Free Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (Myths) by Ali Smith Page B

Paul.)
    (I can’t see a streetname. I think I might not be on the right road for)
    (oh look at that, that’s an interesting-looking one, right in the middle of the road, what is it, a memorial? It’s a memorial with just, as if empty clothes are hanging all round it on hooks, like empty clothes, a lot of soldiers’ and workers’ clothes.)
    (But they look strange. They look like they’ve got the shapes of bodies still in them. And though they’re men’s clothes, the way all their folds are falling looks like women’s –)
    (Oh, right, it’s a statue to the women who fought in the war. Oh I get it. It’s like the clothes they wore, which they just took off and hung up, like a minute ago, like someone else’s clothes they just stepped into briefly. And the clothes have kept their shape so that you get the bodyshape of women but in dungarees and uniforms and clothes they wouldn’t usually wear and so on.)
    (London is all statues. Look at that one. Look at him up on his high horse. I wonder who he was. It says on the side. I can’t make it out. I wonder if he actually looked like he looks there, when he was alive. The Chaplin one didn’t look anything like Chaplin, not really. And the Shakespeare one, well, no way of knowing.)
    (Still no Paul.)
    (I wonder why they didn’t get to be people, like him, with faces and bodies, those women, they just got to be gone, they just got to be empty clothes.)
    (Was it because there were too many girls and it had to be symbolic of them all?)
    (But no, because there are always faces on the soldiers on war memorials, I mean the soldiers on those memorials get to be actual people, with bodies, not just clothes.)
    (I wonder if that’s better, just clothes, I mean in terms of art and meaning and such like. Is it better, like more symbolic, not to be there?)
    (Anthea would know.)
    (I mean, what if Nelson was symbolised by just a hat and an empty jacket? Sometimes Chaplin is just a hat and boots and a walking stick or a hat and a moustache. But that’s because he’s so individual that you know who he is from those things.)
    (Both our grandmothers were in that war. Those clothes on that memorial are the empty clothes of our grandmothers.)
    (The faces of our grandmothers. We never even saw our mother’s mother’s face, well, only in photos we saw it. She was dead before we were born.)
    (Still no Paul.)
    That sign says Whitehall.
    I’m on the wrong road.
    (God, Imogen, can’t you do anything right?)
    I better go back.
    My ambition, Keith says, is to make Pure oblivion possible.
    Right! I say.
    (I hope I say it brightly enough.)
    What I want, he says, is to make it not just possible but natural for someone, from the point of rising in the morning to the point of going to sleep again at night, to spend his whole day, obliviously, in Pure hands.
    So, when his wife turns on his tap to fill his coffee machine, the water that comes out of it is administered, tested and cleaned by Pure. When she puts his coffee in the filter and butters his toast, or chooses him an apple from the fruit bowl, each of these products will have been shipped by and bought at one of the outlets belonging to Pure. When he picks up the paper to read at the breakfast table, whether it’s a tabloid or a Berliner or a broadsheet, it’s one of the papers that belong to Pure. When he switches on his computer, the server he uses is Pure-owned, and the breakfast tv programme he’s not really watching is going out on one of the channels the majority of whose shares is held by Pure. When his wife changes the baby’s diaper, it’s replaced with one bought and packed by Pure Pharmaceuticals, like the two ibuprofen she’s just about to neck, and all the other drugs she needs to take in the course of the day, and when his baby eats, it eats bottled organic range Ooh Baby, made and distributed by Pure. When he slips the latest paperback into his briefcase, or when his wife thinks about what she’ll be reading at her book