by David Nobbs
She would not make things easy for him. She decided to pretend deep outrage on behalf of the whelks, and, to be fair to her, although she couldn’t be described as a whelk lover, she did feel sorry for the poor bemused molluscs.
She turned away from the window at last.
‘Those poor whelks,’ she said.
‘For God’s sake shut up about the whelks,’ he said. Yes, he knew it was ridiculous. She didn’t need to say, ‘Well, you started it.’ Her angry look said it for her. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the whelks can go fuck themselves.’
They were both amazed to hear Nick use the f-word. Normally he hated it. He regarded its constant repetition as evidence of extreme paucity of imagination. The kitchen staff mocked him for it, though not to his face.
‘Fuck themselves? That’s the only thing the wretched sods can do, you callous bastard!’ yelled Alison. She poured out her anger on him, her anger at being upstaged, her fury that he had got in first, her frustration that her intentions had been trumped. She approached him and for a moment he thought that she was going to hit him. He flinched.
‘Those poor creatures – forced to live their lives on beaches between the high and low tide marks while we’re swanning off to Majorca – the scientists discover the paint is destroying their sex lives, so what do they do? Ban the paint? No! They paint more whelks. Bastards!’
He had rarely seen Alison so angry, and all about whelks!
‘They have to be cruel to some whelks in the short term in order to be kind to other whelks in the long term,’ he said. He knew that he was sounding more absurd by the minute. He felt that they might go on and on arguing about whelks for ever.
She moved away. He swallowed. He’d have to abandon whelks and start all over again.
And at that moment Bernie shuffled in. His white designer stubble looked ridiculous at seventy-seven. There was an egg stain on the front of his shirt.
‘I’m not interrupting, am I?’ he asked, and didn’t wait for an answer. (Typical, thought Nick. He never waits for an answer. God, he drives me mad. I must remind myself to remain aware of other people when I grow old.) ‘Only she wants a cuppa, and we’re out of tea-bags.’
They had facilities in the granny flat, but he ran out of things deliberately, so as to have an excuse for company.
‘Only Doctor Rodgerson said to her, “Marjorie, you should get as much liquid running through you as you can. Flush those insides out.” I’m hoping the Nine O’Clock News’ll send her to sleep. Last night John Major was defending the morality of the government, bless him, and she dropped off nicely.’
Alison went into the new kitchen. It was a friendly affair with free-standing wooden units. It had been designed by her and built by ‘Cuisines de Throdnall. It was attractive and user friendly, if a little phonily rural, matching the name of their road.
Bernie shuffled through behind her. He didn’t raise his feet properly any more. Nick followed him.
‘Nights are pulling in,’ said Bernie.
‘That’s extremely observant of you, Bernie,’ said Nick.
Neither Alison nor Nick could believe that Nick had said that. Alison looked at him in horror. He met her look and shook his head slightly in wonderment at his own insensitivity.
They needn’t have worried. Nick’s sarcasm washed over Bernie.
‘Well, they are,’ he said. ‘I hate the autumn, me. Sod the glory of the Fall in New England. It’s all damp, decay and death in Old Warwickshire.’
He had never accepted moving from Yorkshire and blamed Nick and Alison for living in Warwickshire; that was the thanks they got for providing Bernie and Marge with a home.
‘Gray in his room?’ said Bernie. ‘That boy spends too much time on his own.’
‘Thanks, Bernie,’ said Nick, ‘but he is only fourteen.’
‘Sorry I spoke,’ said Bernie. ‘Em out? That girl goes out too much. She’s never in.’
‘Have you ever thought of writing a book about how to be a good parent?’ asked Nick.
‘Sorry I spoke.’
Alison said nothing during these exchanges, just touched her dad lightly, affectionately, a gesture of solidarity: she and he against the monster, Nick, the sarcasm addict.
At last Bernie shuffled off with his tray of tea and the swish swish of his slippers. Alison and Nick returned to the lounge, which she called the sitting room. He had to do it quickly this time.
‘I’m going to change sex, Alison,’ he said.
Because he did it so quickly it came out all wrong. It sounded far too casual, as if he’d said, ‘I think I’ll pop up to the Coach for a pint’ (not that he ever did).
‘I know,’ she said drily. ‘I did pick up the point about those whelks.’
‘I have to,’ he said. ‘I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body. I can’t stand it any more. I hate myself as I am, Alison. I bloody hate myself.’
To her fury, Alison felt tears springing to her eyes. They couldn’t be. She didn’t do tears. Even when she fell from a tree she had never cried. You couldn’t climb trees if you cried when you fell off.
She’d known that there was hatred in Nick. She’d thought some of it was for Throdnall and for his job and for his failure to go to university, but she had begun to think that some of it at least had recently been for her.
She couldn’t stop the tears. They overwhelmed her. She cried as someone would cry who hasn’t cried for years. For the last seven years she had planned her sex change and kept her vast secret. Now this had happened. It was too much.
He hugged her, held her tight. It was natural that she should cry, and she might have forgiven herself for it eventually. What she could never forgive herself for was what she said.
‘I thought it was me you hated.’
Oh the odiousness for her of his discovery of her weakness. She’d have been angry, after saying that, even if he hadn’t spoken the four worst words he could possibly have chosen to comfort her.
‘There there, old girl,’ he said.
She broke away as if stung, and hit him, hit him hard, a stinging slap on the cheek.
Women really are the most extraordinary creatures, he thought. How strange it is that I’m desperate to become one.
5 The Dog-Leg Ninth
The moment he’d left the room she tried to think about those poor whelks. Anything to take her mind off the crashing of her dream.
She still hadn’t grasped what the hope was that could have justified that headline, ‘Hope For Sex Change Whelks’. She felt, in an obscure way, that if she could concentrate on the whelks’ hopes, it might help to give her hope.
Ah! The hope was, apparently, that the paint which caused the sex change might be banned from the bottom of boats. Good. She hoped so. Fervently, she hoped so.
The good news about the whelks didn’t cheer her up as much as she had hoped. She had to get out of the house. There was a tightness across her head, which was throbbing. She understood, for the first time, just what it must feel like to be claustrophobic.
She went up to the master bedroom, which felt cold and starved of sex. She changed into a pair of jeans, a sweater and a thick anorak. Autumn nights in Throdnall could be sneaky.
He was in the kitchen, sipping a mug of cocoa. When he saw her he ran his hand across his cheek where she had slapped him. She knew that he had no idea that he was doing it.
‘I’m popping out,’ she said.
‘Out?’ he repeated incredulously.
‘Out.’
‘It’s gone ten.’
‘I need to clear my head, Nick. I’ve had a shock. You must realise that.’
‘Yes, but it’s not safe.’
‘This is Throdnall, not New York.’
‘Nowhere’s safe these days.’
‘Nobody’s going to attack me, Nick.’
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘I don’t want you to change sex, which I’d have thought was a bit more important than a nocturnal walk.’
&nb
sp; She opened the back door and drank in the air greedily.
She walked down Orchard View Close and turned right into Badger Glade Rise, where no badger had risen from a glade since it had been built. Nature had been swept away, and commemorated in the street names to make the area sound attractive. Nobody would buy the houses if the addresses were Bovis Home Prospect and Bungalow Tedium Drive. How ingeniously our world fools itself, thought Alison with healthy contempt.
At the end of Badger Glade Rise she turned left into Spinney View, where there had been no view of … well, you get the idea.
At the end of Spinney View stood the Coach, trim with hanging baskets, cheery with subdued lighting, humming with idle talk, throttled by parked cars.
She walked towards it. She was gagging for a pint. What? ‘Gagging for a pint’? She was a mother of two. Mothers of two don’t gag for pints.
She hesitated. Dare she go in? If she was a man … when she was a man … oh God, would she ever be a man after tonight? … she would walk in, cheerfully order a pint, sit in a cosy corner, chew a peaceful and wide-ranging cud, take her glass back and say, ‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight, Alan.’
Alan!
If she went in now, people would turn and stare. They would speculate. ‘Had a bit of a bust up with the old man, do you think?’, ‘A pint! Good Lord!’, ‘Looks tense. Something’s wrong’, ‘Not too bad a looker. I suppose a fuck’s out of the question.’
No, she wouldn’t go in.
Oh Alison Heather Divot, née Kettlewell (39), of no fixed gender, has your youthful bravery descended into this?
But it wasn’t for lack of courage that she wouldn’t go in … Oh, Alison, is this what you’ve become – the Queen of the Double Negatives, the ‘Is Unselfishness Impossible?’ girl? … It was because there was no point in going in. Since she would get no peace, her visit would not avail her.
She retraced her steps down Spinney View, continued into Elm Copse Crescent, and went down the ginnel to the back end of the golf course. She saw no other human beings, and all the while her mind was racing.
Should she have told Nick straightaway that she was planning a sex change? Had she wasted her best opportunity? Had she already condemned herself to silence and long suffering?
But what could she have said? How could she have put it without sounding pathetic? She couldn’t have said, ‘Hang on a minute, I thought of it first.’ She didn’t even know if she had thought of it first. She had no idea how long his great plan had been festering in secret. She couldn’t have said, ‘Well I’m changing sex too. Shall we toss to see who goes first?’ She couldn’t even have said, ‘Good Lord! So am I, but after you.’
Once your thunder is stolen it’s ineffectual to raise a storm. There was no way in which she could have responded to Nick’s pre-emptive strike with dignity.
Besides, she knew that she would never be able to begin the process while her mum was alive, and her mum was in remission, they all knew that.
So, actually, once the shock had died down, nothing need really be changed.
She had to put her plans on hold and help Nick with his. It was the only rational course, the only decent course, the only dignified course. She would hurry home and …
Would she hell as like? Let him sweat. Let him pay for his pre-emptive strike. Let him pay for his monstrous, typically male … no, she didn’t believe that, that was stereotypical sex war propaganda … let him pay for his monstrous, typically Nickish, painfully Divotish failure to even consider what was going on in her mind. She strode on, she would walk on and on until dawn. He would send out search parties. She would be found in a ditch suffering from hypothermia, hypotension and hyperbole, he would be mortified, he would begin to appreciate her and …
No. That was so unfair. She stopped by the woods that lined the left-hand side of the dog-leg ninth. She had taken an eight there only last month. A quadruple bogey. ‘I had a quadruple bogey last week too,’ Gray had said. ‘It was in my left nostril.’ Why did boys have to be so disgusting? Why hadn’t she been allowed to be disgusting?
It all came back to gender. Round and round it went. Back it came.
No, she must hurry home and enter a world of irony that only she would understand. She, so desperate to become a man, would have to play the part of the little woman, the supportive wife. She’d done it for twenty years, what did one or two more matter? ‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses,’ as her dear old dad said.
So why was she shinning up a hornbeam, in the light of a waning moon and the sodium half-light that surrounded the polluting town? Up up and up with all the old certainty of youth, footholds where none other could have seen them, up up and up.
Closing time in the Coach. Slamming of car doors far away in the stillness of the night. The sex call of a diesel train as it approached a level crossing. Up up and up. You’re a big girl now, Alison. Will the topmost branches hold your weight?
She gave a great yell, a yell to freeze the blood of weasels, part anger, part defiance, part glory in the power of her lungs. Up it went, her great yell, up, up and up, towards the Milky Way, so sadly dim in the light from the town.
Oh what an actor she would have made, with her voice, if she’d been born a man.
‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,’ she cried over the dark, deserted golf course. ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’
What a Mark Antony she would have made.
‘The evil that men do lives after them.’
Maybe I will be Mark Antony yet, when it’s all over. I could join the Throdnall Players, find out if I really can be any good.
‘The good is oft interred with their bones.’
Her as Mark Antony opposite Nick as Cleopatra. Now there was a thought. Her mood was swinging like the branch of the hornbeam as she sought to balance it. She gave a tomboy’s whoop, a teenage war cry. Somewhere to the right, over beyond the par five fourteenth, a sex-starved vixen replied to her. She laughed, the branch snapped with a crack like a rifle shot, and vixens ran for cover. She was falling, mother of two, PA to the MD, hurtling towards a broken leg, well-paid job up the spout, irresponsible mother, so childish. She clung, slithered, tore her hand, scratched her arm, jammed her feet, flung her arms round a branch like a desperate lover. She was safe. Bruised, cut, shocked, but safe.
She dropped to the ground and limped up the fairway towards the green. She felt suddenly weary. She lowered herself gingerly on to the grass and lay on her back, looking up at the stars, there on the ninth green. Her hands were stinging. Her toes were bruised. Her shoulder was aching. She had behaved ridiculously.
The grass was sodden with dew, but she wouldn’t catch cold, she was tough. She alarmed herself by thinking how peaceful it would be to die here.
That wouldn’t do. She leapt to her feet. It began to rain, a deluge of fine rain, she was soaked. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and then it came again, a wall of rain driven on the wind.
What wind? There was no wind.
She realised that she was standing in the path of the sprinklers.
She wanted to hide her cuts and scratches and bruises from him. She didn’t want him to know that she’d been climbing trees like an irresponsible child.
How best to hide them from him? Sadly, by undressing in front of him in the chilly master bedroom in the same way that she did every night.
He didn’t notice a thing.
They lay side by side, so close, so far away. He slid his right hand across, and clasped her left hand. She didn’t respond, but she didn’t take her hand away.
‘Oh, Alison,’ he whispered, although all the rest of the family were fast asleep, ‘I don’t expect you can even begin to imagine what it’s like to feel trapped in the wrong body.’
For God’s sake! The patronising beast! The infuriatingly complacent tub of lard. Could she bring herself to support him?
‘I can probably imagine it more than you think.’ Dangerous, Alison.
Either tell him or don’t. No hinting. You must forgo the delicious temptation, the glorious linguistic tension of the knifeedge. ‘What I mean is, I am actually quite imaginative.’
Alison realised now why Nick hadn’t wanted sex any more than she had. She remembered that party at the Billinghursts, only last month. They’d been tired and had left early. Someone had said, ‘Can’t wait to get home and get at it, eh?’ They were like that in Throdnall. They’d looked at each other rather shiftily, rather shame-facedly, and thought, Thank goodness we’ll be old by the time the government starts to publish league tables for copulation.
It was almost as if he’d read her thoughts – well, they did sometimes seem to be able to, that was the pity of it, that was the great waste of it.
‘This is why … I find this very hard to talk about, Alison …’ He squeezed her hand. ‘This is why I … haven’t wanted sex for so long. I hate my prick, Alison.’
‘You’re hurting my hand, Nick.’
‘Sorry. I hate it. Bloody upstart.’
Hardly the most suitable phrase, thought Alison drily.
‘I hate my testicles. I hate the hairs on my chest.’
What – all five?
The carriage clock in the dining room struck two.
‘I absolutely loathe shaving.’
Yet you do it every day, for the sake of your self-esteem, although you could get away with doing it every other day, to be honest.
‘I think I’ve felt inadequate every day of my life, Alison. For years I’ve thought it was because I was inadequate as a human being. Then I realised that it was because I was inadequate as a man. It didn’t solve anything, but it was a huge relief.’
All this in whispers.
A late reveller drove past the house much too fast. The council were planning speed bumps to cut out that kind of thing.
‘How long have you … you know?’