by Ali Smith
(I will never forgive her, George is thinking)
– I knew after it something didn’t quite ring true, her mother says. She was always so curious, about where I was, what I was doing, who I was doing it with, who else I was meeting up with or working with, especially that and what I was working on, what I was writing about, what I thought about this or that, it was constant, and I thought, well, that’s a bit like love, that obsessiveness, when people are in love they need to know the strangest things, so maybe it is love, perhaps it just feels this odd to me because it’s the kind of love that can’t be expressed unless we both choose to really mess up our lives. Which I’d no intention of doing, George. I know how good my life is. And, I presumed, neither had she, any such intention, she has a life too, a husband, kids. At least I think she does. At least, I saw some photos once.
But then there was the day I went to see her in her workshop without telling her I was coming, and I knocked on the door and a woman came to the door, she was wearing overalls, and I asked for Lisa and she said who? And I said Lisa Goliard, this is her bookmaking workshop, and the woman said, no, that’s not my name, I’m whatever, and this is my bookmaking workshop, can I help you? And I said, but you sometimes let your workshop to other printers or bookmakers, yes? and she looked at me as if I was crazy and said she was really busy and was there anything she could help me with, and it’s as I was walking away that it came to me that the whole time I’d known Lisa, which was by then a couple of years, I’d never see her once make or do anything in that workshop. We’d just sat around in it, talking. I’d never seen her write anything, or bind anything, or print anything, or cut anything.
And then when I got home I looked her up online and there were the same couple of web pages that I’d looked at before, a page still saying Site Coming Soon and a link to a bookseller in Cumbria, but not much else. In fact nothing else. Not a trace.
She almost didn’t exist, George says. She only just existed.
Not that an absence online means anything, her mother says. She definitely existed. Definitely exists.
If this was a film or a novel, she’d turn out to be a spy, George says.
I know, her mother says.
She says it quite happily in the dark next to George.
It’s possible, she says. It’s not at all impossible. Though it seems improbable. It wouldn’t surprise me. I did meet her rather oddly, it did all happen very oddly. It’s as if someone had looked at my life and calculated exactly how to attract me, then how to fool me once my attention was caught. Quite an art. And she’s quite a nice spy. If she is one.
Is there such a thing as a nice spy? George says.
I wouldn’t have said so before, her mother says. We even had conversations about it, we had a running joke. I’d say, you’re in intelligence, aren’t you, and she’d say I’m afraid I can’t possibly answer that question.
Did you tell her you’d rumbled her workshop? George says.
I did, her mother says. I told her I’d gone and it hadn’t been her workshop the day I went. She laughed and said I’d met the other person who worked there occasionally, and how this person owned the building and was fearful that the authorities, the council, would know she was letting space to other people so always swore no one used it but her whenever she was asked. And when she told me that, I thought, well, that’s perfectly feasible, that explains that, and at exactly the same time I could feel myself thinking, well, that explains that away. I think this double-think is the reason I started to see much less of her.
But George, what I’m about to say, I don’t expect you to understand it till you’re older –
Thanks, George says.
No, her mother says. I’m really not being patronizing. But understanding something like what I’m going to say takes having a bit of age. Some things really do take time. Because even though I suspected I’d been played, there was something. It was true, and it was passionate. It was unsaid. It was left to the understanding. To the imagination. That in itself was pretty exciting. What I’m saying is, I quite liked it. Even if I was being played. And most of all, my darling. The being seen. The being watched. It makes life very, well I don’t know. Pert.
Pert? George says. What kind of a word is pert?
The being watched over, her mother says. It was really something.
But by a spy and a liar? George says.
Seeing and being seen, Georgie, is very rarely simple, her mother says.
Are, George says.
What? her mother says.
Are very rarely simple, George says. Did you tell dad she was a spy? What did he say?
He said (and here her mother puts on a voice that’s supposed to be her father), Carol, nobody is monitoring you. It’s a sub-repressed expression. You’re attracted to her middle-classness. She’s attracted to your working-class origins. It’s a classic class-infatuation paranoia and you’re both making up an adolescent drama to make your own lives more interesting.
Does dad not know about how there are no longer just three but a hundred and fifty different social classes to which it can be decided that we belong? George says.
Her mother laughs in the dark next to George.
Anyway, sweet heart. Games run their course. I got a bit tired of it. I stopped being in touch with her back in the winter.
Yeah. I know, George says.
I was a bit down about it, her mother says. You know?
We all know, George says. You’ve been awful.
Have I? her mother says and laughs gently. Well, I missed her. I still miss her. It felt like I had a friend. She was my friend. And God, George, something about it made me feel permitted.
Permitted? George says. That’s insane.
I know. Allowed, her mother says. Like I was being allowed. It made me laugh, when I realized it. Then it made me feel rather, well, special. Like a character in a film who suddenly develops an aura of light all round her. Can you imagine?
Frankly? No, George says.
Can we never get to go beyond ourselves? her mother says. Never get to be more than ourselves? Will I ever, as far as you’re concerned, be allowed to be anything other than your mother?
No, George says.
And why is that? her mother says.
Because you’re my mother, George says.
Ah, her mother says. I see. Anyway. I quite enjoyed it, while it lasted. Am I mad, George?
Frankly? Yes, George says.
And at least now I know why the texts asking why I wasn’t in touch stopped coming. Ha ha! her mother says.
Good, George says.
How funny, her mother says.
Your Lisa Goliard, or whoever she really is in the real world when she’s not pretending to be someone else, can fuck off back to spy-land, George says.
There is a short disapproving silence in which George senses she’s gone too far. Then her mother says
Please don’t use language like that, George.
It’s okay. He’s asleep, George says.
He might be. But I’m not, her mother says.
Said.
That was then.
This is now.
It’s February now.
But I’m not.
Her mother’s now not anything.
George lies in bed with her hands behind her head and remembers the one time in her life she ever saw Lisa Goliard in the flesh.
They were all on their way on holiday to Greece, they were in the airport pretty early, half past six in the morning, they were getting breakfast in a Pret and she turned to ask her mother to get her a tomato and mozzarella hot thing. But her mother wasn’t there. Her mother’d fallen back, was behind them talking to a woman with long white-looking hair though the woman was young, and beautiful, which George could tell even just from looking at her back; and something about her mother was most strange, she was sort of standing on tiptoes, was she? as if straining upwards, like trying to reach something just too high off a tall shelf, a ver
y high apple off a tree. The person leaned forward and put her hand on George’s mother’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek and as she turned to say a final goodbye George caught the moment of her face.
Who was that? George asked her mother.
Her mother went on and on. Coincidence, the friend who makes books, what are the chances of, well that was a surprise.
George watched her mother’s colour rise and change.
It took a long time for her mother’s colour to return to normal. It took half the plane journey – most of northern Europe – before her mother’s colour had calmed down.
The minotaur is a bull-headed half-man who’s been placed at the centre of a dastardly labyrinth. Every so often the king, whose wife gave birth to this monster, has to feed it live youths and maidens as a sacrifice. The monster is defeated by a hero with a sword and the labyrinth is defeated by a simple ball of string. Isn’t that how it goes?
George gets up and goes over to the door and gets her phone out of the pocket of the jeans hanging on the back. It is 1.23 a.m. It is a bit late to text anyone.
She texts H.
– There is something I need to know.
There’s no answer. George texts again.
– Did you do that minotaur joke because you think that me thinking she was being monitored is a load of bull?
Dark.
Nothing.
George hunkers down in the bed. She tries not to think about anything.
The next day at school, though, H won’t really speak to George. Not in an unpleasant way but in a polite and nodding and turning-away way. It is possibly because she does think George is paranoid and mad. George speaks and it’s not that H doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t really speak back and tends to end her sentences by looking away, which doesn’t make for easy continuous conversation.
This gets particularly complicated because they have been paired up on the empathy / sympathy project in English and are meant to be discussing ideas, and it’s got to be finished and the talks are to be given to the rest of the class on Friday. But H keeps getting up and going to another table where the printer is and printing things out, and it’s on the side of the classroom where there are three girls with whom H is friendly but George is less friendly. Then when she comes back she turns side-on and makes notes and only replies if George asks something direct. She does it nicely but quite definitely uninterestedly.
It is a Tuesday, so there’s Mrs Rock.
I think I might not be a very passionate person, George says.
Mrs Rock, since Christmas, has stopped repeating back to George what George says. Her new tactic is to sit and listen without saying anything, then very near the end of the session to tell George a sort of story or improvise on a word that George has used or something that’s struck her because of something George has said. This means that now the sessions are mostly George in monologue plus epilogue by Mrs Rock.
I asked my father this morning, George says, did he think I was a passionate person and he said I think you’re definitely a very driven person George and there’s definitely a lot of passion in your drive, but I know he was sort of fobbing me off. Not that my father would know whether I was or I wasn’t passionate anyway. Anyway then my little brother started making kissing noises on the back of his hand and my father got embarrassed and changed the subject and then when we went out the front door to go to school my little brother was standing next to my dad’s van in the drive and going on about how there was a lot of passion in this drive, how this drive was full of passion, and I felt stupid, like an idiot, for having said anything out loud at all to anyone.
Mrs Rock sits there silent as a statue.
That makes two people who won’t really speak to George today.
Three, if you count her father.
George feels a stubbornness come over her sitting there in Mrs Rock’s student easy chair. She seals her mouth. She folds her arms. She glances at the clock. It is only ten past. There are another sixty minutes of this session still to go (it is a double period). She will not say another word.
Tick tick tick.
Fifty nine.
Mrs Rock sits next to her table in front of George like a mainland off an island for which the last ferry boat of the day is already long gone.
Silence.
Five minutes pass in this silence.
Those five minutes alone pass like an hour.
George considers risking looking insolent and getting her earphones out of her bag and listening to music on her phone. But she can’t, can she? Because this is her new phone and she hasn’t downloaded any music on to this phone yet, though she’s had it for nearly two months and there’s nothing on it except that song H downloaded for her to which H wrote the words for the DNA revision yesterday.
I will always want you.
Want is quite a complicated word there, because there’s volo, which means I want, but it’s not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love.
But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want?
Numquam amabo?
Mrs Rock, do you mind if I send a text? George says.
You want to send a text to me? Mrs Rock says.
No, George says. Not to you.
Then I do mind, Georgia, because this is a session in which we have decided to spend the duration talking to each other, Mrs Rock says.
Well, George says. It’s not like we’re doing any talking, we’re just sitting here not saying anything.
That’s your choice, Georgia, Mrs Rock says. You get to choose how to use this time with me.
You mean this time in which it was decided by whoever decided it in some school meeting, George says, that I should come and sit in your room so you can all minotaur me to see how I’m doing after my mother dying.
Minotaur you? Mrs Rock says.
I’m sorry? George says.
You said minotaur you, Mrs Rock says.
No I didn’t, George says. I said monitor. You’re monitoring me. You must have heard that other word inside your own head and decided I said it for some reason of your own.
Mrs Rock looks suitably discomfited. She writes something down. Then she looks back up at George with exactly the same blank openness as before the conversation.
And anyway, literally, if I get to choose how I use this time, then I can choose to send a text in it, George says.
Not unless it’s to me, Mrs Rock says. And if you do, you’ll be in trouble. Because, as you know, if you get your phone out of your bag and I see you using it on school property at a time that’s not lunch hour, I’ll have to confiscate it and you won’t get it back till the end of the week.
Does that rule hold even in counselling? George says.
Mrs Rock stands up. It is quite shocking that she does. She takes her coat off the back of the door and opens the door.
Come with me, she says.
Where? George says.
Come on, she says.
Will I need my jacket? George says.
They walk down the corridor and past all the classrooms full of people doing lessons, out of the main school doors then along the front of the school to the school gate, which Mrs Rock walks through. George follows.
As soon as they’re beyond the gate Mrs Rock stops.
You can now get your phone out, Georgia, without breaking any rules, she says.
George gets her phone out.
Mrs Rock turns her back.
You can send that message now, Mrs Rock says.
– Semper is always, George writes. Or there is a good word, usquequaque. It means everywhere, or on all occasions. Perpetuus means continual or continuous and continenter means continuously. But I can’t mean any of them because right now for me they are just words. Then she presses send.
When they get back to Mrs Rock’s room, there’s ten minutes of the session left.
This is the point at which you sit forward and t
ell me the story or whatever you’ve decided to tell me about and with which you want to round off the session, George says.
Yes, but today, Georgia, I think you should round the session off, Mrs Rock says. I think the theme which arose for us today was talking and not talking, and the whens and the wheres and the hows of both of these. Which is why I think it was important that we detoured a little out of the school structure, so that you could make the connection you so clearly felt it was urgent to make.
Then Mrs Rock talks for a bit about what saying things out loud means.
It means a decision to try to articulate things. At the same time it means all the things that can’t be said, even as you make the attempt to put some of them into words.
Mrs Rock means well. She is very nice really.
George explains that when she gets out of here and checks her phone she’ll see that the message Mrs Rock just went so out of her way to let her send will have the little red exclamation mark and the sign next to it saying not delivered, because there is no way you can send a message to a phone number that no longer exists.
So you sent a message knowing that your message would never reach the person you sent it to? Mrs Rock says.
George nods.
Mrs Rock blinks. She glances at the clock.
We have two minutes left, Georgia, she says. Is there anything else you’d like to bring to the session today, or anything else you feel you need to say?
Nope, George says.
They sit in silence for one minute and thirty seconds. Then the bell goes.
Same time next Tuesday, Georgia, Mrs Rock says. See you then.
When George gets home, H is waiting on the front step.
This is the third time H has come to the house.
I thought you weren’t talking to me / what if I will never love / never want / never desire / I think I might not be a very /
Hi, George says.
Hi, H says. I’m really. I’m.
It’s okay, George says.
I was feeling really lousy today, H says. I wasn’t much up to it.
Then H tells her that she found out last night when she got home that her family is moving to Denmark.