Ali Smith - How to be both

Why was it forty? George wondered sitting in the garden with the flowers all nodding round her and the occasional passing butterfly’s shadow calling her eyes beyond the iPad. Was it because forty is a number that sounds like it means a lot, a magic number like forty days and forty nights, forty years in the desert, forty thieves? Open sesame! Ha ha. No, that was a bit sick. And was the woman on the coffee table really the wife of the person who made the film? And was she really pregnant after it? There was something a bit interesting about it, like watching a queen bee at work in a hive. But why had so many of the men worn the masks? Did that make it more exciting? For whom? Or perhaps they didn’t want their own wives, or people at work if they went for interviews, say, after they’d taken part in this film, to know their identities.

Then one afternoon George had clicked on a particular film which made her swear to herself that she’d watch this same film (or a bit of it, since it was quite lengthy) once every day for the rest of her life.

There was a girl in it who must have been sixteen because of legality but looked much younger than George. She looked about twelve. There was a man in it who looked about forty. When he kissed this girl he took almost her whole face into his mouth. They were in a yurt-like room for a very long time doing stuff and the uncomplaining smallness of the girl alongside her evident discomfort and the way she looked both there and absent, as if she’d been drugged, given something to make her feel things in slower motion than they were actually happening to her, had changed something in the structures of George’s brain and heart and certainly her eyes, so that afterwards when George tried to watch any more of this kind of sexual film that girl was there waiting under them all.

More. George found that the girl was there too, pale and pained with her shut eyes and her open o of a mouth, under the surface of the next TV show she watched on catch-up.

She was there under the YouTube videos of Vampire Weekend and the puppy falling off the sofa and the cat sitting on the hoover that hoovered by itself and the fox so domesticated that the person taking the film could stroke its head.

She was there under the pop-ups and the adverts on Facebook, and under the facts about the history of the suffragettes on the BBC site which George looked up for school.

She was there under the news item about the woman who tried to buy a burger at a McDonald’s drive-thru on her horse, who, when she was refused at the hatch, got off her horse and led it into the main building and up to the counter and tried to order there. McDonald’s regrets we are unable to serve customers on horseback .

When she’d sensed that girl there underneath even this, George went back through her own history to find the porn film. She clicked on it.

The girl sat demure on the edge of the bed again.

The man grinned at the camera and took the girl’s head in his hands again.

What you doing out here, Georgie? her father asked her a couple of months ago.

November. It was cold. Her mother was dead. George had forgotten about the girl for weeks, then remembered in a French class at school when they were revising the conditional. She had come home and gone into the garden and found the film and clicked on it. She had apologized sotto voce to the girl in the film for having been inattentive.

Her father’d come out to put stuff in the bins. George was in the pergola with no jacket on. He walked up the garden. She turned the screen towards him. As he got closer he slowed down.

Jesus, George, he said. What are you doing?

I wanted to ask mum about it, George said. I meant to. I was going to. Now I can’t.

She explained to her father that she had formerly watched, and intended again to watch, this film of this girl every day to remind herself not to forget the thing that had happened to this person.

But George, her father said.

She told him she was doing it in witness, by extension, of all the unfair and wrong things that happen to people all the time.

George, it’s good of you, her father said. I applaud the sentiment.

It’s not just sentiment, George said.

Honestly George, when I saw you out here watching something I was cheered, he said. I thought, good, Georgie’s back, she’s watching something on the iPad, she’s interested in things again. I was pleased. But sweet heart. It’s appalling, that stuff. You can’t watch that. And you have to remember, it’s not really meant for you. And I can’t even look at it. And anyway. That girl. I mean. It probably happened years ago.

That’s no reason not to do what I’m doing, George said.

She was probably very well paid for it, her father said.

George’s eyes widened. She snorted.

I can’t believe you just said that, she said. I can’t believe I’m even related to you.

And sex isn’t like that. Loving sex. Real sex. Sex between people who love each other, her father said.

Do you really think I’m that much of a moron? George said.

And you’ll drive yourself mad if you keep watching stuff like that, her father said. You’ll do damage to yourself.

Damage has already happened, George said.

George, her father said.

This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can just watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it before clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl. Do you still not understand?

She held the screen up. Her father put the flat of his hand over his eyes.

Yes, but George, her father said. You watching it, whichever way you think you’re watching it or intend to see it, won’t make any real difference to that girl. It just means the number of people watching the film with her in it will keep going up. And anyway, you can’t be sure of, you can never know. There are circumstances –

I’ve got eyes, George said.

Well, okay, well, what about Henry? her father said. What if he saw?

Why d’you think I’m out here in the cold? He won’t. Not because of me anyway. I mean, obviously he’ll have to do his own seeing in his own time, George said. And anyway. You watch stuff like this. I know you do. Everyone watches it.

Oh dear God, her father said. I can’t believe what you just said.

He’d turned his back because the film was still facing him and was still playing. With his back to her he started to complain. Other people’s children, lucky other people, normal children with normal neuroses like always having to have the same spoon to eat with or just not eating at all or throwing up, cutting themselves, whatever.

He was sort-of joking and sort-of not.

George sat back. She clicked the pause button. She waited till her father had left the garden.

She sat with her father that night watching Newsnight, the kind of programme on which massacres and injustices happened every day — if they made the news — then disappeared into old news, just weren’t news any more. Her mother was dead. Her father was asleep. He was extremely tired. He was sleeping a lot. It was because of the mourning. When he woke up he switched the channel over without even looking at George to UK Border Force on the channel called Pick.

Who’d ever have believed it? George’s mother says.

It is a year before she dies. George and her parents are watching rubbish on TV before going to bed, flicking channels before giving in and putting it off.

Who’d ever have believed, she says, when I was growing up, that one day we’d be watching programmes about people being checked and failed at passport controls? When did this become light entertainment?