Ali Smith - How to be both

And she sat there and said, so my quandary is, Carol, do I even bother to fill these books with beautiful text and pictures or do I just rough up their edges so it looks like there’s something in them, you know, wear them out and smudge them about a bit so it looks like they’ve been well worked, and deliver them to him and get paid and get away with doing much less work myself? Do I choose to be a charlatan or do I make quite a lot of work that the risk is no one will ever even see?

We went for lunch and we got quite drunk. She said, this is exciting for me because I get to watch you eat , and I said, what? really? something like that excites you?

But all the same. How flattering. Someone wanted to watch me eat.

Weird, George says.

Her mother smothers a laugh to herself.

I liked her more and more, she says. She was repressed and respectable and anarchic and rude and unexpected, she was trivial and wild both at once, like a bad girl from school. And she was lovely. She was attentive, sweet to me. And there was something, some glimmer of something. She’d look at me and I’d know there was something real in it, and I liked it, I liked how she paid attention to me, my life. Like she personally cared how I was feeling from day to day or what I was doing from one hour to the next. And she did kiss me, once. Properly, I mean against a wall, a real kiss –

Oh God, George says.

That’s exactly what your father said, her mother says.

You told dad? George says.

Of course I did, her mother says. I tell your dad everything. Anyway sweet heart, after that I knew it was a game. You always know where you are after a kiss. It was a pretty good kiss, George, I liked it fine. But all the same –

( I will never forgive her , George is thinking)

— I knew after it something didn’t quite ring true, her mother says. She was always so curious, about where I was, what I was doing, who I was doing it with, who else I was meeting up with or working with, especially that and what I was working on, what I was writing about, what I thought about this or that, it was constant, and I thought, well, that’s a bit like love, that obsessiveness, when people are in love they need to know the strangest things, so maybe it is love, perhaps it just feels this odd to me because it’s the kind of love that can’t be expressed unless we both choose to really mess up our lives. Which I’d no intention of doing, George. I know how good my life is. And, I presumed, neither had she, any such intention, she has a life too, a husband, kids. At least I think she does. At least, I saw some photos once.

But then there was the day I went to see her in her workshop without telling her I was coming, and I knocked on the door and a woman came to the door, she was wearing overalls, and I asked for Lisa and she said who? And I said Lisa Goliard, this is her bookmaking workshop, and the woman said, no, that’s not my name, I’m whatever, and this is my bookmaking workshop, can I help you? And I said, but you sometimes let your workshop to other printers or bookmakers, yes? and she looked at me as if I was crazy and said she was really busy and was there anything she could help me with, and it’s as I was walking away that it came to me that the whole time I’d known Lisa, which was by then a couple of years, I’d never see her once make or do anything in that workshop. We’d just sat around in it, talking. I’d never seen her write anything, or bind anything, or print anything, or cut anything.

And then when I got home I looked her up online and there were the same couple of web pages that I’d looked at before, a page still saying Site Coming Soon and a link to a bookseller in Cumbria, but not much else. In fact nothing else. Not a trace.

She almost didn’t exist, George says. She only just existed.

Not that an absence online means anything, her mother says. She definitely existed. Definitely exists.

If this was a film or a novel, she’d turn out to be a spy, George says.

I know, her mother says.

She says it quite happily in the dark next to George.

It’s possible, she says. It’s not at all impossible. Though it seems improbable. It wouldn’t surprise me. I did meet her rather oddly, it did all happen very oddly. It’s as if someone had looked at my life and calculated exactly how to attract me, then how to fool me once my attention was caught. Quite an art. And she’s quite a nice spy. If she is one.

Is there such a thing as a nice spy? George says.

I wouldn’t have said so before, her mother says. We even had conversations about it, we had a running joke. I’d say, you’re in intelligence, aren’t you, and she’d say I’m afraid I can’t possibly answer that question.

Did you tell her you’d rumbled her workshop? George says.

I did, her mother says. I told her I’d gone and it hadn’t been her workshop the day I went. She laughed and said I’d met the other person who worked there occasionally, and how this person owned the building and was fearful that the authorities, the council, would know she was letting space to other people so always swore no one used it but her whenever she was asked. And when she told me that, I thought, well, that’s perfectly feasible, that explains that , and at exactly the same time I could feel myself thinking, well, that explains that away . I think this double-think is the reason I started to see much less of her.

But George, what I’m about to say, I don’t expect you to understand it till you’re older –

Thanks, George says.

No, her mother says. I’m really not being patronizing. But understanding something like what I’m going to say takes having a bit of age. Some things really do take time. Because even though I suspected I’d been played, there was something. It was true, and it was passionate. It was unsaid. It was left to the understanding. To the imagination. That in itself was pretty exciting. What I’m saying is, I quite liked it. Even if I was being played. And most of all, my darling. The being seen. The being watched. It makes life very, well I don’t know. Pert.

Pert? George says. What kind of a word is pert?

The being watched over, her mother says. It was really something.

But by a spy and a liar? George says.

Seeing and being seen, Georgie, is very rarely simple, her mother says.

Are, George says.

What? her mother says.

Are very rarely simple, George says. Did you tell dad she was a spy? What did he say?

He said (and here her mother puts on a voice that’s supposed to be her father), Carol, nobody is monitoring you. It’s a sub-repressed expression. You’re attracted to her middle-classness. She’s attracted to your working-class origins. It’s a classic class-infatuation paranoia and you’re both making up an adolescent drama to make your own lives more interesting.

Does dad not know about how there are no longer just three but a hundred and fifty different social classes to which it can be decided that we belong? George says.

Her mother laughs in the dark next to George.

Anyway, sweet heart. Games run their course. I got a bit tired of it. I stopped being in touch with her back in the winter.

Yeah. I know, George says.

I was a bit down about it, her mother says. You know?

We all know, George says. You’ve been awful.

Have I? her mother says and laughs gently. Well, I missed her. I still miss her. It felt like I had a friend. She was my friend. And God, George, something about it made me feel permitted.

Permitted? George says. That’s insane.

I know. Allowed, her mother says. Like I was being allowed . It made me laugh, when I realized it. Then it made me feel rather, well, special. Like a character in a film who suddenly develops an aura of light all round her. Can you imagine?