How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  But it is very unlike her not to try to know or to find out everything there is to know. And this morning at the hotel, when they’d been leaving the breakfast room and passing the reception, her mother had said buona sera to the man and the girl behind the counter, and the girl had laughed. Then that girl had realized she was being impolite, had become ashamed and had stopped herself laughing. George had never seen anyone correct herself or himself like that.

  Not buona sera, madam, forgive me, the man said. But it is buon giorno. Because you are wishing us a good evening and right now it is morning.

  Outside the hotel her mother had stopped on the pavement and looked at George.

  This place is shaking loose everything I thought I knew, she said. All the things I’ve been taking for granted for years.

  She put her arm round George’s shoulder. She hugged Henry close in to her other side.

  It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit! she said.

  She looked genuinely happy there on the pavement outside the shop selling the souvenirs and products of Ferrara.

  George turns now in the palazzo garden and straddles the bench. She has noticed there’s something strange about those schoolkids and she has just realized what it is. None of them is on a phone or looking at a screen. They are all talking to each other. Some of them are now even talking to Henry, or trying to. Henry is describing something. He draws a circle in the air. The kids he’s talking to do the same circling thing with their arms.

  George looks at her mother. Her mother looks at George. A yellow-white flower drops, brushes past her mother’s nose, catches in her hair and comes to rest on her collarbone. Her mother laughs. George feels the urge to laugh too, though she is still wearing her guilt / fury scowl. Half her mouth turns up. The other half holds its downward shape.

  This town they’ve come to is both bright and grim. It is a place of walls and has a huge and imposing castle about which, if George were writing about it at school, she’d use the words impervious and threatening. There is this constant sense of battlement, then there are the winding high-walled little streets which look like nightmares will happen down them, that they’ll definitely leave you lost. But things change in a moment here, light to dark, dark to light, and although it is so stony it is somehow also bright green and red and yellow too; all the walls and buildings go red-golden in the sun. The walls are high and blank but it sounds as if beyond them is hidden garden. There are the long straight avenues of really beautiful trees, as if it’s not a city of walls at all, it’s a city of trees. In fact, all the buildings and walls have bits of tree and bush and grass sprouting out of them at the tops and up the sides of their bright walls.

  It smells of jasmine, then more jasmine, then the occasional sewer, then jasmine again.

  It’s very very strange here, her mother had said last night as they were getting ready for bed. I can’t quite get a grip on it.

  She looked at the map on the bed.

  It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.

  They’d been wandering about getting lost the whole day even though they had the map the hotel had given them. Things that looked close by on the map were, when they tried to get to them, actually quite far away; then they’d try to do something that looked like it’d take a very long time to do and they’d find themselves arriving almost immediately.

  If her mother’d simply looked it up on Google Maps or Streetview they could’ve got to places with more precision and alacrity. But her mother is reluctant to look anything up, or even switch the phone on, for some reason.

  Alacrity? That’s a good word, George, her mother says.

  From the Latin. For briskness, George says.

  We don’t need briskness. Let’s follow our noses unbriskly for a change. It’s the first modern city in Europe, her mother says as they walk back through it after seeing the palace. Because of the town planning and the walls. Though both of you are used to historic towns, growing up where you’ve grown up. You see stuff like this every day. It’s probably no big deal to you. Anyway, the palace we just saw, with the pictures, pre-dates even the walls. It’s from before this city was walled. It’s that early. It’s outstanding, for something that early.

  Then she stops saying things like that and they simply wander in a daze looking a bit like the reprobate kids at school do after spliffing, because this is nothing like home. For instance now that it’s the time of day when people here come out and wander about, the streets are full of pedestrians. At the same time the streets are full of people on bikes but the cyclists all mingle in with the crowds and weave round and past her and her mother and Henry and all the other people in a way that seems effortless. It is miraculous that no one ever hits anyone and that people can cycle so slowly and not topple. Nobody topples. Nobody hurries, even in the rain. Nobody rings a bike bell (except, George notices, the tourists, who are easy to spot). Nobody shouts at anybody to get out of the way. Even very old ladies cycle here wearing black with their bicycle baskets full of things wrapped up in paper and tied with ribbons or string, as if being old, going to a shop and buying things and bringing them home are all completely different acts here.

  A boy the same age as George passes them at a crossroads with his bare arms on either side of a pretty girl lightly perched holding on to nothing on his handlebars.

  George’s mother winks at George.

  George blushes. Then she is annoyed at herself for blushing.

  That night the noise of the summer birds swooping round the roofs near their hotel gives way to a noise of drums and trumpets. They follow this new noise to a square where a crowd of quite young people, older than George but still young, some of whom wear historical costumes tabard-like slung over their jeans and T-shirts, or have leggings like the people in the pictures they saw earlier, one leg one colour, the other a different colour, are taking turns to do marching dances or dancing marches where they throw huge flags on sticks up in the air, flags which unfurl to be bigger than bedspreads as they go up then fold themselves round their sticks again as they come down. The flag throwers walk with them held at their backs against their shoulders like folded wings, then they wave them about in the air like outsize butterfly wings while other members of their teams (it seems to be a rehearsal for a flag-throwing contest) blow long medieval-looking horns and thump their drums.

  She and her mother and Henry stand on an old historic staircase with the other people, above two tall sign boards which say on them TALKING WALLS (you can download a walking tour from each board and one will tell you about where a film director her mother likes grew up, and the other about Giorgio someone, her mother says a novelist who lived here in the past). It is so loud, the rehearsal, that it literally shakes these boards.

  But George watches a dog cross the square through the noise and stop to sniff at something then amble off again as if nothing unusual is happening, so maybe something like this just happens here every week. Then, above the heads of everyone in the city, above the highest-tossed of the flags, church bells here and there announce midnight and as if they’ve been enchanted the next team after that to do a routine does it without drums and bugles but with its musicians humming instead, in tuneful voices and with a gentleness that seems sweet and absurd after the great din of the teams that have gone before.

  If only all ceremonials and pomp got hummed like that, her mother says.

  Do you remember when

  Things were really hummin’.

  Full stop.

  Is her mother really dead? Is it an elaborate hoax? (All hoaxes, on TV and the radio and in the papers and online, are described as elaborate whether they’re elaborate or not.) Has someone elaborately, or not, spirited her mother away like on an episode of Spooks and now she’s living a life elsewhere under a new name and just isn’t allowed to contact people (even her own children) from her former life?

  Because how can someone just vanish?

&
nbsp; George had seen her contorted in the hospital bed. Her skin had changed colour and was covered in weals. She could hardly speak. What she did say, in the last part of whatever was happening to her and before they put George outside the door to wait in the corridor, was that she was a book, I’m an open book, she said. Though it was also equally possible that what she’d said was that she was an unopen book.

  I a a u opn ook.

  George (to Mrs Rock) : I’m going to tell you this thing, and I think after I tell you you’ll suggest I get sent for a stronger type of therapy than the kind you’re giving me because you’ll think I’m completely paranoid and hysterical.

  Mrs Rock : You think I’ll think you’re paranoid and hysterical?

  George : Yes. But I want to tell you now, before I say it, that I’m neither paranoid nor hysterical, though ostensibly it might sound like I am, and I want to make it clear that I thought it way before my mother died, and so did she, she thought it herself.

  Mrs Rock nodded to let George know she was listening.

  What George told Mrs Rock then was that her mother was under surveillance and had been being monitored by spies.

  Mrs Rock : You believe your mother was being monitored by spies?

  That was what counsellors were trained to do, to say back to you what it was you said, but in the form of a question so you could ask yourself why you’d thought or said it. It was soul-destroying.

  George told Mrs Rock anyway. She told her about the time five years ago that her mother was walking past the big glass windows of an expensive and stylish hotel in central London. People were having supper in there; the windows were restaurant windows, and her mother had seen, sitting with a group of people quite prominently in one of the windows, a politician or spin person and at this point her mother had been furious at some politicians. George couldn’t remember which politician it was in the window, only that it was one of the politicians or spin people her mother held responsible for something. Anyway her mother had got her lip salve out of her rucksack and then she’d started to write on the glass of the window with the lip salve above this man’s head like a halo (that’s how she described it).

  She was writing the word LIAR. But by the time it took to write the L, the I and the A, George said, there were security people coming at her from several directions. So she legged it. (Her words.)

  Mrs Rock was writing things down.

  After that, George said, two things happened. Well, three. Mail that came to our house for my parents, and even for me and for Henry, it was around the time when he had a birthday, began arriving looking like it had already been opened. It would arrive in these see-through Sorry Your Mail Has Been Damaged bags that the mail people use if something gets ripped. And then someone revealed in the papers that my mother was one of the Subvert interventionists.

  One of the what? Mrs Rock said.

  George explained about the Subvert movement and how, by using really early pop-up technology pretty much before anyone else was, they’d been able to make things appear on whatever page someone accessed like adverts do now all the time. Except, a Subvert took the form of a random visual or a piece of information.

  My mother was one of the original anonymous four people who made up the things to send out, George said. Eventually there were hundreds of them. She was kind of minor to start with, then she got more minor. It’s actually really hilarious because she’s completely computer illiterate. I mean, you know, was.

  Mrs Rock nodded.

  Anyway, it was her job to subvert political things with art things, and to subvert art things with political things. Like, a box would flash up on a page about Picasso and it would say did you know that 13 million people in the UK are living below the poverty line. Or a box would flash up on a politics page and it would have a picture in it or some stanzas of a poem, stuff like that. Then it got revealed in the papers, George said, that she was a part of the Subvert movement, and then after that, whenever she published anything in the papers about money or economics, the people who disagreed with her called her gauche and politically partisan.

  Inside George’s head as she says this her mother is laughing out loud about being called politically partisan. There isn’t a single person in this world who isn’t it, she says. She says it exactly as if she’s singing a pretty tune, tra la la. And gauche, she says, is one of my favourite words. Always be gauche, George. Go on. I dare you.

  Mrs Rock : And what was the third thing that made you think your mother was being monitored by spies?

  [Enter Lisa Goliard]

  George : Oh no, nothing. There were only the two things.

  Mrs Rock : Didn’t you say there were two, but then change it to three?

  George : For a minute I think I thought there were three. But then I realized I really meant two.

  Mrs Rock : And these are the two things that mean you believe your mother was being monitored by spies?

  George : Yes.

  Mrs Rock : And your mother believed it too?

  George : She knew she was.

  Mrs Rock : You think she knew she was?

  George : We talked about it. All the time. It was a kind of a running joke. Anyway, she quite liked it. She liked being watched.

  Mrs Rock : You think your mother liked being watched?

  George : You think I’m insane, don’t you? You think I’m just making it all up.

  Mrs Rock : You’re worried that I think you’re making it up?

  George : I’m not making any of it up.

  Mrs Rock : Is what I think, or others think, very important to you?

  George : Yeah, but what do you think, Mrs Rock? Are you thinking right now, dear me, this girl needs to be sent for much heavier-duty therapy?

  Mrs Rock : Do you want to be sent for ‘much heavier-duty therapy’?

  George : I’m just asking you to tell me what you think, Mrs Rock.

  Then Mrs Rock did something unexpected. She departed from her usual technique and script and started telling George what she actually maybe thought.

  She said that in the ancient times the word mystery meant something we’re unused to now. The word itself

  – and I know this will interest you, Georgia, because I’ve gathered from talking to you how interested in meanings you are, she said –

  – Well, I was, before, George said.

  – you will be again, I think it’s safe to say that about you, though I’m going a bit out on a limb here and taking a risk saying it, Mrs Rock said. Anyway. The word mystery originally meant a closing, of the mouth or the eyes. It meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed.

  A closing. Not be disclosed.

  George got interested in spite of herself.

  The mysterious nature of some things was accepted then, much more taken for granted, Mrs Rock said. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we’ll probably find out – and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out – what happened. And if we don’t, we feel cheated.

  Right then the bell went and Mrs Rock stopped talking. She’d gone bright red up under her hair and round her ears. She stopped talking as if someone had unplugged her. She closed her notebook and it was as if she’d closed her face too.

  Same time next Tuesday, Georgia, she said. I mean, after Christmas. First Tuesday after the holidays. See you then.

  George opens her eyes. She’s slumped on the floor leaning back against her own bed. Henry is in her bed. All the lights are on. She’d fallen asleep and now she’s woken up.

  Her mother is dead. It’s 1.30 a.m. It’s New Year.

  There’s a noise downstairs. It sounds like someone is at the front door. That’s what woke her.

  It will be her father.

  Henry wakes up. His mother is dead too. She sees the knowledge cross his face about three seconds after he opens his ey
es.

  It’s okay, she says. It’s just dad. Go back to sleep.

  George goes down the first flight then the next flight of stairs. He will have lost his keys or they will be in a pocket he is too pissed to put his hand in or remember he even has.

  She looks through the spy bubble in the door but she can’t see anyone. There’s no one there.

  Then the person outside moves back into view to knock again. George is amazed.

  It is a girl from school, Helena Fisker.

  Helena Fisker with her shoulders dark from the rain, her hair looks quite wet too, is standing on the other side of George’s front door.

  She knocks again and everything about George, because she’s standing so close to the door, literally leaps. It is as if Helena Fisker is knocking on George.

  Helena Fisker had been there in the girls’ toilets when George was being hassled by the moronic Year 9 girls with their mania for using their phones to record the sound levels of other girls urinating. What happened was: if you were a girl you would go to the toilet, then in the next class you’d go to everybody would be laughing at you because they’d all had the sound of you urinating sent to their phones with a film of the toilet door then the door opening then you coming out. Then Facebook. A couple of them even got put on YouTube and lasted several days there.

  All anyone, including the boys, talked about for a while when they talked about someone (if the someone happened to be a girl) was how loud or how quiet her urinating was. This had started a separate mania among all the girls, an existential panic about whether their urinating was silent enough. Now they went to the toilet in twos so that there’d be someone to listen and make sure their urinating wasn’t too audible.

  One day George had opened a toilet door and outside it there’d been a huddle of girls she vaguely recognized but didn’t know any of, all crowded round a girl holding up a smartphone.

  On cue as if they’d rehearsed, like a little choir, they all started making disgusted noises at her.