Ali Smith - How to be both

Frankly? No, George says.

Can we never get to go beyond ourselves? her mother says. Never get to be more than ourselves? Will I ever, as far as you’re concerned, be allowed to be anything other than your mother?

No, George says.

And why is that? her mother says.

Because you’re my mother, George says.

Ah, her mother says. I see. Anyway. I quite enjoyed it, while it lasted. Am I mad, George?

Frankly? Yes, George says.

And at least now I know why the texts asking why I wasn’t in touch stopped coming. Ha ha! her mother says.

Good, George says.

How funny, her mother says.

Your Lisa Goliard, or whoever she really is in the real world when she’s not pretending to be someone else, can fuck off back to spy-land, George says.

There is a short disapproving silence in which George senses she’s gone too far. Then her mother says

Please don’t use language like that, George.

It’s okay. He’s asleep, George says.

He might be. But I’m not, her mother says.

Said.

That was then.

This is now.

It’s February now.

But I’m not.

Her mother’s now not anything.

George lies in bed with her hands behind her head and remembers the one time in her life she ever saw Lisa Goliard in the flesh.

They were all on their way on holiday to Greece, they were in the airport pretty early, half past six in the morning, they were getting breakfast in a Pret and she turned to ask her mother to get her a tomato and mozzarella hot thing. But her mother wasn’t there. Her mother’d fallen back, was behind them talking to a woman with long white-looking hair though the woman was young, and beautiful, which George could tell even just from looking at her back; and something about her mother was most strange, she was sort of standing on tiptoes, was she? as if straining upwards, like trying to reach something just too high off a tall shelf, a very high apple off a tree. The person leaned forward and put her hand on George’s mother’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek and as she turned to say a final goodbye George caught the moment of her face.

Who was that? George asked her mother.

Her mother went on and on. Coincidence, the friend who makes books, what are the chances of, well that was a surprise.

George watched her mother’s colour rise and change.

It took a long time for her mother’s colour to return to normal. It took half the plane journey — most of northern Europe — before her mother’s colour had calmed down.

The minotaur is a bull-headed half-man who’s been placed at the centre of a dastardly labyrinth. Every so often the king, whose wife gave birth to this monster, has to feed it live youths and maidens as a sacrifice. The monster is defeated by a hero with a sword and the labyrinth is defeated by a simple ball of string. Isn’t that how it goes?

George gets up and goes over to the door and gets her phone out of the pocket of the jeans hanging on the back. It is 1.23 a.m. It is a bit late to text anyone.

She texts H.

— There is something I need to know.

There’s no answer. George texts again.

— Did you do that minotaur joke because you think that me thinking she was being monitored is a load of bull?

Dark.

Nothing.

George hunkers down in the bed. She tries not to think about anything.

The next day at school, though, H won’t really speak to George. Not in an unpleasant way but in a polite and nodding and turning-away way. It is possibly because she does think George is paranoid and mad. George speaks and it’s not that H doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t really speak back and tends to end her sentences by looking away, which doesn’t make for easy continuous conversation.

This gets particularly complicated because they have been paired up on the empathy / sympathy project in English and are meant to be discussing ideas, and it’s got to be finished and the talks are to be given to the rest of the class on Friday. But H keeps getting up and going to another table where the printer is and printing things out, and it’s on the side of the classroom where there are three girls with whom H is friendly but George is less friendly. Then when she comes back she turns side-on and makes notes and only replies if George asks something direct. She does it nicely but quite definitely uninterestedly.

It is a Tuesday, so there’s Mrs Rock.

I think I might not be a very passionate person, George says.

Mrs Rock, since Christmas, has stopped repeating back to George what George says. Her new tactic is to sit and listen without saying anything, then very near the end of the session to tell George a sort of story or improvise on a word that George has used or something that’s struck her because of something George has said. This means that now the sessions are mostly George in monologue plus epilogue by Mrs Rock.

I asked my father this morning, George says, did he think I was a passionate person and he said I think you’re definitely a very driven person George and there’s definitely a lot of passion in your drive, but I know he was sort of fobbing me off. Not that my father would know whether I was or I wasn’t passionate anyway. Anyway then my little brother started making kissing noises on the back of his hand and my father got embarrassed and changed the subject and then when we went out the front door to go to school my little brother was standing next to my dad’s van in the drive and going on about how there was a lot of passion in this drive, how this drive was full of passion, and I felt stupid, like an idiot, for having said anything out loud at all to anyone.

Mrs Rock sits there silent as a statue.

That makes two people who won’t really speak to George today.

Three, if you count her father.

George feels a stubbornness come over her sitting there in Mrs Rock’s student easy chair. She seals her mouth. She folds her arms. She glances at the clock. It is only ten past. There are another sixty minutes of this session still to go (it is a double period). She will not say another word.

Tick tick tick.

Fifty nine.

Mrs Rock sits next to her table in front of George like a mainland off an island for which the last ferry boat of the day is already long gone.

Silence.

Five minutes pass in this silence.

Those five minutes alone pass like an hour.

George considers risking looking insolent and getting her earphones out of her bag and listening to music on her phone. But she can’t, can she? Because this is her new phone and she hasn’t downloaded any music on to this phone yet, though she’s had it for nearly two months and there’s nothing on it except that song H downloaded for her to which H wrote the words for the DNA revision yesterday.

I will always want you.

Want is quite a complicated word there, because there’s volo, which means I want, but it’s not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love.

But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want?

Numquam amabo?

Mrs Rock, do you mind if I send a text? George says.

You want to send a text to me? Mrs Rock says.

No, George says. Not to you.

Then I do mind, Georgia, because this is a session in which we have decided to spend the duration talking to each other, Mrs Rock says.

Well, George says. It’s not like we’re doing any talking, we’re just sitting here not saying anything.

That’s your choice, Georgia, Mrs Rock says. You get to choose how to use this time with me.

You mean this time in which it was decided by whoever decided it in some school meeting, George says, that I should come and sit in your room so you can all minotaur me to see how I’m doing after my mother dying.