How to Be Both

by Ali Smith

  It’s kind of better in real life, George says.

  It says online it’s an allegory for laziness, H says. I suppose because his clothes are torn and he looks poor.

  If my mother were still alive she’d make a Subvert out of them saying that, George says. She’d have a heart attack if she heard someone call that picture laziness.

  The same place it says he’s an allegory of laziness, it also says this one’s an allegory of activity, H says.

  She brings up the picture of the rich youth with the arrow in one hand and the hoop in the other.

  I mean if she weren’t already, you know, dead, George says. I saw that one there too. Along from the ragged man. In the flesh.

  H has also found three other pictures by this painter, which aren’t in the Ferrara palace. There is one in which an angel is kneeling to tell a Virgin Mary she’s going to give birth. Above them both, far away in the sky, there’s a floating shape. It’s God. He is shaped oddly, like a shoe, or a – what?

  Then George notices a painted snail at the bottom of the picture, crossing it as if it’s a real snail crossing a picture. The snail shape is nearly the same as the God shape.

  Does that mean that God is like a snail? Or that a snail traversing a picture is like God?

  It has a perfect spiral in the shell.

  Another is a bright gold picture. It is of a woman holding a thin-stemmed flower. The flower has eyes instead of flowerheads.

  Wild, H says.

  The woman holding the flower-eyes is smiling very slightly, like a shy magician.

  The last picture H has found is of a handsome man with brown eyes. He is holding a gold ring. He is holding it like his hand is coming right out of the picture over the edge of its frame and into the real world like he’s literally saying, here, it’s for you, do you want it?

  He is wearing a black hat. Perhaps he is in mourning too.

  Look at that, H says.

  She points to the rock formations in the background, behind the man’s head, where an outcrop of rock shaped a bit like a penis is pointing directly at a rocky bank opposite – across a small bay and on the other side of the handsome man’s head – which has an open cave set back in it.

  Both girls burst out laughing.

  It is both blatant and invisible. It is subtle and at the same time the most unsubtle thing in the world, so unsubtle it’s subtle. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t not see it. It makes the handsome man’s intention completely clear. But only if you notice. If you notice, it changes everything about the picture, like a witty remark someone has been brave enough to make out loud but which you only hear if your ears are open to more than one thing happening. It isn’t lying about anything or feigning anything, and even if you weren’t to notice, it’s there clear as anything. It can just be rocks and landscape if that’s what you want it to be – but there’s always more to see, if you look.

  They stop laughing. This is the point at which H leans towards George as if to kiss her on the mouth, yes, that close, so close that George for a second or two is breathing H’s breath.

  But she doesn’t kiss George.

  I’ll come back, she says.

  George doesn’t say anything.

  H moves her head away again.

  She nods at George.

  George shrugs.

  It’s half an hour later. George and H are in George’s room. They have decided that talking about a painter they don’t know anything about will take too much explaining and be too much hard work, that they might too easily get caught out not knowing about things people knew about then, like how to grind the colours of paints out of beetles etc, or like about popes and saints and gods and goddesses and mythic and delphic whatever (delphic what? George says; delphic, I don’t know, tripods, H says; what are delphic tripods? George says; see? we’ve no idea, H says).

  Instead they will demonstrate the difference between empathy and sympathy with a simple mime.

  For empathy, H will pretend to trip and fall over in the street and George, acting as a passer-by seeing her do this by chance, will trip over her own feet too simply because she’s seen someone else do it. For sympathy, H will pretend to trip again but this time George will go over and ask her if she’s all right and say things like, poor you etc. Then H will pretend she’s really out of it on drugs and George, seeing this, will act like she’s starting to feel dizzy and woozy and high too. Then they will take a poll of the class as to whether this last bit, the drugs bit, is a demonstration of empathy or sympathy.

  They will call their presentation Empathy and Sympathy Take a Trip.

  H is admiring the spread of the damp. George is now hiding it with pictures of the kinds of things her father would never suspect there’d be damp behind. There are some pictures of kittens and a couple of the bands people at school right now are listening to, about which George doesn’t give a toss and which she doesn’t mind being ruined by what’s under them.

  Who’s she? H says looking across the room at the picture on the far wall.

  An Italian film actress, George says. My mother bought it for me.

  Is she good? H says.

  I don’t know, George says. I’ve never seen anything she’s in.

  H looks at the picture of the French girl singers and at the arrangement of photographs above the pillows on the bed of George’s mother as a woman, a girl and a child and even a very small black and white baby. She sits on George’s bed and looks at them.

  Tell me about her, she says.

  You tell me something first, George says. Then I will.

  What? H says. What kind of thing?

  Anything, George says. Just something you remember. Something that came into your head tonight at some point.

  When? H says.

  Whenever, George says. When we looked at the pictures. Whatever.

  Oh, okay, H says. Well. That thing about jackets and rawness.

  She tells George about the festival she was working at last summer, she was selling and tearing tickets for As You Like It at St John’s. She was doing a double shift and for the evening showing the audience was unexpectedly huge, there were nearly three hundred people – about seventy was usually more like it.

  So I was ripping tickets like mad, she says, and doing my eleven and fifteen times tables, fifteen was full price and eleven was concession and we started with almost no change, two five-pound notes, one single pound coin and a handful of pennies, which meant that for a bit I could only really sell tickets to people who had the right money. And it was a really cold evening so the people queuing were cold as well as furious, I know exactly how cold it was because I had no jacket.

  Raw, George says.

  Yeah, but wait, H says. After the tickets I had to serve two hundred and seventy five people polystyrene cups of mulled wine from the urn and they all wanted it because it was so cold, and there was only me, and the urn would only work if you tipped it, which was quite hard because it was heavy and really hard to hold a cup to without it just emptying out all over the cup and my hand. And I’d seen As You Like It one and a half times that day already, I’d seen the last half in the morning and the whole run-through in the afternoon and wanted to go home but I couldn’t because my next job was to hold the torch after the second half to show people where to walk in the dark and how to get to the exit. So I spent a lot of the second half trying to keep warm next to the urn, actually with my arm round the urn a lot of it, and trying to read though it was nearly dark and I wasn’t allowed to use the torch because it would distract from the performers.

  The girl playing Rosalind had this habit of getting into her Ganymede character by walking about behind the audience pretending to be a girl then pretending to be a boy to get her stance right, and she was in a very bad mood that night not just because she was also having to slip off in the breaks and cover for someone ill by playing Ophelia at Trinity but because at her afternoon performance of the Hamlet someone had exploded a bottle of cherryade just as she
started doing her rosemary for remembrance speech and she’d forgotten her lines. Anyway she was walking up and down and up and down in the half-dark pretending to be one and then the other and from where I was sitting I could sort of see her, I was half watching her and half trying to read, and then something else caught my eye, it was a small fast thing, at first I thought maybe she’d forgotten which play she was in, had dipped into being Ophelia and had got down on all fours, which I knew she actually did do in her mad scene, but the thing moving was too fast and too small for that and anyway I could hear her, she was out front, had been on for some time, was doing the line I really like about how you can’t shut doors on wit, and whatever the four-legged thing was darted behind the audience then back again and I saw it was a fox, it had something in its mouth, it had lifted a coat or jacket from the back of the audience and run off with it. And five minutes later it did it again, darted in and this time it came away with what looked like a handbag. And then when the play was over I stood on the road and held up my torch to show people where to go and the three or four people whose things’d been taken wandered about the gardens looking for them and then left the gardens not knowing. I knew. They didn’t. But I didn’t want to tell them. It’d be like betraying the fox. And then on my way home I realized I’d stopped thinking about the cold and that this had happened when I saw the thing happen with the fox.

  Jackets in this year’s disease came of rawness, George says. I suppose it means skin.

  How? H says.

  Where it says jackets, George says. It could be something about the raw way the disease that year made the skin go. And talking of coming and going. And rawness.

  She asks H when her family plans to leave.

  First week of March, H says.

  New school, George says.

  Fifth in four years, H says. You might say I’m used to change. It’s why I’m so well balanced and socially adept. Your turn.

  What? To be socially adept? George says.

  To tell me something you remembered, H says. When we looked at the pictures.

  It is last May. It is Italy. They are in the hire car on the way back to the airport.

  Skiffa what was it? George says.

  Noia, her mother says.

  Henry starts singing in the back of the car. Skipannoy, Skipannoy. Ship ahoy, Ship ahoy.

  Really annoying, Henry, George says.

  Her mother starts singing the words of a Pet Shop Boys song.

  They were never being boring, she sings. They dressed up in thoughts, and thoughts make amends.

  It’s not thoughts, George says. It’s fought.

  No it isn’t, George’s mother says.

  It is, George says. The line goes: we dressed up and fought, then thought, make amends.

  No, her mother says. Because they always write such intelligent words. Imagine. Dressing up in thoughts because thoughts make amends. Thoughts make amends. It ought to be a figure of speech. If I had a shield, that’s what I’d want it to say in Latin on it, that’d be my motto. And I’ve always thought it a beautiful philosophical explanation and understanding of precisely why they were never being boring.

  Your version doesn’t make sense, George says. You can’t dress up in thoughts. It’s fought. It’s obvious. You’re mishearing it.

  I’ll prove it to you, her mother says. Next chance we get we’ll play it and listen.

  We could look up the lyrics online right now, George says.

  Those online sites are full of mistakes, her mother says. We’ll use our human ears and listen together to the original when we get home.

  I bet you fifty pounds I’m right, George says.

  You’re on, her mother says. Prepare yourself for a substantial loss.

  Francesco de what? the woman behind the information desk had said.

  Cossa, George said.

  Cotta? the woman said.

  Cossa, and it’s del, George said. With an l.

  Della Francesca, the other woman, coming over, said.

  No, George said. Francesco. Then del. Then Cossa. Francesco del Cossa.

  The second woman shook her head. The first one shook her head.

  It’s a picture of St Vincent. St Vincent of Ferrara, George said.

  Actually, George had been wrong about that. It’s not Ferrara. It’s a painting of a saint called Ferrer and nothing to do with the place George has been to in Italy.

  But even so, neither of the women at the information desk in the gallery back on that first day George went to see St Vincent Ferrer recognized the name of the painter or the picture. Probably no one ever asks about anything here except the really famous paintings, which makes it fair enough, not to know, because a person can’t be expected to know about every single painting in a gallery of hundreds, no, thousands, even if he or she works on the information desk of what’s just one wing of it.

  And when George first looked at the painting herself she’d thought it wasn’t anything much. You could easily walk past it and glance at it and think you’d seen all you wanted to. Most people, most days, as George has seen day after day, do. It is not what you’d call an immediately prepossessing picture. It had taken a bit of looking to get past her own surface reaction to it. It’s not like those ones in the palace in Italy, or it doesn’t seem to be, at first look.

  If you wouldn’t mind spelling it, thank you, one of the women said.

  She typed what George said into a computer. She waited for a result. When it came, both women looked amazed, like they’d really pulled something off, and then delighted like George’s asking and their being able to answer her had made their day better.

  It’s in Room 55! the first woman said.

  She looked like she might even want to shake George’s hand.

  That was three weeks ago near the start of March. Since then, twice a week, George has been getting up, putting her clothes on, having breakfast, making sure Henry’s ready for school, seeing him off on the bus, going into the front room and doing the dance thing in honour of her mother to whatever random French song comes up on the playlist, putting her jacket on, going to the old bureau and filching the Subverts bank card (her father has forgotten about this account) then leaving the house as if to go to school but doubling back round the other side of the house where her father can’t see which direction she’s taking and cycling to the station instead, where she hangs around in the ticket place or the waiting room for the hour it takes till the cheaper fares kick in. Then George, travelling below surveillance cameras like people in novels from the past used to pass below the leaves or bare branches of trees and the eyes and wings of birds, nods to the tower there on the city horizon like a mega insect antenna, where fifty years ago the singer threw the bread roll at the maître d’, goes down into the Underground and comes up again in a different place not far from the wing of the gallery where the only painting in this country done by the painter her mother liked is.

  Francesco del Cossa

  (about 1435/6–about 1477/8)

  Saint Vincent Ferrer about 1473–5

  Saint Vincent Ferrer was a Spanish Dominican preacher, active throughout Europe and ardent in the conversion of heretics. Here he holds the gospels and points upwards to a vision of Christ displaying his wounds. Christ is flanked by angels holding instruments of his Passion. This is the central part of an altarpiece from a chapel dedicated to Saint Vincent in San Petronio, Bologna.

  Egg on poplar NG597 Bought 1858.

  The gallery knows more about the man in the picture than it does about the painter who painted it. About. There is nothing here about the painter except the fact that they don’t know for definite the year he painted this picture or the years he died and was born.

  The painting is in a room of other pictures by painters from around the same time. At first all these pictures by the other people look more interesting than this one, which just looks like another religious picture (first reason not to look) of a rather severe-faced monk (second reason not to l
ook) who’s ready and waiting with his finger up, holding a book up and open in his other hand, with which, both finger and book, it looks like he’ll probably admonish anyone who does stop and look at him (third reason not to look).

  But then you notice that he’s not looking at you. He’s looking past and above you, or into the far distance, like there’s something happening beyond you and he can see what it is.

  Then there’s the stone road off to the side of him which seems to be changing from road into waterfall as you look, the paving stones literally morphing, stone to water.

  That lets you start to see that the picture is full of things you’d not expect. There’s a Jesus at the top in a sort of gold arch, he looks weirdly old, a bit rough and ready for a Jesus, a bit friendly, like a well-worn human being or a tramp who’s been dressed up as Jesus. He’s wearing salmon pink which somehow makes him (Him?) look like nothing else in the picture and he’s surrounded by angels who are floating, but very unostentatiously, on clouds. Their wings are bright red or purple or silver. They could all be either male or female. They’re holding torture implements like the people in an S&M session online but really unlike an S&M session in their calmness, or is it sweetness? The information placard says they’re holding ‘instruments’, which is apt because it’s quite like they’re about to play music on them, like a small orchestra waiting to tune up.

  Then you notice that the saint is standing on a little table. The table is like a tiny theatre stage. This makes the black cloak-like thing he’s wearing start to look like theatre curtain too. You can see through the table legs to the base of the pillar behind him and it’s like a behind-the-scenes revelation, like it’s all theatre, but at the same time the wrinkles in the skin of the wrist that’s holding the book up are real-looking. They act exactly like the skin of a hand that’s holding something heavy up does.