How to be both

~ ~ ~

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

Cossa, George said.

Cotta? the woman said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Francesco del Cossa

(about 1435/6–about 1477/8)

Saint Vincent Ferrer about 1473–5

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

Egg on poplar NG597 Bought 1858.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of all, up at the level of his head, the pillar’s had its top broken off and there’s what looks like a miniature forest growing out of it.

There are very small people in the background behind the saint’s legs. They’re meant to be small because of perspective but at the same time it makes it look like this man is a giant and sure enough, when you look away from this painting at the others in the room it’s like they’ve all been dwarfed. After this painting they look flat and old-fashioned, as if they’re stale dramas and pretending to be real. This one at least admits the whole thing’s a performance.

Or perhaps it is just that George has spent proper time looking at this one painting and that every single experience of looking at something would be this good if she devoted time to everything she looked at.

George has now been seven times. Each time she’s visited, the monk has seemed less severe. He has started to look unruffled, like he’s not bothered by anything — the other paintings in the room, the stuff happening in them, the people passing back and fore in front of him every day with all their different lives, the whole rest of the gallery, the square, the roads, the traffic, the city, the country, the sea, the countries radiating out beyond the gallery and away. Look at the wide-open arms of the God up there a bit like a baby in a womb in an old cross section of a pregnant woman’s body, a very old wise baby. Look at the cloth of the cloak of the saint which opens wide too and changes from dark to silver right in the middle of the saint’s body. His pointing finger has stopped being about being told off and started to be about looking up, and not really at the God, which is what the gallery placard says he’s pointing at, but more at the way the blue in the sky gets darker and bluer as it rises, or at the way a forest will grow out of stone, or at how what’s meant to be a torture instrument is really powerless, nothing but a museum piece, a stage prop for some old drama whose horror’s all long gone.

George has become more and more interested in spite of herself and in spite of how little this picture — or any of the pictures in this room, all made more than five hundred years ago — seems on first glance to have to do with the real world. Now when she comes into Room 55, it’s weird, but it’s like she is meeting an old friend, albeit one who won’t look her in the eye because the saint is always looking off to the side. But that’s good too. It’s good, to be seen past, as if you’re not the only one, as if everything isn’t happening just to you. Because you’re not. And it isn’t.

A friendly work of art. That was when her mother said the thing about how the art they were looking at was a bit like you. Generous but also, what was it? Something else.

Sarcastic?

George can’t remember.

At first, coming here, she knew consciously all the time that she was seeing a picture her mother never even knew existed or might well have walked past without seeing, like people do, on their way to see the more famous pictures.

Today what she sees is the way the rockscape on one side of the saint is broken, rubbly, as if not yet developed, and on the other side has transformed into buildings that are rather grand and fancy.

It is as if just passing from one side of the saint to the other will result if you go one way in wholeness and if you go the other in brokenness.

Both states are beautiful.

She looks across at the picture to the left of the saint, past the open door. It’s of a woman sitting on a fancy throne holding a sprig of cherries, by a painter called Cosimo Tura, and it has those little glass or coral balls in it too, on a string above her head. So does the one to George’s left, which is a Virgin Mary and Baby and is by Cosimo Tura as well.

The coral and glass balls on the St Vincent picture are by far the brightest and most convincing.

Maybe there was a glass and coral ball school where the painters all went to learn to do these things.

Today is Wednesday. She is missing double maths, English, Latin, biology, history, double French. Today instead she is going to count the number of people who pass through Room 55 in a given half-hour (she will start at noon) and how many of those people stop to look at the Francesco del Cossa picture and for how long.

From this she will be able to form a statistical study of attention spans and art.

Then she will get herself some lunch, then off back to King’s Cross and home in time to be there for Henry getting out of school.

Then she will slip the bank card back into its place as usual and go out into the garden, if it’s not raining, and say the daily hello and how are you today that she’s pledged to the girl in the yurt. She’ll come in and make supper and hope her father comes home in not too bad a shape.

It is lovely, being intoxicated, her father said the other night. It is like wearing a whole fat woolly sheep between me and the world.

The smell of an old sheep in the house, George thought when he said it, its fleece all grassy, matted with excrement, would be hugely preferable to the smell of her father after he’s been drinking.

It was the weekend. She was watching a film on TV. It was about four teenage girls, friends who’d been devastated to find that they were all going to have to spend their summer holidays in different parts of the world. So they made a pact that they’d share a pair of jeans, meaning they’d send the jeans by post from one to the next to the next and so on as a sign of their undying friendship. What happened next was that the pair of jeans acted as a magic catalyst to their lives and saw them through lots of learning curves and self-esteem-getting and being in love, parents’ breaking up, someone dying etc.

When it got to the part where a child was dying of cancer and the jeans helped one of the girls to cope with this, George, sitting on the floor in the front room, howled out loud like a wolf at its crapness.

She decided she’d watch instead one of the DVDs H brought round before she left.

The league of mothers has got your back, H had said handing her a small pile of films all in different languages which her mother had sorted out, in the moving, for your poor friend who likes the 1960s and who is mourning for real.

Mourning for real. George liked the phrase. The top one on the pile next to the DVD player had the actress whose picture is on George’s wall in it. It was about some people who go to a near-deserted island on a boat. Then one of them goes missing. She literally disappears. The people spend the rest of the film looking for her and falling in and out of love with each other, but they never find out where she’s gone or what’s happened to her. George watched it without moving from where she was sitting on the floor from beginning to end. Then she ejected it and took the next film off the top of the pile.

It was called, in French, A Film Like The Others. It had no subtitles and when it started it looked like a bootleg, fuzzy, as if copied from dodgy video.

Her father came into the room and sat in the chair behind her.

She could smell him.

What’s the film, Georgie? he said.

George was about to tell him the title but then she realized that if she told him what it was called he’d think she was being cheeky. This made her laugh.

It’s French, she said.

Nice to hear you laugh, he said behind her.

The film began with some footage of two young men making very small brick walls. They seemed to be learning how to bricklay, could that be it? Over the top of this a lot of people were speaking in a French which George couldn’t really follow. It seemed to be about politics. Then it cut to some young people sitting talking in long grass. There was footage of what looked like strikes and protests, which made George think about the students here, how long they’d lasted in the university building and the stories that went round school about how rough the police and private security men had been to them, which her mother had made her tell her and some of the telling of which she’d sent out in phrases and paragraphs via Subvert.

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

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

Yup, George said.

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

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

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

George didn’t turn round.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You what? her father said.

He sat up.

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

Her father leapt up off the chair.

She heard him take the stairs two at a time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, of course they wouldn’t.

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

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

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

Consider, for a moment, the moral conundrum.

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

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

She gets her phone out and texts H.

— Did you know Leonardo da Vinci was a cartoonist?

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

H has texted straight back.

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

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

The first one said,

— His mother’s name was Fiordelisia Mastria

Then, much later,

— His father built the belltower of the cathedral

The next day,

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

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

Two hours after, another text,

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

Late that night,

— He left in a sulk and went to work elsewhere

Then, next day, over the whole day,

— The 25 March 1470 was a Friday

and

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

Then H clearly ran out of information about the painter.

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

— Res vesana parvaque amor nomine

— Adiuvete!

— Puella fulvis oculis

— Quem volo es

— Quingenta milia passuum ambulem

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

She downloaded it and listened to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their classic status?

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

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

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

She followed it immediately with a text saying

(Helix: Greek for twist.)

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

It’s good to hear your voice

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

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

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

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

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

It must have felt like being punched by a god.

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

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

Meets the cloud of knowing, George thought back.

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

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

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

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

Deceived notions. Ha.

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

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

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

Halfway through writing this email George noticed that she’d used, in its first sentence, the future tense, like there might be such a thing as a future.

!

And did you know (you probably did) that Rosalind Franklin nearly didn’t get credited for the double helix discovery? Though she took the original X-ray that meant Crick and Watson could make their discovery, and was clearly on the way to the same discovery herself. And that when Watson saw her giving a talk about her research he thought she ought to have been warmer and more frivolous in her lecture about diffraction (!) and that he might have been more interested in what she was saying if she’d taken off her glasses and done something with her hair. So we need to add a whole new verse to that wrecking ball song. It is only sixty three years ago that this happened, and that’s less than the age of your grandmother and only eleven years before my mother happened. It is the kind of historic fact that opposes the making of true history. Anyway in the film here the green bars are for adenine, the blue for cytosine, the green for guanine and the red for thymine.

Oh yeah and also, if you remember. You asked, and te semper volam.

Please remember, she thought as she sent it.

Sardonic! That was the other word, along with generous, that her mother’d said she was. Not sarcastic.

When I remember, it is like an earthquake, Henry said yesterday. Sometimes I don’t remember, for almost all day. And then I do. Or I remember maybe a different thing that happened. Like when we went to that shop and bought the pipe that when you blew down it the very long bubbles came out of it.

Henry is doing a project on earthquakes and tsunamis at school. The schoolbook from which he is making his drawings and getting his facts has a picture on its cover of a motorway that looks like it’s been lifted by a giant hand and put back down on its side instead and all the trucks and cars have slid off it and are on their roofs, wheels-upward, at the foot of it.

Strange, but the photo is beautiful. The photos all through this book are beautiful, of roads with crevasse cracks splitting through them, of a clock face at the top of a tower split in half so only the roman numerals for seven to eleven survive and the rest of the face is just sky. There is one picture of a small girl holding a teakettle and standing against a backdrop of aid tents. It’s a natural disaster and it looks a bit like a fashion shoot. Well, almost all photos of roughed-up places, so long as there are no actual dead people in them, look like a fashion shoot.

Sooner or later, George’s mother said in her head, the ones with the dead people in them will look like a fashion shoot too.

Fashion shot. Ha ha.

That would make a good Subvert.

George saw that her little brother, sitting at the breakfast bar over his earthquakes and tsunamis book, was hanging his head like a done flower.

She pulled up a chair beside him.

You’re a rift, she said.

I’m a what? he said in a little voice.

You’re a fault, she said.

I am not, he said.

You are, you’re a San Andreas fault. You’re a tectonic plate, she said.

You’re a tectonic plate, he said.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, she said. But names will never harm me. You’re a drifting continent.

You’re a drifting continent, he said

You’re a drifting incontinent, she said (though the subtlety of this pretty much went over Henry’s head). You’re a Richter scale. A scaly Richter. A nidiot.

Sticks and stones, Henry said.

He was singing now to himself with his face sad.

May break my bones. Sticks and stones.

George went out to the garden. She collected some pebbles and bits of hedge, a few twigs. She came back into the kitchen and she flung them at Henry. Little twigs and leaves stuck in his hair. Gravel went everywhere, into the sugar, the butter, the cutlery drawer.

Henry looked at the debris all round and all over him and then up at her in astonishment.

Did your bones break? she said. Well?

She tickled him a bit.

Is that one broken? she said. Is that one? That one?

It worked. He lightened, he gave in, he laughed and twisted in her arms.

Good.

She scooped the gravel out of the butter and sugar with a spoon. She wiped the twigs and leaves and grit into a J-cloth and cleaned the table. She made them eggs for supper. (Egg on poplar. Like something made in a chic restaurant. What would it taste like? Think of all the paintings made with all the eggs laid all the hundreds of years ago and the blips of life that were the lives of the warmblooded chickens who laid them.)

Henry was still finding the sticks and stones joke funny, and she was still finding the grit in his hair, when she bathed him and put him to bed.

The earth is made of rock. It is more than four and a half billion years old. Five hundred years is a nothing. It is about the length of an eyelash. Less.

At level four to five, things fall off walls and shelves.

At level six, walls themselves fall.

There are thousands of earthquakes all over the earth, every year, most so small no one notices them.

But these are the signs for which people have learned to watch. Dogs will bark. Frogs will leave the area. The sky will fill with strange lights.

Mrs Rock, George had said the last time she’d seen Mrs Rock, I am between you and a hard place.

Mrs Rock almost smiled.

So I have decided to veer towards you rather than towards the hard place, George said.

Mrs Rock looked slightly panicked.

Then George told Mrs Rock how she was sorry she’d lied.

That day when I said the word minotaur then pretended you’d misheard me, George said. You didn’t mishear me. I did say it. Then I pretended I didn’t. And I just wanted to say so, and to apologize. I was being difficult. And also, I know I must have seemed highly paranoid in some of the things I’ve said to you over the past weeks, particularly about my mother and so on. I’ve been making up narratives. I know that now.

Mrs Rock nodded.

Then she told George that the story of the minotaur was one about facing what mazes you. She made it very clear that she was using the word maze, not amaze. Then, when you’d faced it, she said, the thing to do to get out of the labyrinth was to go back the way you’d come, follow your own thread, the thread you’d left behind you, and that this had a lot to do with knowing where we come from and what our roots are –

I disagree with your interpretation, George said.

Mrs Rock stopped. She looked amazed (or perhaps mazed) that someone had interrupted her.

George shook her head.

It just needs the twist in the plot. It needs the outside help, George said. If a girl hadn’t given Theseus the ball of string, chances are he’d never have got out of there. He’d probably still be in there today and that minotaur’d still be demanding and eating the required number of Athenian virgins.

Yes, of course, Mrs Rock said. But it’s also possible, Georgia, that it means, metaphorically speaking –

Aw Mrs Rock, to tell you the truth, I’m so, so tired of what stories are meant to mean, George said. My mother, on the morning of the day she died, annoyed me. She was calling me her little prince, because of that new royal baby and me happening to have the same name, both my parents started doing that last summer. All of which meant that I shied away from her when she tried to kiss me on my way out the door to school. Then the next time she came home was two weeks after and it was in the form of bits of rubble in a cardboard box, which my father put in the passenger seat of his work van then drove round town stopping to leave handfuls of her in places she’d really liked. Only outdoor places, though, so as not to be too shocking or too illegal. Though he did put some of her in his pocket and take her to London, where he went looking specifically for cracks and crevices in the outsides and the insides of the buildings of her favourite art places and theatre places and work places. Into which he pressed, with his thumb, some of my mother. And there’s still quite a lot of her left in the box so that this summer we can take her to Scotland and abroad, to some of the other places she liked. The thing being. What I mean is. It’s not very metaphorical, if you’ll forgive me, Mrs Rock.

Silence.

(What you might even call a stony silence.)

Had George really said all that out loud?

No.

Phew.

George had said only the first sentence out loud. She hadn’t said anything past the words what stories are meant to mean.

But think of her mother. Think of her smiling, looking the minotaur in the eye and — winking.

Think of her father taking what was left of the shape her mother had when she was alive and driving round in the rain to find the places she’d want to be.

This thought of her father freed for George a moment of future-tense vision, by chance a summer vision, in which she will come home from school or London one day in a couple of months’ time and find him standing on the front lawn with the hose in his hand and what turns out to be a Beethoven symphony playing into his ears through the precious Bose headphones nobody else is allowed to touch, while he conducts a spray of water con brio then andante over the green of the new grass he’s had put in.

But back to now, or rather then, and Mrs Rock still a bit in shock at having been interrupted.

Mrs Rock brought her eyebrows down from the top of her head, where they’d gone. She placed a look on her face to show that she was waiting a moment to see if George was going to say anything else.

George placed a look in the same way on her own face to let Mrs Rock know she wasn’t going to say anything.

Mrs Rock breathed out slowly. She leaned forward. She told George she was glad George had told her the truth about saying that word and pretending she hadn’t. Then she settled back into her chair, because George had stayed silent so far at least, and started on about the Greek notion of the truth-teller.

This, Mrs Rock said, was a very important figure in Greek life and philosophy, usually someone with no power, no social status to speak of, who’d take it upon themselves to stand up to the highest authority when the authority was unjust or wrong, and would express out loud the most uncomfortable truths, even though by doing this they would probably even be risking their life.

Upon himself or herself, George said. He or she. His or her life. And, just to say, I find this second allusion, or example or illustration, much more effective than your minotaur one.

Mrs Rock put her pencil down on the desk with a click. She shook her head. She smiled.

Georgia, she said. As I’m sure you’re aware. You can be a little draconian at times.

I’ll take that as a compliment, Mrs Rock, George said.

Yes, Georgia, you may. Same time next Tuesday, Mrs Rock said. See you then.

George opens her notebook. It’s nearly noon.

This is the point in this story at which, according to its structure so far, a friend enters or a door opens or some kind of plot surfaces (but which kind? the one that means the place where a dead person’s buried? the one that means the place where a building’s to be built? the one that means a secret stratagem?); this is the place in this book where a spirit of twist in the tale has tended, in the past, to provide a friendly nudge forward to whatever’s coming next.

George is ready and waiting.

She plans to count the people and how long and how little time they spend looking or not looking at a random picture in a gallery.

What she doesn’t know yet is that in roughly half an hour or so, while she’s collating final figures (a hundred and fifty seven people will have passed through the room altogether and out of this number twenty five will have looked or glanced for no longer than a second; one woman will have stopped to look at the carving of the frame but not looked at the picture for longer than three seconds; two girls and a boy in their late teens will have stopped and made amused comments about St Vincent’s knot of monk hair, the growth like a third eye at the front of his forehead, and stood there looking at him for thirteen full seconds), this will happen:

[Enter Lisa Goliard]

George will recognize her immediately even from having seen her only once in an airport.

She will walk into this room in this gallery, glance round for a moment, see George, not know George from Adam, then come and stand in front of George between her and the painting of St Vincent Ferrer.

She’ll stand right in front of it for several minutes, far longer than anyone except George herself.

Then she’ll shoulder her designer bag and she’ll leave the room.

George will follow.

Standing close to the woman’s back, so long as there are enough people to camouflage her (and there will be), she will say the name like a question (Lisa?) on the stairs, just to make sure it’s her. She will see if the woman turns when she hears the name (she will), and will pretend when she does by looking away and making herself as much like an ordinary disaffected teenage girl as possible that it wasn’t her who said it.

George will surprise a talent in herself for being surreptitious.

She will track the woman, staying behind her and aping the ordinary disaffected teenage girl all the way across London including down into the Underground and back up into the open air, till that woman gets to a house and goes in and shuts its door.

Then George will stand across the road outside the house for a bit.

She will have no idea what to do next or even where she is in London any more.

She will see a low wall opposite the house. She will go and sit on it.

Okay.

1. Unless the woman is some kind of early renaissance specialist or St Vincent Ferrer expert (unlikely, but possible) there is no way she’d ever know about or think to make the journey specially to see this painting out of all the paintings in the whole of London. This will suggest that for her to have known anything about it, including the basic fact of its existence, she must still have been tailing, one way or another, George’s mother — unless she’s tracking George right now — at the time they went to Ferrara.

2. George’s mother is dead. There was a funeral. Her mother is rubble. So why is this woman still on the trail? Is she tracking George? (Unlikely. Anyway, now George is tracking her.)

3. (and George will feel her own eyes open wider at this one) Perhaps somewhere in all of this if you look there’s a proof of love.

This thought will make George furious.

At the same time it will fill her with pride at her mother, right all along. Most of all she will wonder at her mother’s sheer talent.

The maze of the minotaur is one thing. The ability to maze the minotaur back is another thing altogether.

Touché.

High five.

Both.

Consider for a moment this moral conundrum. Imagine it. You’re an artist.

Sitting on the wall opposite, George will get her phone out. She will take a picture.

Then she will take another picture.

After that she will sit there and keep her eye on that house for a bit.

The next time she comes here she will do the same. In honour of her mother’s eyes she will use her own. She will let whoever’s watching know she’s watching.

But none of the above has happened.

Not yet, anyway.

For now, in the present tense, George sits in the gallery and looks at one of the old paintings on the wall.

It’s definitely something to do. For the foreseeable.