How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

This word garden here means more than just garden, because some time ago (before September) George got fed up of everybody at school always talking about the porn they’d seen on the internet. It was like doubly being a virgin, not having seen any. So she decided to watch some and make her own mind up. But she didn’t want Henry seeing because he is only eight, well, he was even younger, only seven, then. This is not discriminatory on her part. He will look for himself and decide for himself when he is old enough. That is, if he gets the chance to wait that long, since kids watch this stuff pretty freely in the playgrounds of the primary schools too.

  So she took the iPad and sat in what was left of the pergola, where she could see anyone (especially Henry) coming towards her, in case, and she clicked on the first images that came up, and it was kind of interesting, quite amazing really all the things she saw and she began to be glad she’d decided to sit out in the garden away from the house.

  It was interesting at first. It was quite eye-opening.

  It got boring and repetitive quite fast.

  After it did, she began to be interested instead in how many of the scenarios needed to have or at least to pretend to have stories. There was one in which a long-haired blonde woman of about twenty, wearing nothing but high heels, was having her hands tied at the wrists by a much older woman wearing a quite fashionable low-cut evening dress. The older woman tipped the younger one’s chin up and she took an eye-dropper and squeezed something into each of the younger woman’s eyes. Apparently this now made the younger woman blind. The older woman led her into a room a bit like a gym if a gym were to be painted black and have chains hanging off its wall bars; also a bit like a gym there were machines and all sorts of apparatus in the room, as well as a semi-circle of men and women dressed in the same kind of evening clothes as the older woman, as if they’d all gone out to a prestigious formal function somewhere. The younger woman didn’t know any of this. She couldn’t see anything because of the eye drops. At least, that was the story. At this point the film flashed forward on to lots of edits showing extreme-looking moments of what was about to happen to the blind woman, which you’d only get to see in full if you subscribed.

  Could she see? Was she really blind? George was intrigued. Was it real? Or was the woman just acting? And if she was blind, had been blinded by whatever the older woman squeezed into her eyes, how long did it take before it wore off and she could see again? Or could she never see again? Maybe she was somewhere in the world right now still wandering about blind. Maybe they’d told her it would wear off, and it never did, or only partially did. Maybe something about those eye drops changed something about the way she saw. Or, on the other hand, maybe she was perfectly fine and had 20:20 vision regardless.

  20:20 vision regardless! Oxymoron. Ha ha.

  Then there was a film where a quite old woman, in her thirties, lay on her back and got fucked one after the other pretty briefly each time by a large number of men, most of them wearing masks like killers wear in thrillers on TV. A figure always came up on the screen every time a new one started. 7!! 8!! 9!! Then the figures flashed forward from 13!! 14!! to 34!! 35!! 36!! There were supposedly forty men altogether. The whole thing was supposed to have taken exactly forty minutes, that’s what the onscreen clock showed, though the film lasted about five. There was only the one woman, on her back on what looked like a coffee table, which can’t have been comfortable. Her eyes were shut, she was a kind of red colour all over, and it was also as if someone had fuzzed or smudged the lens, like it had steamed up. At the end of the film the words on the screen announced that after this filmshoot my wife was pregnant. Then three exclamation marks. !!!

  Why was it forty? George wondered sitting in the garden with the flowers all nodding round her and the occasional passing butterfly’s shadow calling her eyes beyond the iPad. Was it because forty is a number that sounds like it means a lot, a magic number like forty days and forty nights, forty years in the desert, forty thieves? Open sesame! Ha ha. No, that was a bit sick. And was the woman on the coffee table really the wife of the person who made the film? And was she really pregnant after it? There was something a bit interesting about it, like watching a queen bee at work in a hive. But why had so many of the men worn the masks? Did that make it more exciting? For whom? Or perhaps they didn’t want their own wives, or people at work if they went for interviews, say, after they’d taken part in this film, to know their identities.

  Then one afternoon George had clicked on a particular film which made her swear to herself that she’d watch this same film (or a bit of it, since it was quite lengthy) once every day for the rest of her life.

  There was a girl in it who must have been sixteen because of legality but looked much younger than George. She looked about twelve. There was a man in it who looked about forty. When he kissed this girl he took almost her whole face into his mouth. They were in a yurt-like room for a very long time doing stuff and the uncomplaining smallness of the girl alongside her evident discomfort and the way she looked both there and absent, as if she’d been drugged, given something to make her feel things in slower motion than they were actually happening to her, had changed something in the structures of George’s brain and heart and certainly her eyes, so that afterwards when George tried to watch any more of this kind of sexual film that girl was there waiting under them all.

  More. George found that the girl was there too, pale and pained with her shut eyes and her open o of a mouth, under the surface of the next TV show she watched on catch-up.

  She was there under the YouTube videos of Vampire Weekend and the puppy falling off the sofa and the cat sitting on the hoover that hoovered by itself and the fox so domesticated that the person taking the film could stroke its head.

  She was there under the pop-ups and the adverts on Facebook, and under the facts about the history of the suffragettes on the BBC site which George looked up for school.

  She was there under the news item about the woman who tried to buy a burger at a McDonald’s drive-thru on her horse, who, when she was refused at the hatch, got off her horse and led it into the main building and up to the counter and tried to order there. McDonald’s regrets we are unable to serve customers on horseback.

  When she’d sensed that girl there underneath even this, George went back through her own history to find the porn film. She clicked on it.

  The girl sat demure on the edge of the bed again.

  The man grinned at the camera and took the girl’s head in his hands again.

  What you doing out here, Georgie? her father asked her a couple of months ago.

  November. It was cold. Her mother was dead. George had forgotten about the girl for weeks, then remembered in a French class at school when they were revising the conditional. She had come home and gone into the garden and found the film and clicked on it. She had apologized sotto voce to the girl in the film for having been inattentive.

  Her father’d come out to put stuff in the bins. George was in the pergola with no jacket on. He walked up the garden. She turned the screen towards him. As he got closer he slowed down.

  Jesus, George, he said. What are you doing?

  I wanted to ask mum about it, George said. I meant to. I was going to. Now I can’t.

  She explained to her father that she had formerly watched, and intended again to watch, this film of this girl every day to remind herself not to forget the thing that had happened to this person.

  But George, her father said.

  She told him she was doing it in witness, by extension, of all the unfair and wrong things that happen to people all the time.

  George, it’s good of you, her father said. I applaud the sentiment.

  It’s not just sentiment, George said.

  Honestly George, when I saw you out here watching something I was cheered, he said. I thought, good, Georgie’s back, she’s watching something on the iPad, she’s interested in things again. I was pleased. But sweet heart. It’s appalling, that stuff. You can’t watch
that. And you have to remember, it’s not really meant for you. And I can’t even look at it. And anyway. That girl. I mean. It probably happened years ago.

  That’s no reason not to do what I’m doing, George said.

  She was probably very well paid for it, her father said.

  George’s eyes widened. She snorted.

  I can’t believe you just said that, she said. I can’t believe I’m even related to you.

  And sex isn’t like that. Loving sex. Real sex. Sex between people who love each other, her father said.

  Do you really think I’m that much of a moron? George said.

  And you’ll drive yourself mad if you keep watching stuff like that, her father said. You’ll do damage to yourself.

  Damage has already happened, George said.

  George, her father said.

  This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can just watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it before clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl. Do you still not understand?

  She held the screen up. Her father put the flat of his hand over his eyes.

  Yes, but George, her father said. You watching it, whichever way you think you’re watching it or intend to see it, won’t make any real difference to that girl. It just means the number of people watching the film with her in it will keep going up. And anyway, you can’t be sure of, you can never know. There are circumstances –

  I’ve got eyes, George said.

  Well, okay, well, what about Henry? her father said. What if he saw?

  Why d’you think I’m out here in the cold? He won’t. Not because of me anyway. I mean, obviously he’ll have to do his own seeing in his own time, George said. And anyway. You watch stuff like this. I know you do. Everyone watches it.

  Oh dear God, her father said. I can’t believe what you just said.

  He’d turned his back because the film was still facing him and was still playing. With his back to her he started to complain. Other people’s children, lucky other people, normal children with normal neuroses like always having to have the same spoon to eat with or just not eating at all or throwing up, cutting themselves, whatever.

  He was sort-of joking and sort-of not.

  George sat back. She clicked the pause button. She waited till her father had left the garden.

  She sat with her father that night watching Newsnight, the kind of programme on which massacres and injustices happened every day – if they made the news – then disappeared into old news, just weren’t news any more. Her mother was dead. Her father was asleep. He was extremely tired. He was sleeping a lot. It was because of the mourning. When he woke up he switched the channel over without even looking at George to UK Border Force on the channel called Pick.

  Who’d ever have believed it? George’s mother says.

  It is a year before she dies. George and her parents are watching rubbish on TV before going to bed, flicking channels before giving in and putting it off.

  Who’d ever have believed, she says, when I was growing up, that one day we’d be watching programmes about people being checked and failed at passport controls? When did this become light entertainment?

  Six months before she dies and shortly before she gets depressive about her friendship fizzling out with that woman Lisa Goliard, George’s mother comes into the living room. It is a Sunday evening. George is watching a programme about the Flying Scotsman, a train from the past, on TV. But because George came in halfway through this programme and missed the beginning, and because it is an interesting programme, she is simultaneously watching it from the start on catch-up on her laptop.

  On one screen the train has just broken the hundred-mile-an-hour record. On the other screen the train has just been superseded by cars. At the same time George is looking up photobombs on her phone. There are some very brilliant and funny ones. There are some you can’t believe haven’t been digitally enhanced, or look like they must have been set up but the people who took them swear they haven’t.

  You, her mother says watching her, are a migrant of your own existence.

  I am not, George says.

  You are, her mother says.

  What’s your problem, dinosaur? George says.

  Her mother laughs.

  Same problem as yours, she says. We’re all migrants of our own existence now. In this bit of the world at least. So we better get ready. Because look how migrants get treated all over the world.

  Sometimes your political correctness is so tedious that I find myself fall –, George says.

  Then she mimes falling asleep.

  Don’t you ever want to simplify? her mother says. Read a book?

  I read all the time, George says.

  Think about just one thing, instead of fifteen all at once? her mother says.

  I’m versatile, George says without looking up. I’m from the versatile generation. And you’re supposed to be the great online anarchist. You should approve of me being so savvy.

  Savvy, yes, her mother says. Always be savvy please. I’d need that from any daughter of mine. Otherwise, what with me being so politically correct and everything, I’d be sending you straight to the orphanage.

  Properly speaking, that would mean both you and dad would have to die, George says.

  Well, one day, her mother says. With any luck later rather than sooner. Anyway. I don’t actually care how many screens you look at at once. I’m just doing my concerned-parent bit. We all have to. It’s in the contract.

  Blah, George says. You’re pretending you’re being cool about it now because online interventionism was once perceived for about three months several years ago to be cool –

  Thanks! her mother says. Ratified at last.

  – but really you’re just as paranoid as everybody else over forty, George says, all sackcloth and ashes and stuck in the past, hitting your chests with a scourge and ringing your little bells, unclean! Unclean! Disempowerment by information! Disempowerment by information!

  Oh, that’s good, George, her mother says. Can I have that?

  For a Subvert? George says.

  Yes, her mother says.

  No, George says.

  Please? her mother says.

  How much will you pay me? George says.

  You’re a born mercenary, her mother says. £5.

  Done, George says.

  Her mother takes a note out of her purse and writes on it in pencil, in the white space between the picture of Elizabeth Fry and the drawing of some of the women prisoners she helped, the words disempowerment by information paid in full.

  Then : George spent that £5 note the day after. She liked the thought of releasing it into the wild.

  Now : George wishes she hadn’t spent that £5 note. Somewhere out in the world, if no one’s rubbed it out and it hasn’t worn off, her mother’s handwriting is passing from hand to hand, stranger to stranger.

  George looks at the word GARDEN under DANCE THING, in her own handwriting. The dance bit will take less than five minutes and the film of the girl is forty five minutes long, and she can’t usually bear to make herself watch more than five of those terrible minutes.

  Dance thing. Garden. Then Henry standing like a Victorian child from one of the sick sentimental songs about death and orphans, holding his hands in the prayery way in which he’s been holding them since he saw Carols from King’s on TV last week. Then her father trying to pretend he’s not drunk, or getting up still drunk and sleeping it off till lunchtime on the couch, then trying to think up an excuse to go somewhere for the evenings with people who’ll think the only good thing they can do for him is get him drunk, and he won’t be back at work until after the weekend which means five more days of drunk.

  It is only about ten past midnight. Hardly
any time has passed. The fireworks are still going off sporadically outside. The rain is still drumming on the Velux. But her father is not yet home and probably won’t be for ages and George has decided to wait up for him in case when he gets home he can’t get up the stairs by himself.

  There’s a noise outside her door.

  It’s Henry.

  He is standing in the doorway looking tearful and fevered and bizarrely a little like an illustration of Little Lord Fauntleroy now that his hair is so long.

  (He is refusing to have it cut because she always cut his hair.

  Henry, she’s not coming back, George has said.

  I know, Henry said.

  She’s dead, George said. You know that.

  I don’t want my hair cut, Henry said.)

  You can come in, George says. Special dispensation.

  Thank you, Henry says.

  He stands at the door. He doesn’t come in.

  I’m really awake. I’m really bored, he says

  He is near tears.

  George goes over to her bed and folds down the covers and pats it. Henry comes into the room, comes over to the bed and climbs in.

  Toast? George says.

  Henry is looking at the photos of their mother George has put above the bed. He reaches his hand up to one of them.

  Don’t, George says.

  He is good, because so recently asleep. He turns round and sits down.

  Two slices please, he says.

  With jam? George says.

  No butter, whatever you do, he says.

  I will bring you two slices of toast, George says. And after you’ve eaten them you and I together will banish boredom.

  Henry shakes his head.

  I don’t mean bored, he says. I want to be bored. But I can’t. But I really don’t want to be this thing that I’m having to be instead of being bored.

  George nods.

  And Henry, she says. Don’t touch those photos while I’m gone. I mean it.

  George goes downstairs and makes a single slice of toast. She knifes over it with quite thick butter then puts the butter knife straight into the jam without washing it because no one will even notice. She does it precisely because no one will, because she can leave dregs of butter in whatever jam she likes for the rest of her life now.