Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (Myths) (5 page)

Don’t call me that, I say.

Can’t take a joke? he says. Loosen up. Ha ha!

He goes to the bar and brings me a glass of white.

Norm, I said a Diet Coke, I say.

But I’ve bought it now, Norman says.

So I see, I say.

Do you want me to take it back and change it? Norman says.

No, it’s okay, I’ll drink it since it’s here now, I say.

I texted you, Madge, Dominic says.

(My name’s Imogen.)

Did you? I say.

I texted you four times, Dominic says.

Ah. Because I left my mobile at home, I say.

I can’t believe you didn’t have your mobile with you, when I’d told you I was going to text you, Dominic says.

He looks really offended.

No Paul or anybody? I say. I thought everybody was coming.

Just us, Norman says. Your lucky night. Bri’s coming later. He’s bringing Chantelle.

I’d bring Chantelle any day, Dominic says.

I’d do a lot more to Chantelle than just bring her, Norman says. Paul’s gay, man. He won’t come out on a Monday night because of University Challenge being on.

Paul isn’t gay, I say in a small voice.

Paul’s hoping there’ll be questions on tonight about Uranus, Dominic says.

Paul isn’t gay, I say again louder.

You talking from experience then? Norman says.

Scintillating conversation, I say.

I make my face look bored. I hope it will work.

Dominic doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me. The way he’s looking at me makes me look away. I pretend I’m going to the ladies. I slip intoz the other bar and phone Paul.

Come to the pub, I say. I try to sound bright.

Who’s there? Paul asks.

Loads of us, I say.

Is it Dom and Norm? Paul says. I’m only asking because they left an abusive message on my answerphone.

Uh huh. And me, I say. I’m here.

No offence, Imogen. But I’m not coming out, Paul says. They’re wankers. They think they’re so funny, they act like some nasty double act off tv. I don’t know what you’re doing out with them.

Go on, Paul, please, I say. It’ll be good fun.

Yeah, but the world now divides into people who think it’s good fun looking up pictures on the net of women fucking horses and dogs, and people who don’t, Paul says. If you need me to come and get you, call me later.

Paul is very uptight, I think when I press the button to hang up.

I don’t see why he can’t just pretend to find it funny like the rest of us have to.

(Maybe he
is
gay.)

So what about that other work experience girl, then? Norman is saying when I get back through. The one who’s not Chantelle. What about work-experiencing her?

I’ve other things in mind, Dominic says looking at me.

I look above his eyes, at his forehead. I can’t help noticing that both Dominic and Norman have the exact same haircut. Norman goes to the bar and comes back with a full wine bottle. He and Dominic are drinking Grolsch.

I can’t drink all that, I say. I’m only out for one or two, I’ve got to get back.

Yes you can, Norman says. He fills the glass up past the little line, right to the very top, so that it’s almost spilling over onto the table, so that to drink anything out of it at all I’m going to have to lean over and put my mouth to it there on the table, or pick it up with superhuman care so as not to spill it.

We’re off for a curry in a minute, Dominic says. You’re coming too. Drink it fast.

I can’t, I say. It’s Monday. There’s work tomorrow.

Yes you can, Norman says. We work too, you know.

I drink four glasses filled to the top like this. It makes them roar with laughter when I bend right down to drink it. Eventually I do it so that that’s what it will do, make them laugh.

At the restaurant, where everything smells too strong, and where the walls seem to be coming away from their skirting boards, they talk about work as if I’m not there. They make several jokes about Muslim pilots. They tell a long complicated joke about a blind Jewish man and a prostitute. Then Brian texts Dominic to say he can’t come. This causes a shouted dialogue with him down the phone about Chantelle, about Chantelle’s greggy friend, and about whether Chantelle’s greggy friend is there with Chantelle right now so that Brian can ‘watch’. Meanwhile I sit in the swirling restaurant and wonder what the word greggy means. It’s clearly a word they’ve made up. It makes them really laugh. It makes them laugh so much that people round us are looking offended, and so are the Indian people serving us. I can’t help laughing too.

The word seems to mean, on the whole, that they don’t think the other work experience girl wears enough make-up to work, regardless of the fact she’s sixteen and should really know how to by now, as Norman says. That she wears the wrong kinds of clothes. That she is a bit of a disappointment.

That she’s a bit, you know, greg, Dominic says.

I think I’m beginning to understand, I say.

I mean, take you. You exercise, and everything. You’ve got a top job, and everything. But that doesn’t make you a greg. That bike you’ve got. You can get away with it, Norman says.

So the fact that I look all right on a motorbike means I’m not a greg? I say.

They both burst out laughing.

So it means unfeminine? I say.

I’d like to see her gregging, Norman says looking at me. You and that good-looking little sister of yours.

They roar with laughter. I am beginning to find the laughter a bit like someone is sandpapering my skull. I look away from the people all looking at us. I look down at the tablecloth.

Aw. She doesn’t like not knowing the politically correct terms for things, Dominic says.

Greggy greggy greggy. Use your head, Norman says. Come on. Free associate.

Dreggy? I say. Something to do with dregs?

Getting there, getting there, Norman says.

Go on, give her a clue, Dominic says.

Okay. Here’s a great big clue. Like the man at the BBC, Norman says.

What man? I say.

The man who got the sack for Iraq, who used to run the BBC until he let people say what they shouldn’t have, out loud, on the news, Norman says.

Um, I say.

Are you retarded? Greg Dyke. Remember? Dominic says.

You mean, the work experience girl is something to do with Greg Dyke? I say.

They both laugh.

You mean, she says things out loud that she shouldn’t? I say.

She’s, like, a thespian, Norman says.

A what? I say.

A lickian, Norman says. Well, she looks like one.

Like that freakshow who daubed the Pure sign that day, Dominic says. Fucking dyke.

(My whole body goes cold.)

Now there’s one trial I can’t wait to see come to court. I hope we all get to come to it, Norman is saying.

We will, Dominic says. They’ll need men for there to be any coming at a trial like that.

Just what I was telling Brian, Norman says. Be ready to step in, now, when the moment’s right.

You know, I say, it said in the paper this morning that teenagers who are gay are six times more likely to kill themselves than teenagers who aren’t.

Good. Ha ha! Norman says.

Dominic’s eyes cloud. Human species, self-patrolling, he says.

They start talking as if I’m not there again, like they did when they were talking about work.

See, that’s what I don’t get, Dominic says shaking his head, serious. Because, there’s no way they could do it, I mean, without one. So it’s like, pointless.

Freud defined it, Norman says (Norman did psychology at Stirling), as a state of lack. A state of lacking something really, you know, fundamental.

Dominic nods, grave-faced.

Exactly, he says. Obviously.

Adolescent backwardness. Marked underdevelopment, Norman says.

Yeah, but a really heavy case of underdevelopment, Dominic says. I mean, never mind anything else. Never mind how weird it is. Like, what gets me is, there’s nothing to do the job. Nothing to do the jiggery-pokery with. And that’s why Queen Victoria didn’t make rugmunch illegal.

How’s that? Norman says.

It was on Channel Four. Apparently she said there was no such thing, like, it didn’t exist. And she was right. I mean, when men do it, poofs, in sexual terms, I mean, it’s fucking disgusting and it leads to queer paedophilia and everything, but at least it’s real sex they have, eh? But women. It’s, like, how can they? I just don’t get it. It’s a joke, Dominic says.

Yeah, but it’s good, Norman says, if you’re watching and they’re both fuckable.

Yeah, but the real ones are really mostly pretty unfuckable, you have to admit, Dominic says.

(Oh my God my sister who is related to me is a greg, a lack, unfuckable, not properly developed, and not even worth making illegal.)

(There are so many words I don’t know for what my little sister is.)

Dominic and Norman are somehow roaring with laughter again. They have their arms round each other.

I have to go now, I say.

No you don’t, they say in unison and fill my glass with Cobra.

Yes, I do, I say.

I shake them off at the multi-storey. I dodge behind a car so they don’t know where I’ve gone. I wait there until the legs I can see moving about have disappeared. I hear them go up the stairs and I watch them fumble at the exit ticket machine until finally whichever one of them is driving finds the ticket, works out how to put it into the machine the right way and their car goes under the lifted barrier.

I throw up under a tree at the side of the road on my way home. I look up. The tree I’ve just been sick under is in full white blossom.

(Adolescent backwardness.)

(I am fourteen. Myself and Denise MacCall are in a geography classroom. It is interval. We have somehow managed to stay in; maybe Denise said she was feeling sick or maybe I did; that was how you got to stay in over interval. We often said we felt sick if it was raining or cold.

There is a pile of homework jotters on the table. Denise is going through them, reading out people’s names. We say out loud at each name whether we pass or fail the person, like the game Anthea and I play at home at the countdown of the chart on Top of the Pops. Hurray for someone we like. Boo for someone we don’t.

Denise finds Robin Goodman’s jotter.

For some reason Denise MacCall really dislikes Robin Goodman from Beauly, with her short curly dark hair thick on top of her head, her darkish skin, her long hands that the music teacher is always going on about when she plays her clarinet, her serious, studious, far-too-clever face. I dislike her too, though I hardly know her. She is in two or three of my classes, that’s all I know about her, apart from that she plays the clarinet. But it makes me feel happy to dislike her right now, because this is proof that I am Denise’s friend. Though I am not so sure that I like Denise all that much either, or that Denise wouldn’t boo me if she got to a jotter with my name on it and I wasn’t here in the room with her.

Denise and I write the letters L, E and Z, on the front of Robin Goodman’s jotter, with the black Pentel I have in my pencil case. Or, to be more exact, I write the letters and she draws the arrow pointing at them.

Then we slide the jotter back into the middle of the pile.

When geography class starts, and Horny Geog, which is what we call Miss Horne, the old lady teacher who teaches us it, gives out the jotters, we watch to see Robin Goodman’s response. I am sitting a couple of rows behind her. I see her shoulders tense, then droop.

When I go past her at the end of the period and glance down at the book on her desk I can see that she’s made Denise’s arrow into the trunk of a tree and she’s drawn hundreds of little flowerheads, all around the letters L, E and Z, like the letters are the branches of the tree and they’ve all just come into bloom.)

The same Robin Goodman, ten years later, with her long dark hair and her dark, serious, studious face, is

(oh my God)

right here in my house when I get home. She is sitting on the couch with a cup of tea in front of her. She is reading a book. I am too drunk and dizzy to make out the cover of the book she is reading. I stand in the doorway and hold on to the doorframe.

Hi, she says.

(Oh my God and also my sister is a)

What have you done with my sister? I say.

Your sister’s in the bath, she says.

I sit down. I lean my head back. I feel sick.

(I am sitting in the same room as a)

Robin Goodman leaves the room. When she comes back, she puts something into my hand. It’s a glass. It’s one of my glasses from the cupboard.

Drink that, she says, and I’ll get you another one.

You haven’t changed much, since school, I say. You look exactly the same.

So do you, she says. But some things have changed, thank God. We’re not schoolgirls any more.

Apart from. Your hair. Got longer, I say.

Well, ten years, she says. Something’s got to give.

I went away to unversity, I say. Did you go?

If you mean university, yes, I did, she says.

And you came back, I say.

Just like you, she says.

Do you still play the clarnet? I say.

No, she says.

There’s a silence. I look down. There’s a glass in my hand.

Drink it, she says.

I drink it. It tastes beautiful, of clearness.

That’ll be better, she says.

She takes the empty glass and leaves the room. I hear her in my kitchen. I look down at myself and am surprised to see I’m still wearing the tracksuit I put on after work. I’m not completely sure where I’ve just been. I begin to wonder if I made up the whole evening, if I invented the pub, the curryhouse, the whole thing.

That’s my kitchen you were just in, I say when she comes back through.

I know, she says and sits down in my sitting room.

This is my sitting room, I say.

Yep, she says.

(I am sitting in the same room as a)

She is the kind of person who does not really care what she is wearing or what it looks like. At least she is wearing normal clothes. At least she is not wearing that embarrassing Scottish get-up.