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.