Ali Smith - How to be both

I could look it up on your phone, George says.

Then she immediately feels a mixture of things ranging from unpleasant all the way to bad.

(Guilt and fury:

— Sing me a love song

— No, my singing voice went with pregnancy

— I wonder where it went. I bet its in a cathedral city up in some fancy cathedral ceiling hanging out with the carvings of the angels

Fury and guilt:

— Howre your eyes today and how you doin what you doin where are you & whenll we meet )

Her mother doesn’t notice. Her mother has no idea. Her mother is looking down for where her phone is, checking it is safely in the pocket of her bag.

(George’s own phone is not a smartphone though she will be given one of her own in less than a year’s time, at Christmas, three and a half months after her mother dies.)

Let’s not look anything up, her mother says. It’s so nice. Not to have to know.

Her mother is going soft.

Not that there’s anything wrong with soft. Her mother, soft, forgetful, vague and loving, like other people’s mothers always seem to be, is a whole new prospect.

But it is very unlike her not to try to know or to find out everything there is to know. And this morning at the hotel, when they’d been leaving the breakfast room and passing the reception, her mother had said buona sera to the man and the girl behind the counter, and the girl had laughed. Then that girl had realized she was being impolite, had become ashamed and had stopped herself laughing. George had never seen anyone correct herself or himself like that.

Not buona sera, madam, forgive me, the man said. But it is buon giorno. Because you are wishing us a good evening and right now it is morning.

Outside the hotel her mother had stopped on the pavement and looked at George.

This place is shaking loose everything I thought I knew, she said. All the things I’ve been taking for granted for years.

She put her arm round George’s shoulder. She hugged Henry close in to her other side.

It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit! she said.

She looked genuinely happy there on the pavement outside the shop selling the souvenirs and products of Ferrara.

George turns now in the palazzo garden and straddles the bench. She has noticed there’s something strange about those schoolkids and she has just realized what it is. None of them is on a phone or looking at a screen. They are all talking to each other. Some of them are now even talking to Henry, or trying to. Henry is describing something. He draws a circle in the air. The kids he’s talking to do the same circling thing with their arms.

George looks at her mother. Her mother looks at George. A yellow-white flower drops, brushes past her mother’s nose, catches in her hair and comes to rest on her collarbone. Her mother laughs. George feels the urge to laugh too, though she is still wearing her guilt / fury scowl. Half her mouth turns up. The other half holds its downward shape.

This town they’ve come to is both bright and grim. It is a place of walls and has a huge and imposing castle about which, if George were writing about it at school, she’d use the words impervious and threatening. There is this constant sense of battlement, then there are the winding high-walled little streets which look like nightmares will happen down them, that they’ll definitely leave you lost. But things change in a moment here, light to dark, dark to light, and although it is so stony it is somehow also bright green and red and yellow too; all the walls and buildings go red-golden in the sun. The walls are high and blank but it sounds as if beyond them is hidden garden. There are the long straight avenues of really beautiful trees, as if it’s not a city of walls at all, it’s a city of trees. In fact, all the buildings and walls have bits of tree and bush and grass sprouting out of them at the tops and up the sides of their bright walls.

It smells of jasmine, then more jasmine, then the occasional sewer, then jasmine again.

It’s very very strange here, her mother had said last night as they were getting ready for bed. I can’t quite get a grip on it.

She looked at the map on the bed.

It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.

They’d been wandering about getting lost the whole day even though they had the map the hotel had given them. Things that looked close by on the map were, when they tried to get to them, actually quite far away; then they’d try to do something that looked like it’d take a very long time to do and they’d find themselves arriving almost immediately.

If her mother’d simply looked it up on Google Maps or Streetview they could’ve got to places with more precision and alacrity. But her mother is reluctant to look anything up, or even switch the phone on, for some reason.

Alacrity? That’s a good word, George, her mother says.

From the Latin. For briskness, George says.

We don’t need briskness. Let’s follow our noses unbriskly for a change. It’s the first modern city in Europe, her mother says as they walk back through it after seeing the palace. Because of the town planning and the walls. Though both of you are used to historic towns, growing up where you’ve grown up. You see stuff like this every day. It’s probably no big deal to you. Anyway, the palace we just saw, with the pictures, pre-dates even the walls. It’s from before this city was walled. It’s that early. It’s outstanding, for something that early.

Then she stops saying things like that and they simply wander in a daze looking a bit like the reprobate kids at school do after spliffing, because this is nothing like home. For instance now that it’s the time of day when people here come out and wander about, the streets are full of pedestrians. At the same time the streets are full of people on bikes but the cyclists all mingle in with the crowds and weave round and past her and her mother and Henry and all the other people in a way that seems effortless. It is miraculous that no one ever hits anyone and that people can cycle so slowly and not topple. Nobody topples. Nobody hurries, even in the rain. Nobody rings a bike bell (except, George notices, the tourists, who are easy to spot). Nobody shouts at anybody to get out of the way. Even very old ladies cycle here wearing black with their bicycle baskets full of things wrapped up in paper and tied with ribbons or string, as if being old, going to a shop and buying things and bringing them home are all completely different acts here.

A boy the same age as George passes them at a crossroads with his bare arms on either side of a pretty girl lightly perched holding on to nothing on his handlebars.

George’s mother winks at George.

George blushes. Then she is annoyed at herself for blushing.

That night the noise of the summer birds swooping round the roofs near their hotel gives way to a noise of drums and trumpets. They follow this new noise to a square where a crowd of quite young people, older than George but still young, some of whom wear historical costumes tabard-like slung over their jeans and T-shirts, or have leggings like the people in the pictures they saw earlier, one leg one colour, the other a different colour, are taking turns to do marching dances or dancing marches where they throw huge flags on sticks up in the air, flags which unfurl to be bigger than bedspreads as they go up then fold themselves round their sticks again as they come down. The flag throwers walk with them held at their backs against their shoulders like folded wings, then they wave them about in the air like outsize butterfly wings while other members of their teams (it seems to be a rehearsal for a flag-throwing contest) blow long medieval-looking horns and thump their drums.