‘But that tells me nothing, Pete. Where did the idea come from – the first inkling or desire or whatever?’ He stubbed the fag and stared at the ceiling for a long moment.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I had a girlfriend in my teens – Sharon Crean – remember her? One night we were at the pier drinking a flagon and we started fooling with each other, kissing and everything. She was well into it but it was hopeless for me. I didn’t exactly rise to the occasion. I was all over her and eating the face off her but nothing was happening and I couldn’t understand it. I was beginning to panic, I didn’t know what was wrong with me. And then she got on top of me and rammed my hands up under her T-shirt. I went rigid with fright but I was rigid also with something else. Her breasts were in my hands and I couldn’t move; I was feeling her skin and her heat and I just couldn’t move. And then I knew why I couldn’t move. It was because I wanted those breasts so much – not to kiss or caress but for my very own. I wanted them for myself, in the same way I wanted to grow up with muscles and stubble on my face. I wanted their bulk and warmth for myself. And when I realized this I got such a fright that I threw her off there in the sand and I ran all the way home.’
I made tea, and sat down, lit another fag. Everything Pete was saying had the ring of truth about it. I knew him too well, knew his flighty imagination and passion, to know that he couldn’t be flippant about something like this. And I’d lived a long time with my betrayal of him also; lived through the nights and fantasized about the number of ways I was going to make it up to him. Now that the opportunity was here I was finding myself wanting yet again.
‘Can you not see, Pete, why I’m finding it so difficult to understand? It’s just so off the wall I can’t get my head around it. You must see that it’s difficult for someone when you come in here and spring this kind of thing on them. You have to give people more time.’
‘No, Amy, not time, people like you need to learn a bit of humility. People like you are so far up on the high moral ground you can’t hear a word that’s spoken to you. I meet do-gooders like you every day of the week. It’s the new national industry – a conscience for every crisis. I’m sick of going to meetings chaired by liberal do-gooders like yourself talking about the decline of the west as if it were solely to do with services. It’s no good telling you people that the west isn’t dying because it doesn’t have post offices or because cop stations are closing down. It’s dying in people’s hearts and imaginations, that’s where its dying, Amy.’ He sat forward in his chair, in full flow now. ‘Listen to this: I talked to Marie Quinn over Christmas. She did her leaving in eighty-seven with me. She told me she worked for six months in St Theresa’s in Castlebar dealing with outpatients from the country. And did you know they get busloads of these patients, whole busloads of patients who can’t eat or sleep, depressed or hearing voices in their head. But the thing is she can’t find out what the hell’s wrong with these people. She’s running all sorts of tests on them and everything but she can’t pin it down. And these people are genuinely sick, you only have to take one look at them to know that they’re fucked – there’s no light in their eyes. And all Marie can write down now for a diagnosis is loneliness – loneliness as the root and sole cause of their sickness. It has no medical or scientific standing but that’s what she’s writing down. And Marie thinks these people are lonely for company, or wives or children or lovers. But that’s not it; it’s closer to the bone and worse than that. These people are lonely for their dreams and what they might have been, these people are lonely for their own imaginations. And that’s where the west is dying, Amy, in the hearts and minds of the people, not in some raft of statistics about dwindling services and emigration and shit. But the point is, Amy, I’m fucked if I’m going to be one of these dead people. I’m not going to end up another corpse in this graveyard of dreams. I’m not going to end up shuffling along a psychiatric ward in a suit of clothes two sizes too small for me or sitting in some pub in London crying over bad Guinness, singing “Take Me Back to Mayo”. I’m not going to be like that, Amy. This is where I belong and I’m not going to be pushed out by anything. Crazy and all as it sounds I love the place and I’m going to see it thrive. I’ve got plans and they will happen.’
Pete was leaning forward in his chair. The colour had risen in blotches along his cheekbones and he was stabbing the air with his cigarette, driving home each point with the reddened tip: there was no arguing him out of anything now.
‘OK, Pete, get down off your soapbox, I don’t know what half of that has to do with growing breasts but go ahead then, I give up, go ahead and grow whatever you want to grow. Stay here for a few months. Stay here as long as you want.’
He sat back in the chair grinning a bit sheepishly, turning the jar of pills over in his hands.
‘Sometimes I just rant, sis, I get so heated up that my tongue runs ahead of my brain and I get all up in a heap. But that’s not to say I’m wrong, I know what I’m talking about.’
‘Not like us liberal do-gooders?’
‘I didn’t mean that, it was just a rush of blood to the head. So I can wait here then, you’re prepared to put up with a fledgling hermaphrodite in your flat for a few months?’
‘Let’s just say I’m prepared to put up with my brother for a few months.’
In the following days I questioned Pete as to where he was getting his supply of oestrogen. He was popping 150 mgs a day, twice the recommended dosage for any application. He just waved the query aside blithely, talking about the old man’s prostate cancer and HRT, the pill, other sources. I was led to believe that if you had the right contacts then the female hormone was not exactly the most difficult thing in the world to get your hands on. And then he came out with one of those curious pieces of apocrypha which I will always associate with him; one of those pieces of information which stop you dead in your tracks irrespective of whether they’re true or not: did I know that the falling sperm count in the western world was thought to be directly attributable to the increased amount of female hormone in the atmosphere and foodstuffs? The androgens were being overpowered on all sides. On the surface, the feminine might be suffering an ideological backlash, but down in the trenches, at the biochemical level, there was no doubt as to who was gaining the whip hand: the planet was being slowly emasculated on the q.t.
‘I’m only signing on the winning side,’ he said. ‘Getting there ahead of the rush.’
He stayed over three months in my flat and he thrived in it like a bird of paradise. He spent his days reading from my bookshelves while the hormone worked in his body, taking the opportunity to improve his mind. He went out a few times and trawled through the second-hand shops for a new wardrobe. He brought back a series of flowing skirts and floral print blouses and went through the permutations of them three or four times a day. Unbelievably, I found myself taking a hand in his metamorphosis. One night as he fiddled with his hair in front of the mirror I took the brush from him and gave him a complete make-over. I trimmed away the scraggy ends of his hair and layered it, then blow-dried it upside down to give it body. I smoothed out the weathered patches of his cheeks with foundation and used a blusher to take the focus off his jawline. I then used a warm kohl pencil on his eyes and finished his lips with clear balm. Gazing at himself in the mirror he pursed his lips and blew himself a kiss.
‘Jesus, if I didn’t know I’d fancy the arse off myself.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Good.’
‘Just good, nothing more than good?’
‘Just good: comfortable, like a man living a warm dream. Happy I’m doing it.’
‘Can you see yourself walking out milking like that some day?’
‘I don’t know about that. I think that might be in the future yet.’
‘You don’t talk much about your plans, Pete, you keep hinting at them but that’s all you do.’
He turned from the mirror and sat down to light a fag.
‘I’ve given them so much thought,
Amy, so much thought you wouldn’t believe it. I sit in your room at night smoking and dressed in your clothes and I hear the same old solutions going through my head, the same old talk of increased quotas and subsidies and headage, the same old solutions that have us fucked the way we are. But I’ve got ideas for the place and my ideas are very different – they have imagination and fire and I know they can succeed. I don’t want to talk about them though – they’re so wild and fragile they might shatter in the light of day.’ He paused to tip his ash. ‘The first thing I have to do, however, is get my hands on the place. I can’t do a thing until the place is signed over to me. I have all the forms and I keep shoving them under the old man’s nose but he won’t go for it; he’s too set in his ways. I wouldn’t mind but there’s a pile of money in it for the fucker.’
By now his voice had risen a few octaves and he’d stopped shaving a couple of weeks. It was obvious also from the slope of his chest that his breasts had flourished. When the great moment came he stood in the room naked but for a skirt with his arms crossed over his chest.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘The great unveiling.’
He closed his eyes and pushed his arms wide and his new-born breasts popped out, shimmering slightly as if they were going to take flight. And they really were breasts: warm and curved like small moons and tipped off with pink areolas. He pinched them between his thumb and forefinger and brought up two tiny nipples, no bigger than sucked sweets.
‘See,’ he said proudly. ‘They work perfectly.’
‘They’re marvellous,’ I said, genuinely awed. ‘Any woman would be proud of them.’
‘What about any man?’
‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’
‘Do you want a feel?’ he said impishly.
‘No, I’ll take your word for them.’
‘I think you’re jealous already.’
He preened himself a while longer, testing the curve of them in his cupped palms and checking out his profile from both sides in every mirror. He lifted his hair from his shoulders and held it above his head, turning this way and that so that he could get a complete view. His pleasure was obvious and I couldn’t but be affected by the quiet joy with which he regarded himself. Over the following days he marvelled at them continually. He changed the flowing blouse to stretch tops and spent all day parading from one room to the next, relishing his appearance in the light of each mirror. I came in one evening and found him washing dishes at the sink, naked but for the skirt. He just blushed demurely and walked away to his room.
I got up one morning shortly after and found him standing in his jeans with his bag packed. I thought he’d put weight on overnight but then I saw that he was wearing three or four sweaters.
‘OK, Amy,’ he said, ‘I’m off. Thanks for all the tea and hospitality but it’s time I was out of here.’
‘Where are you going to go?’
‘I’m going home; it’s spring now, time to get back to work, the quickening earth and so on. Besides, I’ve got plans, remember?’
‘But what about, what about … ?’ I was pointing.
‘My tits,’ he interjected. ‘I’ve used up the last of the tabs so that’s the end of it. They’ll subside in a few weeks and I’ll be back to normal, whatever that is.’
‘How are you going to explain your shape and voice?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll tell them I put on weight and that it affected my voice. Something like that. Don’t worry, I’ll think of something. I usually do.’ He picked up his bags. ‘Amy, thanks a lot, I’m very grateful. It’s not often that people are given the time and space to fulfil a dream. I’m very grateful for it.’
‘No problem, Pete. I think I enjoyed it. Do you think you’ll do it again?’
‘Yes, definitely.’
‘How far next time?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I have the nerve or inclination.’
‘Whatever you do, look after yourself.’
‘I will. You take care of yourself too.’
And he was gone.
Last time I was home there were big changes around the farm. I sensed them the moment I got out of the car. The concrete yard was scrubbed and the slurry pit was cleaned out completely. The shed doors swung open and there was no sign of the dogs or hens or geese which usually swarmed the yard.
Pete came through the doorway of a shed in jeans and T-shirt. I saw straight off that his breasts were gone and that a two-day-old stubble shadowed his face.
He stared blankly for a moment and then ran towards me, a huge smile spreading over his face. He held me at arm’s length after kissing me and shook me gently. His face was wide open with joy.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘You finally got your hands on it.’
‘Finally. Lock, stock and barrel, the whole fucking shooting gallery.’
‘Well done. What brought him round?’
‘I don’t know and I didn’t query it. Maybe it was the money. He just shoved the forms under my nose one night and he had the whole lot signed. Do whatever the hell you want with it, he said. So that’s exactly what I’m doing. Come on. I want to show you my big idea. ‘
He dragged me by the hand around the back of the sheds where the open pasture began. I saw he had the biggest field sectioned off into paddocks – six in all, about one acre apiece. Each of them was wired off with two rows of sheep wire reaching to about six feet in height; the whole field was completely covered in sand.
‘This is it, Amy, the wave of the future. This is where I am going to plough all my money.’
‘Into covering good grazing land with sand?’
‘No, into ostriches.’
‘Ostriches?’
‘Yes, ostriches. I’ve sold off half the herd and I’m importing six ostriches from England. And this is going to be their home.’
‘Ostriches, Pete, in this climate?’
‘It’s not so crazy. They’ve been farming them in England for the last couple of years and in Donegal for the last ten months. By all accounts they’re thriving up there.’
‘And what are you going to do with them?’
‘Export them, on the hook or the hoof. There’s a ready market for them in Belgium and Holland. Ostrich meat sells for thirty pound a pound in restaurants over there.’
‘Christ, you won’t be eating too many feeds of that then. It seems a shame that those creatures should end up on tables though.’
‘You’re just being squeamish, Amy – the old bleeding heart again. Squeamishness has no place in farming; this is a survival thing.’
‘I suppose the old man is thrilled with the idea.’
‘He just shook his head and walked away when I told him. I think he suffers from nightmares now – the hills of west Mayo over-run with ostriches.’
‘And your shape’s back to normal.’
‘Yes, and my voice too. It took about two months. I went around clutching my throat for weeks, telling them I had a throat infection and trying to keep my mouth shut. I wore a pile of sweaters, told them I’d taken a chill with the infection.’
We were leaning on the fence posts, gazing out over the sand flats where they ran away in a single stripe to where the gradient steepened at the base of the hills and then became covered in gorse and heather. On the higher slopes black-faced mountain sheep flocked and on the low-lying pasture cattle grazed in the neighbouring stripes.
‘For the life of me I can’t see ostriches swarming over these hills.’
‘Well, that’s what it’s all about, sis – seeing things, imagination, the future.’
‘I hope the whole thing doesn’t blow up in your face and leave you looking an eejit.’
He smiled quietly and rested his chin in his arms.
‘You mean look more foolish than I already am – a cross-dressing queer, part-time hermaphrodite and owner of a subsistence farm. Things would want to get wild bad for me to look more foolish than I already am. No, I’ve got a good feeling about this, Amy, I know I
can make it work.’ He straightened up suddenly. ‘Look at this.’ He undid his jeans and pulled them apart. I could see that he was wearing tights beneath them over a pretty pair of French knickers. I burst out laughing and he grinned. ‘This is what the well-dressed young queen is wearing this weather. It’s called the rustic simplicity look. Have you ever thought of all the farmers there are out here and all the secrets they might be hoarding under their clothes?’
‘No, Pete, I can’t honestly say that small farmers hold much sexual fascination for me.’
‘You shouldn’t limit your horizons, Amy. Keep an open mind. All those eligible young farmers, hard manual labour. I’m sure they’d be well able to cater to your every need.’
‘Shut up, Pete.’
‘Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night now and I put on all my favourite things: skirts, underwear, blouses, make-up, the whole thing, and then I go out and walk through these fields and hills, prowling the darkness, singing and dancing like a dervish or something. And I can see everything in the dark. I can see what this place was and what it is and what it’s going to be. I have 3D vision in the dark sometimes. And it’s wonderful, it thrills me beyond belief. Some night, though, I’m going to meet someone who knows me and then I’m going to have some explaining to do. But I really don’t give a damn, this is my land now and I just don’t give a damn.’
The wind was rushing through his hair now, casting it in a swirl about his face. The spark in his eyes shone through the murk and even his teeth seemed ablaze with a kind of joy.
‘I’m full of hope for this place. I’m so full of hope for it because I’ve got a vision and like all visions it’s a bit crazed. I love this place so much, some night I’m going to lie down and fuck it.’
‘Jesus … Pete!’
Getting it in the Head Page 12