How to Be Both

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

Shortly after midnight on New Years Eve, George, a 16-year-old girl from Cambridge, England, makes a plan for the remainder of the school holidays. George is researching music from the 1960s and plans to dance the twist each morning in honor of her recently deceased mother, Dr. Carol Martineau. Prior to her death, Carol would dance and stretch every day before work, and there is old video footage of her dancing the twist as a toddler with her own mother. After dancing, George plans to spend time each day watching a disturbing pornographic video in the garden so as to bear witness to the exploitation of the young woman in the video. George’s father, currently out drinking, previously came across George watching the video once, and was horrified both by the video itself and by George’s dubious explanation of why she keeps watching it.

George is interrupted by her younger brother Henry, who is seeking comfort after waking up upset. George consoles him and tucks him into her own bed before making herself a snack and falling asleep on the floor beside the bed. They are awoken a short while later by a knock at the front door. One of George’s classmates, Helena “H” Fisker, is visiting to wish George a happy new year. H and George aren’t close, but H recently smashed another girl’s phone in George’s defense when the girl and her friends were harassing George by recording the sound of her urinating. H also complimented George on a recent presentation she gave in school about a 1960s film star, and she is well-known in school for her artistic talent. George invites H in and introduces her to Henry. She shows H a hidden leak in the ceiling of her loft bedroom that she hopes will eventually cause enough damage to destroy the house, and H agrees that it would be nice to see the stars unimpeded from bed. H’s lively conversation makes George laugh for the first time since her mother’s death.

Over the course of the night, George recalls memories of a time before her mother’s death. Every previous New Year, George and her family would burn a list of their regrets from the past year and update a list of their hopes for the coming one. George recalls laughing with her parents over the lyrics of an old record, and regrets that she refused to join her mother in watching a meteor shower several months before her death. In addition to publishing articles and studying economic and political theory, Carol engaged in online guerrilla activism as part of a hacktivist group producing Subverts, online popups criticizing the government and social injustices on websites and search engines. Once, George criticized the hypocrisy of Carol’s concern over her excessive screen use with the phrase “disempowerment by information,” and Carol paid George £5 to quote the phrase in a Subvert. Because of Carol’s work, both she and George believed that she was under government surveillance prior to her death. George suspects that government agents may have taken her mother’s missing phone in the chaos of her initial hospitalization, although neither her father nor the school counselor give the suspicion much credit.

George particularly remembers a trip that she, Carol, and Henry took to Ferrara, Italy, the previous Spring to see the work of Francesco del Cossa in Piazza Schifanoia. George and her mother bickered good-naturedly on the car ride to the palace as George’s mother posed her the hypothetical question of whether an artist deserved higher pay for a higher quality of work. George refused to answer without details on the circumstances and context, and her mother eventually explained that the question related to the life of Francesco del Cossa, who wrote to the duke who had commissioned the fresco asking to be paid a higher rate than the other workers because the quality of his work was higher. The request was denied, but eventually it became the major source of extant information about Francesco del Cossa. The fresco consists of scenes depicting the months of the year and associated deities laid out along all the walls of a room. Both George and her mother were entranced by the liveliness and incisiveness of Francesco del Cossa’s art, which covers a whole wall, spans three months, and is unquestionably superior to the rest of the room’s decoration.