Ali Smith - How to be both

The girls go back to examining their wall: as soon as they forget he’s there the brother dips his head and his hands into the bag the friend has brought with her: he has found something to eat in there and is ripping at its wrap: both girls hear him and turn and see and shout at him at once, then both stand up and chase him out of the room.

But when they get back –

ruination!

They have put their too-hot cups on the surface of the picture-wall and the cups have spilled a bit when the table got knocked: these cups are stuck to some of the pictures of — what are they of, again? — so much so that to pick a cup up by a handle is also to pick up the whole wall.

Both girls peel the picture-wall off the cups: the studies the cups stuck to are marked from the heat and the spill with 2 perfect circles from the shapes of the bases of the cups.

The girl looks appalled.

She holds up the bit of the wall: she unsticks with a little knife the 2 studies marked with the circles: she waves the studies in the air as if to dry them.

But the friend takes them out of her hands: she laughs: she holds them both up in front of her eyes like they’re eyes.

Ha ha!

The girl looks astonished: her mouth opens: then it breaks into a smile: then laughter from them both: then both girls take one end of the long wall of pictures each, like they did before but now with its cut-out bricks gone from the middle and they stretch it out across the room again: this time rather than treating it with such care the girl, when the wall is at full stretch, wraps her end of it round her shoulder and tucks it under her arms like a collar or a scarf.

When she sees the girl do this the friend does the same: next moment both girls are shawling themselves in it: they twist themselves round inside the swath of wall until they are both a bristle of pictures like armour over their chests and stomachs and arms and up to their necks: then they twist towards each other as if it is the wall that is bringing them together: they meet wrapped like caterpillars in the middle of the room: but they don’t just meet, they collide: at which the paper wall breaks and as it comes apart its brick-shapes fly off like rooftiles and the girls hit the floor together in each other’s arms in the mess of the pictures littered round them.

I like a good skilful friend.

I like a good opened-up wall.

I’m doing a portrait now of my brown-eyed friend: what’s his name? I forget his name: you know who I mean, I mean what’s-his-name: his father has died which means he is the official head of his family: he owns all the land and all the ships and has come into all the money: it is an unofficial portrait though cause his wife will not have me paint him officially so to placate me he has asked me to do him too, since official versions are never true, is what he says when I ask him why

(can’t remember his name but I remember pretty clearly my annoyance at his wife)

and I’ve sketched some ships in the far background and come back to the shape of his head again: but my friend, sitting in front of me, is even more restless today than usual: I work on the fold in the undershirt where it prettily tops his collar but with my eye on him today he can hardly sit still.

I know his frustration: I’ve always known it: it is almost as old as our friendship: the walled-up power, the dismay in the air round him like when a storm is unable to break.

But as ever out of kindness he pretends to me to be feeling something else.

He says he has been infuriated by a story.

It haunts him, he says: he can’t stop thinking about it.

What story? I say.

All stories, he says, really. They’re never the story I need or really want.

I ready the picture: I am quiet: I let the time pass: after a bit he speaks into this silence and tells me the bones of the story.

It’s about a magic helmet which allows its bearer to turn into anything, transform into any shape he likes, all he has to do is put the helmet on his head.

But that’s not the part that maddens him: he likes that part of the story: there’s this other part of the story and it’s about 3 maidens, guardians of a store of gold, and whoever wins the gold from them and forges it into a ring will have power over everything, over the land, the sea, the world and all its peoples: but there’s a snag: there’s a condition: he’ll have all the power, the man who forges the ring, but to keep this power he’ll have to renounce love.

My friend looks at me: he shifts about on the stool: his eyes are blunt and aimed: the everything that he can’t say to me makes him even finer to my eye.

I mark behind where his shoulder will end the curve of the line for the rock where I’ll put the fisherman: over here I’ll put the 2 children with the fish-spear under the high rock overhang: I mark where his hand will come over the frame at the front: I mark out in rough the little circle shape for the ring his hand will hold.

I just don’t see why, he is saying. Why whoever is brave or lucky enough to win the gold and make it into the ring can’t have both the ring and the love.

I nod that I agree and that I understand.

I know now what to make of the rest of the landscape behind him.

Here I am again: me, 2 eyes and a wall.

We are outside a house, have I been here before? There are 2 girls kneeling on the paving.

An old woman, I think I

do I know her? no

has come out and is sitting on the wall watching them: they’re painting, eggs? No, eyes: they’re painting 2 eyes on to a wall: they take an eye each: they begin with the black for the hole through which we see: then they ring the colour round it in segments (blue): then the white: then the black outline.

An old woman is telling them something: a girl (who is she?) bends down to a pot with white in it, reaches forward, adds a small square of white the size of the end of her fingertip then does the same in the same place to the other eye cause an eye with no light is an eye that can’t see, I think is what the old woman sitting on a wall is telling

hardly able to hear though cause there’s

something

God knows what

drawing me

skin of my father?

the eyes of my mother?

down to

that thin-looking line

made of nothing

ground and grit and the

gather of dirt and earth and

the grains of stone

there at the very foot of this

(really badly made just saying)

wall at the place where the crumble of

the brickbase meets the paving

look

the line where

one thing meets another

the little green almost not-there weeds

take root in it

by enchantment

cause it’s an enchanted line

the line drawn between planes

place of green possibles

cause whatever they’re doing up there

eyes painted on a wall

it’s nothing

to the tiny and the many

variations of colours invisible

till the eye’s so close it

becomes the place

where a horizontal line meets a

vertical and a surface meets a surface and a

structure meets another which looks to

be 2 dimensions only but is deeper than

sea should you dare to enter or

deep as a sky and goes as deep into the

earth (the flower folds its petals down

the head droops on the stem)

through layered clay on stone

mixed by the

worms through whose mouths

everything passes

paddled by the many legs of

spores so small they’re much

much finer than an eyelash and

are colours only darkness can

make

veins like tracery

look

the treebranch thick with

all its leaves before even the

thought of the arrow

how

the root in the dark makes its