Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (Myths) (7 page)

Yes, Robin said. All of that. And more.

There’s more? I said. Man!

So to speak, Robin said. And the wedding day was set. And the whole village was coming. Not just the village, but all the fine families of the island were coming. And some people off faraway other islands. And off the mainland. Several gods had been invited and many had actually said they’d come. And Iphis was in quite a bad way, because she couldn’t imagine.

She couldn’t imagine what? I said.

She couldn’t imagine how she was going to do it, Robin said.

How do you mean? I said.

She stood in a field far enough away from the village so nobody would hear except maybe a few goats, a few cows, and she shouted at the sky, she shouted at nothing, at Isis, at all the gods. Why have you done this to me? You fuckers. You jokers. Look what’s happened now. I mean, look at that cow there. What’d be the point in giving her a cow instead of a bull? I can’t be a boy to my girl! I don’t know how! I wish I’d never been born! You’ve made me wrong! I wish I’d been killed at birth! Nothing can help me!

But maybe her girl, what’s her name, Ianthe,
wants
a girl, I said. Clearly Iphis is exactly the kind of boy-girl or girl-boy she loves.

Well, yes. I agree, Robin said. That’s debatable. But it’s not in the original story. In the original, Iphis stands there shouting at the gods. Even if Daedalus was here, Iphis shouted, and he’s the greatest inventor in the world, who can fly across the sea like a bird though he’s just a man! But even
he
wouldn’t know what to invent to make this okay for Ianthe and me. I mean, you were kind, Isis, and you told my mother it’d be fine, but now what? Now I’ve got to get married, and it’s tomorrow, and I’ll be the laughing stock of the whole village, because of you. And Juno and Hymen are coming. We’ll be the laughing stock of the heavens too. And how can I get married to my girl in front of them, in front of my father, in front of everyone? And not just that. Not just that. I’m never, ever, ever going to be able to please my girl. And she’ll be mine, but never really mine. It’ll be like standing right in the middle of a stream, dying of thirst, with my hand full of water, but I won’t be able to drink it!

Why won’t she be able to drink it? I said.

Robin shrugged.

It’s just what she thinks at this point in the story, she said. She’s young. She’s scared. She doesn’t know yet that it’ll be okay. She’s only about twelve. That was the marriageable age, then, twelve. I was terrified, too, when I was twelve and wanted to marry another girl. (Who did you want to marry? I said. Janice McLean, Robin said, who lived in Kinmylies. She was very glamorous. And she had a pony.) Twelve, or thirteen, terrified. It’s easy to think it’s a mistake, or you’re a mistake. It’s easy, when everything and everyone you know tells you you’re the wrong shape, to believe you’re the wrong shape. And also, don’t forget, the story of Iphis was being made up by a man. Well, I say man, but Ovid’s very fluid, as writers go, much more than most. He knows, more than most, that the imagination doesn’t have a gender. He’s really good. He honours all sorts of love. He honours all sorts of story. But with this story, well, he can’t help being the Roman he is, he can’t help fixating on what it is that girls don’t have under their togas, and it’s him who can’t imagine what girls would ever do without one.

I had a quick look under the duvet.

Doesn’t feel or look like anything’s missing to me, I said.

Ah, I love Iphis, Robin said. I love her. Look at her. Dressed as a boy to save her life. Standing in a field, shouting at the way things are. She’d do anything for love. She’d risk changing everything she is.

What’s going to happen? I said.

What do you think? Robin said.

Well, she’s going to need some help. The father’s not going to be any good, he doesn’t even know his boy’s a girl. Not very observant. And Ianthe thinks that’s what a boy is, what Iphis is. Ianthe’s just happy to be getting married. But she won’t want a humiliation either, and they’d be the joke of the village. She’s only twelve, too. So Iphis can’t go and ask her for help. So. It’s either the mother or the goddess.

Well-spotted, Robin said. Off the mother went to have a word with the goddess in her own way.

That’s one of the reasons Midge is so resentful, I said.

The what who’s so what? Robin said.

Imogen. She had to do all that mother stuff when ours left, I said. Maybe it’s why she’s so thin. Have you noticed how thin she is?

Yep, Robin said.

I never had to do anything, I said. I’m lucky. I was born mythless. I grew up mythless.

No you didn’t. Nobody grows up mythless, Robin said. It’s what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters.

I thought about our mother. I thought about what she’d said, that she had to be free of what people expected of her, otherwise she’d simply have died. I thought about our father, out in the garden in the first days after she went, hanging out the washing. I thought about Midge, seven years old, running downstairs to take over, to do it instead of him, because the neighbours were laughing to see a man at the washing line. Good girl, our father had said.

Keep telling the story, I said. Go on.

So the mother, then, Robin said, went to the temple, and she said into the thin air: look, come on. You told me it’d be okay. And now we’ve got this huge wedding happening tomorrow, and it’s all going to go wrong. So could you just sort it out for me? Please.

And as she left the empty temple, the temple started to shake, and the doors of the temple trembled.

And lo and behold, I said.

Yep. Jaw lengthens, stride lengthens, absolutely everything lengthens. By the time she’d got home, the girl Iphis had become exactly the boy that she and her girl needed her to be. And the boy their two families needed. And everyone in the village needed. And all the people coming from all over the place who were very anxious to have a really good party needed. And the visiting gods needed. And the particular historic era with its own views on what was excitingly perverse in a love story needed. And the writer of Metamorphoses needed, who really, really needed a happy love story at the end of Book 9 to carry him through the several much more scurrilous stories about people who fall, unhappily and with terrible consequences, in love with their fathers, their brothers, various unsuitable animals, and the dead ghosts of their lovers, Robin said. Voilà. Sorted. No problemo. Metamorphoses is full of the gods being mean to people, raping people then turning them into cows or streams so they won’t tell, hunting them till they change into plants or rivers, punishing them for their pride or their arrogance or their skill by changing them into mountains or insects. Happy stories are rare in it. But the next day dawned, and the whole world opened its eyes, it was the day of the wedding. Even Juno had come, and Hymen was there too, and all the families of Crete were gathered in their finery for the huge celebration all over the island, as the girl met her boy there at the altar.

Girl meets boy, I said. In so many more ways than one.

Old, old story, Robin said.

I’m glad it worked out, I said.

Good old story, Robin said.

Good old Ovid, giving it balls, I said.

Even though it didn’t need them. Anubis! Robin said suddenly. The god with the jackal head. Anubis.

Anubis colony? I said.

Come on, Robin said. You and me. What do you say?

Bed, I said.

Off we went, back to bed.

We were tangled in each other’s arms so that I wasn’t sure whose hand that was by my head, was it hers or mine? I moved my hand. The hand by my head didn’t move. She saw me looking at it.

It’s yours, she said. I mean, it’s on the end of my arm. But it’s yours. So’s the arm. So’s the shoulder. So’s everything else it’s connected to.

Her hand opened me. Then her hand became a wing. Then everything about me became a wing, a single wing, and she was the other wing, we were a bird. We were a bird that could sing Mozart. It was a music I recognised, it was both deep and light. Then it changed into a music I’d never heard before, so new to me that it made me airborne, I was nothing but the notes she was playing, held in air. Then I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before, who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once? Her beautiful head was down at my breast, she caught me between her teeth just once, she put the nip into nipple like the cub of a fox would, down we went, no wonder they call it an earth, it was loamy, it was good, it was what good meant, it was earthy, it was what earth meant, it was the underground of everything, the kind of soil that cleans things. Was that her tongue? Was that what they meant when they said flames had tongues? Was I melting? Would I melt? Was I gold? Was I magnesium? Was I briny, were my whole insides a piece of sea, was I nothing but salty water with a mind of its own, was I some kind of fountain, was I the force of water through stone? I was hard all right, and then I was sinew, I was a snake, I changed stone to snake in three simple moves, stoke stake snake, then I was a tree whose branches were all budded knots, and what were those felty buds, were they – antlers? were antlers really growing out of both of us? was my whole front furring over? and were we the same pelt? were our hands black shining hoofs? were we kicking? were we bitten? were our heads locked into each other to the death? till we broke open? I was a she was a he was a we were a girl and a girl and a boy and a boy, we were blades, were a knife that could cut through myth, were two knives thrown by a magician, were arrows fired by a god, we hit heart, we hit home, we were the tail of a fish were the reek of a cat were the beak of a bird were the feather that mastered gravity were high above every landscape then down deep in the purple haze of the heather were roamin in a gloamin in a brash unending Scottish piece of perfect jigging reeling reel can we really keep this up? this fast? this high? this happy? round again? another notch higher? heuch! the perfect jigsaw fit of one into the curve of another as if a hill top into sky, was that a thistle? was I nothing but grass, a patch of coarse grasses? was that incredible colour coming out of me? the shining heads of – what? buttercups? because the scent of them, farmy and delicate, came into my head and out of my eyes, my ears, out of my mouth, out of my nose, I was scent that could see, I was eyes that could taste, I loved butter. I loved everything. Hold everything under my chin! I was all my open senses held together on the head of a pin, and was it an angel who knew how to use hands like that, as wings?

We were all that, in the space of about ten minutes. Phew. A bird, a song, the insides of a mouth, a fox, an earth, all the elements, minerals, a water feature, a stone, a snake, a tree, some thistles, several flowers, arrows, both genders, a whole new gender, no gender at all and God knows how many other things including a couple of fighting stags.

I got up to get us a drink of water and as I stood in the kitchen in the early morning light, running the water out of the tap, I looked out at the hills at the back of the town, at the trees on the hills, at the bushes in the garden, at the birds, at the brand new leaves on a branch, at a cat on a fence, at the bits of wood that made the fence, and I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn’t even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.

Then I wondered why on earth would anyone ever stand in the world as if standing in the cornucopic middle of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but inside a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all round her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting?

(It is really English down here in England.)

First class all the way. I was the only person in Carriage J when we set off. Me! A whole train carriage to myself! I am doing all right

(and that train getting more and more English the further south we came. The serving staff doing the coffee changed into English people at Newcastle. And the conductor’s voice on the speakers changed into English at Newcastle too and then it was like being on a totally different train though I hadn’t even moved in my seat, and the people getting on and sitting in the other seats round me all really Englishy and by the time we’d got to York it was like a different)

OUCH. Oh sorry!

(People in England just walk into you and they don’t even apologise.)

(And there are so many, so many! People here go on and on for miles and miles and miles.)

(Where’s my phone?)

Menu. Contacts. Select. Dad. Call.

(God, it is so busy here with the people and the noise and the traffic I can hardly hear the)

Answerphone.

(He never answers it when he sees my name come up.)

Hi Dad, it’s me. It’s Thursday, it’s a quarter to five. Just leaving you another to tell you I’m not in first class on the train any more, I’m in that, eh, Leicester Square, God it’s really sunny down here, it’s a bit too warm, I’ve got half an hour between very important business meetings so was just calling to say hi. Eh, right, well, I’ll give you a wee call when I’m out of my meetings, so bye for now. Bye now. Bye.

End call.

Menu. Contacts. Select. Paul. Call.

Answerphone.

(Damn.)

Oh hi Paul, it’s just me, it’s just eh Imogen. It’s Thursday, it’s about a quarter to five, and I was just wondering if you could check with secretarial for me, I eh can’t get through, I’ve been trying and it’s constantly engaged or maybe something’s up with the signal or something, anyway sorry to be calling so late in the afternoon, but because I couldn’t get through I thought what’ll I do, oh I know, I can always phone Paul, he’ll help me out, so if you’d just check with them for me that the market projection email and the colour printouts went off to Keith down here and whether he’ll have seen it all before I get over to the office? I should be there in about fifteen minutes. I’ll wait for your call, Paul. Thanks, Paul. Bye for now. Bye now. Bye.

Menu. Contacts. Select. Anthea. Call.

Answerphone.

Hi. This is Anthea. Don’t leave me a message on this phone
because I’m actually trying not to use my mobile any longer
since the production of mobiles involves slave labour on a huge
scale and also since mobiles get in the way of us living fully
and properly in the present moment and connecting properly, on
a real level, with people and are just another way to sell us
short. Come and see me instead and we’ll talk properly. Thanks.

(For God’s sake.)

Hi, it’s me. It’s Thursday, it’s ten to five. Can you hear me? I can hardly hear myself, it’s so noisy here, it’s just ridiculous. Anyway I’m on my way to a meeting and I was walking through a kind of a park or square at the back of the Leicester Square, where I got the underground to, and there was this statue of William Shakespeare there in it, and the thought came into my head, Anthea’d like that, and then, like, you wouldn’t believe it! About two seconds later I saw right across from it this statue of Charlie Chaplin! So I thought I’d just phone and tell you. I’m actually coming up to Trafalgar Square now, it’s all, like, pedestrian now, you can walk right across it, the fountains are on, it’s so warm down here that people are actually jumping about in the water, it can’t be hygienic, loads of people are wearing shorts down here, nobody’s got a coat on, I’ve actually had to take mine off, that’s how warm it is, oh! and there’s Nelson! but he’s like so high up you can’t really see him at all, I’m right under him now, anyway I was just phoning, because every time I come here and see the famous things it makes me think of us, you know, watching tv, when we were kids, and Nelson’s Column and Big Ben and wondering if we’d ever in a million years get to see them really, for real, eh, well now I’m waiting for the green man at a pedestrian crossing right under Nelson’s Column, you should hear all the different languages, all round me, it’s very very interesting to hear so many different voices at once, oh well, now I’m on a road that’s all official-looking buildings, well, just calling to say I’ll see you when I get back, I’m back tomorrow, I’ll have to have a wee look at my map now, I’ll have to get it out of my bag, so, well, I’ll stop now. Bye for now. Bye.

End call.

(Still no Paul.)

(She won’t ever hear that message. That message’ll just delete itself off Orange in a week’s time.)

(But it was nice to be talking on my phone here, made me feel a bit safer, and though I was ostensibly just saying stuff for no reason it kind of felt good to.)

(Maybe it’s easier to talk to someone who won’t ever actually hear what you say.)

(What a funny thought. What a ridiculous thought.)

Is this Strand?

(She loves all that Shakespeare stuff, and she loved that film, so did I, where the posh people are unveiling the new white statue and they pull the cover off and lying fast asleep in its arms is Charlie Chaplin, and later the blind girl gets her sight back because he gets rich with a windfall and spends it all on her sight operation, but then he sees that now that she can see, he’s clearly the wrong kind of person, and it’s tragic, not a comedy at all.)

(Still no Paul.)

(I can’t see a streetname. I think I might not be on the right road for)

(oh look at that, that’s an interesting-looking one, right in the middle of the road, what is it, a memorial? It’s a memorial with just, as if empty clothes are hanging all round it on hooks, like empty clothes, a lot of soldiers’ and workers’ clothes.)

(But they look strange. They look like they’ve got the shapes of bodies still in them. And though they’re men’s clothes, the way all their folds are falling looks like women’s –)

(Oh, right, it’s a statue to the women who fought in the war. Oh I get it. It’s like the clothes they wore, which they just took off and hung up, like a minute ago, like someone else’s clothes they just stepped into briefly. And the clothes have kept their shape so that you get the bodyshape of women but in dungarees and uniforms and clothes they wouldn’t usually wear and so on.)

(London is all statues. Look at that one. Look at him up on his high horse. I wonder who he was. It says on the side. I can’t make it out. I wonder if he actually looked like he looks there, when he was alive. The Chaplin one didn’t look anything like Chaplin, not really. And the Shakespeare one, well, no way of knowing.)

(Still no Paul.)

(I wonder why they didn’t get to be people, like him, with faces and bodies, those women, they just got to be gone, they just got to be empty clothes.)

(Was it because there were too many girls and it had to be symbolic of them all?)

(But no, because there are always faces on the soldiers on war memorials, I mean the soldiers on those memorials get to be actual people, with bodies, not just clothes.)

(I wonder if that’s better, just clothes, I mean in terms of art and meaning and such like. Is it better, like more symbolic,
not
to be there?)

(Anthea would know.)

(I mean, what if Nelson was symbolised by just a hat and an empty jacket? Sometimes Chaplin is just a hat and boots and a walking stick or a hat and a moustache. But that’s because he’s so individual that you know who he is from those things.)

(Both our grandmothers were in that war. Those clothes on that memorial are the empty clothes of our grandmothers.)

(The faces of our grandmothers. We never even saw our mother’s mother’s face, well, only in photos we saw it. She was dead before we were born.)

(Still no Paul.)

That sign says Whitehall.

I’m on the wrong road.

(God, Imogen, can’t you do anything right?)

I better go back.

My ambition, Keith says, is to make Pure oblivion possible.

Right! I say.

(I hope I say it brightly enough.)

What I want, he says, is to make it not just possible but natural for someone, from the point of rising in the morning to the point of going to sleep again at night, to spend his whole day, obliviously, in Pure hands.

So, when his wife turns on his tap to fill his coffee machine, the water that comes out of it is administered, tested and cleaned by Pure. When she puts his coffee in the filter and butters his toast, or chooses him an apple from the fruit bowl, each of these products will have been shipped by and bought at one of the outlets belonging to Pure. When he picks up the paper to read at the breakfast table, whether it’s a tabloid or a Berliner or a broadsheet, it’s one of the papers that belong to Pure. When he switches on his computer, the server he uses is Pure-owned, and the breakfast tv programme he’s not really watching is going out on one of the channels the majority of whose shares is held by Pure. When his wife changes the baby’s diaper, it’s replaced with one bought and packed by Pure Pharmaceuticals, like the two ibuprofen she’s just about to neck, and all the other drugs she needs to take in the course of the day, and when his baby eats, it eats bottled organic range Ooh Baby, made and distributed by Pure. When he slips the latest paperback into his briefcase, or when his wife thinks about what she’ll be reading at her book group later that day, whatever it is has been published by one of the twelve imprints owned by Pure, and bought, in person or online, at one of the three chains now owned by Pure, and if it was bought online it may even have been delivered by a mail network operated by Pure. And should our man feel like watching some high-grade porn, – if you’ll excuse me, ah, ah, for being so crude as to suggest it –

I nod.

(I smile like people suggest it to me all the time.)

– on his laptop or on his phonescreen on the way to work, while he keeps himself hydrated by drinking a bottle of Pure’s Eau Caledonia, he can do so courtesy of one of the several leisure outlets owned, distributed and operated by Pure.

(But I am feeling a bit uneasy. I am feeling a bit disenchanted. Has Keith driven me all this way out of London in a specially-chauffeured car to this collection of prefab offices on the outskirts of a New Town just to give me a Creative lecture?)

And that’s just breakfast, Keith is saying. Our Pure Man hasn’t even reached work yet. That’s just the opener. There’s the whole rest of the day to come. And we’ve only touched on his wife, only skimmed the surface of his infant. We haven’t even begun to consider his ten-year-old son, his teenage daughter. Because Pure Product is everywhere. Pure is massive throughout the global economy.

But most important, Pure is pure. And Pure must be perceived by the market as pure. It does what it says on the tin. You get me, ah, ah?

Imogen, Keith, yes, Keith, I do, I say.

Keith is walking me from prefab to prefab, holding forth. There seems to be almost nobody else working here.

(Maybe they’ve all gone home. It’s seven p. m., after all.)

(I wish there were at least one or two other people around. I wish that chauffeur bloke had stayed. But no, he pulled out of the car park as soon as he dropped me off.)

(The angle the sun is at is making it hard for me to do anything but squint at Keith.)

Right, Keith, I say

(even though he hasn’t said anything else.)

(He isn’t in the least bit interested in the print-outs. I’ve tried bringing them into the conversation twice.)

… trillion-dollar water market, he is saying.

(I know all this.)

… planned takeover of the Germans who own Thames Water, naturally, and we’ve just bought up a fine-looking concern in the Netherlands, and massive market opportunities coming up with the Chinese and Indian water business, he says.

(I know all this too.)

Which is why, ah, ah, he says.

Imogen, I say.

Which is why, Imogen, I’ve brought you down here to Base Camp, Keith says.

(
This
is Base Camp? Milton Keynes?)

… putting you in charge of Pure DND, Keith says.

(Me! In charge of something!)

(Oh my God!)

Thanks, Keith, I say. What’s, uh – what exactly is –?

With your natural tact, he is saying. With your way with words. With your natural instinctual caring talent for turning an argument on its head. With your understanding of the politics of locale. With your ability to deal with media issues head-on. Most of all, with your style. And I’m the first to admit that right now we need a woman’s touch on the team, ah, ah. We need that more than anything, and at Pure we will reward more than anything your ability to look good, look right, say the right thing, on camera if necessary, under all pressures, and to take the flak like a man if anything goes pear-shaped.

(Keith thinks I’m overweight.)

We’ve stopped outside a prefab identical to all the others. Keith presses the code-buttons on a door and lets it swing open. He stands back, gestures to me to look inside.

There’s a new desk, a new computer set-up, a new chair, a new phone, a new sofa, a shining pot plant.

Pure Dominant Narrative Department, he says. Welcome home.

Pure – ? I say.

Do I have to carry you over the threshold? he says. Go on! Take a seat at the desk! It’s your seat! It was purchased for you! Go on!

I don’t move from the door. Keith strides in, pulls the swivel chair out from behind the desk and sends it rolling towards me. I catch it.

Sit, he says.

I sit in it, in the doorway.

Keith comes over, takes the back of the chair, swivels it round and stands behind me

(which reminds me of what the boy used to do when we went to the shows at the Bught, on the waltzers, the boy who’d hold the back of the waltzer if there were girls in it then make us all laugh like lunatics by giving it an especially dizzying spin.)

Keith’s head is by my head. He is speaking into my right ear.