How to Be Both (29 page)

Her father was maundering on now about the film and song which had made her mother decide to call George her name.

I said but what if you ended up looking like the girl in the film. She’s a bit plain, a bit of a loser. But your mother was right. She liked the notion of an anti-hero. Anti-heroine. She was of the belief that people can be who they really are and still come up trumps against the odds. Including me, I hope. Eh? Eh, Georgie?

Yup, George said.

She sighed. She hated the song from which her name had supposedly come.

Her father started whistling it then singing the bit about how the world would see a new Georgie girl. The people in the film, whose faces you never
got to see, just their arms and legs and torsos, sat round and talked about God knows what. The film showed them talking like all that mattered was that they
were
talking. While they talked they played with stems of the grass they were sitting in. They’d break little bits off it. They’d knot it. They’d split it as if to whistle through it. They’d hold up a stem and burn it with the end of a cigarette as they talked, holding the lit end to it till the bit of grass burnt through and fell off, then starting again further down the stem or with a new bit of grass. Then the film cut to a wall with words sprayed on it. PLUTÔT LA VIE.

You know, her father said behind her, you’ll be leaving me soon, don’t you?

George didn’t turn round.

Purchased that ticket to the moon for me already, have you, then? she said.

Silence, except for the French people all talking years ago. She turned. Her father looked grave. He didn’t look misted or sentimental. He didn’t even look drunk, though the room round him smelt like he couldn’t not be.

It’s the nature of things, her father said. Your mother, in some ways, is lucky. She’ll never have to lose you now. Or Henry.

Dad, George said. I’m not going anywhere. I’m sixteen.

Her
father looked down. He looked like he might start to cry.

Perhaps the day will come, George thought, when I will listen to my father. For now though, how can I? He’s my father.

As she thought it, she felt mean. So she gave in, fractionally.

Oh yeah, and dad, she said. My room’s got a leak.

You what? her father said.

He sat up.

The roof’s been leaking, she said. It’s possible that it’s been like that for some time. It was happening behind posters and stuff so I didn’t notice. Not till earlier today.

Her father leapt up off the chair.

She heard him take the stairs two at a time.

George left the interesting / boring French film running and opened her laptop. She typed in Italian Film Directors. She clicked on Images.

Up came a photograph of a man in the dark whose face she couldn’t see, wearing a lit-up picture on his chest. No, not a picture. Someone was literally projecting a film on to the man using him as a screen.

George clicked on the link. It was about a director who’d sat in an art gallery in Italy while an artist projected one of the director’s own films from start to finish on to his chest.

It
said that not long after this art act this man was found dead on a beach.

It said rent-boy, assignation, murder, conspiracy theory, Mafia, Vatican.

It had a photograph of people letting off fireworks where his body’d been found.

She heard her father thumping about upstairs. Imagine if someone projected films on to the side of your house. Would what those films were about affect your living space, she wondered, or your breathing, say, if they projected them on to your chest?

No, of course they wouldn’t.

But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.

George sits among the pictures from all the centuries ago and looks hard at a picture by the painter who disappeared then reappeared centuries later by the skin of his teeth. His teethskin. The painter who wanted more money because he was greedy. Or the painter who wanted more money because he knew his worth. The painter who thought he was better than everybody else. Or the painter who knew he deserved better.

Is worth the same as money? Are they the same thing? Is money who we are? Is it how much we make that makes us who we are? What does the word make mean? Are we what we make?
It is so
bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit. We saw the pictures. What more do we need to know?
The banking crisis. The food-banking crisis. The girl in the yurt. (
She was probably very well paid for it
.)

Consider, for a moment, the moral conundrum.

She shakes her head, which is like it’s full of rattling hard grimy things like the way her room, in November one afternoon when the wind had lifted the Velux up and open on its own, had filled with grimy sycamore seeds and shreds of wing and old leaf off the trees at the backs of the houses, all over the desk, the bed, the books, the floor, bits of city filthiness scattered all over the last of her clean clothes.

Galleries are not much like life. They are such clean places, generally. Something about this one that they haven’t thought to mention in any of the brochures or online information, but that is actually a selling point for George, is that it smells nice, at least in this new wing it does, George doesn’t know about the old wing. It smells of wood in here. It can shift from quiet to full quite suddenly. You can be sitting here on the bench and there can be no one in the room but you (and the attendant) though you can always hear the footfall in the other rooms because all the floors throughout are creaky. Then from nowhere a huge group of tourists from Japan or Germany, wherever, will fill the place, sometimes kids, sometimes adults, usually passing time till it’s their
turn to see the Leonardo cartoon out in the hall for which there’s usually more of a queue.

She gets her phone out and texts H.

– Did you know Leonardo da Vinci was a cartoonist?

Then she readies her notebook and pen for the statistical experiment.

H has texted straight back.

–
Yeah and he was so ahead of his time he invented Helix the Cat

H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse. The day she left she started sending texts. The texts seemed pretty random. They weren’t about where H was or what it was like there or what H was feeling or doing; not once has H mentioned any of the stuff that people are usually meant to tell you. Instead they came, with no accompanying explanation, like information arrows aimed through space at their target, which was George.

The first one said,

– His mother’s name was Fiordelisia Mastria

Then, much later,

– His father built the belltower of the cathedral

The next day,

– He sent a letter on 25 March 1470 to a Duke called Borso d’Este to ask for more money for those pictures you went to see

After that one, George (who wasn’t replying to
any of these because every time she took her phone in her hand to try to, she’d type in half a word or a couple of words then she’d stop and delete it and in the end send nothing) knew they were about the something real between them.

Two hours after, another text,

– The Duke wrote on the bottom of it in pencil in Latin, Let him be content with the amount already decided

Late that night,

– He left in a sulk and went to work elsewhere

Then, next day, over the whole day,

– The 25 March 1470 was a Friday

and

– They thought for years all his paintings were done by someone else

Then H clearly ran out of information about the painter.

Instead, over the next few days, she fired mysterious little arrows at George in Latin:

– Res vesana parvaque amor nomine

– Adiuvete!

– Puella fulvis oculis

– Quem volo es

–
Quingenta milia passuum ambulem

On the second day of the Latin texts, George worked out that I would walk five hundred miles was also the name of the Scottish song by the geeky eighties twins with the glasses.

She
downloaded it and listened to it.

Then she’d downloaded the songs called Help!, Crazy Little Thing Called Love and Brown-Eyed Girl. She listened to them all. She made up a playlist – the first one she’d made on her new phone – and listed them by their Latin names. When she worked out that Quem volo es was maybe meant to be the song called You’re The One That I Want, she laughed out loud.

They were pretty good. And H didn’t do Latin so the fact that they were actually quite good Latin meant even more.

It also means that when she hears songs, just in passing, for instance when she’s doing shopping and they’re played like they always are over the loudspeakers at Asda, she doesn’t mind any more. This is useful. Almost everywhere you go songs are invariably being played and just hearing songs in the air, in shops or cafés or on adverts on TV, has been one of the hardest things to deal with.

There is also the bonus that these songs H has made her listen to are the kind that play everywhere. But not just that. When you listen properly to them they are also pretty good songs. Even more strange and fine is the fact that someone has wanted her to hear them, and not just someone, but Helena Fisker.

It is like having a conversation without needing to say anything. It is also like H is trying to find a
language that will make personal sense to George’s ears. No one has ever done this before for George. She has spent her whole life speaking other people’s languages. It is new to her. The newness of it has a sort of power that can make the old things – as old as those old songs, even as ancient as Latin itself – a kind of new, but a kind that doesn’t dismiss their, what would you call it?

George sits in the new wing of the National Gallery in front of an old painting and tries to think of the words for it.

Their classic status?

She nods. That’s it. Whatever is happening makes them new and lets them still be old both at once.

After she’d downloaded the songs, she’d sent her first reply to H.

Let’s helix again, like we did last summer.

She followed it immediately with a text saying

(
Helix : Greek for twist.)

Back came a text that pierced whatever was between the outside world and George’s chest. In other words, George literally felt something.

It’s good to hear your voice

What is great about the voice of that singer called Sylvie Vartan (whom George, apparently, may even resemble a little) is that there’s almost no way it can be made gentle, or made to lie. Also, although it was recorded decades ago, her voice is always, the moment you hear it, rough with its own
aliveness. It is like being pleasurably sandpapered. It lets you know you’re alive. When George wants something fierce and sad in her ears she listens to the song where Sylvie Vartan howls like a wolf on the words
dreamed
and
read
in French. One day last week with this song on repeat in her ears she cycled out towards Addenbrooke’s which is the place her mother died, then way past the hospital and out into the countryside because on her way to London, the morning before, she’d seen from the train a metal structure, a sculpture thing shaped very like a double helix.

It
was
a DNA structure after all, a sculpture of one, and it marked the start of a cycle trail you could follow for two miles along the little different-coloured rectangles painted on the tarmac, each standing for one of the 10,257 components there are in a single human gene.

She sat in a clump of grass at the side of the path in the early spring sun. The grass was wet. She didn’t care. There were bees and flies out and about. A small bee-like creature landed on the cuff of her jacket and she flicked it away with a precise flick of her thumb and first finger.

But a fraction of a second after she did she realized the impact her finger must have had on something so small.

It must have felt like being hit by the rounded front of a giant treetrunk that’s been swung
through the air at you without you knowing it was coming.

It must have felt like being punched by a god.

That’s when she sensed, like something blurred and moving glimpsed through a partition whose glass is clouded, both that love was coming for her and the nothing she could do about it.

The cloud of unknowing, her mother said in her ear.

Meets the cloud of knowing, George thought back.

So she cycled the length of the single gene holding her phone camera out and towards the ground. She took a photo of the other double helix sculpture that marked the end.

She looked at the picture on her phone then back up at the artwork itself.

It resembled a joyful bedspring or a bespoke ladder. It was like a kind of shout, if a shout to the sky could be said to look like something. It looked like the opposite of history, though they were always going on at school about how DNA history had been made here in this city.

What if history, instead,
was
that shout, that upward spring, that staircase-ladder thing, and everybody was just used to calling something quite different the word history? What if received notions of history were deceptive?

Deceived notions. Ha.

Maybe
anything that forced or pushed such a spring back down or blocked the upward shout of it was opposed to the making of what history really was.

When she got back to the house she downloaded the film and the photos and she sent them.

When you come back we will cycle the length of one thirty-thousandth of the human genome
, she wrote.
If we ever want to cycle the whole thing it will take us four years, that’s if we do it without stopping and unless we split the task and do half each, which will mean it will take two years each but be a lot less interesting. It will be like cycling round the earth 15 times, or seven and a half if we do half each.