Scottish Cairngorms education Edinburgh Bristol London. It says articles and talks ideology pay ratios pay differentials literal ideological consequences spread of UK poverty. It says thesis backed by IMF recognition inequality and slowdown in growth and stability. It mentions her particular bugbear, chief executive interests workforce kept low-waged. It says discovery three years ago Martineau one of the anonymous influential satire Subverts online art movement thousands supporters imitators.

  It says tragic unsuspected allergic reaction standard antibiotic.

  The last thing it says is is survived by. That means dead. Husband Nathan Cook and their two children.

  It all means dead.

  It all means George’s mother has disappeared off, or rather into, the face of the earth.

  Every day before work George’s mother, when she was alive (because she can’t exactly do it now being, you know, dead), used to do a keep-fit set of stretches and exercises. At the end of this she would always do a dance round the living room for the length of a song on a playlist on her phone.

  She’d started doing this a couple of years ago. Every day she put up with everybody laughing at her doing her moves among the furniture, her headphones bigger than her ears.

  Every single day, George has decided, from its first day onwards for this first year in which her mother won’t be alive, she will not just wear something black somewhere on her person but she will do the sixties dance for her in her honour. This is only problematic in that George will have to listen to songs while she does it, and that listening to songs is one of the things she can no longer do without inducing a kind of sadness that actually hurts in the chest.

  George’s mother’s phone is one of the things that went missing in the panic and aftermath. It hasn’t turned up, though the house is still full of all her other things exactly where she left them. She will have had her phone with her. It went missing between the railway station and the hospital. Its number has been stopped, presumably by her father. If you ring it now the message you get is the recorded voice telling you this number is currently not in use.

  George thinks her mother’s phone has probably been taken by someone working in surveillance.

  George’s father : George, I told you. I don’t want to hear any more of that paranoid nonsense from you.

  Mrs Rock : So you believe your mother’s phone was taken by someone working in surveillance?

  All her mother’s playlists were on her phone. Her mother was unusually private about her phone. George only sneaked a look at it once or twice (and both times felt bad for doing so, for different reasons). She never even looked at the playlists. She only looked at a couple of emails and texts. She never thought to look at music. It was her mother’s music. It was bound to have been rubbish. Now she has no idea and will never know what song or songs her mother listened to every day to do the dance thing, or on the train, or walking along the street.

  But the dance her mother did was always that old sixties dance, for which there are instructions online and even several specific songs.

  There is a piece of Super
8 footage her mother had transferred, of herself as a very small child in about 1965 doing this dance with her own mother, George’s grandmother. George has it on her laptop and her phone.

  It is a grandmother who was dead way before George, though George has seen old photographs. She looks like someone from another time. Well, she is. She is a very young woman, strict-looking but pretty, a stranger with dark hair up on top of her head. The film footage is all flickers and shadows at the top edge of it, which is where the grandmother’s face tends to be because the film is really being taken of George’s mother, who is much much smaller in it than Henry is now. She must be only about three years old. She is wearing a cardigan knitted in pink wool. It is the most colourful thing in the film. George can even see the detail, if she stops the frame, of the toggle buttons on its front, they’re black, and behind this child who is her mother there is a television screen on spindly slanted legs, the kind from when television screens bulged like the midriffs of obese middle-aged people.

  George’s mother, next to the stockinged legs of her own mother, is twisting from side to side in the silence, her little arms all elbow. She looks serious and grim but she is also smiling; even then her mouth, when she smiled, was that straight line and it looks like she is already, even so young, being polite yet firm about the fact that she’s having to concentrate. In the film she is really having to concentrate because she is so small and the cardigan is so chunky, so much bigger and thicker than she is that she looks like a small pink snowperson, like she is bound to topple over. The whole thing somehow becomes about the fact that she is balancing her self in all its wholeness, compactness and littleness against something that looks like it’s going to happen and which, if it does happen, will end the dance. But it never does happen because just before the film turns into being about some swans and rowing boats on a boating pond somewhere in Scotland the dance ends, her mother (as a child) puts her arms up in the air delighted and the lady with the hair up (George’s grandmother) puts her arms down, catches the child and lifts her up into the flicker and out of the frame.

  The dance part lasts 48 seconds on George’s laptop.

  Lockjaw. Quicksand. Polio. Lung. These are some of the words that George’s mother was frightened of when she was small. (George once asked.)

  Tell Laura I Love Her. That’s one of the records that her mother loved when she was small. One Little Robin In A Cherry Tree. To listen to these, with first their crackling needle noise then the starburst of their hokey tunes, is like being able to experience the past like you have literally entered it and it is a whole other place, completely new to you, where people really did sing songs like this, a past so alien it is like a kind of shock.

  Shock of the new and the old both at once, her mother says.

  Said.

  One afternoon George’s father brings home the new turntable and when he finally works out how to connect it up with the CD soundbox they drag the old records out from under the stairs.

  A boy called Tommy loves a girl called Laura. He wants to give her ‘everything’ (this is funny in itself, apparently, from the way her parents fall about, though this is back when George is too young to understand why), including flowers and presents and – the thing he wants to give her most – a wedding ring. But he can’t afford one, so he signs up for a stock-car race because there is a prize of 1000 dollars (idiot, George says, yes, I’m afraid so, her mother says, romantic, her father says, and Henry is too little right then to say anything). Tommy phones Laura’s house. But Laura’s not there. So he tells her mother instead to Tell Laura he Loves Her, tell Laura he needs her, tell Laura he won’t be late, he’s got something to do that can’t wait (uh-oh, her mother says, it’s already tragic because at one remove. Is it? George says. What does one remove mean? Romantic, her father says. That’s all technology ever does in the end, her mother says. It can’t do anything but highlight the metaphysical. What’s metaphysical? George says. Too big a word for this song, her father says). Then the car he’s in bursts into flames and as they pull him dying from the twisted remains of it he tells them to tell Laura he loves her and not to cry because his love for her will never die.

  She and her mother and father all crying with laughter on the rug.

  Why did you even keep this record? George asks her mother. It’s so bad.

  I didn’t know till today but obviously I was keeping it precisely so that you, me and your father would all end up listening to it today, her mother says and they all fall about laughing again.

  Thinking about that today back then in this new today right now, and in whichever stage of mourning she’s in, doesn’t make George feel sad or feel anything in particular.

  But in case the record might do for the dance thing she went downstairs just before New Year happened, but after her father’d gone out so he wouldn’t be hurt by hearing it, and found it in the pile of smaller records by the turntable (there’s a name for the smaller-sized records but she can’t remember what it is).

  She turned the sound to very low. She put it on. It had a warp in it so the guitars in its intro sounded seasick, like the record felt sick, though George herself felt fine, or rather, nothing.

  It was definitely not suitable though, being too slow.

  The dance her mother did every day needs an upward beat.

  At midnight on all the other New Years her mother would usually get out some really nice paper, the kind with real bits of flower petal mixed in with its texture, and give her and her father two pieces each. They would each (except Henry, asleep, which was important, fire being involved) write their wishes and hopes for the new year on to one of them and write the things they’d hated most about the old year on to the other one. Then – being very very careful not to mix the pieces up – each person would take a turn standing over the sink, strike a match, hold the flame to a corner of the piece of paper with all the things written on it that he or she hadn’t liked, and watch it burn. Then when you couldn’t hold it any more without hurting yourself you could drop it safely into the sink (this letting-go of it was the whole point of the ritual, her mother always said) where, when it finished burning, you could wash the burnt-up bits away.

  This year George has no wishes and hopes.

  Instead the piece of paper in front of her is blank except for the words WHAT’S LEFT OF XMAS HOLIDAYS DAILY SCHEDULE. She has written numbers, meaning the times of day, down one side of it. Next to 9.30 she has written DANCE THING.

  This is the whole point of her looking for likely tunes, so that she will be ready to begin as soon as breakfast is over tomorrow (today).

  Some time ago, George goes into her mother’s study and wanders around poking at the things on top of the books on the shelves. Her mother is not dead yet. Her mother is there working. There are piles of papers everywhere.

  George, her mother says without looking round.

  What are you working on? George says.

  Haven’t you homework? her mother says.

  You’re working on whether I’ve got homework? George says.

  George, her mother says. Don’t move anything, stop touching stuff and go and get on with something of your own.

  George comes and stands at the corner of the desk. She sits on the chair next to her mother’s chair.

  I’m a bit bored, she says.

  Me too, her mother says. This is statistics. I have to concentrate.

  Her mouth is the thin line.

  Why do you keep these? George says picking up the little jar full of pencil shavings.

  The jar was originally a Santorini mini capers jar, it says so on what’s left of the label. Through the glass you can see the different woods of the different pencils her mother has been using. One layer is dark brown. One layer is light gold colour. You can see the paint lines, the tiny zigzags of colour made into the shapes like the edges of those scallop shells by the twist of the pencil in the sharpener.

  One pencil, she can see, was once red and black (stripes?). One
pencil was marbled blue. One was green, a really nice bright green. George takes out a blue-edged sharpening. It looks a bit like a wooden moth. She winds it round her finger. It is delicate and falls to pieces as soon as she twists it.

  Keep what? her mother says.

  George holds out the bits of shaving.

  What’s the point? she says.

  Point. Ha ha! her mother says. Funny.

  Why don’t you just sharpen your pencils into the bin like a normal person? George says.

  Well, her mother says pushing her chair back. It seems sad to, to just throw them away, I don’t like to. Not until I’ve finished whatever project I’ve used them on.

  Bit pathetic, George says.

  Well, yes, I suppose it is, her mother says. Literally. I think it’s cause they’re a proof of something. Hmm. But a proof of what?

  George rolls her eyes.

  Proof that you once sharpened some pencils, George says. Can I borrow the dictionary for a minute?

  Use your own, her mother says. Go away. Shut the door after you, you annoying and challenging little pest.

  She pulls her chair back in and clicks on something. George doesn’t leave immediately. She stands behind her mother, takes the big dictionary off the shelf and opens it against the wall.

  Plonk piazza pelmet pathway partake pastiche pathetic see under pathos. The quality that arouses pity. Pathetic. Affecting the emotions of pity, grief or sorrow. Sadly inadequate. (Interesting: inadequate and sad.) Contemptible. Derisory. Applied to the superior oblique muscle, which turns the eyeball downwards, and to the trochlear nerve connecting with it (anat).

  It isn’t until George has left the room and shut the door after her that she gets what she herself said and why it was funny.

  Pencil sharpenings. The point. Ha ha!

  She thinks about going back in and saying

  I get it!

  But she knows not to, so she doesn’t.

  (Point taken, George thinks now, on New Year’s morning.)

  WHAT’S LEFT OF XMAS HOLIDAYS DAILY SCHEDULE.

  Under DANCE THING next to 10 a.m. she writes the word GARDEN.