Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (Myths) (4 page)

DON’T BE STUPID. WATER IS A HUMAN RIGHT. SELLING IT IN ANY WAY IS MORALLY WRO

The work experience girls were applauding and laughing. One of them was singing. Let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low. Through the streets in my kilt I’ll go. All the lassies say hello. They saw me and waved at me. I waved back. A Press person was on a mobile. The rest of Press and Personnel were crowded round looking concerned. Two security men stood listlessly at the foot of the ladder. One of them pointed towards the building; I looked up, but its windows, including the window I had myself been staring through a minute ago, were the kind you can’t see into.

I wondered if my sister was watching me from up there. I had an urge to wave.

NG., the boy wrote.

The security men shook their heads at each other.

Becky from Reception winked at me then nodded, serious-faced, at the security men. We watched the long-limbed boy sign off, with a series of arrogant and expert slants and curlicues, the final word at the bottom of his handiwork:

IPHISOL.

He shook the paintcan, listened to the rattle it made, thought about whether to keep it or to chuck it away, then tucked it into the pocket of his waistcoat. He took hold of the sides of the ladder, lifted his feet off the rung in one move, put them on the outsides of the downstruts and slid himself neatly to the ground. He landed on his feet and he turned round.

My head, something happened to its insides. It was as if a storm at sea happened, but only for a moment, and only on the inside of my head. My ribcage, something definitely happened there. It was as if it unknotted itself from itself, like the hull of a ship hitting rock, giving way, and the ship that I was opened wide inside me and in came the ocean.

He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

But he looked really like a girl.

She was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life.

(Oh my God my sister is A GAY.)

(I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset. I am not upset.)

I am putting on my Stella McCartney Adidas tracksuit bottoms. I am lacing up my Nike runners. I am zipping up my Stella McCartney Adidas tracksuit top. I am going out the front door like I am a (normal) person just going out of a (normal) front door on a (normal) early summer day in the month of May and I am going for a run which is the kind of (normal) thing (normal) people do all the time.

There. I’m running. That feels better. I can feel the road beneath my feet. There. There. There.

(It is our mother’s fault for splitting up with our father.)

(But if that’s true then I might also be a gay.)

(Well obviously that’s not true then, that’s not true at all.)

(I am definitely, definitely not a gay.)

(I definitely like men.)

(But so does she. So did she. She had that boyfriend, Dave, that she went out with for ages. She had that other boyfriend, Stuart. She had that one called Andrew and that weird English boyfriend, Miles or Giles who lived on Mull, and that boy Sammy, and there was one called Tony, and Nicholas, because she always had boyfriends, she had boyfriends from about the age of twelve, long before I did.)

I am crossing at the lights. I am going to run as far as I can. I am going to run along the river, through the Islands, round by the sports tracks, past the cemetery and up towards the canal

(is that the right way to say it, a gay? Is there a correct word for it?)

(How do you know if you are it?)

(Does our mother know about Anthea being it?)

(Does our father know?)

(It is completely natural to be a gay or a homosexual or whatever. It is totally okay in this day and age.)

(Gay people are just the same as heterosexual people, except for the being gay, of course.)

(They were holding hands at the front door.)

(I should have known. She always was weird. She always was different. She always was contrary. She always did what she knew she shouldn’t.)

(It is the fault of the Spice Girls.)

(She chose the video of Spiceworld with Sporty Spice on the limited edition tin.)

(She was always a bit too feminist.)

(She was always playing that George Michael cd.)

(She always votes for the girls on Big Brother and she voted for that transsexual the year he was on, or she, or whatever it is you’re supposed to say.)

(She liked the Eurovision Song Contest.)

(She still likes the Eurovision Song Contest.)

(She liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

(But so did I. I liked it too. And it had those girls in it who were both female homosexuals and they were portrayed as very sweet, and it was okay because it was Willow, and she was clever, and we knew to like her and everything, and her friend Tara was very sweet, and I remember one episode where they kissed and their feet came off the ground and they levitated because of the kiss, and I remember that the thing to do when we talked about it at school the next day was to make sick noises.)

Four texts on my phone. Dominic.

WOT U UP 2?

COMIN 2 PUB?

GET HERE NOW.

U R REQD HERE.

(I hate text language. It is so demeaning.)

(I will text him when I get back from my run. I will say I left my mobile at home and didn’t get the message till later.)

I am down to just over seven stone.

I am doing well.

We are really revolutionising the bottled water market in Scotland.

Eau Caledonia. They love it as a tag. I got a raise.

I get paid thirty-five thousand before tax.

I can’t believe I’m earning that much money. Me!

I am clearly doing the right thing. There is good money in water.

(She is still insisting on calling them shaveys or whatever, and it is unfair of her to lump them all together. It is just fashion. Boys are worse followers of fashion than girls. I mean, men than women. She is wrong to do that. She is wrong)

(they were holding hands at the front door, where any neighbour could see, and then I saw Robin Goodman lean my sister gently into the hedge, back against the branches of it, she was so gentle, and)

(and kiss her.)

(I should have known when she always liked songs that had I and you in them, instead of he and I, or he and she, we always knew, we used to say at college that that was the giveaway, when people preferred those songs that had the word you instead of a man or a woman, like that classic old Tracy Chapman album our mother left behind her that she was always playing before she went.)

(I will never leave my children when I have fallen in love and am married and have had them. I will have them young, not when I am old, like the selfish generation. I would rather give up any career than not have them. I would rather give myself up. I would rather give up everything including any stupid political principle than leave children that belonged to me. Look how it ends. Thank God that feministy time of selfishness is over and we now have everything we will ever need, including a much more responsible set of values.)

It is a lovely day to go for a run. It is not raining. It doesn’t even look like it will rain later.

(My sister is a gay.)

(I am not upset.) (I am fine.)

(It’d be okay, I mean I wouldn’t mind so much, if it was someone else’s sister.)

(It is okay. Lots of people are it. Just none that I have known personally, that’s all.)

I am running along the riverside. I am so lucky to live here at this time in history, in the Capital of the Highlands, which is exceptionally buoyant right now, the fastest-developing city in the whole of the UK at the moment thanks to tourism and retirement, and soon also thanks to the growing water economy, of which I am a central part, and which will make history.

We speak the purest English here in the whole country. It is because of the vowel sounds and what happened to them when Gaelic speakers were made to speak English after the 1745 rebellion and the 1746 defeat when Gaelic was stamped out and punishable by death, and then all the local girls married the incoming English-speaking soldiers.

If I can remember the exact, correct words to all the songs on that awful Tracy Chapman album, which I can’t have heard for years, it must be at least ten years, I’ll be able to run for at least three more miles.

It is good to be goal-orientated. It makes all the other things go out of your mind.

I could go via the canal and past the locks and up over towards the Beauly road and then round by

(but dear God my sister has been hanging around for weeks with a person who is a criminal and against whom the company I work for is pressing charges, and not just that but a person whom I remember from school, and a person, I also remember, we all always called that word behind her back at school, and now this person has turned my sister into one of them, I mean One of Them. And I mean, how did we know to call Robin Goodman that word at school? Adolescent instinct? Well, I didn’t know, I never really knew. I thought it was because she had a boy’s name instead of a girl’s name. That’s what I used to think, or maybe because she came in on the bus from Beauly, with the Beauly kids, from somewhere else, and because she had a boy’s name, that’s what I thought. And because she was a bit different, and didn’t people used to say that her mother was black, Robin Goodman, and her father was white, or was it the other way round, and was that even true? I don’t remember there being any black people living in Beauly, we’d surely have known, we’d all have known, if there was.)

(I can’t bring myself to say the word.)

(Dear God. It is worse than the word cancer.)

(My little sister is going to grow up into a dissatisfied older predatory totally dried-up abnormal woman like Judi Dench in that film Notes on a Scandal.)

(Judi Dench plays that sort of person so well, is what I thought when I saw it, but that was when I didn’t think my sister was going to maybe be one of them and have such a terrible life with no real love in it.)

(My little sister is going to have a terrible sad life.)

(But I saw Robin Goodman lean my sister into the hedge with such gentleness, there is no other word for it, and kiss her, and then I saw, not so gently, Robin Goodman shift one of her own legs in between my sister’s legs while she kissed her, and I saw my sister, it wasn’t just one-sided, she was kissing Robin Goodman back, and then they were both laughing.)

(They were laughing with outrageous happiness.)

(Neighbours must have seen. It was broad daylight.)

(I might have to move house.)

(Well, that’s all right. That’s all right. If I have to move house I have enough money to.)

Thirty-five thousand, very good money for my age, and for me being a girl, our dad says, which is a bit sexist of him, because gender is nothing to do with whether you are good at a job or not. It is nothing to do with me being a woman or not, the fact that I am the only woman on the Highland Pure Creative board of ten of us – it is because I am good at what I do.

Actually, I think Keith might ask me to go to the States, maybe for training with the in-house Creatives at Base Camp. I think Base Camp is in LA!

He seems very pleased with the Eau Caledonia tag.

He thinks it will corner not just the English-speaking market but a good chunk of the French market, which is crucial, the French market being so water-sales-established worldwide. Scottish, yet French. Well done, he said. They’d like you at Base Camp. You’d like it there.

Me! Los Angeles!

He seemed to be intimating it. He intimated it last Tuesday. He said I’d like it there, that’s what he said last week, that I’d like it, that they’d like me.

I told Anthea he had intimated it. She said: Keith intubated you? Like on ER?

I said: you’re being ridiculous, Anthea.

(There is also that gay woman doctor character on ER whose lovers always die in fires and so on.)

(Gay people are always dying all the time.)

Anthea is being ridiculous. I got her a good position and now she is at home doing nothing. She is really clever. She is wasting herself.

(I was sitting at home trying to think of a tag, I’d thought of MacAqua, but McDonald’s would sue, I’d thought of Scotteau, I’d been saying the word Eau out loud, and Anthea walked past the table as I said it, and she added Caledonia, we’re such a good team, we’d be a good team, we’d have been a good team, oh my God my sister is a)

Well, it is bloody lucky Keith intimates anything to me at all after they did me that favour at Pure about Anthea. She is so naïve, she has no idea what an unusually good salary level she was started at, it is really lucky nobody has associated me with how rude she was that day and that thing happening to the Pure sign

(which is clearly where they met. Maybe I saw the oh so romantic moment they met, last month, I was watching out the window, and the weirdo vandal came down the ladder and she and Anthea were talking, before Security took her away to wait for the police. I saw the name on the forms Security made her fill out. I recognised it. I knew it, the name, from when we were girls. It’s a small town. What else can you do, in a small town?)

(Unless they were in cahoots before that and had decided on it as a dual attack on Pure, which is possible, I mean, anything under the sun is possible now.)

(Everything has changed.)

(Nothing is the same.)

I’ve stopped. I’m not running. I’m just standing.

(I don’t want to run anywhere. I can’t think where to run to.)

(I better make it look like there is a reason for me to be just standing. I’ll go and stand by the pedestrian crossing.)

That word
intimated
is maybe something to do with the word intimate, since the word intimate is so much a part of, almost the whole of, the word intimated.

I am standing at the pedestrian crossing like a (normal) person waiting to cross the road. A bus goes past. It is full of (normal-looking) people.

(My sister is now one of the reasons the man who owns Stagecoach buses had that million-pound poster campaign all over Scotland where they had pictures of people saying things like ‘I’m not a bigot but I don’t want my children taught to be gay at school’, that kind of thing.)

(They were laughing. Like they were actually happy. Or like being gay is okay, or really funny, or really good fun, or something.)

I am running on the spot so as not to lose momentum.

(It is the putting of that leg in between the other legs that I can’t get out of my head. It is really kind of unforgettable.)

(It is so …

intimate.)

I stop running on the spot. I stand at the pedestrian crossing and look one way, then the other. Nothing is coming. The road is totally clear.

But I just stand.

(I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I can’t get myself to cross from one side to the other.)

(My sister would be banned in schools if she was a book.)

(No, because the parliament lifted that legislation, didn’t it?)

(Did it?)

(I can’t remember. I can’t remember either way. I didn’t ever think that particular law was anything I’d ever have to remember, or consider.)

(Have I ever noticed or considered anything about it? Should I have?)

(I did. I have. I remember reading in the paper about how people all across the world, and not just people but governments, in Poland and in Russia, but also in Spain, and Italy, are getting more and more tough on people being it. I mean, you’d expect that in Russia and in Poland. But in Italy? In Spain? Those are places that are supposed to be like here.)

(It said in the paper this morning that teenagers who are it are six times more likely to commit suicide than teenagers who aren’t it.)

(I don’t know what to do with myself.)

I stand at the crossing with no cars coming in either direction and I still don’t move to cross the road. I feel a little dizzy. I feel a little faint.

(Anyone looking at me will think I’m really weird.)

There’s only Dominic and Norman in the pub.

Where’ve you been, you useless slag? Norman says.