Ali Smith - How to be both

This year George has no wishes and hopes.

Instead the piece of paper in front of her is blank except for the words WHAT’S LEFT OF XMAS HOLIDAYS DAILY SCHEDULE. She has written numbers, meaning the times of day, down one side of it. Next to 9.30 she has written DANCE THING.

This is the whole point of her looking for likely tunes, so that she will be ready to begin as soon as breakfast is over tomorrow (today).

Some time ago, George goes into her mother’s study and wanders around poking at the things on top of the books on the shelves. Her mother is not dead yet. Her mother is there working. There are piles of papers everywhere.

George, her mother says without looking round.

What are you working on? George says.

Haven’t you homework? her mother says.

You’re working on whether I’ve got homework? George says.

George , her mother says. Don’t move anything, stop touching stuff and go and get on with something of your own.

George comes and stands at the corner of the desk. She sits on the chair next to her mother’s chair.

I’m a bit bored, she says.

Me too, her mother says. This is statistics. I have to concentrate.

Her mouth is the thin line.

Why do you keep these? George says picking up the little jar full of pencil shavings.

The jar was originally a Santorini mini capers jar, it says so on what’s left of the label. Through the glass you can see the different woods of the different pencils her mother has been using. One layer is dark brown. One layer is light gold colour. You can see the paint lines, the tiny zigzags of colour made into the shapes like the edges of those scallop shells by the twist of the pencil in the sharpener.

One pencil, she can see, was once red and black (stripes?). One pencil was marbled blue. One was green, a really nice bright green. George takes out a blue-edged sharpening. It looks a bit like a wooden moth. She winds it round her finger. It is delicate and falls to pieces as soon as she twists it.

Keep what? her mother says.

George holds out the bits of shaving.

What’s the point? she says.

Point. Ha ha! her mother says. Funny.

Why don’t you just sharpen your pencils into the bin like a normal person? George says.

Well, her mother says pushing her chair back. It seems sad to, to just throw them away, I don’t like to. Not until I’ve finished whatever project I’ve used them on.

Bit pathetic, George says.

Well, yes, I suppose it is, her mother says. Literally. I think it’s cause they’re a proof of something. Hmm. But a proof of what?

George rolls her eyes.

Proof that you once sharpened some pencils, George says. Can I borrow the dictionary for a minute?

Use your own, her mother says. Go away. Shut the door after you, you annoying and challenging little pest.

She pulls her chair back in and clicks on something. George doesn’t leave immediately. She stands behind her mother, takes the big dictionary off the shelf and opens it against the wall.

Plonk piazza pelmet pathway partake pastiche pathetic see under pathos. The quality that arouses pity. Pathetic. Affecting the emotions of pity, grief or sorrow. Sadly inadequate. (Interesting: inadequate and sad.) Contemptible. Derisory. Applied to the superior oblique muscle, which turns the eyeball downwards, and to the trochlear nerve connecting with it ( anat ).

It isn’t until George has left the room and shut the door after her that she gets what she herself said and why it was funny.

Pencil sharpenings. The point. Ha ha!

She thinks about going back in and saying

I get it!

But she knows not to, so she doesn’t.

(Point taken, George thinks now, on New Year’s morning.)

WHAT’S LEFT OF XMAS HOLIDAYS DAILY SCHEDULE.

Under DANCE THING next to 10 a.m. she writes the word GARDEN.

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. !!!