How to be both

one

Consider this moral conundrum for a moment, George’s mother says to George who’s sitting in the front passenger seat.

Not says. Said.

George’s mother is dead.

What moral conundrum? George says.

The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side the driver’s seat is on at home. This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.

Okay. You’re an artist, her mother says.

Am I? George says. Since when? And is that a moral conundrum?

Ha ha, her mother says. Humour me. Imagine it. You’re an artist.

This conversation is happening last May, when George’s mother is still alive, obviously. She’s been dead since September. Now it’s January, to be more precise it’s just past midnight on New Year’s Eve, which means it has just become the year after the year in which George’s mother died.

George’s father is out. It is better than him being at home, standing maudlin in the kitchen or going round the house switching things off and on. Henry is asleep. She just went in and checked on him; he was dead to the world, though not as dead as the word dead literally means when it means, you know, dead.

This will be the first year her mother hasn’t been alive since the year her mother was born. That is so obvious that it is stupid even to think it and yet so terrible that you can’t not think it. Both at once.

Anyway George is spending the first minutes of the new year looking up the lyrics of an old song. Let’s Twist Again. Lyrics by Kal Mann. The words are pretty bad. Let’s twist again like we did last summer. Let’s twist again like we did last year. Then there’s a really bad rhyme, a rhyme that isn’t, properly speaking, even a rhyme.

Do you remember when

Things were really hummin’.

Hummin’ doesn’t rhyme with summer, the line doesn’t end in a question mark, and is it meant to mean, literally, do you remember that time when things smelt really bad?

Then Let’s twist again, twisting time is here. Or, as all the sites say, twistin’ time.

At least they’ve used an apostrophe, the George from before her mother died says.

I do not give a fuck about whether some site on the internet attends to grammatical correctness, the George from after says.

That before and after thing is about mourning, is what people keep saying. They keep talking about how grief has stages. There’s some dispute about how many stages of grief there are. There are three, or five, or some people say seven.

It’s quite like the songwriter actually couldn’t be bothered to think of words. Maybe he was in one of the three, five or seven stages of mourning too. Stage nine (or twenty three or a hundred and twenty three or ad infinitum, because nothing will ever not be like this again): in this stage you will no longer be bothered with whether songwords mean anything. In fact you will hate almost all songs.

But George has to find a song to which you can do this specific dance.

It being so apparently contradictory and meaningless is no doubt a bonus. It will be precisely why the song sold so many copies and was such a big deal at the time. People like things not to be too meaningful.

Okay, I’m imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song. Outside the car window Italy unfurls round and over them so hot and yellow it looks like it’s been sandblasted. In the back Henry snuffles lightly, his eyes closed, his mouth open. The band of the seatbelt is over his forehead because he is so small.

You’re an artist, her mother says, and you’re working on a project with a lot of other artists. And everybody on the project is getting the same amount, salary-wise. But you believe that what you’re doing is worth more than everyone on the project, including you, is getting paid. So you write a letter to the man who’s commissioned the work and you ask him to give you more money than everyone else is getting.

Am I worth more? George says. Am I better than the other artists?

Does that matter? her mother says. Is that what matters?

Is it me or is it the work that’s worth more? George says.

Good. Keep going, her mother says.

Is this real? George says. Is it hypothetical?

Does that matter? her mother says.

Is this something that already has an answer in reality but you’re testing me with the concept of it though you already know perfectly well what you yourself think about it? George says.

Maybe, her mother says. But I’m not interested in what I think. I’m interested in what you think.

You’re not usually interested in anything I think, George says.

That’s so adolescent of you, George, her mother says.

I am adolescent, George says.

Well, yes. That explains that, then, her mother says.

There’s a tiny silence, still okay, but if she doesn’t give in a bit and soon George knows that her mother, who has been prickly, unpredictable and misery-faced for weeks now about there being trouble in the paradise otherwise known as her friendship with that woman Lisa Goliard, will get first of all distant then distinctly moody and ratty.

Is it happening now or in the past? George says. Is the artist a woman or a man?

Do either of those things matter? her mother says.

Does either, George says. Either being singular.

Mea maxima, her mother says.

I just don’t get why you won’t commit, ever, George says. And that doesn’t mean what you think it means. If you say it without the culpa it just means I’m the most, or I’m the greatest, or to me the greatest belongs, or my most.

It’s true, her mother says. I’m the most greatest. But the most greatest what?

Past or present? George says. Male or female? It can’t be both. It must be one or the other.

Who says? Why must it? her mother says.

AUGH, George says too loud.

Don’t, her mother says jerking her head towards the back. Unless you want him awake, in which case you’re in charge of entertainment.

I. Can’t. Answer. Your. Moral. Question. Unless. I. Know. More. Details, George says sotto voce, which, in Italian, though George doesn’t speak Italian, literally means below the voice.

Does morality need details? her mother whispers back.

God, George says.

Does morality need God? her mother says.

Talking to you, George says still below the voice, is like talking to a wall.

Oh, very good, you, very good, her mother says.

How exactly is that good? George says.

Because this particular art, artist and conundrum are all about walls, her mother says. And that’s where I’m driving you to.

Yeah, George says. Up the wall.

Her mother laughs a real out-loud laugh, so loud that after it they both turn to see if Henry will waken, but he doesn’t. This kind of laugh from her mother is so rare right now that it is almost like normal. George is so pleased she feels herself blush with it.

And what you just said is grammatically incorrect, she says.

It is not, her mother says.

It is, George says. Grammar is a finite set of rules and you just broke one.

I don’t subscribe to that belief, her mother says.

I don’t think you can call language a belief, George says.

I subscribe to the belief, her mother says, that language is a living growing changing organism.

I don’t think that belief will get you into heaven, George says.

Her mother laughs for real again.

No, listen, an organism, her mother says –

(and through George’s head flashes the cover of the old paperback called How To Achieve Good Orgasm that her mother keeps in one of her bedside cupboards, from way before George was born, from the time in her mother’s life when she was, she says, young and easy under some appleboughs)

— which follows its own rules and alters them as it likes and the meaning of what I said is perfectly clear therefore its grammar is perfectly acceptable, her mother says.

(How To Achieve Good Organism.)

Well. Grammatically inelegant then, George says.

I bet you don’t even remember what it was I said in the first place, her mother says.

Where I’m driving you to, George says.

Her mother takes both hands off the wheel in mock despair.

How did I, the most maxima unpedantic of all the maxima unpedantic women in the world, end up giving birth to such a pedant? And why the hell wasn’t I smart enough to drown it at birth?

Is that the moral conundrum? George says.

Consider it, for a moment, yes, why don’t you, her mother says.

No she doesn’t.

Her mother doesn’t say.

Her mother said.

Because if things really did happen simultaneously it’d be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of the text have been overprinted, like each page is actually two pages but with one superimposed on the other to make it unreadable. Because it’s New Year not May, and it’s England not Italy, and it’s pouring with rain outside and regardless of the hum (the hummin’) of the rain you can still hear people’s stupid New Year fireworks going off and off and off like a small war, because people are standing out in the pouring rain, rain pelting into their champagne glasses, their upturned faces watching their own (sadly) inadequate fireworks light up then go black.

George’s room is in the loft bit of the house and since they had the roof redone last summer it’s had a leak in it at the slant at the far end. A little runnel of water comes in every time it rains, it’s coming in right now, happy New Year George! Happy New Year to you too, rain, and running in a beaded line straight down the place where the plaster meets the plasterboard then dripping down on to the books piled on top of the bookcase. Over the weeks since it’s been happening the posters have started to peel off it because the Blu-tack won’t hold to some of the wall. Under them a light brown set of stains, like the map of a tree-root network, or a set of country lanes, or a thousand-times magnified mould, or the veins that get visible in the whites of your eyes when you’re tired — no, not like any of these things, because thinking these things is just a stupid game. Damp is coming in and staining the wall and that’s all there is to it.

George hasn’t said anything about it to her father. The roofbeams will rot and then the roof will fall in. She wakes up with a bad chest and congestion in her nose whenever it’s rained, but when the roof collapses inwards all the not being able to breathe will have been worth it.

Her father never comes into her room. He has no idea it is happening. With any luck he won’t find out until it’s too late.

It is already too late.

The perfect irony of it is that right now her father has a job with a roofing company. His job involves going into people’s houses with a tiny rotating camera that’s got a light attached to it which he fastens to the end of the rods more usually used to sweep chimneys. He connects the camera to the portable screen and pushes it all the way up inside the chimney. Then anyone who wants to know, and has £120 to spare, can see what the inside of his or her chimney looks like. If the person who wants to know has an extra £150, her father can provide a recorded file of the visuals so he or she can look at the inside of the chimney owned by him or her any time he or she chooses.

They. Everybody else says they. Why shouldn’t George?

Any time they choose.

Anyway George’s room, given time, enough bad weather and the right inattention, will open to the sky, to all this rain, the amount of which people on TV keep calling biblical. The TV news has been about all the flooded places up and down the country every night now since way before Christmas (though there has been no flooding here, her father says, because the medieval drainage system is still as good as it always was in this city). Her room will be stained with the grey grease and dregs of the dirt the rain has absorbed and carries, the dirt the air absorbs every day just from the fact of life on earth. Everything in this room will rot. She will have the pleasure of watching it happen. The floorboards will curl up at their ends, bend, split open at the nailed places and pull loose from their glue.

She will lie in bed with all the covers thrown off and the stars will be directly above her, nothing between her and their long-ago burnt-out eyes.

George (to her father): Do you think, when we die, that we still have memories?

George’s father (to George): No.

George (to Mrs Rock, the school counsellor): (exact same question).

Mrs Rock (to George): Do you think we’ll need memories, after we die?

Oh very clever, very clever, they think they’re so clever always answering questions with questions. Though generally Mrs Rock is really nice. Mrs Rock is a rock, as the teachers at the school keep saying, like they think they’re the first persons ever to have said it, when they suggest to George that she should be seeing Mrs Rock, she’s a rock you know, which they say after they clear their throats and ask how George is doing, then say again after they hear that George is already seeing her and has managed to swap PE double period every week for a series of Rock sessions. Rock sessions! They laugh at George’s joke then they look embarrassed, because they’ve laughed when they were supposed to be being attentive and mournful-looking, and can George really even have made a joke, is that done, since she’s supposed to be feeling so sad and everything?

How are you feeling? Mrs Rock said.

I’m okay, George said. I think it’s because I don’t think I am.

You’re okay because you don’t think you’re okay? Mrs Rock said.

Feeling, George said. I think I’m okay because I don’t think I’m feeling.

You don’t think you’re feeling? Mrs Rock said.

Well, if I am, it’s like it’s at a distance, George said.

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.

Shock of the new and the old both at once, her mother says.

Said.

One afternoon George’s father brings home the new turntable and when he finally works out how to connect it up with the CD soundbox they drag the old records out from under the stairs.

A boy called Tommy loves a girl called Laura. He wants to give her ‘everything’ (this is funny in itself, apparently, from the way her parents fall about, though this is back when George is too young to understand why), including flowers and presents and — the thing he wants to give her most — a wedding ring. But he can’t afford one, so he signs up for a stock-car race because there is a prize of 1000 dollars (idiot, George says, yes, I’m afraid so, her mother says, romantic, her father says, and Henry is too little right then to say anything). Tommy phones Laura’s house. But Laura’s not there. So he tells her mother instead to Tell Laura he Loves Her, tell Laura he needs her, tell Laura he won’t be late, he’s got something to do that can’t wait (uh-oh, her mother says, it’s already tragic because at one remove. Is it? George says. What does one remove mean? Romantic, her father says. That’s all technology ever does in the end, her mother says. It can’t do anything but highlight the metaphysical. What’s metaphysical? George says. Too big a word for this song, her father says). Then the car he’s in bursts into flames and as they pull him dying from the twisted remains of it he tells them to tell Laura he loves her and not to cry because his love for her will never die.

She and her mother and father all crying with laughter on the rug.

Why did you even keep this record? George asks her mother. It’s so bad.

I didn’t know till today but obviously I was keeping it precisely so that you, me and your father would all end up listening to it today, her mother says and they all fall about laughing again.

Thinking about that today back then in this new today right now, and in whichever stage of mourning she’s in, doesn’t make George feel sad or feel anything in particular.

But in case the record might do for the dance thing she went downstairs just before New Year happened, but after her father’d gone out so he wouldn’t be hurt by hearing it, and found it in the pile of smaller records by the turntable (there’s a name for the smaller-sized records but she can’t remember what it is).

She turned the sound to very low. She put it on. It had a warp in it so the guitars in its intro sounded seasick, like the record felt sick, though George herself felt fine, or rather, nothing.

It was definitely not suitable though, being too slow.

The dance her mother did every day needs an upward beat.

At midnight on all the other New Years her mother would usually get out some really nice paper, the kind with real bits of flower petal mixed in with its texture, and give her and her father two pieces each. They would each (except Henry, asleep, which was important, fire being involved) write their wishes and hopes for the new year on to one of them and write the things they’d hated most about the old year on to the other one. Then — being very very careful not to mix the pieces up — each person would take a turn standing over the sink, strike a match, hold the flame to a corner of the piece of paper with all the things written on it that he or she hadn’t liked, and watch it burn. Then when you couldn’t hold it any more without hurting yourself you could drop it safely into the sink (this letting-go of it was the whole point of the ritual, her mother always said) where, when it finished burning, you could wash the burnt-up bits away.

This year George has no wishes and hopes.

Instead the piece of paper in front of her is blank except for the words WHAT’S LEFT OF XMAS HOLIDAYS DAILY SCHEDULE. She has written numbers, meaning the times of day, down one side of it. Next to 9.30 she has written DANCE THING.

This is the whole point of her looking for likely tunes, so that she will be ready to begin as soon as breakfast is over tomorrow (today).

Some time ago, George goes into her mother’s study and wanders around poking at the things on top of the books on the shelves. Her mother is not dead yet. Her mother is there working. There are piles of papers everywhere.

George, her mother says without looking round.

What are you working on? George says.

Haven’t you homework? her mother says.

You’re working on whether I’ve got homework? George says.

George, her mother says. Don’t move anything, stop touching stuff and go and get on with something of your own.

George comes and stands at the corner of the desk. She sits on the chair next to her mother’s chair.

I’m a bit bored, she says.

Me too, her mother says. This is statistics. I have to concentrate.

Her mouth is the thin line.

Why do you keep these? George says picking up the little jar full of pencil shavings.

The jar was originally a Santorini mini capers jar, it says so on what’s left of the label. Through the glass you can see the different woods of the different pencils her mother has been using. One layer is dark brown. One layer is light gold colour. You can see the paint lines, the tiny zigzags of colour made into the shapes like the edges of those scallop shells by the twist of the pencil in the sharpener.

One pencil, she can see, was once red and black (stripes?). One pencil was marbled blue. One was green, a really nice bright green. George takes out a blue-edged sharpening. It looks a bit like a wooden moth. She winds it round her finger. It is delicate and falls to pieces as soon as she twists it.

Keep what? her mother says.

George holds out the bits of shaving.

What’s the point? she says.

Point. Ha ha! her mother says. Funny.

Why don’t you just sharpen your pencils into the bin like a normal person? George says.

Well, her mother says pushing her chair back. It seems sad to, to just throw them away, I don’t like to. Not until I’ve finished whatever project I’ve used them on.

Bit pathetic, George says.

Well, yes, I suppose it is, her mother says. Literally. I think it’s cause they’re a proof of something. Hmm. But a proof of what?

George rolls her eyes.

Proof that you once sharpened some pencils, George says. Can I borrow the dictionary for a minute?

Use your own, her mother says. Go away. Shut the door after you, you annoying and challenging little pest.

She pulls her chair back in and clicks on something. George doesn’t leave immediately. She stands behind her mother, takes the big dictionary off the shelf and opens it against the wall.

Plonk piazza pelmet pathway partake pastiche pathetic see under pathos. The quality that arouses pity. Pathetic. Affecting the emotions of pity, grief or sorrow. Sadly inadequate. (Interesting: inadequate and sad.) Contemptible. Derisory. Applied to the superior oblique muscle, which turns the eyeball downwards, and to the trochlear nerve connecting with it (anat).

It isn’t until George has left the room and shut the door after her that she gets what she herself said and why it was funny.

Pencil sharpenings. The point. Ha ha!

She thinks about going back in and saying

I get it!

But she knows not to, so she doesn’t.

(Point taken, George thinks now, on New Year’s morning.)

WHAT’S LEFT OF XMAS HOLIDAYS DAILY SCHEDULE.

Under DANCE THING next to 10 a.m. she writes the word GARDEN.

This word garden here means more than just garden, because some time ago (before September) George got fed up of everybody at school always talking about the porn they’d seen on the internet. It was like doubly being a virgin, not having seen any. So she decided to watch some and make her own mind up. But she didn’t want Henry seeing because he is only eight, well, he was even younger, only seven, then. This is not discriminatory on her part. He will look for himself and decide for himself when he is old enough. That is, if he gets the chance to wait that long, since kids watch this stuff pretty freely in the playgrounds of the primary schools too.

So she took the iPad and sat in what was left of the pergola, where she could see anyone (especially Henry) coming towards her, in case, and she clicked on the first images that came up, and it was kind of interesting, quite amazing really all the things she saw and she began to be glad she’d decided to sit out in the garden away from the house.

It was interesting at first. It was quite eye-opening.

It got boring and repetitive quite fast.

After it did, she began to be interested instead in how many of the scenarios needed to have or at least to pretend to have stories. There was one in which a long-haired blonde woman of about twenty, wearing nothing but high heels, was having her hands tied at the wrists by a much older woman wearing a quite fashionable low-cut evening dress. The older woman tipped the younger one’s chin up and she took an eye-dropper and squeezed something into each of the younger woman’s eyes. Apparently this now made the younger woman blind. The older woman led her into a room a bit like a gym if a gym were to be painted black and have chains hanging off its wall bars; also a bit like a gym there were machines and all sorts of apparatus in the room, as well as a semi-circle of men and women dressed in the same kind of evening clothes as the older woman, as if they’d all gone out to a prestigious formal function somewhere. The younger woman didn’t know any of this. She couldn’t see anything because of the eye drops. At least, that was the story. At this point the film flashed forward on to lots of edits showing extreme-looking moments of what was about to happen to the blind woman, which you’d only get to see in full if you subscribed.

Could she see? Was she really blind? George was intrigued. Was it real? Or was the woman just acting? And if she was blind, had been blinded by whatever the older woman squeezed into her eyes, how long did it take before it wore off and she could see again? Or could she never see again? Maybe she was somewhere in the world right now still wandering about blind. Maybe they’d told her it would wear off, and it never did, or only partially did. Maybe something about those eye drops changed something about the way she saw. Or, on the other hand, maybe she was perfectly fine and had 20:20 vision regardless.

20:20 vision regardless! Oxymoron. Ha ha.

Then there was a film where a quite old woman, in her thirties, lay on her back and got fucked one after the other pretty briefly each time by a large number of men, most of them wearing masks like killers wear in thrillers on TV. A figure always came up on the screen every time a new one started. 7!! 8!! 9!! Then the figures flashed forward from 13!! 14!! to 34!! 35!! 36!! There were supposedly forty men altogether. The whole thing was supposed to have taken exactly forty minutes, that’s what the onscreen clock showed, though the film lasted about five. There was only the one woman, on her back on what looked like a coffee table, which can’t have been comfortable. Her eyes were shut, she was a kind of red colour all over, and it was also as if someone had fuzzed or smudged the lens, like it had steamed up. At the end of the film the words on the screen announced that after this filmshoot my wife was pregnant. Then three exclamation marks. !!!

Why was it forty? George wondered sitting in the garden with the flowers all nodding round her and the occasional passing butterfly’s shadow calling her eyes beyond the iPad. Was it because forty is a number that sounds like it means a lot, a magic number like forty days and forty nights, forty years in the desert, forty thieves? Open sesame! Ha ha. No, that was a bit sick. And was the woman on the coffee table really the wife of the person who made the film? And was she really pregnant after it? There was something a bit interesting about it, like watching a queen bee at work in a hive. But why had so many of the men worn the masks? Did that make it more exciting? For whom? Or perhaps they didn’t want their own wives, or people at work if they went for interviews, say, after they’d taken part in this film, to know their identities.

Then one afternoon George had clicked on a particular film which made her swear to herself that she’d watch this same film (or a bit of it, since it was quite lengthy) once every day for the rest of her life.

There was a girl in it who must have been sixteen because of legality but looked much younger than George. She looked about twelve. There was a man in it who looked about forty. When he kissed this girl he took almost her whole face into his mouth. They were in a yurt-like room for a very long time doing stuff and the uncomplaining smallness of the girl alongside her evident discomfort and the way she looked both there and absent, as if she’d been drugged, given something to make her feel things in slower motion than they were actually happening to her, had changed something in the structures of George’s brain and heart and certainly her eyes, so that afterwards when George tried to watch any more of this kind of sexual film that girl was there waiting under them all.

More. George found that the girl was there too, pale and pained with her shut eyes and her open o of a mouth, under the surface of the next TV show she watched on catch-up.

She was there under the YouTube videos of Vampire Weekend and the puppy falling off the sofa and the cat sitting on the hoover that hoovered by itself and the fox so domesticated that the person taking the film could stroke its head.

She was there under the pop-ups and the adverts on Facebook, and under the facts about the history of the suffragettes on the BBC site which George looked up for school.

She was there under the news item about the woman who tried to buy a burger at a McDonald’s drive-thru on her horse, who, when she was refused at the hatch, got off her horse and led it into the main building and up to the counter and tried to order there. McDonald’s regrets we are unable to serve customers on horseback.

When she’d sensed that girl there underneath even this, George went back through her own history to find the porn film. She clicked on it.

The girl sat demure on the edge of the bed again.

The man grinned at the camera and took the girl’s head in his hands again.

What you doing out here, Georgie? her father asked her a couple of months ago.

November. It was cold. Her mother was dead. George had forgotten about the girl for weeks, then remembered in a French class at school when they were revising the conditional. She had come home and gone into the garden and found the film and clicked on it. She had apologized sotto voce to the girl in the film for having been inattentive.

Her father’d come out to put stuff in the bins. George was in the pergola with no jacket on. He walked up the garden. She turned the screen towards him. As he got closer he slowed down.

Jesus, George, he said. What are you doing?

I wanted to ask mum about it, George said. I meant to. I was going to. Now I can’t.

She explained to her father that she had formerly watched, and intended again to watch, this film of this girl every day to remind herself not to forget the thing that had happened to this person.

But George, her father said.

She told him she was doing it in witness, by extension, of all the unfair and wrong things that happen to people all the time.

George, it’s good of you, her father said. I applaud the sentiment.

It’s not just sentiment, George said.

Honestly George, when I saw you out here watching something I was cheered, he said. I thought, good, Georgie’s back, she’s watching something on the iPad, she’s interested in things again. I was pleased. But sweet heart. It’s appalling, that stuff. You can’t watch that. And you have to remember, it’s not really meant for you. And I can’t even look at it. And anyway. That girl. I mean. It probably happened years ago.

That’s no reason not to do what I’m doing, George said.

She was probably very well paid for it, her father said.

George’s eyes widened. She snorted.

I can’t believe you just said that, she said. I can’t believe I’m even related to you.

And sex isn’t like that. Loving sex. Real sex. Sex between people who love each other, her father said.

Do you really think I’m that much of a moron? George said.

And you’ll drive yourself mad if you keep watching stuff like that, her father said. You’ll do damage to yourself.

Damage has already happened, George said.

George, her father said.

This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can just watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it before clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl. Do you still not understand?

She held the screen up. Her father put the flat of his hand over his eyes.

Yes, but George, her father said. You watching it, whichever way you think you’re watching it or intend to see it, won’t make any real difference to that girl. It just means the number of people watching the film with her in it will keep going up. And anyway, you can’t be sure of, you can never know. There are circumstances –

I’ve got eyes, George said.

Well, okay, well, what about Henry? her father said. What if he saw?

Why d’you think I’m out here in the cold? He won’t. Not because of me anyway. I mean, obviously he’ll have to do his own seeing in his own time, George said. And anyway. You watch stuff like this. I know you do. Everyone watches it.

Oh dear God, her father said. I can’t believe what you just said.

He’d turned his back because the film was still facing him and was still playing. With his back to her he started to complain. Other people’s children, lucky other people, normal children with normal neuroses like always having to have the same spoon to eat with or just not eating at all or throwing up, cutting themselves, whatever.

He was sort-of joking and sort-of not.

George sat back. She clicked the pause button. She waited till her father had left the garden.

She sat with her father that night watching Newsnight, the kind of programme on which massacres and injustices happened every day — if they made the news — then disappeared into old news, just weren’t news any more. Her mother was dead. Her father was asleep. He was extremely tired. He was sleeping a lot. It was because of the mourning. When he woke up he switched the channel over without even looking at George to UK Border Force on the channel called Pick.

Who’d ever have believed it? George’s mother says.

It is a year before she dies. George and her parents are watching rubbish on TV before going to bed, flicking channels before giving in and putting it off.

Who’d ever have believed, she says, when I was growing up, that one day we’d be watching programmes about people being checked and failed at passport controls? When did this become light entertainment?

Six months before she dies and shortly before she gets depressive about her friendship fizzling out with that woman Lisa Goliard, George’s mother comes into the living room. It is a Sunday evening. George is watching a programme about the Flying Scotsman, a train from the past, on TV. But because George came in halfway through this programme and missed the beginning, and because it is an interesting programme, she is simultaneously watching it from the start on catch-up on her laptop.

On one screen the train has just broken the hundred-mile-an-hour record. On the other screen the train has just been superseded by cars. At the same time George is looking up photobombs on her phone. There are some very brilliant and funny ones. There are some you can’t believe haven’t been digitally enhanced, or look like they must have been set up but the people who took them swear they haven’t.

You, her mother says watching her, are a migrant of your own existence.

I am not, George says.

You are, her mother says.

What’s your problem, dinosaur? George says.

Her mother laughs.

Same problem as yours, she says. We’re all migrants of our own existence now. In this bit of the world at least. So we better get ready. Because look how migrants get treated all over the world.

Sometimes your political correctness is so tedious that I find myself fall —, George says.

Then she mimes falling asleep.

Don’t you ever want to simplify? her mother says. Read a book?

I read all the time, George says.

Think about just one thing, instead of fifteen all at once? her mother says.

I’m versatile, George says without looking up. I’m from the versatile generation. And you’re supposed to be the great online anarchist. You should approve of me being so savvy.

Savvy, yes, her mother says. Always be savvy please. I’d need that from any daughter of mine. Otherwise, what with me being so politically correct and everything, I’d be sending you straight to the orphanage.

Properly speaking, that would mean both you and dad would have to die, George says.

Well, one day, her mother says. With any luck later rather than sooner. Anyway. I don’t actually care how many screens you look at at once. I’m just doing my concerned-parent bit. We all have to. It’s in the contract.

Blah, George says. You’re pretending you’re being cool about it now because online interventionism was once perceived for about three months several years ago to be cool –

Thanks! her mother says. Ratified at last.

— but really you’re just as paranoid as everybody else over forty, George says, all sackcloth and ashes and stuck in the past, hitting your chests with a scourge and ringing your little bells, unclean! Unclean! Disempowerment by information! Disempowerment by information!

Oh, that’s good, George, her mother says. Can I have that?

For a Subvert? George says.

Yes, her mother says.

No, George says.

Please? her mother says.

How much will you pay me? George says.

You’re a born mercenary, her mother says. £5.

Done, George says.

Her mother takes a note out of her purse and writes on it in pencil, in the white space between the picture of Elizabeth Fry and the drawing of some of the women prisoners she helped, the words disempowerment by information paid in full.

Then: George spent that £5 note the day after. She liked the thought of releasing it into the wild.

Now: George wishes she hadn’t spent that £5 note. Somewhere out in the world, if no one’s rubbed it out and it hasn’t worn off, her mother’s handwriting is passing from hand to hand, stranger to stranger.

George looks at the word GARDEN under DANCE THING, in her own handwriting. The dance bit will take less than five minutes and the film of the girl is forty five minutes long, and she can’t usually bear to make herself watch more than five of those terrible minutes.

Dance thing. Garden. Then Henry standing like a Victorian child from one of the sick sentimental songs about death and orphans, holding his hands in the prayery way in which he’s been holding them since he saw Carols from King’s on TV last week. Then her father trying to pretend he’s not drunk, or getting up still drunk and sleeping it off till lunchtime on the couch, then trying to think up an excuse to go somewhere for the evenings with people who’ll think the only good thing they can do for him is get him drunk, and he won’t be back at work until after the weekend which means five more days of drunk.

It is only about ten past midnight. Hardly any time has passed. The fireworks are still going off sporadically outside. The rain is still drumming on the Velux. But her father is not yet home and probably won’t be for ages and George has decided to wait up for him in case when he gets home he can’t get up the stairs by himself.

There’s a noise outside her door.

It’s Henry.

He is standing in the doorway looking tearful and fevered and bizarrely a little like an illustration of Little Lord Fauntleroy now that his hair is so long.

(He is refusing to have it cut because she always cut his hair.

Henry, she’s not coming back, George has said.

I know, Henry said.

She’s dead, George said. You know that.

I don’t want my hair cut, Henry said.)

You can come in, George says. Special dispensation.

Thank you, Henry says.

He stands at the door. He doesn’t come in.

I’m really awake. I’m really bored, he says

He is near tears.

George goes over to her bed and folds down the covers and pats it. Henry comes into the room, comes over to the bed and climbs in.

Toast? George says.

Henry is looking at the photos of their mother George has put above the bed. He reaches his hand up to one of them.

Don’t, George says.

He is good, because so recently asleep. He turns round and sits down.

Two slices please, he says.

With jam? George says.

No butter, whatever you do, he says.

I will bring you two slices of toast, George says. And after you’ve eaten them you and I together will banish boredom.

Henry shakes his head.

I don’t mean bored, he says. I want to be bored. But I can’t. But I really don’t want to be this thing that I’m having to be instead of being bored.

George nods.

And Henry, she says. Don’t touch those photos while I’m gone. I mean it.

George goes downstairs and makes a single slice of toast. She knifes over it with quite thick butter then puts the butter knife straight into the jam without washing it because no one will even notice. She does it precisely because no one will, because she can leave dregs of butter in whatever jam she likes for the rest of her life now.

By the time she gets back upstairs Henry is asleep. She knew he would be. She takes the photo he’s unstuck off the wall out of his hand (the picture of her mother as a teenager sitting on a statue in a park in Edinburgh right up on the back of the horse of whoever the man is the statue happens to represent) and sticks it back in its place (she has arranged them so that there is no chronology).

She sits down on the floor, leans back against her own bed and eats the toast.

It’s so boring, she says in Italy in the palazzo in the mock-child voice they always use for this game.

Only you would come through the doors of a palace designed especially to dispel boredom and know to say out loud, by some magic understanding of the meanings of things, that you find it boring, her mother says.

But George is playing the what’s-the-point-of-art game. Maybe her mother hasn’t realized she’s playing it.

There’s nobody else in this whole place but us, she says still in the voice. What’s the point, what’s the point of it? What’s it got to do with anything? What’s the point of art?

Art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen. (That’s the wording of one of her mother’s most retweeted Subverts.) Obviously. But this is a family game. They’ve played this game for years. It is one of her father’s games, he plays it to make her and her brother laugh whenever her mother makes them all go to a gallery. He pretends to be a slightly mentally challenged person. He pretends it so well that sometimes people in the galleries turn and look at him, or look away in case he really might be mentally challenged.

In this case the art in this room has already made something happen — the literal cheering-up of her mother, who happened last week to see a stray photo in an art magazine of one of the pictures from here, a blue-coloured picture of a man standing dressed in ripped white clothes and wearing an old rope as a belt, at the seeing and liking so much of which her mother literally stopped being sad (she has been in a bad mood for weeks now because of her friend Lisa Goliard disappearing) then announced to the family over breakfast three days ago that they were all going to see that picture for real next week and that she’d booked a hotel.

Nathan, can you take Wednesday to Sunday off? she said.

Nope, her father said.

Fine, she said. I don’t need you to look at pictures with me. George, can you take Wednesday to Friday off school?

I’ll have to check with my secretary, George said, I’ve got a very busy schedule. And I feel it’s my duty to inform you that it’s illegal to take children out of school just for holidays now.

How’s your throat? her mother said.

Really really sore, George said. I think it’s an infection. Where are we going?

Somewhere in Italy, her mother said. Henry, how’s your throat?

My throat is very well, thank you for asking, Henry said.

Henry, your throat is really sore, George said.

Is it? Henry said.

Otherwise you can’t come to Italy, George said.

Is it good there for throats? Henry said.

Now, in the palazzo, when George says the supposed-to-be-funny thing about what’s the point of art, Henry says, as if he thinks she means it too,

It’s really pretty.

Henry is gay. He must be. Though it’s true, this is a really pretty room. At least, that part up at that end there is, it’s spectacular, or maybe it’s just better lit than the other parts of the room. Her mother is off the whole length of the place towards it. It is like her mother has been struck by — what? Lightening. Her mother has lightened up since the minute they landed in this country and the plane door opened and the warmer air came in.

The moment they walked into this room she lightened even more.

Though it is embarrassing and excruciating when someone won’t play your game George gets over herself. She slips into her real self again.

Is this the place you were talking about in the car? she says. The moral conundrum?

Her mother says nothing.

She is looking.

George looks too.

The room is warm and dark. No, not dark, it’s light. Both. It’s like a huge dark dance hall with a lit-up picture that goes round some of its walls. There is nothing else in the room, except some low benches on which to sit and look at the walls, and over in the far corner a middle-aged lady (attendant?) on a folding seat. Apart from that, there is just the picture. It is impossible to see it all at once. Half the room is covered in it. The other half has faded picture, or no picture. What there is, though, is so full of life happening that it’s actually like life, at least those bits are at the far end. And the people in the broad blue stripe which goes all round the middle of the wall, all through the middle of the picture splitting it into an above and a below, look like they’re floating, or walking on air, especially in that brighter part.

It resembles a giant comic strip. Except it’s also like art.

There are ducks. There’s a man with his fist round the neck of a duck. The duck looks really surprised, like it’s saying what the f—. Above the duck’s head there’s another bird just sitting there completely free. It’s sitting next to the man and it’s watching him throttling the duck as if it’s quite interested in what’s happening.

This is only one detail. There are details like it everywhere. There’s a paddling dog. George stares at its genitals. In fact, look at the largeness of the testicles on all the creatures who have them everywhere in the picture, except the one creature you’d expect it on, the bull. He doesn’t seem to have any.

Then there’s a monkey hugging the leg of a boy, who regards it with snobby disdain. Over there there’s a very small child in a cap, in yellow, reading or eating something. An old woman holding a piece of paper is being attentive to the child. There are unicorns pulling a chariot here and lovers kissing there, and people with musical instruments here, people working up trees and in fields there. There are cherubs and garlands, crowds of people, women working at what looks like a loom up there, and down here there are eyes looking out of a black archway while people talk and do business and don’t notice the looking. There are dogs and horses, soldiers and townspeople, birds and flowers, rivers and riverbanks, water bubbles in the rivers, swans that look like they’re laughing. There’s a crowd of babies. They look haughty. There are rabbits, or hares, no, both.

The buildings in the picture are sometimes beautiful and sometimes broken open, there are broken road slabs and bricks, broken arches up against fine architecture and plants growing through the whole and broken buildings everywhere.

It is impossible, though, not to keep looking then looking back again at the blue-coloured stripe which runs like a frieze round the room between the upper part and the lower parts of the picture and in which the people and the animals seem to float free. The blue calls your eyes every time. It gives you a breather from the things happening above and below it. In the blue there’s a woman in a beautiful red dress just sitting in the air above a cheeky-looking goat or sheep. There’s the man in the white rags. That’s the man who was in the picture her mother saw at home. He’s why they’re here. Along from him, on the other side of the woman floating above the goat, there’s a young man or a young woman, could be either, dressed in beautiful rich clothes and holding an arrow or a stick and a gold hoop thing, like everything’s nothing but a charming game.

Male or female? she says to her mother who’s standing under these figures.

I don’t know, her mother says.

Her mother, smiling, points to the man in rags then the woman sitting on air then the playful rather dilettante richly dressed figure in turn.

Male, female, both, she says. Beautiful, all of them, including the sheep. And look at that.

She points to the top level, the level it hurts more to look at for longer because it’s so high, where there are three chariots, pulled by different creatures, and a lot of people standing about, and birds and rabbits and trees and flowers and far landscapes.

In come the gods, her mother says.

Are they the gods? George says.

And nobody even notices, her mother says. Look at all the people round them. Like the gods are no big deal. In they come and nobody even bats an eyelid.

George turns on her heel to look at the other wall. Down that long side of the room there’s more of the picture. It’s meant to be the same kind of thing as this wall. The overall design is the same. But it’s just not as good, not as eyecatching or interesting — or maybe it hasn’t been as well restored.

George has a closer look at the other picture-wall.

Its figures are just not as beautiful. There are creatures, like that giant lobster there, but they’re nothing compared, say, to that horse on that wall looking out almost directly, whose eyes tell you he’s not at all sure about having that man on his back. There are people and flowers here too, even people covered in flowers, but they’re less attractive, or more grotesque, than the people there on that end wall where the horses get fatter as the skies get bluer.

It is meant to be the seasons, is it?

She goes back to the good wall.

It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details, like that man with the duck. They’re all also happening on their own terms. The picture makes you look at both — the close-up happenings and the bigger picture. Looking at the man with the duck is like seeing how everyday and how almost comic cruelty is. The cruelty happens in among everything else happening. It is an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is.

There doesn’t seem to be hunting or cruelty in the top parts, just the lower parts.

The unicorns have horns that look like they’re made of lit-up glass.

The clothes all the people are wearing look as if breeze is blowing through them.

George turns towards her mother and is surprised by how young and bright she looks standing under the blue.

What is this place? George says.

Her mother shakes her head.

Palazzo, she says.

Then she says a word that George can’t catch.

I’ve never seen anything like it, her mother says. It’s so warm it’s almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I’ve never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It’s never sentimental. It’s generous, but it’s sardonic too. And whenever it’s sardonic, a moment later it’s generous again.

She turns to George.

It’s a bit like you, she says.

Then she doesn’t say anything. She just looks.

The place is completely silent behind them except for the lady attendant who has been charmed by Henry into leading him from picture to picture and telling him the words for whatever he points at.

Cavallo, the woman says.

Horse, Henry says.

Si! the woman says. Bene. Unicorni. Cielo. Stelle. Terra. Dei e dee e lo zodiaco. Minerva. Venere. Apollo. Minerva Marzo Ariete. Venere Aprile Toro. Apollo Maggio Gemelli. Duca Borso di Ferrara. Dondo la giustizia. Dondo un regalo. Il palio. Un cagnolino.

She sees George and her mother are both listening to her too. She points at the blank and faded walls.

Secco, she says.

She points at the still-picture-covered walls.

Fresco, she says.

She points at the really good bright end wall.

Mando o andato a Venezia per ottenere il meglio azzurro.

I think she’s saying that the blue colour is Venetian, her mother says.

George’s mother goes over to speak to the attendant. She speaks in English. The attendant speaks back in Italian which her mother doesn’t speak. They smile at each other and have a conversation.

What did she say? George asks her mother as they leave the room through the curtained door and go down the stairs.

I’ve no idea, her mother says. But it was nice to talk to her.

Afterwards they sit at an outside restaurant table in the garden of this place. Yellow sweet-smelling flowers drop off the trees on to their heads and on to the table. George notices a huge crack in the outside of the palace building up near the roof.

The earthquake maybe, her mother says. Quite recent. Last year. I think we’re lucky to have got to see it at all. I think it’s just reopened to the public.

Is that why some of the walls have pictures and some just blank plaster? George says. And two of the people in the chariots on the end wall have faces and one of them doesn’t?

I don’t know, her mother says. I don’t know much about it. It was quite hard to find out anything. But I’m finding it quite enjoyable, not knowing.

But what about the moral conundrum? George says.

The what? her mother says.

The getting paid more for the better art, George says.

Oh, yes. That, her mother says. Well.

She tells George again about the artist who did part of the room five hundred and fifty years ago, who thought his work should be paid better than everybody else’s in the room and wrote a letter asking the Duke for more money.

In fact, what happened is something even more compelling, she says. Because that letter he wrote’s the only reason we know anything about that artist even existing. And they only found that letter a hundred years ago. Which was more than four hundred years after he painted his bit of the walls. For four hundred years he didn’t exist. No one even knew the room had frescoes in it till only about a hundred or so years ago, end of the eighteen hundreds. They’d been whitewashed over for hundreds of years. Then some whitewash fell off the walls and they found these pictures underneath. The room’d been lost till then.

So if you were in a room, I mean like if you were just sitting in a room. Could the room you were actually in get — lost? Henry says.

He looks stricken.

No, George says. Don’t be an idiot.

Don’t call your brother an idiot, George’s mother says.

You’re an idiot, Henry says.

Don’t call your sister an idiot, their mother says.

I didn’t call him an idiot, I said nidiot, George says. Nidiot is much worse than just idiot.

You’re far and away more of a nidiot than me, Henry says.

Than I am, George says.

Her mother laughs.

You can’t not do that, can you? she says. It’s your nature, isn’t it?

Do what? George says.

Henry runs off into the cow parsley at the rough end of the garden where there are some modern-looking sculptures and the meadow has been left to grow as high as it likes. Because the grass is so high he vanishes completely.

This is like a magic place, her mother says.

It’s true that it is kind of spectacular here, George thinks — and that’s the second time she’s thought the word spectacular — because when they walked out here a moment ago and down the garden path to this restaurant, which looked like it might be a junk shop but turns out to serve pasta and wine, a jazz track with old-fashioned piano and trumpets suddenly started playing as if by itself in the air (in reality out of one of the restaurant’s speakers) as if especially for them.

Now the garden fills with Italian schoolchildren younger than George and older than Henry. They sit round the tables and talk to each other.

Did he get the money in the end? George says.

Who? her mother says.

The painter, George says. Because he really was better. If he painted the part of the room at the far end.

I don’t know, George, her mother says. I know almost nothing about it. I only really know what I’ve told you, which is what it said under the picture when I saw it at home. When we get back I’ll read up about it. Though, you know, it might just be that our eyes are more used to finding some parts of the room more beautiful than the others, because of what we now expect beauty to be. It might be our standards rather than theirs. But I agree. I agree with you. Some of it is really outstandingly beautiful. Some of it is breathtaking. And I find it pretty interesting that the only reason we know that the painter who did that wall existed, even lived at all, is that he asked for more.

Like Oliver Twist, George says.

Her mother smiles.

In some ways, she says.

What was his name? George says.

Her mother screws up her eyes.

You know, I knew this, George, I did know. I read it when we were at home. But right now I can’t remember it, her mother says.

We came all this way to see a picture you like that much but you can’t remember the name of the man who did it? George says.

Her mother widens her eyes at her.

I know, she says. But it kind of doesn’t matter, does it, that we don’t know his name. We saw the pictures. What more do we need to know? It’s enough just that someone painted them and then one day we came here and saw them. No?

I could look it up on your phone, George says.

Then she immediately feels a mixture of things ranging from unpleasant all the way to bad.

(Guilt and fury:

— Sing me a love song

— No, my singing voice went with pregnancy

— I wonder where it went. I bet its in a cathedral city up in some fancy cathedral ceiling hanging out with the carvings of the angels

Fury and guilt:

— Howre your eyes today and how you doin what you doin where are you & whenll we meet)

Her mother doesn’t notice. Her mother has no idea. Her mother is looking down for where her phone is, checking it is safely in the pocket of her bag.

(George’s own phone is not a smartphone though she will be given one of her own in less than a year’s time, at Christmas, three and a half months after her mother dies.)

Let’s not look anything up, her mother says. It’s so nice. Not to have to know.

Her mother is going soft.

Not that there’s anything wrong with soft. Her mother, soft, forgetful, vague and loving, like other people’s mothers always seem to be, is a whole new prospect.

But it is very unlike her not to try to know or to find out everything there is to know. And this morning at the hotel, when they’d been leaving the breakfast room and passing the reception, her mother had said buona sera to the man and the girl behind the counter, and the girl had laughed. Then that girl had realized she was being impolite, had become ashamed and had stopped herself laughing. George had never seen anyone correct herself or himself like that.

Not buona sera, madam, forgive me, the man said. But it is buon giorno. Because you are wishing us a good evening and right now it is morning.

Outside the hotel her mother had stopped on the pavement and looked at George.

This place is shaking loose everything I thought I knew, she said. All the things I’ve been taking for granted for years.

She put her arm round George’s shoulder. She hugged Henry close in to her other side.

It is so bloody lovely to forget myself for a bit! she said.

She looked genuinely happy there on the pavement outside the shop selling the souvenirs and products of Ferrara.

George turns now in the palazzo garden and straddles the bench. She has noticed there’s something strange about those schoolkids and she has just realized what it is. None of them is on a phone or looking at a screen. They are all talking to each other. Some of them are now even talking to Henry, or trying to. Henry is describing something. He draws a circle in the air. The kids he’s talking to do the same circling thing with their arms.

George looks at her mother. Her mother looks at George. A yellow-white flower drops, brushes past her mother’s nose, catches in her hair and comes to rest on her collarbone. Her mother laughs. George feels the urge to laugh too, though she is still wearing her guilt / fury scowl. Half her mouth turns up. The other half holds its downward shape.

This town they’ve come to is both bright and grim. It is a place of walls and has a huge and imposing castle about which, if George were writing about it at school, she’d use the words impervious and threatening. There is this constant sense of battlement, then there are the winding high-walled little streets which look like nightmares will happen down them, that they’ll definitely leave you lost. But things change in a moment here, light to dark, dark to light, and although it is so stony it is somehow also bright green and red and yellow too; all the walls and buildings go red-golden in the sun. The walls are high and blank but it sounds as if beyond them is hidden garden. There are the long straight avenues of really beautiful trees, as if it’s not a city of walls at all, it’s a city of trees. In fact, all the buildings and walls have bits of tree and bush and grass sprouting out of them at the tops and up the sides of their bright walls.

It smells of jasmine, then more jasmine, then the occasional sewer, then jasmine again.

It’s very very strange here, her mother had said last night as they were getting ready for bed. I can’t quite get a grip on it.

She looked at the map on the bed.

It’s as if that map they gave us is nothing to do with the actual experience of being here, she said.

They’d been wandering about getting lost the whole day even though they had the map the hotel had given them. Things that looked close by on the map were, when they tried to get to them, actually quite far away; then they’d try to do something that looked like it’d take a very long time to do and they’d find themselves arriving almost immediately.

If her mother’d simply looked it up on Google Maps or Streetview they could’ve got to places with more precision and alacrity. But her mother is reluctant to look anything up, or even switch the phone on, for some reason.

Alacrity? That’s a good word, George, her mother says.

From the Latin. For briskness, George says.

We don’t need briskness. Let’s follow our noses unbriskly for a change. It’s the first modern city in Europe, her mother says as they walk back through it after seeing the palace. Because of the town planning and the walls. Though both of you are used to historic towns, growing up where you’ve grown up. You see stuff like this every day. It’s probably no big deal to you. Anyway, the palace we just saw, with the pictures, pre-dates even the walls. It’s from before this city was walled. It’s that early. It’s outstanding, for something that early.

Then she stops saying things like that and they simply wander in a daze looking a bit like the reprobate kids at school do after spliffing, because this is nothing like home. For instance now that it’s the time of day when people here come out and wander about, the streets are full of pedestrians. At the same time the streets are full of people on bikes but the cyclists all mingle in with the crowds and weave round and past her and her mother and Henry and all the other people in a way that seems effortless. It is miraculous that no one ever hits anyone and that people can cycle so slowly and not topple. Nobody topples. Nobody hurries, even in the rain. Nobody rings a bike bell (except, George notices, the tourists, who are easy to spot). Nobody shouts at anybody to get out of the way. Even very old ladies cycle here wearing black with their bicycle baskets full of things wrapped up in paper and tied with ribbons or string, as if being old, going to a shop and buying things and bringing them home are all completely different acts here.

A boy the same age as George passes them at a crossroads with his bare arms on either side of a pretty girl lightly perched holding on to nothing on his handlebars.

George’s mother winks at George.

George blushes. Then she is annoyed at herself for blushing.

That night the noise of the summer birds swooping round the roofs near their hotel gives way to a noise of drums and trumpets. They follow this new noise to a square where a crowd of quite young people, older than George but still young, some of whom wear historical costumes tabard-like slung over their jeans and T-shirts, or have leggings like the people in the pictures they saw earlier, one leg one colour, the other a different colour, are taking turns to do marching dances or dancing marches where they throw huge flags on sticks up in the air, flags which unfurl to be bigger than bedspreads as they go up then fold themselves round their sticks again as they come down. The flag throwers walk with them held at their backs against their shoulders like folded wings, then they wave them about in the air like outsize butterfly wings while other members of their teams (it seems to be a rehearsal for a flag-throwing contest) blow long medieval-looking horns and thump their drums.

She and her mother and Henry stand on an old historic staircase with the other people, above two tall sign boards which say on them TALKING WALLS (you can download a walking tour from each board and one will tell you about where a film director her mother likes grew up, and the other about Giorgio someone, her mother says a novelist who lived here in the past). It is so loud, the rehearsal, that it literally shakes these boards.

But George watches a dog cross the square through the noise and stop to sniff at something then amble off again as if nothing unusual is happening, so maybe something like this just happens here every week. Then, above the heads of everyone in the city, above the highest-tossed of the flags, church bells here and there announce midnight and as if they’ve been enchanted the next team after that to do a routine does it without drums and bugles but with its musicians humming instead, in tuneful voices and with a gentleness that seems sweet and absurd after the great din of the teams that have gone before.

If only all ceremonials and pomp got hummed like that, her mother says.

Do you remember when

Things were really hummin’.

Full stop.

Is her mother really dead? Is it an elaborate hoax? (All hoaxes, on TV and the radio and in the papers and online, are described as elaborate whether they’re elaborate or not.) Has someone elaborately, or not, spirited her mother away like on an episode of Spooks and now she’s living a life elsewhere under a new name and just isn’t allowed to contact people (even her own children) from her former life?

Because how can someone just vanish?

George had seen her contorted in the hospital bed. Her skin had changed colour and was covered in weals. She could hardly speak. What she did say, in the last part of whatever was happening to her and before they put George outside the door to wait in the corridor, was that she was a book, I’m an open book, she said. Though it was also equally possible that what she’d said was that she was an unopen book.

I a a u opn ook.

George (to Mrs Rock): I’m going to tell you this thing, and I think after I tell you you’ll suggest I get sent for a stronger type of therapy than the kind you’re giving me because you’ll think I’m completely paranoid and hysterical.

Mrs Rock: You think I’ll think you’re paranoid and hysterical?

George: Yes. But I want to tell you now, before I say it, that I’m neither paranoid nor hysterical, though ostensibly it might sound like I am, and I want to make it clear that I thought it way before my mother died, and so did she, she thought it herself.

Mrs Rock nodded to let George know she was listening.

What George told Mrs Rock then was that her mother was under surveillance and had been being monitored by spies.

Mrs Rock: You believe your mother was being monitored by spies?

That was what counsellors were trained to do, to say back to you what it was you said, but in the form of a question so you could ask yourself why you’d thought or said it. It was soul-destroying.

George told Mrs Rock anyway. She told her about the time five years ago that her mother was walking past the big glass windows of an expensive and stylish hotel in central London. People were having supper in there; the windows were restaurant windows, and her mother had seen, sitting with a group of people quite prominently in one of the windows, a politician or spin person and at this point her mother had been furious at some politicians. George couldn’t remember which politician it was in the window, only that it was one of the politicians or spin people her mother held responsible for something. Anyway her mother had got her lip salve out of her rucksack and then she’d started to write on the glass of the window with the lip salve above this man’s head like a halo (that’s how she described it).

She was writing the word LIAR. But by the time it took to write the L, the I and the A, George said, there were security people coming at her from several directions. So she legged it. (Her words.)

Mrs Rock was writing things down.

After that, George said, two things happened. Well, three. Mail that came to our house for my parents, and even for me and for Henry, it was around the time when he had a birthday, began arriving looking like it had already been opened. It would arrive in these see-through Sorry Your Mail Has Been Damaged bags that the mail people use if something gets ripped. And then someone revealed in the papers that my mother was one of the Subvert interventionists.

One of the what? Mrs Rock said.

George explained about the Subvert movement and how, by using really early pop-up technology pretty much before anyone else was, they’d been able to make things appear on whatever page someone accessed like adverts do now all the time. Except, a Subvert took the form of a random visual or a piece of information.

My mother was one of the original anonymous four people who made up the things to send out, George said. Eventually there were hundreds of them. She was kind of minor to start with, then she got more minor. It’s actually really hilarious because she’s completely computer illiterate. I mean, you know, was.

Mrs Rock nodded.

Anyway, it was her job to subvert political things with art things, and to subvert art things with political things. Like, a box would flash up on a page about Picasso and it would say did you know that 13 million people in the UK are living below the poverty line. Or a box would flash up on a politics page and it would have a picture in it or some stanzas of a poem, stuff like that. Then it got revealed in the papers, George said, that she was a part of the Subvert movement, and then after that, whenever she published anything in the papers about money or economics, the people who disagreed with her called her gauche and politically partisan.

Inside George’s head as she says this her mother is laughing out loud about being called politically partisan. There isn’t a single person in this world who isn’t it, she says. She says it exactly as if she’s singing a pretty tune, tra la la. And gauche, she says, is one of my favourite words. Always be gauche, George. Go on. I dare you.

Mrs Rock: And what was the third thing that made you think your mother was being monitored by spies?

[Enter Lisa Goliard]

George: Oh no, nothing. There were only the two things.

Mrs Rock: Didn’t you say there were two, but then change it to three?

George: For a minute I think I thought there were three. But then I realized I really meant two.

Mrs Rock: And these are the two things that mean you believe your mother was being monitored by spies?

George: Yes.

Mrs Rock: And your mother believed it too?

George: She knew she was.

Mrs Rock: You think she knew she was?

George: We talked about it. All the time. It was a kind of a running joke. Anyway, she quite liked it. She liked being watched.

Mrs Rock: You think your mother liked being watched?

George: You think I’m insane, don’t you? You think I’m just making it all up.

Mrs Rock: You’re worried that I think you’re making it up?

George: I’m not making any of it up.

Mrs Rock: Is what I think, or others think, very important to you?

George: Yeah, but what do you think, Mrs Rock? Are you thinking right now, dear me, this girl needs to be sent for much heavier-duty therapy?

Mrs Rock: Do you want to be sent for ‘much heavier-duty therapy’?

George: I’m just asking you to tell me what you think, Mrs Rock.

Then Mrs Rock did something unexpected. She departed from her usual technique and script and started telling George what she actually maybe thought.

She said that in the ancient times the word mystery meant something we’re unused to now. The word itself

— and I know this will interest you, Georgia, because I’ve gathered from talking to you how interested in meanings you are, she said –

— Well, I was, before, George said.

— you will be again, I think it’s safe to say that about you, though I’m going a bit out on a limb here and taking a risk saying it, Mrs Rock said. Anyway. The word mystery originally meant a closing, of the mouth or the eyes. It meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed.

A closing. Not be disclosed.

George got interested in spite of herself.

The mysterious nature of some things was accepted then, much more taken for granted, Mrs Rock said. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable, it means a crime novel, a thriller, a drama on TV, usually one where we’ll probably find out — and where the whole point of reading it or watching it will be that we will find out — what happened. And if we don’t, we feel cheated.

Right then the bell went and Mrs Rock stopped talking. She’d gone bright red up under her hair and round her ears. She stopped talking as if someone had unplugged her. She closed her notebook and it was as if she’d closed her face too.

Same time next Tuesday, Georgia, she said. I mean, after Christmas. First Tuesday after the holidays. See you then.

George opens her eyes. She’s slumped on the floor leaning back against her own bed. Henry is in her bed. All the lights are on. She’d fallen asleep and now she’s woken up.

Her mother is dead. It’s 1.30 a.m. It’s New Year.

There’s a noise downstairs. It sounds like someone is at the front door. That’s what woke her.

It will be her father.

Henry wakes up. His mother is dead too. She sees the knowledge cross his face about three seconds after he opens his eyes.

It’s okay, she says. It’s just dad. Go back to sleep.

George goes down the first flight then the next flight of stairs. He will have lost his keys or they will be in a pocket he is too pissed to put his hand in or remember he even has.

She looks through the spy bubble in the door but she can’t see anyone. There’s no one there.

Then the person outside moves back into view to knock again. George is amazed.

It is a girl from school, Helena Fisker.

Helena Fisker with her shoulders dark from the rain, her hair looks quite wet too, is standing on the other side of George’s front door.

She knocks again and everything about George, because she’s standing so close to the door, literally leaps. It is as if Helena Fisker is knocking on George.

Helena Fisker had been there in the girls’ toilets when George was being hassled by the moronic Year 9 girls with their mania for using their phones to record the sound levels of other girls urinating. What happened was: if you were a girl you would go to the toilet, then in the next class you’d go to everybody would be laughing at you because they’d all had the sound of you urinating sent to their phones with a film of the toilet door then the door opening then you coming out. Then Facebook. A couple of them even got put on YouTube and lasted several days there.

All anyone, including the boys, talked about for a while when they talked about someone (if the someone happened to be a girl) was how loud or how quiet her urinating was. This had started a separate mania among all the girls, an existential panic about whether their urinating was silent enough. Now they went to the toilet in twos so that there’d be someone to listen and make sure their urinating wasn’t too audible.

One day George had opened a toilet door and outside it there’d been a huddle of girls she vaguely recognized but didn’t know any of, all crowded round a girl holding up a smartphone.

On cue as if they’d rehearsed, like a little choir, they all started making disgusted noises at her.

But behind them, at the main door, she’d seen Helena Fisker come in.

Most people in the school were pretty respectful of Helena Fisker.

Helena Fisker had been reprimanded, most recently, George knew from people in art, for designing the school Christmas card. She was known for being really good at art. The picture of the robin she’d presented them with was apparently such a cute one that they’d simply let her place the order and stamped the form for the printer. It was paid for and printed up with the name of the school on the back. Five hundred had arrived from the printer in a huge box.

When they’d opened the box they’d found, instead of the robin, a picture of a really ugly massive blank concrete wall in the sun.

Helena Fisker, the story goes, had smiled at the Head as if she couldn’t understand the fuss when she was called to his office and made to stand on the carpet in front of his desk.

But it’s Bethlehem, she’d said.

Now this gang of girls was standing in front of George and filming and squealing at her with no idea that Helena Fisker was standing behind them. Helena Fisker caught George’s eye over the tops of their heads. Then Helena Fisker shrugged her eyes.

Her doing just that knocked everything those girls were saying and doing into the land-of-not-meaning-anything-much.

Helena Fisker reached her hand over the tops of those little girls’ heads and plucked the phone out of the main girl’s hand.

All the girls turned round at once.

Hi, Helena Fisker said.

Then she told them they were a silly little bunch of wankers. Then she asked them why they were all so interested in urine and what their problem was. Then she pushed past them and held the smartphone over the bowl of the toilet that George had just flushed.

All the girls squealed, especially the one whose phone it was.

You can choose. Delete or drop, Helena Fisker said.

It’s waterproof, you ethnic cow, one of the girls said.

Did you just call me an ethnic cow? Helena Fisker said. Great. A bonus.

Helena Fisker slammed the front of the smartphone on the edge of the toilet door. Bits of plastic flew off.

Now we can test your phone’s waterproofing and we can test the school’s policies on racism, she was saying as George left.

Thanks, George had said later when they were queuing up outside history.

She had never actually spoken to Helena Fisker before.

I liked that speech you gave in English that day, Helena Fisker said then. That story you told about the BT Tower.

(It had been George’s turn, in the going-round-the-room order, to give a three-minute talk about empathy. She’d had no idea what to say. Then Ms Maxwell had said in front of the whole class, though in a quiet and nice way, it’s okay if you don’t want to talk today, Georgia. This had made George even more determined to do it. But when she stood up her mind went blank. So she’d said some things her mother was always saying about how near-impossible it was to inhabit anyone else’s shoes, whether they lived in Paraguay or just down the road or were even just in the next room or the next seat along from you, and ended it by telling the story of a pop singer who was having her lunch in the restaurant of the BT Tower when it was called the Post Office Tower in the 1960s and was so outraged at the way the maître d’ was bossing one of the underwaiters around that she took the bread roll she’d just been given off her side plate and threw it at the maître d’ and hit him on the back of the head.)

That’s all she and Helena Fisker have ever said to each other.

A couple of times since that thing in the toilets happened, though, George has caught herself thinking something unexpected. She has caught herself wondering whether those girls, that girl with the phone — if the phone memory had survived — had deleted or maybe kept the film.

If that film still existed it meant there was a recording of her somewhere and in it she was looking straight over their heads into the eyes of Helena Fisker.

George opens the door.

Thought you maybe weren’t in, Helena Fisker says.

I am, George says.

Good, Helena Fisker says. Happy New Year.

Henry sits up in the bed when George and Helena Fisker come into George’s room.

Who are you? Henry says.

I’m H, Helena Fisker says. Who are you?

I’m Henry. What kind of a name is that? Henry says.

It’s the initial of my first name, Helena Fisker says. The people who don’t really know me tend to call me Helena. But I know your sister. We’re friends at school. So you can call me H as well.

It’s the same initial as my first name, Henry says. Did you bring a present?

Henry, George says.

She apologizes. She explains to Helena Fisker that since their mother died whenever people come to the house they generally tend to bring Henry a present, sometimes several presents.

Don’t you get them too? Helena Fisker says.

Not as many as he gets, George says. I think they think I’m too old for presents. Or they’re more scared of trying to give me anything.

Did she bring a present or not? Henry says.

Yes, Helena Fisker says. I brought you a cabbage.

A cabbage isn’t a present, Henry says.

It is if you’re a rabbit, Helena Fisker says.

George laughs out loud.

Henry, too, clearly thinks this is very funny. He curls into a laughing ball in the bedclothes.

Your hair’s all wet, he says when he stops laughing.

That’s what happens when you walk through the rain with no hat or hood or umbrella, Helena Fisker says.

George takes her over to the bookcase and shows her the leak and the rain dripping every few minutes on to the cover of the top book on the pile.

At some point, George says, this roof will stave in.

Cool, Helena Fisker says. You’ll be able to look directly out at the constellations.

There’ll be nothing between me and them, George says.

Except the occasional police helicopter, Helena Fisker says. The great lawnmower in the sky.

George laughs.

Two seconds after she does she realizes something and she is surprised.

What she realizes is that she has laughed.

In fact she has laughed twice, once at the rabbit joke and once at the lawnmower.

The thought of it pretty much surprises her into another laugh, this time inside herself.

That makes it three times since September that George has laughed in an undeniable present tense.