Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis

by Ali Smith

  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.

  Your first brief, Keith is saying, is a piece replying to the article in the British-based Independent newspaper this morning, which you’ll have seen –

  (I haven’t. Oh God.)

  – about how bottled water uses much less stringent testing than tap water. DDR, ah, ah.

  DD . . .? I say.

  Deny Disparage Rephrase, Keith says. Use your initiative. Your imagination. So many of those so-called regulated tests on tap water useless and some of them actually harmful. Science insists, and many scientists insist. Statistics say. Our independent findings versus their crackpot findings. You pen it, we place it.

  (He wants me to do – what?)

  Your second brief is a little tougher. But I know you’ll meet it. Small body of irate ethnics in one of our Indian sub-interests factioning against our planned filter-dam two-thirds completed and soon to power four Pure labs in the area. They say: our dam blocks their access to fresh water and ruins their crops. We say: they’re ethnic troublemakers who are trying to involve us in a despicable religious war. Use the word terrorism if necessary. Got it?

  (Do what?)

  (This chair feels unsafe. Its slight moving under Keith’s arm is making me feel sick.)

  Fifty-five and upwards per annum, Keith says, negotiable after the handling of these first two briefs.

  (But it’s – wrong.)

  Our kind of person, Keith says.

  (Keith’s midriff is close to my eyes. I can see that his trousers are repressing an erection. More, I can see that he wants me to see it. He is actually showing me his hidden hard-on.)

  . . . brightest star in the UK-based Pure-concern sky, he’s saying, and I know you can do it, ah, ah, –

  (I try to say my name. But I can’t speak. My mouth’s too dry.)

  (It’s possible that he came all the way out here to this prefab and set the height level of this chair at the exact height for me to see his erection properly.)

  . . . only girl this high in management, he is saying.

  (I can’t say anything.)

  (Then I remember the last time I needed a glass of water.)

  (I think about what a glass of water means.)

  I can’t do this, I say.

  Yes you can, he says. You’re not a silly girl.

  No, I’m not, I say. And I can’t make up rubbish and pretend it’s true. Those people in India. That water is their right.

  Not so, my little Scotty dog, Keith says. According to the World Water Forum 2000, whose subject was water’s exact designation, water is not a human right. Water is a human need. And that means we can market it. We can sell a need. It’s our human right to.

  Keith, that’s ridiculous, I say. Those words you just used are all in the wrong places.

  Keith spins the chair round with me in it until it’s facing him. He stands with his hands on the arms and leans over me so I can’t get out of the chair. He looks at me solemnly. He gives the chair a playful little warning jolt.

  I shake my head.

  It’s bullshit, Keith, I say. You can’t do that.

  It’s international-government-ratified, he says. It’s law. Whether you think it’s bullshit or not. And I can do what I like. And there’s nothing you or anyone else can do about it.

  Then the law should be changed, I hear myself say. It’s a wrong law. And there’s a lot I can do about it. What I can do is, I can, uh, I can say as loudly as I possibly can, everywhere that I can, that it shouldn’t be happening like this, until as many people hear as it takes to make it not happen.

  I hear my own voice get louder and louder. But Keith doesn’t move. He doesn’t flinch. He holds the chair square.

  Your surname again? he says quietly.

  I take a breath.

  It’s Gunn, I say.

  He shakes his head as if it was him who named me, as if he can decide what I’m called and what I’m not.

  Not really Pure material, he says. Pity. You looked just right.

  I can feel something rising in me as big as his hard-on. It’s anger.

  It forces me up on to my feet, lurches me forward in the chair so that my head nearly hits his head and he has to step back.

  I take a deep breath. I keep myself calm. I speak quietly.

  Which way’s the station from here, Keith, and will I need a cab? I ask.

  Locked in the ladies toilet in the main prefab while I’m waiting for the taxi, I throw up. Luckily I am adept at throwing up, so I get none of it on my clothes.

  (But it is the second time for months and months, I realise as the taxi pulls away from Pure Base Camp, that I haven’t thrown up on purpose.)

  I get myself back to London. I love London! I walk between Euston and King’s Cross like it’s something I do all the time, like I belong among all these other people walking along a London street.

  I manage to get a seat in a sitting-up carriage on the last sleeper north.

  On the journey I tell the other three people in the carriage about Pure and about the people in India.

  English people are just as shy and polite as Scottish people really, under all that pretend confidence, and some of them can be very nice.

  But I will also have to find a way of telling the story that doesn’t make people look away, or go and sit somewhere else.

  Still, even though I’m sitting here near-shouting about the ways of the world at a few strangers in a near-empty railway carriage, I feel – what is it I feel?

  I feel completely sane.

  I feel all energised. I feel so energised on this slow-moving train that it’s like I’m travelling faster than the train is. I feel all loaded. A loaded Gunn!

  Somewhere in Northumberland, as the train slows up again, I remember the story about the clan I get my name from, the story about the Gunn girl who was wooed by the chief of another clan and who didn’t like him. She refused to marry him.

  So he came to the Gunn castle one day and he killed all the Gunns he could find, in fact he killed everybody, family or not, that he happened to meet on his way to her chamber. When he got there he broke the door down. He took her by force.

  He drove her miles and miles to his own stronghold where he shut her up at the top of a tower until she’d give in.

  But she didn’t give in. She never gave in. She threw herself out of the tower instead, to her death. Ha!

  I used to think that story of my far-back ancestor was a morbid story. But tonig
ht, I mean this morning, on this train about to cross the border between there and here, a story like that one becomes all about where we see it from. Where we’re lucky enough

  (or unlucky enough)

  to see it from.

  And listen. Listen, you other two remaining people asleep right now. Listen, world out there, slow-passing beyond the train windows. I’m Imogen Gunn. I come from a family that can’t be had. I come from a country that’s the opposite of a, what was it, dominant narrative. I’m all Highland adrenalin. I’m all teuchter laughter and I’m all teuchter anger. Pure! Ha!

  We roll slowly past the Lowland sea, and the sea belongs to all of us. We roll slowly past the rugged banks of lochs and rivers in a kind of clearness of fine early morning summer light, and they’re full of water that belongs to everyone.

  Then I think to check my phone.

  Seven missed calls – from Paul!

  It’s a sign!

  (And to think I used to think he wasn’t the right kind of person for me.)

  Even though it’s really late, I mean really early morning, I call him straight back without listening to any of the messages.

  Paul, I say. It’s me. Did I wake you?

  No, it’s fine, he says. Well, I mean, you did. But Imogen –

  Listen, Paul, I say. First there’s something I have to say. And it’s this. I really like you. I mean, I really, really like you. I’ve liked you since the very first moment we met. You were at the water cooler. Remember?