Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith [13]
(they were holding hands at the front door, where any neighbour could see, and then I saw Robin Goodman lean my sister gently into the hedge, back against the branches of it, she was so gentle, and)
(and kiss her.)
(I should have known when she always liked songs that had I and you in them, instead of he and I, or he and she, we always knew, we used to say at college that that was the giveaway, when people preferred those songs that had the word you instead of a man or a woman, like that classic old Tracy Chapman album our mother left behind her that she was always playing before she went.)
(I will never leave my children when I have fallen in love and am married and have had them. I will have them young, not when I am old, like the selfish generation. I would rather give up any career than not have them. I would rather give myself up. I would rather give up everything including any stupid political principle than leave children that belonged to me. Look how it ends. Thank God that feministy time of selfishness is over and we now have everything we will ever need, including a much more responsible set of values.)
It is a lovely day to go for a run. It is not raining. It doesn’t even look like it will rain later.
(My sister is a gay.)
(I am not upset.)
(I am fine.)
(It’d be okay, I mean I wouldn’t mind so much, if it was someone else’s sister.)
(It is okay. Lots of people are it. Just none that I have known personally, that’s all.)
I am running along the riverside. I am so lucky to live here at this time in history, in the Capital of the Highlands, which is exceptionally buoyant right now, the fastest-developing city in the whole of the UK at the moment thanks to tourism and retirement, and soon also thanks to the growing water economy, of which I am a central part, and which will make history.
We speak the purest English here in the whole country. It is because of the vowel sounds and what happened to them when Gaelic speakers were made to speak English after the 1745 rebellion and the 1746 defeat when Gaelic was stamped out and punishable by death, and then all the local girls married the incoming English-speaking soldiers.
If I can remember the exact, correct words to all the songs on that awful Tracy Chapman album, which I can’t have heard for years, it must be at least ten years, I’ll be able to run for at least three more miles.
It is good to be goal-orientated. It makes all the other things go out of your mind.
I could go via the canal and past the locks and up over towards the Beauly road and then round by
(but dear God my sister has been hanging around for weeks with a person who is a criminal and against whom the company I work for is pressing charges, and not just that but a person whom I remember from school, and a person, I also remember, we all always called that word behind her back at school, and now this person has turned my sister into one of them, I mean One of Them. And I mean, how did we know to call Robin Goodman that word at school? Adolescent instinct? Well, I didn’t know, I never really knew. I thought it was because she had a boy’s name instead of a girl’s name. That’s what I used to think, or maybe because she came in on the bus from Beauly, with the Beauly kids, from somewhere else, and because she had a boy’s name, that’s what I thought. And because she was a bit different, and didn’t people used to say that her mother was black, Robin Goodman, and her father was white, or was it the other way round, and was that even true? I don’t remember there being any black people living in Beauly, we’d surely have known, we’d all have known, if there was.)
(I can’t bring myself to say the word.)
(Dear God. It is worse than the word cancer.)
(My little sister is going to grow up into a dissatisfied older predatory totally dried-up abnormal woman like Judi Dench in that film Notes on a Scandal.)
(Judi Dench plays that sort of person so well, is what I thought when I saw it, but that was when I didn’t think my sister was going to maybe