Ali Smith - How to be both

Strange, but the photo is beautiful. The photos all through this book are beautiful, of roads with crevasse cracks splitting through them, of a clock face at the top of a tower split in half so only the roman numerals for seven to eleven survive and the rest of the face is just sky. There is one picture of a small girl holding a teakettle and standing against a backdrop of aid tents. It’s a natural disaster and it looks a bit like a fashion shoot. Well, almost all photos of roughed-up places, so long as there are no actual dead people in them, look like a fashion shoot.

S ooner or later , George’s mother said in her head, the ones with the dead people in them will look like a fashion shoot too .

Fashion shot. Ha ha.

That would make a good Subvert.

George saw that her little brother, sitting at the breakfast bar over his earthquakes and tsunamis book, was hanging his head like a done flower.

She pulled up a chair beside him.

You’re a rift, she said.

I’m a what? he said in a little voice.

You’re a fault, she said.

I am not, he said.

You are, you’re a San Andreas fault. You’re a tectonic plate, she said.

You’re a tectonic plate, he said.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, she said. But names will never harm me. You’re a drifting continent.

You’re a drifting continent, he said

You’re a drifting incontinent, she said (though the subtlety of this pretty much went over Henry’s head). You’re a Richter scale. A scaly Richter. A nidiot.

Sticks and stones, Henry said.

He was singing now to himself with his face sad.

May break my bones. Sticks and stones.

George went out to the garden. She collected some pebbles and bits of hedge, a few twigs. She came back into the kitchen and she flung them at Henry. Little twigs and leaves stuck in his hair. Gravel went everywhere, into the sugar, the butter, the cutlery drawer.

Henry looked at the debris all round and all over him and then up at her in astonishment.

Did your bones break? she said. Well?

She tickled him a bit.

Is that one broken? she said. Is that one? That one?

It worked. He lightened, he gave in, he laughed and twisted in her arms.

Good.

She scooped the gravel out of the butter and sugar with a spoon. She wiped the twigs and leaves and grit into a J-cloth and cleaned the table. She made them eggs for supper. (Egg on poplar. Like something made in a chic restaurant. What would it taste like? Think of all the paintings made with all the eggs laid all the hundreds of years ago and the blips of life that were the lives of the warmblooded chickens who laid them.)

Henry was still finding the sticks and stones joke funny, and she was still finding the grit in his hair, when she bathed him and put him to bed.

The earth is made of rock. It is more than four and a half billion years old. Five hundred years is a nothing. It is about the length of an eyelash. Less.

At level four to five, things fall off walls and shelves.

At level six, walls themselves fall.

There are thousands of earthquakes all over the earth, every year, most so small no one notices them.

But these are the signs for which people have learned to watch. Dogs will bark. Frogs will leave the area. The sky will fill with strange lights.

Mrs Rock, George had said the last time she’d seen Mrs Rock, I am between you and a hard place.

Mrs Rock almost smiled.

So I have decided to veer towards you rather than towards the hard place, George said.

Mrs Rock looked slightly panicked.

Then George told Mrs Rock how she was sorry she’d lied.

That day when I said the word minotaur then pretended you’d misheard me, George said. You didn’t mishear me. I did say it. Then I pretended I didn’t. And I just wanted to say so, and to apologize. I was being difficult. And also, I know I must have seemed highly paranoid in some of the things I’ve said to you over the past weeks, particularly about my mother and so on. I’ve been making up narratives. I know that now.

Mrs Rock nodded.

Then she told George that the story of the minotaur was one about facing what mazes you. She made it very clear that she was using the word maze, not amaze. Then, when you’d faced it, she said, the thing to do to get out of the labyrinth was to go back the way you’d come, follow your own thread, the thread you’d left behind you, and that this had a lot to do with knowing where we come from and what our roots are –

I disagree with your interpretation, George said.

Mrs Rock stopped. She looked amazed (or perhaps mazed) that someone had interrupted her.

George shook her head.

It just needs the twist in the plot. It needs the outside help, George said. If a girl hadn’t given Theseus the ball of string, chances are he’d never have got out of there. He’d probably still be in there today and that minotaur’d still be demanding and eating the required number of Athenian virgins.

Yes, of course, Mrs Rock said. But it’s also possible, Georgia, that it means, metaphorically speaking –

Aw Mrs Rock, to tell you the truth, I’m so, so tired of what stories are meant to mean, George said. My mother, on the morning of the day she died, annoyed me. She was calling me her little prince, because of that new royal baby and me happening to have the same name, both my parents started doing that last summer. All of which meant that I shied away from her when she tried to kiss me on my way out the door to school. Then the next time she came home was two weeks after and it was in the form of bits of rubble in a cardboard box, which my father put in the passenger seat of his work van then drove round town stopping to leave handfuls of her in places she’d really liked. Only outdoor places, though, so as not to be too shocking or too illegal. Though he did put some of her in his pocket and take her to London, where he went looking specifically for cracks and crevices in the outsides and the insides of the buildings of her favourite art places and theatre places and work places. Into which he pressed, with his thumb, some of my mother. And there’s still quite a lot of her left in the box so that this summer we can take her to Scotland and abroad, to some of the other places she liked. The thing being. What I mean is. It’s not very metaphorical, if you’ll forgive me, Mrs Rock.

Silence.

(What you might even call a stony silence.)

Had George really said all that out loud?

No.

Phew.

George had said only the first sentence out loud. She hadn’t said anything past the words what stories are meant to mean .

But think of her mother. Think of her smiling, looking the minotaur in the eye and — winking.

Think of her father taking what was left of the shape her mother had when she was alive and driving round in the rain to find the places she’d want to be.

This thought of her father freed for George a moment of future-tense vision, by chance a summer vision, in which she will come home from school or London one day in a couple of months’ time and find him standing on the front lawn with the hose in his hand and what turns out to be a Beethoven symphony playing into his ears through the precious Bose headphones nobody else is allowed to touch, while he conducts a spray of water con brio then andante over the green of the new grass he’s had put in.

But back to now, or rather then, and Mrs Rock still a bit in shock at having been interrupted.

Mrs Rock brought her eyebrows down from the top of her head, where they’d gone. She placed a look on her face to show that she was waiting a moment to see if George was going to say anything else.

George placed a look in the same way on her own face to let Mrs Rock know she wasn’t going to say anything.