Ali Smith - Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (Myths, The)

Praise forGirl Meets Boy:

AGlobe and MailBest Book
Winner of the Sundial Scottish Arts Council Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the International IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award
Finalist for the Clare McLean Prize for
Scotlands Best Novel
Finalist for the Prince Maurice Prize for
Literary Love Stories

As a storyteller, Ali Smiths supreme gift is that, with what seems effortless confidence, she shows us unfamiliar beauty within the mundane, as if we were children again. In prose marked by harmonious opposites, shes childlike and wise, exuberant and subtle, humorously intelligent and provocatively dry.

The Globe and Mail

The great thing about stories is that they can build their own walls and then let us walk right through them. Girl Meets Boy is a joyful celebration of life in all its strange shapes, on all sides of the wall.

Jeanette Winterson, The Times

As fanciful as it is honest and as moving as it is hilarious, this is a gorgeous story.

The London Paper

A spritely love story that plays on notions of gender and sexuality to exuberant effect.

The Observer

An ecstatic, exhilarating helter-skelter ride of a story.

Financial Times

Smith creates a story of the head-spinning ecstasy of falling in love. Gentle, generous and wonderfully imaginative, this is a joy to read.

Metro

Also by Ali Smith

Novels
Like
Hotel World
The Accidental

Collections
Free Love and Other Stories
Other Stories and Other Stories
The Whole Story and Other Stories

Plays
Trace of Arc
Just
The Seer

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009

Copyright 2007 Ali Smith

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2009. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2008. First published in 2007 in Great Britain by Cannongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Smith, Ali, 1962
Girl meets boy / Ali Smith.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36734-1

I. Title. II. Series: Myths series (Toronto, Ont.)
PR6069.M4213G57 2009 823.914 C2008-905514-4

Typeset in Van Dijck by Palimpsest Book Production, Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

v3.1

for Lucy Cuthbertson

for Sarah Wood

Far away, in some other category, far
away from the snobbery and glitter in
which our souls and bodies have been
entangled, is forged the instrument
of the new dawn.
E M Forster

It is the mark of a narrow world that
it mistrusts the undefined.
Joseph Roth

I am thinking about the difference
between history and myth. Or between
expression and vision. The need for
narrative and the simultaneous need
to escape the prison-house of the
story to misquote.
Kathy Acker

Gender ought not to be construed as
a stable identity rather, gender is an
identity tenuously constituted in time.
Judith Butler

Practise only impossibilities.
John Lyly

Let me tell you about when I was a girl, our grandfather says.

It is Saturday evening; we always stay at their house on Saturdays. The couch and the chairs are shoved back against the walls. The teak coffee table from the middle of the room is up under the window. The floor has been cleared for the backward and forward somersaults, the juggling with oranges and eggs, the how-to-do-a-cart-wheel, how-to-stand-on-your-head, how-to-walk-on-your-hands lessons. Our grandfather holds us upside-down by the legs until we get our balance. Our grandfather worked in a circus before he met and married our grandmother. He once did headstands on top of a whole troupe of headstanders. He once walked a tightrope across the Thames. The Thames is a river in London, which is five hundred and twenty-seven miles from here, according to the mileage chart in the RAC book in among our fathers books at home. Oh, across the Thames, was it? our grandmother says. Not across the falls at Niagara? Ah, Niagara, our grandfather says. Now that was a whole other kittle of fish.

It is after gymnastics and it is before Blind Date. Sometimes after gymnastics it is The Generation Game instead. Back in history The Generation Game was our mothers favourite programme, way before we were born, when she was as small as us. But our mother isnt here any more, and anyway we prefer Blind Date, where every week without fail a boy chooses a girl from three girls and a girl chooses a boy from three boys, with a screen and Cilla Black in between them each time. Then the chosen boys and girls from last weeks programme come back and talk about their blind date, which has usually been awful, and there is always excitement about whether therell be a wedding, which is what its called before people get divorced, and to which Cilla Black will get to wear a hat.

But which is Cilla Black, then, boy or girl? She doesnt seem to be either. She can look at the boys if she wants; she can go round the screen and look at the girls. She can go between the two sides of things like a magician, or a joke. The audience always laughs with delight when she does it.

Youre being ridiculous, Anthea, Midge says shrugging her eyes at me.

Cilla Black is from the sixties, our grandmother says as if that explains everything.

It is Saturday tea-time, after supper and before our bath. It is always exciting to sit in the chairs in the places they usually arent. Midge and I, one on each knee, are on our grandfathers lap and all three of us are wedged into the pushed-back armchair waiting for our grandmother to settle. She drags her own armchair closer to the electric fire. She puts her whole weight behind the coffee table and shoves it over so she can watch the football results. You dont need the sound up for that. Then she neatens the magazines on the under-rack of the table and then she sits down. Steam rises off teacups. Weve got the taste of buttered toast in our mouths. At least, I assume we all have it, since weve all been eating the same toast, well, different bits of the same toast. Then I start to worry. Because what if we all taste things differently? What if each bit of toast tastes completely different? After all, the two bits Ive eaten definitely tasted a bit different even from each other. I look round the room, from head to head of each of us. Then I taste the taste in my own mouth again.