by Ali Smith
It had a photograph of people letting off fireworks where his body’d been found.
She heard her father thumping about upstairs. Imagine if someone projected films on to the side of your house. Would what those films were about affect your living space, she wondered, or your breathing, say, if they projected them on to your chest?
No, of course they wouldn’t.
But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.
George sits among the pictures from all the centuries ago and looks hard at a picture by the painter who disappeared then reappeared centuries later by the skin of his teeth. His teethskin. The painter who wanted more money because he was greedy. Or the painter who wanted more money because he knew his worth. The painter who thought he was better than everybody else. Or the painter who knew he deserved better.
Is worth the same as money? Are they the same thing? Is money who we are? Is it how much we make that makes us who we are? What does the word make mean? Are we what we make? It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit. We saw the pictures. What more do we need to know? The banking crisis. The food-banking crisis. The girl in the yurt. (She was probably very well paid for it.)
Consider, for a moment, the moral conundrum.
She shakes her head, which is like it’s full of rattling hard grimy things like the way her room, in November one afternoon when the wind had lifted the Velux up and open on its own, had filled with grimy sycamore seeds and shreds of wing and old leaf off the trees at the backs of the houses, all over the desk, the bed, the books, the floor, bits of city filthiness scattered all over the last of her clean clothes.
Galleries are not much like life. They are such clean places, generally. Something about this one that they haven’t thought to mention in any of the brochures or online information, but that is actually a selling point for George, is that it smells nice, at least in this new wing it does, George doesn’t know about the old wing. It smells of wood in here. It can shift from quiet to full quite suddenly. You can be sitting here on the bench and there can be no one in the room but you (and the attendant) though you can always hear the footfall in the other rooms because all the floors throughout are creaky. Then from nowhere a huge group of tourists from Japan or Germany, wherever, will fill the place, sometimes kids, sometimes adults, usually passing time till it’s their turn to see the Leonardo cartoon out in the hall for which there’s usually more of a queue.
She gets her phone out and texts H.
– Did you know Leonardo da Vinci was a cartoonist?
Then she readies her notebook and pen for the statistical experiment.
H has texted straight back.
– Yeah and he was so ahead of his time he invented Helix the Cat
H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse. The day she left she started sending texts. The texts seemed pretty random. They weren’t about where H was or what it was like there or what H was feeling or doing; not once has H mentioned any of the stuff that people are usually meant to tell you. Instead they came, with no accompanying explanation, like information arrows aimed through space at their target, which was George.
The first one said,
– His mother’s name was Fiordelisia Mastria
Then, much later,
– His father built the belltower of the cathedral
The next day,
– He sent a letter on 25 March 1470 to a Duke called Borso d’Este to ask for more money for those pictures you went to see
After that one, George (who wasn’t replying to any of these because every time she took her phone in her hand to try to, she’d type in half a word or a couple of words then she’d stop and delete it and in the end send nothing) knew they were about the something real between them.
Two hours after, another text,
– The Duke wrote on the bottom of it in pencil in Latin, Let him be content with the amount already decided
Late that night,
– He left in a sulk and went to work elsewhere
Then, next day, over the whole day,
– The 25 March 1470 was a Friday
and
– They thought for years all his paintings were done by someone else
Then H clearly ran out of information about the painter.
Instead, over the next few days, she fired mysterious little arrows at George in Latin:
– Res vesana parvaque amor nomine
– Adiuvete!
– Puella fulvis oculis
– Quem volo es
– Quingenta milia passuum ambulem
On the second day of the Latin texts, George worked out that I would walk five hundred miles was also the name of the Scottish song by the geeky eighties twins with the glasses.
She downloaded it and listened to it.
Then she’d downloaded the songs called Help!, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Brown-Eyed Girl. She listened to them all. She made up a playlist – the first one she’d made on her new phone – and listed them by their Latin names. When she worked out that Quem volo es was maybe meant to be the song called You’re The One That I Want, she laughed out loud.
They were pretty good. And H didn’t do Latin so the fact that they were actually quite good Latin meant even more.
It also means that when she hears songs, just in passing, for instance when she’s doing shopping and they’re played like they always are over the loudspeakers at Asda, she doesn’t mind any more. This is useful. Almost everywhere you go songs are invariably being played and just hearing songs in the air, in shops or cafés or on adverts on TV, has been one of the hardest things to deal with.
There is also the bonus that these songs H has made her listen to are the kind that play everywhere. But not just that. When you listen properly to them they are also pretty good songs. Even more strange and fine is the fact that someone has wanted her to hear them, and not just someone, but Helena Fisker.
It is like having a conversation without needing to say anything. It is also like H is trying to find a language that will make personal sense to George’s ears. No one has ever done this before for George. She has spent her whole life speaking other people’s languages. It is new to her. The newness of it has a sort of power that can make the old things – as old as those old songs, even as ancient as Latin itself – a kind of new, but a kind that doesn’t dismiss their, what would you call it?
George sits in the new wing of the National Gallery in front of an old painting and tries to think of the words for it.
Their classic status?
She nods. That’s it. Whatever is happening makes them new and lets them still be old both at once.
After she’d downloaded the songs, she’d sent her first reply to H.
Let’s helix again, like we did last summer.
She followed it immediately with a text saying
(Helix : Greek for twist.)
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. (Egg 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.
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.