How to Be Both (17 page)

If you’re feeling, it’s at a distance? Mrs Rock said.

Like always having the sound of someone drilling a hole in a wall, not your wall, but a wall like very close to you, George said. Like, say you wake up one morning to the noise of someone along the road having work done on his or her house and you don’t just hear the drilling happening, you feel it in your own house, though it’s actually happening several houses away.

Is it? Mrs Rock said.

Which? George said.

Um, Mrs Rock said.

In any case, in both cases, the answer is yes, George said. It’s at a distance
and
it’s like the drilling thing. Anyway I don’t care any more about syntax. So I’m sorry I troubled you with that last which.

Mrs
Rock looked really confused.

She wrote something down on her notepad. George watched her do it. Mrs Rock looked back up at George. George shrugged and closed her eyes.

Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock’s self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there’s an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can the world be this vulgar?

How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?

She didn’t say it out loud, though, because there wasn’t a point.

It isn’t about saying.

It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.

It is last August. Her mother is at the dining-room table reading out loud off the internet.

Meteor watchers are in luck tonight
, her mother is saying.
With clear skies predicted for the Perseid shower for much of the UK, up to sixty shooting stars an hour should be visible between late Monday evening and early Tuesday morning
.

Sixty
shooting stars! Henry says.

He runs round and round the table really fast making an eeeee noise as he goes.

Sky News weather presenter Sarah Pennock
, her mother says,
said showers will fade during the night giving many people a chance to see the astronomical spectacle
.

Then her mother laughs.

Sky news! her mother says.

Henry. Headache. Enough, her father says.

He catches Henry, lifts him up and turns him upside down.

Eeeeeeeeeeee, Henry says. I am a star, I am shooting, and turning me upside down will not stop meeeeeeee.

It’s just pollution, George says.

You won’t say that when you see them shooting so beautiful over your head, her mother says.

Fully, George says.

Every meteor is a speck of comet dust vaporizing as it enters our atmosphere at thirty six miles per second
, her mother reads.

That’s not very fast, Henry says still upside down from beneath his jumper which has upended and fallen over his face.
Cars
go at thirty.

Per second, not per hour, George says.

One hundred and forty thousand miles an hour
, her mother reads.

Remarkably
slow really, Henry says.

He starts singing words.

Cars and stars, cars and stars.

It’s exciting, her mother says.

Really cold tonight, George says.

Don’t be so boring, George, her mother says.

Ia, George says because this conversation takes place when she has started insisting that her mother and father, when they use her name, call her her full name.

Her mother snorts a laugh.

What? George says.

It’s just that when you say that, well. It sounds like you’re saying something funny from my youth, her mother says. It’s how we used to do caricatures of the rich kids. D’you remember, Nathan?

No, her father says.

Yah, George, yah, her mother says pretending to be a posh girl from the past.

George can choose react or ignore. She chooses ignore.

We wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway, she says. There’ll be too much local light.

We’ll put all the lights off, her mother says.

I don’t mean our lights. I mean all the lights of the whole of Cambridge, George says.

We’ll put all those lights off too, her mother says.
Brightest around midnight
. Right. I know. We can
all get in the car and drive out of town to the back of Fulbourn and watch them from there, Nathan, what do you think?

Up at six, Carol, her father says.

Good, okay, her mother says. You stay at home with Henry, and me and George, I mean George yah, will go.

Georgia and I, George says. And I’m not going.

That makes three of you George yahs not going, her mother says. Okay. All three of you plus your father can stay at home with Henry and I’ll go myself. Nathan, his face is going very red, put him down.

No because I
want
to see the sixty stars, Henry says still upside down. I want to see them more than anyone else in this actual room.

It says here there might even be fireballs, her mother says.

I want to see fireballs a lot actually, Henry says.

It’s just pollution. And satellites, George says. There’s no point.

Miss Moan, her father says shaking Henry in the air.

Ms
Moan, her mother says.

Pardon my world-stopping act of political incorrectness, her father says.

He says it gently and means it both funnily and nastily.

I prefer Miss, George says. Till I’m, you know, Doctor Moan.

Too
young to know the political importance of choosing to be called Ms anything, her mother says.

She could be saying this to George or her father. Her father is ten years younger than her mother which means, her mother likes to say, that they have been formed by very different political upbringings, the main difference being a childhood under Thatcher versus a late adolescence under Thatcher.

(Thatcher was a prime minister some time after Churchill and long before George was born who, according to one of her mother’s most successful Subverts, gave birth to a baby Blair, someone George actually remembers being prime minister from when she was small, him in a nappy and so on but standing fully-formed and otherwise naked on a shell (not the beach kind, the missile kind) with Thatcher all puffed-out cheeks blowing his hair about and baby Blair with one hand over his crotch and the other coy at his chest and the caption underneath : The Birth of Vain Us. That Subvert, George remembers, was everywhere. It was funny seeing it in all the papers and online and knowing and not being able to tell anyone that it was her mother who’d pressed the button that sent it out into the world.)

What the age difference between her parents means in real terms though is that they’ve split up twice, though twice so far got back together again.

And
I suppose the days of you being at least gracious to me about feminism are long gone, but I won’t complain, since it won’t make any difference and since the history of feminism teaches one never to expect graciousness anyway, and when you’re putting that child down, try not to put him down too hard on his head or you’ll break his neck, her mother says without looking up from the screen. And George. Or whatever your name is. If you miss seeing this with me you’ll regret it for the rest of your days.

I won’t, George says.

Not says. Said.

There was an obituary in the Independent, because although George’s mother wasn’t famous like people who get obituaries usually are, and although she didn’t have tenure any more, she still had a quite important job at a think-tank and occasionally published opinion pieces in the Guardian or the Telegraph and sometimes also the American papers in their European editions, and a lot more people knew who she was after it was unveiled in the papers about the guerrilla internet stuff.
Dr Carol Martineau Economist Journalist Internet Guerrilla Interventionist 19 November 1962–10 September 2013 aged 50 years
. It says, in the first paragraph,
renaissance woman
. It says
childhood Scottish Cairngorms education Edinburgh Bristol London
. It says
articles and talks
ideology pay ratios pay differentials literal ideological consequences spread of UK poverty
. It says
thesis backed by IMF recognition inequality and slowdown in growth and stability
. It mentions her particular bugbear,
chief executive interests workforce kept low-waged
. It says
discovery three years ago Martineau one of the anonymous influential satire Subverts online art movement thousands supporters imitators
.

It says
tragic unsuspected allergic reaction standard antibiotic
.

The last thing it says is
is survived by.
That means dead.
Husband Nathan Cook and their two children
.

It all means dead.

It all means George’s mother has disappeared off, or rather into, the face of the earth.

Every day before work George’s mother, when she was alive (because she can’t exactly do it now being, you know, dead), used to do a keep-fit set of stretches and exercises. At the end of this she would always do a dance round the living room for the length of a song on a playlist on her phone.

She’d started doing this a couple of years ago. Every day she put up with everybody laughing at her doing her moves among the furniture, her headphones bigger than her ears.

Every single day, George has decided, from its first day onwards for this first year in which her
mother won’t be alive, she will not just wear something black somewhere on her person but she will do the sixties dance for her in her honour. This is only problematic in that George will have to listen to songs while she does it, and that listening to songs is one of the things she can no longer do without inducing a kind of sadness that actually hurts in the chest.

George’s mother’s phone is one of the things that went missing in the panic and aftermath. It hasn’t turned up, though the house is still full of all her other things exactly where she left them. She will have had her phone with her. It went missing between the railway station and the hospital. Its number has been stopped, presumably by her father. If you ring it now the message you get is the recorded voice telling you this number is currently not in use.

George thinks her mother’s phone has probably been taken by someone working in surveillance.

George’s father : George, I told you. I don’t want to hear any more of that paranoid nonsense from you.

Mrs Rock : So you believe your mother’s phone was taken by someone working in surveillance?

All her mother’s playlists were on her phone. Her mother was unusually private about her phone. George only sneaked a look at it once or twice (and both times felt bad for doing so, for different
reasons). She never even looked at the playlists. She only looked at a couple of emails and texts. She never thought to look at music. It was her mother’s music. It was bound to have been rubbish. Now she has no idea and will never know what song or songs her mother listened to every day to do the dance thing, or on the train, or walking along the street.

But the dance her mother did was always that old sixties dance, for which there are instructions online and even several specific songs.

There is a piece of Super 8 footage her mother had transferred, of herself as a very small child in about 1965 doing this dance with her own mother, George’s grandmother. George has it on her laptop and her phone.

It is a grandmother who was dead way before George, though George has seen old photographs. She looks like someone from another time. Well, she is. She is a very young woman, strict-looking but pretty, a stranger with dark hair up on top of her head. The film footage is all flickers and shadows at the top edge of it, which is where the grandmother’s face tends to be because the film is really being taken of George’s mother, who is much much smaller in it than Henry is now. She must be only about three years old. She is wearing a cardigan knitted in pink wool. It is the most colourful thing in the film. George can even see the
detail, if she stops the frame, of the toggle buttons on its front, they’re black, and behind this child who is her mother there is a television screen on spindly slanted legs, the kind from when television screens bulged like the midriffs of obese middle-aged people.

George’s mother, next to the stockinged legs of her own mother, is twisting from side to side in the silence, her little arms all elbow. She looks serious and grim but she is also smiling; even then her mouth, when she smiled, was that straight line and it looks like she is already, even so young, being polite yet firm about the fact that she’s having to concentrate. In the film she is
really
having to concentrate because she is so small and the cardigan is so chunky, so much bigger and thicker than she is that she looks like a small pink snowperson, like she is bound to topple over. The whole thing somehow becomes about the fact that she is balancing her self in all its wholeness, compactness and littleness against something that looks like it’s going to happen and which, if it does happen, will end the dance. But it never does happen because just before the film turns into being about some swans and rowing boats on a boating pond somewhere in Scotland the dance ends, her mother (as a child) puts her arms up in the air delighted and the lady with the hair up (George’s grandmother) puts her arms down, catches the
child and lifts her up into the flicker and out of the frame.

The dance part lasts 48 seconds on George’s laptop.

Lockjaw. Quicksand. Polio. Lung. These are some of the words that George’s mother was frightened of when she was small. (George once asked.)

Tell Laura I Love Her. That’s one of the records that her mother loved when she was small. One Little Robin In A Cherry Tree. To listen to these, with first their crackling needle noise then the starburst of their hokey tunes, is like being able to experience the past like you have literally entered it and it is a whole other place, completely new to you, where people really did sing songs like this, a past so alien it is like a kind of shock.