Girl Meets Boy - Ali Smith [21]
I’ve been there! We went there! I said. We had a holiday there when we were kids. We spent a lot of it at the hospital in Heraklion, actually, because our dad went to hire a motorbike to impress this woman in a motorbike hire shop, and before he’d hired one he rode it a few yards round a corner to get a feel for it, and fell off it and scraped the skin off half the side of his body.
A long time ago, Robin said, long before motorbike hire, long before motors, long before bikes, long before you, long before me, back before the great tsunami that flattened most of northern Crete and drowned most of the Minoan cities, which, by the way, was probably the incident responsible for the creation of the myth about the lost city of Atlantis –
That’s very interesting, I said.
It is, she said. There’s pumice stone fifty feet up on dry land in parts of Crete, and cow-bones all mixed up with sea-creature remains, far too high for any other geological explanation –
No, I mean that thing about responsibility and creating a myth, I said.
Oh, she said. Well –
I mean, do myths spring fully formed from the imagin ation and the needs of a society, I said, as if they emerged from society’s subconscious? Or are myths conscious creations by the various money-making forces? For instance, is advertising a new kind of myth-making? Do companies sell their water etc by telling us the right kind of persuasive myth? Is that why people who really don’t need to buy something that’s practically free still go out and buy bottles of it? Will they soon be thinking up a myth to sell us air? And do people, for instance, want to be thin because of a prevailing myth that thinness is more beautiful?
Anth, Robin said. Do you want to hear this story about the boy-girl or don’t you?
I do, I said.
Right. Crete. Way back then, she said. Ready?
Uh huh, I said.
Sure? she said.
Yep, I said.
So there was this woman who was pregnant, and her husband came to her –
Which one was Iphis? I said.
Neither, she said. And her husband said –
What were their names? I said.
I can’t remember their names. Anyway, the husband came to the wife –
Who was pregnant, I said.
Uh huh, and he said, listen, I’m really praying for two things, and one of them is that this baby gives you no pain in the giving birth.
Hmm, right, his wife said. That’s likely, isn’t it?
Ha ha! I said.
No, well, no she didn’t, Robin said. I’m imposing far too modern a reading on it. No, she acted correctly for her time, thanked him for even considering, so graciously, from his man’s world where women didn’t really count, that there’d be any pain at all involved for her. And what’s the other thing you’re praying for? she asked. When she said this, the man, who was a good man, looked very sad. The woman was immediately suspicious. Her husband said, look, you know what I’m going to say. The thing is. When you give birth, if you have a boy, that’ll be fine, we can keep it, of course, and that’s what I’m praying for.
Uh huh? the woman said. And?
And if you have a girl, we can’t, he said. We’ll have to put it to death if it’s a girl. A girl’s a burden. You know it is. I can’t afford a girl. You know I can’t. A girl’s no use to me. So that’s that. I’m so sorry to have to say this, I wish it wasn’t so, and I don’t want to do this, but it’s the way of the world.
The way of the world, I said. Great. Thank God we’re modern.
Still the way of the world in lots of places all over the world, Robin said, red ink for a girl, blue for a boy, on the bottom of doctors’ certificates, letting parents know, in the places it’s not legal to allow people just to abort girls, what to abort and what to keep. So. The woman went off to do some praying of her own. And as she knelt down in the temple, and prayed to the nothing that was there, the goddess Isis appeared right in front of her.
Like the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, I said.
Except much, much earlier, culturally and historically, than the Virgin Mary, Robin said, and also the woman wasn’t sick, though