How to be both

~ ~ ~

The first time H comes to the house again after New Year she hands George the A4 envelope she’s carrying under her arm. She takes off her jacket and hangs it up in the hall.

George holds the envelope back out for her to take.

It’s for you, H says.

What is it? George says.

I brought you some stars, H says. I printed them up off the net.

George opens it. Inside there’s a photograph on thick paper. It’s summer in the picture. Two women (both young, both between girl and woman) are walking along a road together past some shops in a very sunny-looking place. Is it now or is it in the past? One of them is yellow-haired and one of them is darker. The yellow-haired one, the smaller of the two, is looking at something off camera, off to her left. She’s wearing a gold and orange top. The dark-haired taller girl is wearing a short blue dress with a stripe round the edging of it. She is in the middle of turning to look at the other. There’s a breeze, so her hand has gone up to hold her hair back off her face. The yellow-haired one looks preoccupied, intent. The dark one looks as if something that’s been said has struck her and she’s about to say a yes.

Who are they? George says.

French, H says. From the 1960s. I was telling my mother about your sixties kick and I told her that story, the one you told in Maxwell’s class about the BT Tower and she wanted to know which singer it was and then she started looking up singers she’d liked, especially ones her mother’d liked, and she got annoyed that I didn’t know any of them and made me look them all up on YouTube. Then, when I did, I thought this one (she points at the blonde one) looked a bit like you.

Really? George says.

My mother says they were both huge stars, H says. Not together, separate stars. They both had huge careers and changed the music industry in France. My mother went on and on about it. Actually she went off on a tangent, I told her about your mother at one point and she went all (H starts doing a lightly French accent) it is not fair for your friend, she is not going to get the important boredoms and mournings and melancholies that are her due and are owing to her just from being the age that she is, for now it will be interrupted by real mournings and real melancholies, anyway then I thought I’d bring the picture round to get away from her going on about it, then I thought I could ask you if you want to come out to the car park with me.

A car park? George says.

The multi-storey, H says. Want to come?

Now? George says.

I guarantee it’ll be really boring, H says.

George looks out of the window. H’s bike is leaning against the wall outside. Her own bike is in the shed still with last summer’s puncture. In her head she can see the tyre useless in the dark, the bike all lopsided against the gardening stuff.

Okay, she says.

They walk towards town with H wheeling her bike between them. When they get to the multi-storey George goes towards the lift door but H puts a finger to her mouth then points at the glass-walled security cubicle. There’s a man in a uniform in it with what looks like a newspaper for a head. He’s asleep under it. H points at the fire doors that lead to the stairs. She opens one of the doors with great care. It’s heavy. George props it with her foot. When they’ve both squeezed through, H eases it closed.

It’s a Monday night in February so there aren’t many cars. There’s only one solitary four-wheel drive parked up on the top deck, which is the roof of the car park and is open air, open to the sky, its concrete flooring wet from the rain and shining under the car park lights.

George and H lean as far over the top deck wall as they can (they make them this high so it’ll be less inviting to suicides, H says). They look down at the roofs of their city, the streets near-empty, shining too after the rain. An occasional car passes below. Nobody much is out.

This is what the town will look like when I’m dead too, George thinks. And if I were to jump, right now? Nothing about it would change. They would just clean up whatever mess I’d make and then the next night it would rain or not rain, the street surface would be shiny or matt, the occasional car would pass below and on the busy days the traffic would queue up down there to park in here so people could go to the shops, this deck would fill with cars then later it’d empty of cars, and the months would pass one after the other, February coming round again, and again, and again, February after February after February, and this historic city would carry on being its historic self regardless.

She stops thinking it because H has fetched, by herself, by dragging it up the steps in the stairwell, the shopping trolley they passed on the way up which someone’d abandoned at the lift doors on the floor below.

It’s quite a new trolley. It crosses the concrete without too much noise.

Here, H says. Hold it steady for me.

George holds it still while H climbs into it, no, not so much climbs as vaults. All she has to do is take hold of the side and flick herself into the air and she’s in. It is pretty impressive.

How’s your chariot-driving? she says.

Put it this way, George says. There’s only one car up here and if I push you, no matter what direction I intend to push you in, you’ll hit it. And if you’re fortunate enough not to hit it –

She points at the steep entry and exit slopes that dip in real suddenness down to the next floor.

Ski-jump, H says. The ultimate challenge.

She glances above her head at where the security camera is. Then she jumps out of the trolley as easily as she jumped in.

Right, she says. You first.

She nods at George then nods towards the trolley.

No way, George says.

Go on, H says. Trust me.

No, George says.

We won’t do the slope, H says. I promise. I’ll be careful. I think we’ve time for one. If there’s time for two and he stays asleep and no one comes up I’ll get you to do me too.

She holds the trolley steady.

She’s waiting.

There’s nowhere for a foothold so George has to balance herself on the sides of it and sort of roll into it and turn herself the right way up again

(ouch).

Ready? H says.

George nods. She braces herself against the sides of the trolley and equally as much against the fact that she isn’t the kind of person who usually does something like this.

Want me to keep hold of it all the way across or just to push it really hard then let it go? H says.

The latter, George hears herself say.

She is quite surprised at herself.

Latter. Fortunate. You use words, H says, that I never hear anyone else using ever. You’re wild.

Literally, George says inside the cage of the trolley.

Latter. Fortunate. Literally. Here goes, H says.

H swings the trolley round so George is facing the expanse of the car park roof. She angles it away from the exit slopes. The next thing George knows is the way she’s forced backwards by a forward shove so strong that for a moment it’s like she’s going in two directions at once.

Later, back at home, George goes downstairs to make coffee and leaves Henry in her room talking to H.

Yeah, that’s her, H is saying. The heroine of the Anger Games.

It’s Hunger Games, Henry says.

Catnip, H says.

Her name’s not Catnip, Henry says.

By the time she gets back upstairs Henry and H are engaged in a kind of verbal ping-pong.

Henry: As blind as?

H: Houses.

(Henry laughs.)

Henry: As safe as?

H: A bell.

Henry: As bold as?

H: A cucumber.

(Henry rolls about on the floor laughing at the word cucumber.)

H: Okay. Switch!

Henry: Switch!

H: As keen as?

Henry: A cucumber.

H: As pleased as?

Henry: A cucumber.

H: As deaf as?

Henry: A cucumber.

H: You can’t just keep saying cucumber.

Henry: I can if I want.

H: Well, okay. Fair enough. But if you can, I can too.

Henry: Okay.

H: Cucumber.

Henry: Cucumber what?

H: I’m just playing it your way. Cucumber.

Henry: No, play it properly. As what as a what?

H: As cucumber as … a … cu–

Henry: Play it properly!

H: Likewise, Henry. Like plus wise.

When H goes home at eleven George literally feels it, the house become duller, as if all the light in it has stalled in the dim part that happens before a lightbulb has properly warmed up. The house becomes as blind as a house, as deaf as a house, as dry as a house, as hard as a house. George does all the things you’re meant to do before bed. She washes, she brushes her teeth, she takes off the clothes she’s been wearing in the daytime and puts on the clothes you’re meant to wear at night.

But in bed, instead of the usual jangling nothing in her head, she thinks about how H has a mother who is French.

She thinks about how H’s father is from Karachi and Copenhagen and how, H says, according to her father, it is actually perfectly possible to be from the north and the south and the east and the west all at once.

She thinks this is maybe where H gets her eyes from.

She thinks about the picture of the two French singers on her desk. She thinks about how she might be said to resemble a French girl singer from the 1960s.

She will put that picture up by itself, give it a whole wall like she’s done with the poster her mother bought her of the film actress when they went to the museum in Ferrara and saw the exhibition about the director her mother liked who always used this actress in his films.

She thinks about how she’s never cycled two on a bike before, where one person does the cycling by standing on the pedals and the other person sits on the seat and holds on to her at the waist but loosely enough so that she can continue to move quite freely up and down.

She thinks about how polite H was when she apologized to the security man at the car park. In the end he had seemed rather charmed even as he’d threatened them with the police.

Finally she lets herself think about how it feels:

to be so frightened that you almost can’t breathe

to speed so fast and be so completely out of control

to know the meaning of helpless

to spin across a shining space knowing any moment you might end up hurt, but likewise, all the same, like plus wise you just might not.

Then she wakes up and for once it’s morning and she has slept right through without any of the usual waking up.

The next time H comes to the house George isn’t expecting her and is in her mother’s study. She has sneaked in there where she’s not meant to be and is sitting at the desk with the big dictionary open looking to see if LIA, without the R, happens to be a word in its own right.

(It doesn’t.)

She looks at the list of words that begin with LIA. She imagines her mother in the dock in a courtroom. Yes, your honour, I did write the word above his head, but I wasn’t writing the word you imagine. I was writing the word LIANA and a liana, as I’m sure you know your honour, is a twisting woody tropical plant which can hold the weight of a man swinging through the trees, familiar to us for instance from the Tarzan films of my youth. From this it should be easy to deduce that the word I was writing would have been meant finally as a compliment.

Or

Yes, your honour, but it was going to be the word LIATRIS, which your honour may or may not already know is a plant but can also mean a blazing star, from which it should be easy to deduce etc.

No. Because her mother would never have lied like that about what she was writing. Lying and equivocating are what George, not her mother, would do if she’d been caught writing some word on a window above someone important’s head.

Not that her mother was caught.

Though George probably would have been.

Her mother, instead, would have said something simple and true like, yes your honour I cannot tell a lie, I believe him to be a liar which is precisely why I was writing the word.

I cannot tell a lie. It was me who chopped down the cherry tree. Now that I’ve been so honest, make me a precedent. No, not president. I said precedent.

That’d maybe be worth £5 for a Subvert, if her mother were here.

(But now that she isn’t, does that make it worthless?)

There are also the possible words LIAS, LIANG, LIARD. A sort of stone, a Chinese weight measure, a greyish colour and a coin worth very little (it is interesting to George that the word liard can mean both money and a colour).

There is the word LIABLE.

There is the word LIAISON.

(I bet its in a cathedral city up in some fancy cathedral ceiling hanging out with the carvings of the angels.

I bet its

its)

Wrong.

The wrongness of it is infuriating.

The George from after can still feel the fury at the wrongness of things that beat such huge dents into the chest of the George from before.

She turns on the chair. H is in the doorway.

Your dad let me in, she says. I went up to your room but you weren’t there.

H had decided earlier that day at school that a good way to do revision would be for them to transfer what they needed to remember into song lyrics and learn to sing them to the tune of some song they both know. This, H says, will make information unforgettable. They both have a test next week in biology and George also has a test in Latin.

So what we can do, H said, is: I’ll make up the biology version and we can learn it off by heart then you can translate it into Latin for double the benefit.

They’d been standing in the corridor outside history.

What do you think? H had said.

What I’m thinking is, George said. When we die.

Uh huh? H said.

Do you think we still have memories? George said.

This was her test question.

H wasn’t even fazed. She was never fazed by anything. She made a face, but it was a thinking face.

Hmm, she’d said.

Then she’d shrugged and said,

Who knows?

George had nodded. Good answer.

Now H is here, turning on one foot and looking at all the piles of books and papers and pictures.

Wow. What a place, she says. What’s this place?

What’s this place? George turns on the swivel chair her mother specially bought for this study and catches, at the corner of her eye, the framed and printed-out first-ever Subvert. It’s a list of the names of all the women art students who went to an art college in London over three years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. This list with no explanation attached flashed up for a month on the online pages of anyone who looked up the word Slade (including people who’d chanced to be looking up things about the band with all the old men in it who wrote that Christmas song). It came about because George’s mother had been reading a biography of a quite famous artist from the turn of that century and had become more and more interested in what had happened to his wife, whom he’d met at the same art school. She’d been a student too but had died really young after having more children than her body could handle having (George’s mother is a feminist). (Was.) Before this woman died (well obviously) she had had a friend called Edna who was also a student at the school. In fact Edna’d been one of the most talented artists in the place. Edna had gone on to marry a well-to-do type. One day this well-to-do type had come home to find Edna’s paints and brushes spread out on the dining-room table and had told Edna to put all this rubbish away. It was before Henry was born. George and her mother and father were on holiday in Suffolk staying in a cottage. Her mother had been reading this book. She got to the page where this happened to Edna and she burst into tears in the garden. That’s the story. George has no memory of it but the story goes that her mother raged round the cottage’s garden like a mad person and that the letting agency had sent a bill afterwards for some of the plants she’d wrecked. Your mother is a very passionate person, her father always said whenever the story got told. Anyway Edna’s life hadn’t been so bad after all in the end because the husband had died quite early on and she herself had gone on to live till she was a hundred and to show lots of pictures in galleries and even to be called, by a reputable newspaper, the most imaginative artist in England (though she did have a nervous breakdown at one point, and at another point in history her studio got hit by a bomb and totally destroyed along with lots of her work).

All of this information flashes through George’s head in that fraction of a second it takes to do the single swivel round towards H in her mother’s chair and say the words:

It’s my mother’s study.

Cool, H says.

She puts a piece of paper with her writing all over it down next to George on the desk. She picks up a picture off the top of a pile of letters. George looks to see what she’s picked up.

She liked that picture so much, George says, that we went all the way to Italy to see it.

Who is it? H says.

I don’t know, George says. Just some man. On a wall. In a kind of blue space.

Who did it? H says.

I don’t know that either, George says.

She looks down at the song she’s meant to translate into Latin. She has no idea what the Latin for DNA will be.

To The Tune Of Wrecking Ball

(Verse 1)

Herr Friedrich Miescher found it in / some pus in 1869 / Crick, Watson and Ros Franklin saw / the two strands intertwined like vine. / Double helix in 1953 / X-Ray photo ’52. / Franklin died before Nobel Prize Award / Life not one strand but two.

(Chorus)

G — A - T — C and D — NA / Deoxyribonu-cleic / Guanine-adenine-thymine cytosine / Supercoil can be both / Po — o - si tive / Yeah and /Ne — e - g a tive.

(Verse 2)

Plants fungi animals make up / The eukaryotes / Bacteria and archaea / The prokaryotes / It’s A&T or it’s G&C that’s the / Only way it will do / Two long chromosomes, codons three letters long / I will always want you.

H is still standing looking at the picture of the man in rags.

That last line’s just there for scansion, she says. While I decide what else to use.

She holds up the picture of the man.

When in history is this from? she says.

It’s from a palace, George says. If you look up the words Ferrara Palazzo in Images, Ferrara’s the place we saw it, you’ll probably find it.

She looks at the song again.

I don’t think I can translate much more than three or four lines of this into Latin, she says. A lot of it also already looks pretty Greek.

Do the last line first, H says.

She is sort of grinning. She is looking away, still looking at the picture of the ragged man.

The one line we’re not going to need or use and that’s the one you want first in Latin? George says.

I’d just quite like to hear it in Latin, H says.

She is grinning broadly now and still looking away. She sits down on the floor.

She’s waiting.

Okay, George says. But can I ask you something first?

Yep, H says.

It’s a hypothetical, George says.

I’m not much good with them, H says. I’ve been known to faint whenever I see a needle.

George gets off her mother’s chair and comes and sits opposite H cross-legged on the floor too.

If I were to say to you that while my mother was alive she was being monitored, she says.

For health, or? H says. For diet, or what?

George speaks a little more quietly because her father doesn’t like her saying this stuff, she made it up to distract herself from her life and how do you think that makes me feel, George? And you’re making it up to distract yourself from her death. She was being adolescent. So are you. Get a grip. Interpol and MI5 and MI6 and MI7 were not interested in your mother. He has specifically instructed her to stop it, and has been known to lose his head about it if George does mention it, even though he’s being generally self-consciously gentle at most other times, what with everything being so post-death.

By people in, you know. Like on TV, George says. Except not like on TV, there weren’t bombs or guns or torture or anything, there was just this person. Sort of keeping an eye on her.

Oh, H says. That kind of monitored.

If I were to say it, George says. Would you think words like deluded and paranoid and needs to be put on some kind of medication?

H thinks about it. Then she nods.

You would? George says.

Not living in the real world, H says.

Something inside George’s chest falls. It is a relief, after all, the kind of relief where everything feels both bruised and released.

H is still speaking.

More likely that your mother was being minotaured, she is saying.

It isn’t a joke, George says.

I’m not joking, H says. I mean, it’s not like we live in mythical times. It’s not like we live in a world where the police, say, would ever minotaur the people whose son’s murder they were supposed to be investigating, or the press would minotaur famous people or even dead people to make money out of them.

Ha, George says.

It’s not like the government would minotaur us, H says. I mean, not our government. Obviously all the undemocratic and less good and less civilized ones would do it to their citizens. But our own one. I mean, they might minotaur the people they needed to know about. But they’d never do it to ordinary people, say through their emails or mobiles, or through the games they play on their mobiles. And it’s not like the shops we buy things from do it to us either, is it, every time we buy something. You’re deluded and insane. There’s no such thing as a minotaur. It’s mythical. And your mother was, what? Quite a political person? Someone who published stuff about money in the papers? And did disruptive stuff on the net? Why would anyone want to monitor her? I think your imaginings are dangerous. Someone should monitor you.

She looks up.

I’d do it, she says. I’d have done it, if it was you.

If it had been you, George says inside her head.

I’d have minotaured you for free, H says.

She looks George laughingly and seriously right in the eye.

Or maybe, if it were you, George thinks.

She lies down flat on her back on her mother’s carpet. Her mother got this carpet at an antique shop off Mill Road. Well, antique. Junk shop, really.

H lies down next to her so that their heads are level.

Both girls stare at the ceiling.

The thing is, doctor, H says.

George hears her from the miles away where she’s thinking about what the differences might be, and what her mother would have said they were, between antiques and just old junk.

I have this need, H is saying.

What need? George says.

To be more, H says.

More what? George says.

Well, H says and her voice sounds strangely altered. More.

Oh, George says.

I think I might be, by nature, H says, a bit more hands-on than hypothetical.

Then one of her hands reaches and takes one of George’s hands.

The hand doesn’t just take George’s hand, it interlaces its fingers with it.

This is the point at which all the words drain out of the part of George’s brain where words are kept.

H’s hand holds her hand for a moment, then H’s hand lets go of her hand.

Yes? she says. No?

George doesn’t speak

I can slow down, H says. I can wait. I can wait till it’s right. I can do that.

Then she says,

Or maybe you don’t —.

George doesn’t speak.

Maybe I’m not —, H says.

Then George’s father is at the door of the room, he’s been there for God knows how long. George sits up.

Girls, he says. George. You know I don’t want you in there. Nothing’s sorted. There’s a lot of important stuff, I don’t want anything messed with in there. And I thought you were organizing supper tonight, George.

I am, George says. I will. I’m just about to.

Is your friend staying for supper? her father says.

No, Mr Cook, I’ve got to be home, H says.

She is still lying on her back on the floor.

You’re very welcome to stay, Helena, her father says. There’ll be plenty.

Thanks, Mr Cook, H says. It’s really nice of you. I’m expected at home.

You can stay for supper, George says.

No I can’t, H says.

She gets up.

See you, she says.

A minute later she is not in the room any more.

A moment after that George hears the front door of the house closing.

George lies back down flat on the carpet again.

She is not a girl. She is a block of stone.

She is a piece of wall.

She is something against which other things impact without her permission or understanding.

It is last May in Italy. George and her mother and Henry are sitting after supper at a table outside a restaurant under some arches near the castle. Her mother has been going on and on to them (well, to George, because Henry is on a computer game) about fresco structure, about how when some frescoes in a different Italian city were damaged in the 1960s in bad flooding and the authorities and restorers removed them to mend them as best they could, they found, underneath them, the underdrawing their artists had made for them, and sometimes the underdrawings were significantly different from their surfaces, which is something they’d never have discovered if there hadn’t been the damage in the first place.

George is only half listening because the game Henry is looking at on the iPad is called Injustice and George thinks Henry is far too young for it.

What game is it? her mother says.

It’s the one where all the cartoon superheroes have turned evil, George says. It’s really violent.

Henry, her mother says.

She takes an earphone out of one of Henry’s ears.

What? Henry says.

Find something less violent to do on there, his mother says.

Okay, Henry says. If I must.

You must, his mother says.

Henry puts the earphone back in and clicks off the game. He clicks on a download of Horrible Histories instead. Pretty soon he is giggling to himself. Not long after that he falls asleep at the table with his head on the iPad.

But which came first? her mother says. The chicken or the egg? The picture underneath or the picture on the surface?

The picture below came first, George says. Because it was done first.

But the first thing we see, her mother said, and most times the only thing we see, is the one on the surface. So does that mean it comes first after all? And does that mean the other picture, if we don’t know about it, may as well not exist?

George sighs heavily. Her mother points across the way, to the castle wall. A bus goes past. Its whole back is an advert for something in which there’s a Madonna and child picture as if from the past, except the mother is showing the baby Jesus how to look something up on an iPad.

We’re sitting here having our supper, her mother is saying, and looking at everything that’s round us. And over there. Right there in front of us. If this was a night seventy years ago –

— yeah, but it isn’t, George says. It’s now.

— we’d be sitting here watching people being lined up and shot against that wall. Along from where those seats for the café bar are.

Uch. God, George says. Mum. How do you even know that?

Would it be better, or worse, or truer, or falser, if I didn’t? her mother says.

George scowls. History is horrible. It is a mound of bodies pressing down into the ground below cities and towns in the unending wars and the famines and the diseases, and all the people starved or done away with or rounded up and shot or tortured and left to die or put up against the walls near castles or stood in front of ditches and shot into them. George is appalled by history, its only redeeming feature being that it tends to be well and truly over.

And which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. What we see or how we see?

Yeah, but that thing happening. With the shooting. It was aeons ago, George says.

Only twenty years before me, and here I am sitting here right now, her mother says.

Ancient history, George says.

That’s me, her mother says. And yet here I am. Still happening.

But it isn’t, George says. Because that was then. This is now. That’s what time is.

Do things just go away? her mother says. Do things that happened not exist, or stop existing, just because we can’t see them happening in front of us?

They do when they’re over, George says.

And what about the things we watch happening right in front of us and still can’t really see? her mother says.

George rolls her eyes.

Totally pointless discussion, she says.

Why? her mother says.

Okay. That castle, George says. It’s right in front of us, yes?

So I see, her mother says.

I mean, you can’t not, George says. Unless your eyes don’t work. And even if your eyes didn’t work, you’d still be able to go up to it and touch it, you’d be able to register it being there one way or another.

Absolutely, her mother says.

But though it’s the same castle as it was when it was built way back when, and it has its history, George says, and all the things have happened to it and in it and round it and so on ad infinitum, that’s nothing to do with us sitting here looking at it right now. Apart from it being scenery because we’re tourists.

Do tourists see differently from other people? her mother says. And how can you have grown up in the town you’ve grown up in and not consider what the presence of the past might mean?

George yawns ostentatiously.

Best place in the world to learn how to ignore it, she says. Taught me everything I’ll ever need to know. Especially about tourism. And growing up around historic buildings. I mean. They’re just buildings. You’re always talking such crap about things meaning more than they actually mean. It’s like some drippy hippy hangover, like you were inoculated with hippiness when you were little and now you can’t help but treat everything as if it’s symbolic.

That castle, her mother says, was built by order of the Estense court, the d’Estes being the family who ruled this province for hundreds of years and the people responsible for so much of the art and poetry and music. And therefore for the art and writing and music that followed it, which you and I take for granted. If it wasn’t for Ariosto, who flourished because of this court, there’d be a very different Shakespeare. If there’d even be a Shakespeare at all.

Yeah, maybe, but it’s hardly relevant now, George says.

You know, Georgie, nothing’s not connected, her mother says.

You always call me Georgie when you want to patronize me, George says.

And we don’t live on a flat surface, her mother says. That castle, this city, were built all those irrelevant centuries ago by a family whose titles and hereditaries come down in more or less a direct connection to Franz Ferdinand.

The band? George says.

Yes, her mother says. The pop band whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 brought about World War One.

World War One is like a whole hundred years ago next year, George says. You can hardly call it relevant to us any more.

What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And meant I inherited his weak lungs? Not relevant to us? her mother says. And then the break-up of the Balkans, and the start of the territorial trouble in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the civil unrest in Ireland, and the shifts of power in Russia, and the power shifts in the Ottoman empire, and the bankruptcy, economic catastrophe and social unrest in Germany, all of which played a huge part in the rise of Fascism and in the bringing about of another war in which, as it happens, your own grandmother and grandfather — who happened to be my mother and father — both fought when they were just two or three years older than you? Not relevant? To us?

Her mother shakes her head.

What? George says. What?

A well-heeled Cambridge childhood, her mother says.

She laughs a laugh to herself. The laugh infuriates George.

Why did you and dad choose to live there, then, if you didn’t want us to grow up there? she says.

Oh, you know, her mother says. Good schools. Proximity to London. Buoyant housing market that’d always hold its own in recession. All the things that really matter in life.

Is her mother being ironic? It’s hard to tell.

Very good food-bank system for when you leave school and your father and I can’t afford to send you to university and eat, and for later too for you when you come out of university, her mother says.

That’s such an irresponsible thing to say, George says.

Well but at least it’s new and contemporary, my irresponsibility, her mother says.

The tables round them are emptying. It’s late and quite a bit cooler. There’s been rain beyond the arches while they’ve sat here eating and arguing. Her mother puts a hand into her handbag and pulls out a jumper. She gives it to George to put round Henry’s shoulders. Then she gets her phone out of her bag. She switches it on. Guilt and fury. After a moment, she switches it off. George feels so guilty she is nearly sick with guilt. She formulates, quick, the kind of question she knows her mother likes to answer.

You know that place we went to earlier today? George says.

Uh huh, her mother says.

Do you think any women artists did any of it? George says.

Her mother forgets the phone in her hand and immediately holds forth (just as George knew she would).

She tells George how there are a few renaissance painters they know about who happen to have been women, but not very many, a negligible percentage. She tells her about one called Catherine who was brought up by the court here, in that castle right there, because she was the daughter of a nobleman and one of the women of the Estense court took her under her wing and made sure she had a superb education. Then Catherine had gone into a nunnery, which was a good place to go if you were a woman and wanted to paint, and while she was there she became a celebrated nun and she wrote books and painted pictures on the side, about which nobody really found out until after she died.

Her paintings are quite lovely, her mother says. And you can actually still see Catherine today.

You mean through sensing her personality by looking at the paintings etc, George says.

No, I mean quite literally, her mother says. In the flesh.

How? George says.

In a church in Bologna, her mother says. When they made her a saint they dug her up — there’s all sorts of testimonials about how sweet the smell was when they dug her up –

Mum, George says.

— and they put her in a box in a church dedicated to her, and if you go there you can still see her, she’s gone black with age and she’s sitting in the box and holding a book and some kind of holy monstrance.

That’s insane, George says.

But other than something like that happening? her mother says. No. It’s pretty unlikely that women worked on much that’s extant, certainly on anything we saw today. Though if I had to, I don’t know, write a paper about it or try to make a thesis about it, I could make a pretty good one about the vaginal shape here –

Mum, George says.

— we’re in Italy, George, it’s all right, no one knows what I’m saying, her mother says drawing a diamond shape at her own breastbone, the vaginal shape here on that beautiful worker in the rags in the blue section, the most virile and powerful figure in the whole room, much more so than the Duke, who’s supposed to be the subject and the hero of that room, and which must surely have caused a bit of trouble for the artist, especially since that figure’s a worker or a slave and also clearly black or Semitic. And how the open shape at his chest complements the way the painter makes the rope round his waist a piece of simultaneously dangling and erect phallic symbolism –

(her mother did an art history degree once)

— and as to the constant sexual and gender ambiguities running through the whole work

(and a women’s studies degree)

— at least the part of it that this particular artist seems to have produced, well. Or if we want to be more detailed about it. The way he used that figure of the effeminate boy, the boyish girl, to balance the powerful masculine effect of the worker, and how this figure holds both an arrow and a hoop, male and female symbols one in each hand. On this alone I could make a reasonably witty argument for its originator being female, if I had to. But as to likelihood?

How does she even remember seeing all these things, George thinks. I saw the same room, the exact same room as she did, we were both standing in the very same place, and I didn’t see any of it.

Her mother shakes her head.

Slim, George, I’m sorry to say.

That night in their hotel room before they go to bed her mother is brushing her teeth in the bathroom. This hotel used to be someone’s house in the years when people made frescoes. It is called the Prisciani Suite and was the actual house of someone who had something to do with the making of the frescoes at the palace where they went to see the pictures earlier (it says so at the door in a long information panel which George, who doesn’t speak Italian, has tried to decipher). There are still some bits of the original frescoes the man from back then will have lived with on the walls of this room — George has even touched them. They go right the way up the wall, up past the mezzanine where Henry is asleep above them on a small single bed. You can touch them if you like. Nothing says not to. Pellegrino Prisciani. Pellegrino, like the bottles of water, she’d said. And the bird, her mother’d said. What bird? George had said. The peregrine falcon, her mother’d said, pellegrino means a pilgrim, and at some point it also morphed into what we know as the name of the bird.

Is there anything her mother doesn’t know about?

The hotel is full of art. Above the bed she and her mother will sleep in is a modern piece by an Italian artist from now. It is shaped like a giant eye but with a propeller at one end like an aircraft, except the propeller looks like it’s been made with giant sycamore seeds. The strip of metal or whatever it is that’s meant to be the pupil has a snail shell stuck to the upper curve of it and the whole thing moves very slowly in the air above the bed so that it almost seems possible the snail might also be moving, even though it’s obvious it’s not. There is a panel on the wall about the artwork. Leon Battista Alberti regalo a Leonello d’Este un manoscritto in cui compariva il disegno dell’occhio alato. Questa raffigurazione allegorica rappresenta l’elevazione l’intellettuale: l’occhio simbolo della divinita, le ali simbolo della velocita, o meglio della conoscenza intuitiva, la sola che permette di accedere alla contemplazione e alla vera conoscenza. Leon Battista Alberti, whoever he was, regaled Leonello d’Este (important if he was an Este since they were, George has gathered, like the royals of Ferrara) a manuscript in which, something about comparing, and design, and some words George doesn’t know. But that one, occhio, might be eye or eyes, not just because the artwork is obviously an eye, but because of the word oculist. A refiguring allegory and represent and intellectual elevation, the eye symbolizes divinity, something symbolizes velocity, blah, intuition, permitting, contemplation –

George gives up.

Her mother’s phone, in its pouch, is on the bedside table.

Guilt and fury. Guilt and fury.

There is something her mother doesn’t know about, George thinks looking up at that eye.

The giant eye turns on its own in the air above the bed and George glows and fades below it like her whole self is a faulty neon.

George is tired of art. She is fed up of its always knowing best.

I want to come clean about something, she says when her mother comes out of the bathroom.

Uh huh? her mother says. What would that be?

It would be something I did that I shouldn’t have done, George says.

What? her mother says stopping halfway across the room, the moisturizer jar in one hand and its lid in the other.

I’ve been feeling bad for months, George says.

Her mother puts the stuff in her hands down and comes over and sits on the bed next to her.

Sweet heart, she says. Stop worrying right now. Whatever it is. Everything is forgivable.

I don’t know that this is forgivable, George says.

Her mother’s face is all concern.

Okay, she says. Tell me.

George doesn’t tell her mother about the time she looked at the phone and saw the text conversation about losing your voice and the carvings of angels. But she does tell her about the day when her mother’s phone had flashed on, on the sideboard in the kitchen, and George had seen the name Lisa Goliard lighting it up.

Uh huh? her mother says.

George decides to leave out the bit it said about her mother’s eyes.

It said How you doin what you doin where are you & whenll we meet, George says.

Her mother is nodding.

And the thing is, George says. I sent a reply.

Did you? her mother says. A message from you?

A message from you, George says.

From me? her mother says.

I wrote it pretending to be you, George says. I’ve been feeling really bad about it. I know I shouldn’t have looked. I should never have invaded your privacy. And I know I shouldn’t have pretended to be you under any circumstances.

What did I say? Can you remember? her mother says.

By heart, George says.

And? her mother says.

I’m ever so sorry Lisa but I am very busy spending quality time with my family and am so taken up with all the loving things happening with my husband and two children that I’m afraid I won’t be able to meet with you for some considerable time, George says.

Her mother explodes into laughter. George is stunned. Her mother is laughing like it’s the funniest thing she’s heard in a long time.

Oh you’re a beauty, George, you really are, you’re a perfect beauty, she says. Did she write back?

Yes, George says. She wrote back and said, like, Are you all right you don’t sound like you.

Her mother slaps the bed in delight.

And I wrote back, George says, and said I am very well thank you just very busy with important and time-consuming private family matters but so busy that I no longer have much time even to look at this phone. I will be in touch with you so please don’t get in touch with me. Goodbye for now. And then I deleted my messages. And then I deleted her messages.

Her mother laughs so loudly and so delightedly that Henry, asleep above them, wakes up and comes downstairs to see what’s happening.

When they’ve got Henry back to bed and settled again they get into bed themselves. Her mother puts the lights off. They listen for Henry’s breathing to regulate. It soon does.

Then this is the story her mother tells her quietly in the dark:

One day I was waiting at a cash machine in King’s Cross and there was this woman ahead of me, about the same age as me.

As I am, George says.

George, her mother says. Whose story is this?

Sorry, George says.

She gave me a smile because we were both waiting our turn. The bag she had at her feet was open, it was full of things that interested me, rolls of artisan paper and a big ball of green yarn or wool or gardening string, and a great many pens and pencils and some metal tools and rulers. Anyway her turn came and she was putting her numbers in and then she started patting all her pockets and riffling through that open bag and looking at the ground all around her feet and I said, are you looking for something? can I help? And she clapped her hand to her forehead and she said when did I become the kind of person who panics about where her bank card is when she’s at a cashpoint in the middle of getting money out of it when the card is right there in front of her, it’s just that she’s forgotten she’s actually put it into the machine? Which made me laugh because I recognized myself in it. And we had a chat and I asked her about the rolls of paper in her bag and she told me she made books, one-offs, like artworks, books that were themselves also art objects. You know me. I was interested. We swapped emails.

About a fortnight later there was a message from this woman in my inbox, all it said was: what do you think? and when I opened the attachment it was some photos of a beautiful little book, all colours and swerving written lines and figures, sort of like if Matisse had written it, and I wrote back and told her I really liked it, and she emailed me back saying but should I be doing something different with my life? and I was struck by the intimacy of the question, from a stranger to a virtual stranger. I wrote back and said, do you want to do something different with your life? Then I didn’t hear anything and I forgot about her again. Until one day she left me a voicemail inviting me to lunch, which was odd because I didn’t remember ever giving her my phone number, you know me, I never give it out. The voicemail said she had something to show me and invited me to come to her workshop first.

It was pretty exciting going there. There was lots of printers’ type, drawers of it open and half open, and inks and paint everywhere, and machines for cutting, and an old press, and bottles full of who knows what, fixatives, colours, I don’t know. I loved it.

The thing she wanted to show me was a glass box. She was making a set of books for a commission for someone who wanted her to make three of these books then deliver them to him sealed in a glass case. So these books would be full of beautifully decorated pages that no one’d ever be able to look at, without breakage at least.

And she sat there and said, so my quandary is, Carol, do I even bother to fill these books with beautiful text and pictures or do I just rough up their edges so it looks like there’s something in them, you know, wear them out and smudge them about a bit so it looks like they’ve been well worked, and deliver them to him and get paid and get away with doing much less work myself? Do I choose to be a charlatan or do I make quite a lot of work that the risk is no one will ever even see?

We went for lunch and we got quite drunk. She said, this is exciting for me because I get to watch you eat, and I said, what? really? something like that excites you?

But all the same. How flattering. Someone wanted to watch me eat.

Weird, George says.

Her mother smothers a laugh to herself.

I liked her more and more, she says. She was repressed and respectable and anarchic and rude and unexpected, she was trivial and wild both at once, like a bad girl from school. And she was lovely. She was attentive, sweet to me. And there was something, some glimmer of something. She’d look at me and I’d know there was something real in it, and I liked it, I liked how she paid attention to me, my life. Like she personally cared how I was feeling from day to day or what I was doing from one hour to the next. And she did kiss me, once. Properly, I mean against a wall, a real kiss –

Oh God, George says.

That’s exactly what your father said, her mother says.

You told dad? George says.

Of course I did, her mother says. I tell your dad everything. Anyway sweet heart, after that I knew it was a game. You always know where you are after a kiss. It was a pretty good kiss, George, I liked it fine. But all the same –

(I will never forgive her, George is thinking)

— I knew after it something didn’t quite ring true, her mother says. She was always so curious, about where I was, what I was doing, who I was doing it with, who else I was meeting up with or working with, especially that and what I was working on, what I was writing about, what I thought about this or that, it was constant, and I thought, well, that’s a bit like love, that obsessiveness, when people are in love they need to know the strangest things, so maybe it is love, perhaps it just feels this odd to me because it’s the kind of love that can’t be expressed unless we both choose to really mess up our lives. Which I’d no intention of doing, George. I know how good my life is. And, I presumed, neither had she, any such intention, she has a life too, a husband, kids. At least I think she does. At least, I saw some photos once.

But then there was the day I went to see her in her workshop without telling her I was coming, and I knocked on the door and a woman came to the door, she was wearing overalls, and I asked for Lisa and she said who? And I said Lisa Goliard, this is her bookmaking workshop, and the woman said, no, that’s not my name, I’m whatever, and this is my bookmaking workshop, can I help you? And I said, but you sometimes let your workshop to other printers or bookmakers, yes? and she looked at me as if I was crazy and said she was really busy and was there anything she could help me with, and it’s as I was walking away that it came to me that the whole time I’d known Lisa, which was by then a couple of years, I’d never see her once make or do anything in that workshop. We’d just sat around in it, talking. I’d never seen her write anything, or bind anything, or print anything, or cut anything.

And then when I got home I looked her up online and there were the same couple of web pages that I’d looked at before, a page still saying Site Coming Soon and a link to a bookseller in Cumbria, but not much else. In fact nothing else. Not a trace.

She almost didn’t exist, George says. She only just existed.

Not that an absence online means anything, her mother says. She definitely existed. Definitely exists.

If this was a film or a novel, she’d turn out to be a spy, George says.

I know, her mother says.

She says it quite happily in the dark next to George.

It’s possible, she says. It’s not at all impossible. Though it seems improbable. It wouldn’t surprise me. I did meet her rather oddly, it did all happen very oddly. It’s as if someone had looked at my life and calculated exactly how to attract me, then how to fool me once my attention was caught. Quite an art. And she’s quite a nice spy. If she is one.

Is there such a thing as a nice spy? George says.

I wouldn’t have said so before, her mother says. We even had conversations about it, we had a running joke. I’d say, you’re in intelligence, aren’t you, and she’d say I’m afraid I can’t possibly answer that question.

Did you tell her you’d rumbled her workshop? George says.

I did, her mother says. I told her I’d gone and it hadn’t been her workshop the day I went. She laughed and said I’d met the other person who worked there occasionally, and how this person owned the building and was fearful that the authorities, the council, would know she was letting space to other people so always swore no one used it but her whenever she was asked. And when she told me that, I thought, well, that’s perfectly feasible, that explains that, and at exactly the same time I could feel myself thinking, well, that explains that away. I think this double-think is the reason I started to see much less of her.

But George, what I’m about to say, I don’t expect you to understand it till you’re older –

Thanks, George says.

No, her mother says. I’m really not being patronizing. But understanding something like what I’m going to say takes having a bit of age. Some things really do take time. Because even though I suspected I’d been played, there was something. It was true, and it was passionate. It was unsaid. It was left to the understanding. To the imagination. That in itself was pretty exciting. What I’m saying is, I quite liked it. Even if I was being played. And most of all, my darling. The being seen. The being watched. It makes life very, well I don’t know. Pert.

Pert? George says. What kind of a word is pert?

The being watched over, her mother says. It was really something.

But by a spy and a liar? George says.

Seeing and being seen, Georgie, is very rarely simple, her mother says.

Are, George says.

What? her mother says.

Are very rarely simple, George says. Did you tell dad she was a spy? What did he say?

He said (and here her mother puts on a voice that’s supposed to be her father), Carol, nobody is monitoring you. It’s a sub-repressed expression. You’re attracted to her middle-classness. She’s attracted to your working-class origins. It’s a classic class-infatuation paranoia and you’re both making up an adolescent drama to make your own lives more interesting.

Does dad not know about how there are no longer just three but a hundred and fifty different social classes to which it can be decided that we belong? George says.

Her mother laughs in the dark next to George.

Anyway, sweet heart. Games run their course. I got a bit tired of it. I stopped being in touch with her back in the winter.

Yeah. I know, George says.

I was a bit down about it, her mother says. You know?

We all know, George says. You’ve been awful.

Have I? her mother says and laughs gently. Well, I missed her. I still miss her. It felt like I had a friend. She was my friend. And God, George, something about it made me feel permitted.

Permitted? George says. That’s insane.

I know. Allowed, her mother says. Like I was being allowed. It made me laugh, when I realized it. Then it made me feel rather, well, special. Like a character in a film who suddenly develops an aura of light all round her. Can you imagine?

Frankly? No, George says.

Can we never get to go beyond ourselves? her mother says. Never get to be more than ourselves? Will I ever, as far as you’re concerned, be allowed to be anything other than your mother?

No, George says.

And why is that? her mother says.

Because you’re my mother, George says.

Ah, her mother says. I see. Anyway. I quite enjoyed it, while it lasted. Am I mad, George?

Frankly? Yes, George says.

And at least now I know why the texts asking why I wasn’t in touch stopped coming. Ha ha! her mother says.

Good, George says.

How funny, her mother says.

Your Lisa Goliard, or whoever she really is in the real world when she’s not pretending to be someone else, can fuck off back to spy-land, George says.

There is a short disapproving silence in which George senses she’s gone too far. Then her mother says

Please don’t use language like that, George.

It’s okay. He’s asleep, George says.

He might be. But I’m not, her mother says.

Said.

That was then.

This is now.

It’s February now.

But I’m not.

Her mother’s now not anything.

George lies in bed with her hands behind her head and remembers the one time in her life she ever saw Lisa Goliard in the flesh.

They were all on their way on holiday to Greece, they were in the airport pretty early, half past six in the morning, they were getting breakfast in a Pret and she turned to ask her mother to get her a tomato and mozzarella hot thing. But her mother wasn’t there. Her mother’d fallen back, was behind them talking to a woman with long white-looking hair though the woman was young, and beautiful, which George could tell even just from looking at her back; and something about her mother was most strange, she was sort of standing on tiptoes, was she? as if straining upwards, like trying to reach something just too high off a tall shelf, a very high apple off a tree. The person leaned forward and put her hand on George’s mother’s shoulder and kissed her on the cheek and as she turned to say a final goodbye George caught the moment of her face.

Who was that? George asked her mother.

Her mother went on and on. Coincidence, the friend who makes books, what are the chances of, well that was a surprise.

George watched her mother’s colour rise and change.

It took a long time for her mother’s colour to return to normal. It took half the plane journey — most of northern Europe — before her mother’s colour had calmed down.

The minotaur is a bull-headed half-man who’s been placed at the centre of a dastardly labyrinth. Every so often the king, whose wife gave birth to this monster, has to feed it live youths and maidens as a sacrifice. The monster is defeated by a hero with a sword and the labyrinth is defeated by a simple ball of string. Isn’t that how it goes?

George gets up and goes over to the door and gets her phone out of the pocket of the jeans hanging on the back. It is 1.23 a.m. It is a bit late to text anyone.

She texts H.

— There is something I need to know.

There’s no answer. George texts again.

— Did you do that minotaur joke because you think that me thinking she was being monitored is a load of bull?

Dark.

Nothing.

George hunkers down in the bed. She tries not to think about anything.

The next day at school, though, H won’t really speak to George. Not in an unpleasant way but in a polite and nodding and turning-away way. It is possibly because she does think George is paranoid and mad. George speaks and it’s not that H doesn’t reply, but she doesn’t really speak back and tends to end her sentences by looking away, which doesn’t make for easy continuous conversation.

This gets particularly complicated because they have been paired up on the empathy / sympathy project in English and are meant to be discussing ideas, and it’s got to be finished and the talks are to be given to the rest of the class on Friday. But H keeps getting up and going to another table where the printer is and printing things out, and it’s on the side of the classroom where there are three girls with whom H is friendly but George is less friendly. Then when she comes back she turns side-on and makes notes and only replies if George asks something direct. She does it nicely but quite definitely uninterestedly.

It is a Tuesday, so there’s Mrs Rock.

I think I might not be a very passionate person, George says.

Mrs Rock, since Christmas, has stopped repeating back to George what George says. Her new tactic is to sit and listen without saying anything, then very near the end of the session to tell George a sort of story or improvise on a word that George has used or something that’s struck her because of something George has said. This means that now the sessions are mostly George in monologue plus epilogue by Mrs Rock.

I asked my father this morning, George says, did he think I was a passionate person and he said I think you’re definitely a very driven person George and there’s definitely a lot of passion in your drive, but I know he was sort of fobbing me off. Not that my father would know whether I was or I wasn’t passionate anyway. Anyway then my little brother started making kissing noises on the back of his hand and my father got embarrassed and changed the subject and then when we went out the front door to go to school my little brother was standing next to my dad’s van in the drive and going on about how there was a lot of passion in this drive, how this drive was full of passion, and I felt stupid, like an idiot, for having said anything out loud at all to anyone.

Mrs Rock sits there silent as a statue.

That makes two people who won’t really speak to George today.

Three, if you count her father.

George feels a stubbornness come over her sitting there in Mrs Rock’s student easy chair. She seals her mouth. She folds her arms. She glances at the clock. It is only ten past. There are another sixty minutes of this session still to go (it is a double period). She will not say another word.

Tick tick tick.

Fifty nine.

Mrs Rock sits next to her table in front of George like a mainland off an island for which the last ferry boat of the day is already long gone.

Silence.

Five minutes pass in this silence.

Those five minutes alone pass like an hour.

George considers risking looking insolent and getting her earphones out of her bag and listening to music on her phone. But she can’t, can she? Because this is her new phone and she hasn’t downloaded any music on to this phone yet, though she’s had it for nearly two months and there’s nothing on it except that song H downloaded for her to which H wrote the words for the DNA revision yesterday.

I will always want you.

Want is quite a complicated word there, because there’s volo, which means I want, but it’s not usually used with people. Desidero? I feel the want of, I desire. Amabo? I will love.

But what if I will never love? What if I will never desire? What if I will never want?

Numquam amabo?

Mrs Rock, do you mind if I send a text? George says.

You want to send a text to me? Mrs Rock says.

No, George says. Not to you.

Then I do mind, Georgia, because this is a session in which we have decided to spend the duration talking to each other, Mrs Rock says.

Well, George says. It’s not like we’re doing any talking, we’re just sitting here not saying anything.

That’s your choice, Georgia, Mrs Rock says. You get to choose how to use this time with me.

You mean this time in which it was decided by whoever decided it in some school meeting, George says, that I should come and sit in your room so you can all minotaur me to see how I’m doing after my mother dying.

Minotaur you? Mrs Rock says.

I’m sorry? George says.

You said minotaur you, Mrs Rock says.

No I didn’t, George says. I said monitor. You’re monitoring me. You must have heard that other word inside your own head and decided I said it for some reason of your own.

Mrs Rock looks suitably discomfited. She writes something down. Then she looks back up at George with exactly the same blank openness as before the conversation.

And anyway, literally, if I get to choose how I use this time, then I can choose to send a text in it, George says.

Not unless it’s to me, Mrs Rock says. And if you do, you’ll be in trouble. Because, as you know, if you get your phone out of your bag and I see you using it on school property at a time that’s not lunch hour, I’ll have to confiscate it and you won’t get it back till the end of the week.

Does that rule hold even in counselling? George says.

Mrs Rock stands up. It is quite shocking that she does. She takes her coat off the back of the door and opens the door.

Come with me, she says.

Where? George says.

Come on, she says.

Will I need my jacket? George says.

They walk down the corridor and past all the classrooms full of people doing lessons, out of the main school doors then along the front of the school to the school gate, which Mrs Rock walks through. George follows.

As soon as they’re beyond the gate Mrs Rock stops.

You can now get your phone out, Georgia, without breaking any rules, she says.

George gets her phone out.

Mrs Rock turns her back.

You can send that message now, Mrs Rock says.

— Semper is always, George writes. Or there is a good word, usquequaque. It means everywhere, or on all occasions. Perpetuus means continual or continuous and continenter means continuously. But I can’t mean any of them because right now for me they are just words. Then she presses send.

When they get back to Mrs Rock’s room, there’s ten minutes of the session left.

This is the point at which you sit forward and tell me the story or whatever you’ve decided to tell me about and with which you want to round off the session, George says.

Yes, but today, Georgia, I think you should round the session off, Mrs Rock says. I think the theme which arose for us today was talking and not talking, and the whens and the wheres and the hows of both of these. Which is why I think it was important that we detoured a little out of the school structure, so that you could make the connection you so clearly felt it was urgent to make.

Then Mrs Rock talks for a bit about what saying things out loud means.

It means a decision to try to articulate things. At the same time it means all the things that can’t be said, even as you make the attempt to put some of them into words.

Mrs Rock means well. She is very nice really.

George explains that when she gets out of here and checks her phone she’ll see that the message Mrs Rock just went so out of her way to let her send will have the little red exclamation mark and the sign next to it saying not delivered, because there is no way you can send a message to a phone number that no longer exists.

So you sent a message knowing that your message would never reach the person you sent it to? Mrs Rock says.

George nods.

Mrs Rock blinks. She glances at the clock.

We have two minutes left, Georgia, she says. Is there anything else you’d like to bring to the session today, or anything else you feel you need to say?

Nope, George says.

They sit in silence for one minute and thirty seconds. Then the bell goes.

Same time next Tuesday, Georgia, Mrs Rock says. See you then.

When George gets home, H is waiting on the front step.

This is the third time H has come to the house.

I thought you weren’t talking to me / what if I will never love / never want / never desire / I think I might not be a very /

Hi, George says.

Hi, H says. I’m really. I’m.

It’s okay, George says.

I was feeling really lousy today, H says. I wasn’t much up to it.

Then H tells her that she found out last night when she got home that her family is moving to Denmark.

Moving? George says. You?

H nods.

Away? George says.

H nods.

For good? George says.

H looks away, then looks back at George.

Can you just take a school student out of a school year like that? George says.

H shrugs.

When? George says.

Beginning of March, H says. My father’s work. He’s in Copenhagen now. He’s found us a fantastic apartment.

She looks miserable.

George shrugs.

Empathy sympathy? she says.

H nods.

Brought my ideas, she says.

They sit down at the downstairs table. H switches on her iPad.

She has had an idea that they should do a presentation on the painter who did the painting which George’s mother liked enough to go all the way to Italy to see. She has found some other pictures by him and a bit of biography.

Not that there’s much, she says. The thing it always says about him, in the hardly-anything-there-is when you do look him up, is that very little is known about him. They don’t know for sure when he was born and they only know he died because there’s a letter that says he did, maybe in the plague, and he was 42 the letter says, which means they can work out a rough birthdate, but no one’s sure exactly which years, it could be one or the other. And there’s the letter he wrote himself, that your mother told you about, that he wrote to the Duke about wanting higher pay. There’s one of his pictures in London in the National Gallery and there’s a drawing at the British Museum. There are only fifteen or sixteen things by him in the whole world. At least I think so. A lot of what I was looking at came up in Italian. I google-translated it.

H reads something out.

Cossa was the victim of the plague that infierti in Bologna between 1477 and 1478 … the 78 would be the most likely date, jackets in this year’s disease came of rawness.

Jackets what? George says.

Jackets in this year’s disease came of rawness, H says again. I wrote it down exactly. That’s what it said.

She reads another bit.

The few early works do not leave almost predict doing compositions so innovative imaginative —

then she says a word that sounds like annoy or paranoia.

She shows it to George on the page.

— so innovative imaginative Schifanoia.

That’s it. That’s the place we went to, George says when she sees the word.

(Her mother is saying it next to her in the car in Italy right now, months ago. It is the place to which they are on their way.

Skiff. A. Noy. A., she is saying. Translated, it means the palace of escaping from boredom.

I’ll be the judge of that, George is saying back.

They pass a roadsign that makes George laugh because it points the way to somewhere called Lame.

They pass another. It says

Scagli di vivere

non berti la

vita

Is that what it said? Something to live, not something the life? It went past so fast.)

H has decided that they could do the empathy / sympathy exercise about this painter precisely because there’s so little known about him. This means they can make a great deal of it up and not be marked wrong because nobody will know either way.

Yeah, but will Maxwell expect us to do all that dreary historical imagine you are a person from another time stuff? George says. Imagine you are a medieval washerwoman or wizard who’s been parachuted into the 21st century.

He’d speak like from another time, H says. He’d say things like ho, or gadzooks, or egad.

I don’t think they knew about the word ho, I mean about what it means in rap songs, in Italy in the whenever it was, George says.

I expect they had their own word for it, H says.

George goes upstairs. She goes into her mother’s study and gets the dictionary off the shelf. In it, it says ho was already a word in 1300 when it meant an exclamation of surprise and also the call of a boatman. Now, apart from a prostitute and a shout of laughter, it can stand as a police term for a Habitual Offender and as a government term for the Home Office.

Ho ho ho, H says. Lots of ho’s in Shakespeare. Heigh-ho, green holly. Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.

(H worked last year at the Shakespeare Festival in the summer as a ticket-seller and cleaner-upper for £10 a night.)

Wouldn’t it be better if we just imagine him talking like we do? George says. More empathetic?

Yeah, but the language would definitely have been different, H says.

Yeah, it’d have been Italian, George says.

But Italian then, H says. The way they said things then. Which would be different from it now. Imagine. Him wandering in his whatever they wore up and down the stairs in, I don’t know. The multi-storey. What would he make of cars?

Little prisons on wheels, George says.

Little confessionals on wheels. Everything for him would’ve been about God, H says.

That’s good, George says. Write that down.

He’d be like an exchange student, not just from another country but from another time, H says.

He’d be all alas I am being made up really badly by a sixteen-year-old girl who knows fuck all about art and nothing at all about me except that I did some paintings and seem to have died of the plague, George says.

H laughs.

You can’t just make stuff up about real people, George says.

We make stuff up about real people all the time, H says. Right now you’re making stuff up about me. And I’m definitely making stuff up about you. You know I am.

George blushes, then is surprised to find she’s blushing. She turns away. She thinks something else quick; she thinks how typical it’d be. You’d need your own dead person to come back from the dead. You’d be waiting and waiting for that person to come back. But instead of the person you needed you’d get some dead renaissance painter going on and on about himself and his work and it’d be someone you knew nothing about and that’d be meant to teach you empathy, would it?

It’s exactly the kind of stunt her mother would pull.

There’s an advert on TV right now for life assurance and someone’s dressed up as a plague victim in that, because the advert wants to suggest that its life assurance company has been around for centuries and that nothing’s not insurable.

But what would it have been like, she wonders, to die of plague? To be buried in a pit full of other people’s bones, someone fearful of catching it shovelling you in before you’re even cold, then shovelling all the other dead people on top of you? For a moment she thinks of bones under a cold floor, under flagstones in a church maybe, or under nondescript town buildings that people are living and working in right now with no idea that the bones are there below them. The bones agitate. They shift amongst themselves at her imagining them. They’re the bones of the man who painted that truly shocked duck with the hunter’s fist round its neck, painted the gentle eye of the horse, the woman who could float in the air above the back of the sheep or goat with its cheeky face, that strong dark man in the rags her mother found so astonishing and which H has brought up on to the screen right now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has a perfect spiral in the shell.

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

Wild, H says.

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

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

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

Look at that, H says.

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

Both girls burst out laughing.

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

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

But she doesn’t kiss George.

I’ll come back, she says.

George doesn’t say anything.

H moves her head away again.

She nods at George.

George shrugs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is she good? H says.

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

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

Tell me about her, she says.

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

What? H says. What kind of thing?

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

When? H says.

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

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

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

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

Raw, George says.

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

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

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

How? H says.

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

She asks H when her family plans to leave.

First week of March, H says.

New school, George says.

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

What? To be socially adept? George says.

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

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

Skiffa what was it? George says.

Noia, her mother says.

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

Really annoying, Henry, George says.

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

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

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

No it isn’t, George’s mother says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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