Ali Smith - How to be both

— and I know this will interest you, Georgia, because I’ve gathered from talking to you how interested in meanings you are, she said –

— Well, I was, before, George said.

— you will be again, I think it’s safe to say that about you, though I’m going a bit out on a limb here and taking a risk saying it, Mrs Rock said. Anyway. The word mystery originally meant a closing, of the mouth or the eyes. It meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed.

A closing. Not be disclosed.

George got interested in spite of herself.

The mysterious nature of some things was accepted then, much more taken for granted, Mrs Rock said. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we’ll probably find out — and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out — what happened. And if we don’t, we feel cheated.

Right then the bell went and Mrs Rock stopped talking. She’d gone bright red up under her hair and round her ears. She stopped talking as if someone had unplugged her. She closed her notebook and it was as if she’d closed her face too.

Same time next Tuesday, Georgia, she said. I mean, after Christmas. First Tuesday after the holidays. See you then.

George opens her eyes. She’s slumped on the floor leaning back against her own bed. Henry is in her bed. All the lights are on. She’d fallen asleep and now she’s woken up.

Her mother is dead. It’s 1.30 a.m. It’s New Year.

There’s a noise downstairs. It sounds like someone is at the front door. That’s what woke her.

It will be her father.

Henry wakes up. His mother is dead too. She sees the knowledge cross his face about three seconds after he opens his eyes.

It’s okay, she says. It’s just dad. Go back to sleep.

George goes down the first flight then the next flight of stairs. He will have lost his keys or they will be in a pocket he is too pissed to put his hand in or remember he even has.

She looks through the spy bubble in the door but she can’t see anyone. There’s no one there.

Then the person outside moves back into view to knock again. George is amazed.

It is a girl from school, Helena Fisker.

Helena Fisker with her shoulders dark from the rain, her hair looks quite wet too, is standing on the other side of George’s front door.

She knocks again and everything about George, because she’s standing so close to the door, literally leaps. It is as if Helena Fisker is knocking on George.

Helena Fisker had been there in the girls’ toilets when George was being hassled by the moronic Year 9 girls with their mania for using their phones to record the sound levels of other girls urinating. What happened was: if you were a girl you would go to the toilet, then in the next class you’d go to everybody would be laughing at you because they’d all had the sound of you urinating sent to their phones with a film of the toilet door then the door opening then you coming out. Then Facebook. A couple of them even got put on YouTube and lasted several days there.

All anyone, including the boys, talked about for a while when they talked about someone (if the someone happened to be a girl) was how loud or how quiet her urinating was. This had started a separate mania among all the girls, an existential panic about whether their urinating was silent enough. Now they went to the toilet in twos so that there’d be someone to listen and make sure their urinating wasn’t too audible.

One day George had opened a toilet door and outside it there’d been a huddle of girls she vaguely recognized but didn’t know any of, all crowded round a girl holding up a smartphone.

On cue as if they’d rehearsed, like a little choir, they all started making disgusted noises at her.

But behind them, at the main door, she’d seen Helena Fisker come in.

Most people in the school were pretty respectful of Helena Fisker.

Helena Fisker had been reprimanded, most recently, George knew from people in art, for designing the school Christmas card. She was known for being really good at art. The picture of the robin she’d presented them with was apparently such a cute one that they’d simply let her place the order and stamped the form for the printer. It was paid for and printed up with the name of the school on the back. Five hundred had arrived from the printer in a huge box.

When they’d opened the box they’d found, instead of the robin, a picture of a really ugly massive blank concrete wall in the sun.

Helena Fisker, the story goes, had smiled at the Head as if she couldn’t understand the fuss when she was called to his office and made to stand on the carpet in front of his desk.

But it’s Bethlehem, she’d said.

Now this gang of girls was standing in front of George and filming and squealing at her with no idea that Helena Fisker was standing behind them. Helena Fisker caught George’s eye over the tops of their heads. Then Helena Fisker shrugged her eyes.

Her doing just that knocked everything those girls were saying and doing into the land-of-not-meaning-anything-much.

Helena Fisker reached her hand over the tops of those little girls’ heads and plucked the phone out of the main girl’s hand.

All the girls turned round at once.

Hi, Helena Fisker said.

Then she told them they were a silly little bunch of wankers. Then she asked them why they were all so interested in urine and what their problem was. Then she pushed past them and held the smartphone over the bowl of the toilet that George had just flushed.

All the girls squealed, especially the one whose phone it was.

You can choose. Delete or drop, Helena Fisker said.

It’s waterproof, you ethnic cow, one of the girls said.

Did you just call me an ethnic cow? Helena Fisker said. Great. A bonus.

Helena Fisker slammed the front of the smartphone on the edge of the toilet door. Bits of plastic flew off.

Now we can test your phone’s waterproofing and we can test the school’s policies on racism, she was saying as George left.

Thanks, George had said later when they were queuing up outside history.

She had never actually spoken to Helena Fisker before.

I liked that speech you gave in English that day, Helena Fisker said then. That story you told about the BT Tower.

(It had been George’s turn, in the going-round-the-room order, to give a three-minute talk about empathy. She’d had no idea what to say. Then Ms Maxwell had said in front of the whole class, though in a quiet and nice way, it’s okay if you don’t want to talk today, Georgia. This had made George even more determined to do it. But when she stood up her mind went blank. So she’d said some things her mother was always saying about how near-impossible it was to inhabit anyone else’s shoes, whether they lived in Paraguay or just down the road or were even just in the next room or the next seat along from you, and ended it by telling the story of a pop singer who was having her lunch in the restaurant of the BT Tower when it was called the Post Office Tower in the 1960s and was so outraged at the way the maître d’ was bossing one of the underwaiters around that she took the bread roll she’d just been given off her side plate and threw it at the maître d’ and hit him on the back of the head.)

That’s all she and Helena Fisker have ever said to each other.

A couple of times since that thing in the toilets happened, though, George has caught herself thinking something unexpected. She has caught herself wondering whether those girls, that girl with the phone — if the phone memory had survived — had deleted or maybe kept the film.