How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  George opens it. Inside there’s a photograph on thick paper. It’s summer in the picture. Two women (both young, both between girl and woman) are walking along a road together past some shops in a very sunny-looking place. Is it now or is it in the past? One of them is yellow-haired and one of them is darker. The yellow-haired one, the smaller of the two, is looking at something off camera, off to her left. She’s wearing a gold and orange top. The dark-haired taller girl is wearing a short blue dress with a stripe round the edging of it. She is in the middle of turning to look at the other. There’s a breeze, so her hand has gone up to hold her hair back off her face. The yellow-haired one looks preoccupied, intent. The dark one looks as if something that’s been said has struck her and she’s about to say a yes.

  Who are they? George says.

  French, H says. From the 1960s. I was telling my mother about your sixties kick and I told her that story, the one you told in Maxwell’s class about the BT Tower and she wanted to know which singer it was and then she started looking up singers she’d liked, especially ones her mother’d liked, and she got annoyed that I didn’t know any of them and made me look them all up on YouTube. Then, when I did, I thought this one (she points at the blonde one) looked a bit like you.

  Really? George says.

  My mother says they were both huge stars, H says. Not together, separate stars. They both had huge careers and changed the music industry in France. My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies, anyway then I thought I’d bring the picture round to get away from her going on about it, then I thought I could ask you if you want to come out to the car park with me.

  A car park? George says.

  The multi-storey, H says. Want to come?

  Now? George says.

  I guarantee it’ll be really boring, H says.

  George looks out of the window. H’s bike is leaning against the wall outside. Her own bike is in the shed still with last summer’s puncture. In her head she can see the tyre useless in the dark, the bike all lopsided against the gardening stuff.

  Okay, she says.

  They walk towards town with H wheeling her bike between them. When they get to the multi-storey George goes towards the lift door but H puts a finger to her mouth then points at the glass-walled security cubicle. There’s a man in a uniform in it with what looks like a newspaper for a head. He’s asleep under it. H points at the fire doors that lead to the stairs. She opens one of the doors with great care. It’s heavy. George props it with her foot. When they’ve both squeezed through, H eases it closed.

  It’s a Monday night in February so there aren’t many cars. There’s only one solitary four-wheel drive parked up on the top deck, which is the roof of the car park and is open air, open to the sky, its concrete flooring wet from the rain and shining under the car park lights.

  George and H lean as far over the top deck wall as they can (they make them this high so it’ll be less inviting to suicides, H says). They look down at the roofs of their city, the streets near-empty, shining too after the rain. An occasional car passes below. Nobody much is out.

  This is what the town will look like when I’m dead too, George thinks. And if I were to jump, right now? Nothing about it would change. They would just clean up whatever mess I’d make and then the next night it would rain or not rain, the street surface would be shiny or matt, the occasional car would pass below and on the busy days the traffic would queue up down there to park in here so people could go to the shops, this deck would fill with cars then later it’d empty of cars, and the months would pass one after the other, February coming round again, and again, and again, February after February after February, and this historic city would carry on being its historic self regardless.

  She stops thinking it because H has fetched, by herself, by dragging it up the steps in the stairwell, the shopping trolley they passed on the way up which someone’d abandoned at the lift doors on the floor below.

  It’s quite a new trolley. It crosses the concrete without too much noise.

  Here, H says. Hold it steady for me.

  George holds it still while H climbs into it, no, not so much climbs as vaults. All she has to do is take hold of the side and flick herself into the air and she’s in. It is pretty impressive.

  How’s your chariot-driving? she says.

  Put it this way, George says. There’s only one car up here and if I push you, no matter what direction I intend to push you in, you’ll hit it. And if you’re fortunate enough not to hit it –

  She points at the steep entry and exit slopes that dip in real suddenness down to the next floor.

  Ski-jump, H says. The ultimate challenge.

  She glances above her head at where the security camera is. Then she jumps out of the trolley as easily as she jumped in.

  Right, she says. You first.

  She nods at George then nods towards the trolley.

  No way, George says.

  Go on, H says. Trust me.

  No, George says.

  We won’t do the slope, H says. I promise. I’ll be careful. I think we’ve time for one. If there’s time for two and he stays asleep and no one comes up I’ll get you to do me too.

  She holds the trolley steady.

  She’s waiting.

  There’s nowhere for a foothold so George has to balance herself on the sides of it and sort of roll into it and turn herself the right way up again

  (ouch).

  Ready? H says.

  George nods. She braces herself against the sides of the trolley and equally as much against the fact that she isn’t the kind of person who usually does something like this.

  Want me to keep hold of it all the way across or just to push it really hard then let it go? H says.

  The latter, George hears herself say.

  She is quite surprised at herself.

  Latter. Fortunate. You use words, H says, that I never hear anyone else using ever. You’re wild.

  Literally, George says inside the cage of the trolley.

  Latter. Fortunate. Literally. Here goes, H says.

  H swings the trolley round so George is facing the expanse of the car park roof. She angles it away from the exit slopes. The next thing George knows is the way she’s forced backwards by a forward shove so strong that for a moment it’s like she’s going in two directions at once.

  Later, back at home, George goes downstairs to make coffee and leaves Henry in her room talking to H.

  Yeah, that’s her, H is saying. The heroine of the Anger Games.

  It’s Hunger Games, Henry says.

  Catnip, H says.

  Her name’s not Catnip, Henry says.

  By the time she gets back upstairs Henry and H are engaged in a kind of verbal ping-pong.

  Henry : As blind as?

  H : Houses.

  (Henry laughs.)

  Henry : As safe as?

  H : A bell.

  Henry : As bold as?

  H : A cucumber.

  (Henry rolls about on the floor laughing at the word cucumber.)

  H : Okay. Switch!

  Henry : Switch!

  H : As keen as?

  Henry : A cucumber.

  H : As pleased as?

  Henry : A cucumber.

  H : As deaf as?

  Henry : A cucumber.

  H : You can’t just keep saying cucumber.

  Henry : I can if I want.

  H : Well, okay. Fair enough. But if you can, I can too.

  Henry : Okay.

  H : Cucumber.

  Henry : Cucumber what?

  H : I’m just playing it your way. Cucumber.

  Henry : No, play i
t properly. As what as a what?

  H : As cucumber as … a … cu–

  Henry : Play it properly!

  H : Likewise, Henry. Like plus wise.

  When H goes home at eleven George literally feels it, the house become duller, as if all the light in it has stalled in the dim part that happens before a lightbulb has properly warmed up. The house becomes as blind as a house, as deaf as a house, as dry as a house, as hard as a house. George does all the things you’re meant to do before bed. She washes, she brushes her teeth, she takes off the clothes she’s been wearing in the daytime and puts on the clothes you’re meant to wear at night.

  But in bed, instead of the usual jangling nothing in her head, she thinks about how H has a mother who is French.

  She thinks about how H’s father is from Karachi and Copenhagen and how, H says, according to her father, it is actually perfectly possible to be from the north and the south and the east and the west all at once.

  She thinks this is maybe where H gets her eyes from.

  She thinks about the picture of the two French singers on her desk. She thinks about how she might be said to resemble a French girl singer from the 1960s.

  She will put that picture up by itself, give it a whole wall like she’s done with the poster her mother bought her of the film actress when they went to the museum in Ferrara and saw the exhibition about the director her mother liked who always used this actress in his films.

  She thinks about how she’s never cycled two on a bike before, where one person does the cycling by standing on the pedals and the other person sits on the seat and holds on to her at the waist but loosely enough so that she can continue to move quite freely up and down.

  She thinks about how polite H was when she apologized to the security man at the car park. In the end he had seemed rather charmed even as he’d threatened them with the police.

  Finally she lets herself think about how it feels:

  to be so frightened that you almost can’t breathe

  to speed so fast and be so completely out of control

  to know the meaning of helpless

  to spin across a shining space knowing any moment you might end up hurt, but likewise, all the same, like plus wise you just might not.

  Then she wakes up and for once it’s morning and she has slept right through without any of the usual waking up.

  The next time H comes to the house George isn’t expecting her and is in her mother’s study. She has sneaked in there where she’s not meant to be and is sitting at the desk with the big dictionary open looking to see if LIA, without the R, happens to be a word in its own right.

  (It doesn’t.)

  She looks at the list of words that begin with LIA. She imagines her mother in the dock in a courtroom. Yes, your honour, I did write the word above his head, but I wasn’t writing the word you imagine. I was writing the word LIANA and a liana, as I’m sure you know your honour, is a twisting woody tropical plant which can hold the weight of a man swinging through the trees, familiar to us for instance from the Tarzan films of my youth. From this it should be easy to deduce that the word I was writing would have been meant finally as a compliment.

  Or

  Yes, your honour, but it was going to be the word LIATRIS, which your honour may or may not already know is a plant but can also mean a blazing star, from which it should be easy to deduce etc.

  No. Because her mother would never have lied like that about what she was writing. Lying and equivocating are what George, not her mother, would do if she’d been caught writing some word on a window above someone important’s head.

  Not that her mother was caught.

  Though George probably would have been.

  Her mother, instead, would have said something simple and true like, yes your honour I cannot tell a lie, I believe him to be a liar which is precisely why I was writing the word.

  I cannot tell a lie. It was me who chopped down the cherry tree. Now that I’ve been so honest, make me a precedent. No, not president. I said precedent.

  That’d maybe be worth £5 for a Subvert, if her mother were here.

  (But now that she isn’t, does that make it worthless?)

  There are also the possible words LIAS, LIANG, LIARD. A sort of stone, a Chinese weight measure, a greyish colour and a coin worth very little (it is interesting to George that the word liard can mean both money and a colour).

  There is the word LIABLE.

  There is the word LIAISON.

  (I bet its in a cathedral city up in some fancy cathedral ceiling hanging out with the carvings of the angels.

  I bet its

  its)

  Wrong.

  The wrongness of it is infuriating.

  The George from after can still feel the fury at the wrongness of things that beat such huge dents into the chest of the George from before.

  She turns on the chair. H is in the doorway.

  Your dad let me in, she says. I went up to your room but you weren’t there.

  H had decided earlier that day at school that a good way to do revision would be for them to transfer what they needed to remember into song lyrics and learn to sing them to the tune of some song they both know. This, H says, will make information unforgettable. They both have a test next week in biology and George also has a test in Latin.

  So what we can do, H said, is : I’ll make up the biology version and we can learn it off by heart then you can translate it into Latin for double the benefit.

  They’d been standing in the corridor outside history.

  What do you think? H had said.

  What I’m thinking is, George said. When we die.

  Uh huh? H said.

  Do you think we still have memories? George said.

  This was her test question.

  H wasn’t even fazed. She was never fazed by anything. She made a face, but it was a thinking face.

  Hmm, she’d said.

  Then she’d shrugged and said,

  Who knows?

  George had nodded. Good answer.

  Now H is here, turning on one foot and looking at all the piles of books and papers and pictures.

  Wow. What a place, she says. What’s this place?

  What’s this place? George turns on the swivel chair her mother specially bought for this study and catches, at the corner of her eye, the framed and printed-out first-ever Subvert. It’s a list of the names of all the women art students who went to an art college in London over three years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. This list with no explanation attached flashed up for a month on the online pages of anyone who looked up the word Slade (including people who’d chanced to be looking up things about the band with all the old men in it who wrote that Christmas song). It came about because George’s mother had been reading a biography of a quite famous artist from the turn of that century and had become more and more interested in what had happened to his wife, whom he’d met at the same art school. She’d been a student too but had died really young after having more children than her body could handle having (George’s mother is a feminist). (Was.) Before this woman died (well obviously) she had had a friend called Edna who was also a student at the school. In fact Edna’d been one of the most talented artists in the place. Edna had gone on to marry a well-to-do type. One day this well-to-do type had come home to find Edna’s paints and brushes spread out on the dining-room table and had told Edna to put all this rubbish away. It was before Henry was born. George and her mother and father were on holiday in Suffolk staying in a cottage. Her mother had been reading this book. She got to the page where this happened to Edna and she burst into tears in the garden. That’s the story. George has no memory of it but the story goes that her mother raged round the cottage’s garden like a mad person and that the letting agency had sent a bill afterwards for some of the plants she’d wrecked. Your mother is a very passionate person, her father always said whenever the story got told. Anyway Edna’s life h
adn’t been so bad after all in the end because the husband had died quite early on and she herself had gone on to live till she was a hundred and to show lots of pictures in galleries and even to be called, by a reputable newspaper, the most imaginative artist in England (though she did have a nervous breakdown at one point, and at another point in history her studio got hit by a bomb and totally destroyed along with lots of her work).

  All of this information flashes through George’s head in that fraction of a second it takes to do the single swivel round towards H in her mother’s chair and say the words:

  It’s my mother’s study.

  Cool, H says.

  She puts a piece of paper with her writing all over it down next to George on the desk. She picks up a picture off the top of a pile of letters. George looks to see what she’s picked up.

  She liked that picture so much, George says, that we went all the way to Italy to see it.

  Who is it? H says.

  I don’t know, George says. Just some man. On a wall. In a kind of blue space.

  Who did it? H says.

  I don’t know that either, George says.

  She looks down at the song she’s meant to translate into Latin. She has no idea what the Latin for DNA will be.

  To The Tune Of Wrecking Ball

  (Verse 1)

  Herr Friedrich Miescher found it in / some pus in 1869 / Crick, Watson and Ros Franklin saw / the two strands intertwined like vine. / Double helix in 1953 / X-Ray photo ’52. / Franklin died before Nobel Prize Award / Life not one strand but two.

  (Chorus)

  G - A - T - C and D - NA / Deoxyribonu-cleic / Guanine-adenine-thymine cytosine / Supercoil can be both / Po - o - si tive / Yeah and /Ne - e - g a tive.

  (Verse 2)

  Plants fungi animals make up / The eukaryotes / Bacteria and archaea / The prokaryotes / It’s A&T or it’s G&C that’s the / Only way it will do / Two long chromosomes, codons three letters long / I will always want you.

  H is still standing looking at the picture of the man in rags.

  That last line’s just there for scansion, she says. While I decide what else to use.

  She holds up the picture of the man.

  When in history is this from? she says.

  It’s from a palace, George says. If you look up the words Ferrara Palazzo in Images, Ferrara’s the place we saw it, you’ll probably find it.