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.