Girl Meets Boy Read online

  What I mean is. There, under the trees, on a fresh spring day by the banks of the River Ness, that fast black backbone of a Scottish northern town; there, flanked by presbyterian church after presbyterian church, we gave our hands in marriage under the blossom, gave each other and took each other for better, for worse, in sickness or health, to love, comfort, honour, cherish, protect, and to have and to hold each other from that day forward, for as long as we both should live till death us would part.

  Ness I said Ness I will Ness.

  Into thin air, to the nothing that was there, with the river our witness, we said yes. We said we did. We said we would.

  We’d thought we were alone, Robin and I. We’d thought it was just us, under the trees outside the cathedral. But as soon as we’d made our vows there was a great whoop of joy behind us, and when we turned round we saw all the people, there must have been hundreds, they were clapping and cheering, they were throwing confetti, they waved and they roared celebration.

  My sister was there at the front with her other half, Paul. She was happy. She smiled. Paul looked happy. He was growing his hair. My sister gestured to me like she couldn’t believe it, at a couple standing not far from her – look! – was it them? – sure enough, it was them, our father and our mother, both, and they were standing together and they weren’t arguing, they were talking to each other very civilly, they clinked their glasses as I watched.

  They’re discussing the unsuitability of the wedding, Midge said.

  I nodded. First time they’ve agreed on anything in years, I said.

  All the people from the rest of the tale were there too; Becky from Reception; the two work experience girls, Chantelle and her friend Lorraine; Brian, who was going out with Chantelle; and Chantelle’s mum, who wasn’t in the story as such but who’d clearly also taken a shine to Brian; a whole gaggle of Pure people, including the security men who first arrested Robin; they waved and smiled. Not Norman or Dominic, were those their names? they’d been promoted to Base Camp, so they weren’t there, at least not that I saw, and not the boss of bosses, Keith, I don’t remember seeing him either. But the whole of the Provost’s office came, and some officials from other places we’d written on; the theatre, the shopping mall, the Castle. A male-voice choir from the Inverness Police Force attended, they sang a beautiful arrangement of songs from Gilbert and Sullivan. Then the Inverness Constabulary female-voice choir sang an equally beautiful choral arrangement of Don’t Cha (Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me). Then the Provost made an eloquent speech. Inverness, she said, once famed for its faith in unexpected ancient creatures of the deep, had now become famous for something new: for fairness, for art, and for the art of fairness. Inverness, now world-renowned for its humane and galvanising public works of art, had quadrupled its tourist intake. Thousands more people were coming especially to view the public exhibits. And not just Antiques Roadshow, but Songs of Praise, Question Time, Newsnight Review and several other tv programmes had all petitioned the council, keen to record themselves in front of the famous sloganned walls. The Inverness art may have spawned copycat art in other cities and towns, she said, but none so good as in the city whose new defining motto, inscribed on all the signposts at all the entrypoints to the city, would be from this day forth A Hundred Thousand Welcomes And When You See A Wrong, Write It! Ceud Mile Failte! Còir! Sgriobh!

  Really terrible slogan, I said privately to Robin.

  Your sister thought it up, Robin said. Definitely in line for a job as Council Creative.

  Which is your family? I asked Robin. She pointed them out. They were by the drinks table with Venus, Artemis and Dionysos; her father and mother were cuddling the baby Cupid, which was problematic because of the arrows (in fact there was a bit of a fuss later when Lorraine cut her finger open on an arrow-tip, and even more problems when Artemis and Chantelle were found down the riverbank in the dusk light firing arrows at the rabbits on the grass at the side of the Castle and, Chantelle being very short-sighted, the damage to four passing cars had to be paid for, and Brian had to be comforted after Chantelle swore eternal celibacy, so it was lucky that Chantelle’s mum had come with her after all).

  Then we had the speeches, and Midge read out the apologies, including one from the Loch Ness Monster, who’d sent us an old rusty underwater radar scanner, some signed photos of herself and a lovely set of silver fishknives, and there was a half gold-edged, half black-edged telegram-poem from John Knox, sorry he couldn’t make it to be there with us even in spirit:

  Here’s tae ye,

  Wha’s like ye?

  Far too many

  And ye’re all damnt to Hell.

  But whit can I say,

  It’s a weddin day,

  So come on, raise your glasses now,

  And wish the damnt pair weel!

  We had the blessings then, and the toasts. Honour, riches, marriage-blessing, Love, continuance, and increasing, Hourly joys be still upon us, Juno sing her blessings on us, till all the seas gang dry, my dear, and the rocks melt wi’ the sun. May our eternal summer never fade. May the road rise up to meet us, and may God always hold us in the palm of His hand. A dog on two legs was drinking too much whisky. A goddess so regal she must have been Isis spent the whole reception making fine new guests out of clay. A beautiful Greek couple came graciously up and shook our hands; they were newlyweds themselves, they said, and how had the run-up to the wedding been? was it as nervewracking as it’d been for them? They’d never thought they’d make it. But they had, they were happy, and they wished us all happiness. They told us to honeymoon in Crete, where their families would make us welcome, and that’s exactly what we did, Robin and I, when the wedding was over, we hotfooted it to the hot island, its surfaces layered with wild flowers, marjoram, sage and thyme, its rocks split by the force of tiny white and pink and yellow flowers and everywhere the scent of herbs and salt and sea. We stood where the Iphis story had originated, we stood between red-painted pillars in the reconstructed palace, we went to the museum to see the ancient, pieced-together, re-imagined painting of the athlete, the acrobat, boy or girl or both, who was agile enough to somersault right over the top of the back of the charging bull. We stood where the civilised, rich, cultured, Minoan cannibals had lived before nature had simply flooded them into oblivion, and we thought about the story that arose from their rituals, the story of the annual sacrifice of the seven boys and seven girls to the bull-headed beast, and the clever artist, the man who invented human wings, who devised the girls and the boys a safe way out of the bloody maze.

  But back at the wedding the band had struck up now, and what a grand noise, for the legendary red-faced fiddler who played at all the best weddings had come, and had had a drink, and had got out his fiddle, he was the man to turn curved wood and horsehair, cat-gut and resin into a single blackbird then into a flight of blackbirds singing all the evenings at once, then into a spawn of happy salmon, into the return of the longed-for boat to a port, into the longing that waits in a lucky place for two people who don’t yet know each other to meet exactly there, where the stones grass over, the borders cross themselves. It was the song of the flow of things, the song of the undammed river, and there with the fiddler was his sidekick, who doubled the tune and who, when he played alongside his partner, found in everything he laid hands on (whistle, squeezebox, harp, guitar, old empty oilcan and a stick or stone to bang it with) the kind of music that not only made the bushes and the trees pull themselves out of the ground and move where they could hear better, but made them throw their leaves and twigs up in the air, made all the seagulls clap their wings, made all the dogs of the Highlands bark with joy, made all the roofs dance on the houses, made every paving stone of the whole town tear itself up, stand itself on its pointed corner and do a happy pirouette, even made the old cathedral itself on its fixed foundations leap and caper.

  Up the river it came, then, the astonishing little boat, up the river that no boats ever came up, with its two great fibreglass ju
ts like the horns of a goat or a cow or a goddess held ahead of it, and its sail full and white against the trees and the sky. How it got from the loch through the Islands, how it did the impossible, got under the Infirmary Bridge with that full huge sail up we’ll never know, but it did, it sailed the stretch of Ness Bank and it docked right below us, and there at the wheel was our grandmother, and throwing the rope to be caught was our grandfather. Robert and Helen Gunn, they were back from the sea, in time for the party.

  We felt in our water that something was happening! our grandmother called up to us as she put her foot on dry land. We wouldn’t miss this, no, not for the world!

  Well, girls, and have you been good, and has the world been good to you? and how was your catch? have you landed fine fish? that was our grandfather, his old arms round us, him ruffling our hair.

  They were younger than the day they left. They were brown and robust, their faces and hands were lined like the trunks of trees. They met Robin. They met Paul. They flung their arms round them like family.

  Our grandmother danced the Canadian Barn Dance with Paul.

  Our grandfather danced the Gay Gordons with Robin.

  The music and the dancing went on late into the night. In fact, there was still dancing going on when the night was over, the light coming back and the new day dawning.

  Uh-huh. Okay. I know.

  In my dreams.

  What I mean is, we stood on the bank of the river under the trees, the pair of us, and we promised the nothing that was there, the nothing that made us, the nothing that was listening, that we truly desired to go beyond our selves.

  And that’s the message. That’s it. That’s all.

  Rings that widen on the surface of a loch above a thrown-in stone. A drink of water offered to a thirsty traveller on the road. Nothing more than what happens when things come together, when hydrogen, say, meets oxygen, or a story from then meets a story from now, or stone meets water meets girl meets boy meets bird meets hand meets wing meets bone meets light meets dark meets eye meets word meets world meets grain of sand meets thirst meets hunger meets need meets dream meets real meets same meets different meets death meets life meets end meets beginning all over again, the story of nature itself, ever-inventive, making one thing out of another, and one thing into another, and nothing lasts, and nothing’s lost, and nothing ever perishes, and things can always change, because things will always change, and things will always be different, because things can always be different.

  And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us be brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.

  And there’s always a whole other kittle of fish, our grandfather said in my ear as he reached down and tucked the warm stone into my hand, there it was, ready for me to throw.

  Right, Anthea?

  Right, Grandad, I said.

  Acknowledgements and thanks

  I’ve adapted the story of Burning Lily from the account of the early life of Lilian Lenton in Rebel Girls by Jill Liddington (Virago, 2006).

  The myth of Iphis originates in Book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. ‘Carry your gifts to the temples, happy pair, and rejoice, confident and unafraid!’ It is one of the cheeriest metamorphoses in the whole work, one of the most happily resolved of its stories about the desire for and the ramifications of change.

  The statistics in chapter four were collated by Womankind (www.womankind.org.uk), a UK charity whose raison d’être is to provide voice, aid and rights to disempowered women worldwide.

  I’ve borrowed the rhetorical structure of one of Keith’s talks from a paper given in 2001 by the sociologist J-P Joseph about the global water corporation Vivendi Universal, quoted in Blue Gold by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke (Earthscan, 2002). The writings of Vandana Shiva are another good place to help comprehend what’s happening right now, worldwide, when it comes to the politics of water, as is H20: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), which lets us know, among many other marvellous things, that ‘water is bent’.

  Thank you, Xandra. Thank you, Jeanette.

  Thank you, Rachel, Bridget and Kasia.

  Thank you, Robyn and Hiraani at This ASFC.

  Thank you, Andrew, and everyone at Wylie’s, especially

  Tracy. Thank you, Anya.

  Thank you, Lucy.

  Thank you, Sarah.