How to Be Both by Ali Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

wouldn’t come that day to the river, it was that his mother didn’t like him going near rivers cause of the brother that had drowned before he was born, and he had been named for the brother, the others were all sisters.
    We met whenever his family came to town, though increasingly in secret cause he was from a family which would have had little to do with mine, and we went often to the river so he could doubly defy his mother, first by going at all and second by going without her knowledge : but he never went by himself in case the river decided it wanted to claim this other brother too : though truth be told I didn’t know this about him until we were both much older.
    On our first shared birthday he showed me all the things you can do if you’re balanced on the top of a very tall wall : you can hang yourself off it by nothing but your hands, then by nothing but one hand : you can walk along the top of it like a cat or a rope-walking gypsy performing : you can dance : you can run along it like a squirrel or stand on it on only one leg like a heron and do little jumps : you can tuck the other leg up behind your back or kick it openly back and fore while keeping your balance :finally you can jump off the wall up into the air with your arms out wide like a heron taking flight.
    He demonstrated all these things except the last : of the last he only spread his arms like wings to show me, as if about to.
    Don’t, I shouted.
    He barked a laugh full of the daring of his dancing : he did one last leap in the air and landed square and safe sitting down with a thump on the top of the wall, his arms still wide : he swung his legs at me like a figure in a painting sitting half in and half out, legs over the woodframe.
    You’re a boy afraid of a wall, he called down at me.
    And you’re a boy with no idea how wrong he is, I called back at him. You’ll need to know me better. And to know I’m afraid of nothing. And my father is a maker of walls, among other things, and if you can kick your legs like you’re doing against one and nothing chips off it then you’re lucky, it’s a pretty good one. But that’s far too high a wall to jump off. Any fool can calculate that.
    Exactly, and I’m no fool, he said and then stood up again as if to do the jump and made me laugh again. Instead of jumping he bowed as low as was safe to.
    Bartolommeo Garganelli is very pleased, on this day auspicious to both of us, to make your quaintances, he said.
    Youmight talk as fancy as your clothes, I said. But even a common fisher of gutterfish knows you’ve just got that last word wrong.
    1 quaintance. 2 quaintances, he said. And I’ve met more than 2, I’ve met 3 of you. Expert fisher. Expert fish-thrower. Expert in walls and their trajectories.
    If you’d care to come down, I said, I’ll consider introducing you to the rest of me.
    Here I am again : me and a boy and a wall.
    (I will take it as an omen.)
    But this time the boy looks straight through me as if I’ve swallowed a magic ring and the ring has rendered me invisible.
    (I will take this as an omen too.)
    First he was all sainthood : now he’s all lovelorn : what use to him is a painter?
    I’ll do what good I can.
    I’ll draw him an open threshold.
    I’ll put a lit torch in his hand.
    For the making of pictures we need plants and stones, stonedust and water, fish bones, sheep and goat bones, the bones of hens or other fowls whitened in high heat and ground down fine : we can use the foot of a hare, the tails of squirrels : we need breadcrumbs, willow shoots, fig shoots, fig milk : we need bristles from pigs and the teeth of clean meat-eating animals, for example dog, cat,wolf, leopard : we need gypsum : we need porphyry for grinding : we need a travelling box and a good source of pigment and we need the minerals which are the source of colour : above all we need eggs, the fresher the better, and from the country not the town mean better colours when dry.
    We can dull things down if