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Ali Smith

Girl Meets Boy

Τάδε νυν ἕταιραις

ταϊς εμαισι τέρπνα κάλως άείσω.

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

I

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 father’s 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 mother’s favourite programme, way before we were born, when she was as small as us. But our mother isn’t 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 week’s programme come back and talk about their blind date, which has usually been awful, and there is always excitement about whether there’ll be a wedding, which is what it’s 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 doesn’t 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.

You’re being ridiculous, Anthea, Midge says shrugging her eyes at me.