Mantrapped

by Fay Weldon

  Babies were art objects put out into the living world, not the paper world that writers love, but still there for the editing, for the improvement, taking their turn, piling up in the filing tray, sometimes marked 'urgent', sometimes not. I shall give Doralee a future in which she has a baby. Our personalities are half taken from our parents, half our own. It will have Ruby's eccentricity and Graham's capacity to attract enduring love and partners who dance naked, and Adrienne's liking for little scarves. It will have Doralee's gift for self-interest and Peter's sweetness. It will be just fine. It will have to arrive the other side of the end of this book, in the fictional world, but it's in store for her as a present from me. I hope she's grateful: if she's not at first, I daresay she will be with time.

  A good explanation for absence

  There was a knocking at the door. Doralee was awake at once. Peter! At last. She would not reproach, she would not ask questions, he was home, that was all that mattered. She would never be snarky again.

  They would get married, in a church - or else she would convert to Judaism so as not to upset his mother. She would ask her father to the wedding, she would even invite Eve. She would have a baby. All this between the futon and the door, with a blue pashmina grabbed and flung over the T-shirt she wore to bed. She opened the door eagerly, but it was not Peter, it was a woman of uncertain age, rather overweight with a lot of red hair which needed a good cut. Doralee arranged the pashmina to give herself more cover.

  'Oh thank God, thank God, Doralee!' said the woman. 'You're here. I was so scared you wouldn't be. Anything at all can happen. Nothing's what it seems. It's terrifying.'

  There was something sinister about the voice. It was some mad imitation of Peter. Perhaps it was a practical joke on the part of the newspaper? A sort of singing telegram: a bizarre apology for absence. If so it was unforgivable. It was the middle of the night. There must be some other way of doing this sort of thing. It would be a divorceable offence if only they were married.

  'Who sent you?' asked Doralee. 'Because I'm tired and need to sleep and I'm not in the mood for jokes. Perhaps you want to speak to my husband? I'm expecting him any minute.'

  'Partner,' said the woman. 'Not husband. And I am your partner. I only look like this; try and understand. See me as a hermit crab got into the wrong shell.' Only the previous week Doralee had been writing an article about how not to be a hermit crab, and Peter had provided her with useful details about the lifestyle of these strange creatures. Why was this woman talking about them? Could she be his mistress? But that was absurd. Peter's offices were full of interns whose major ambition was to sleep their way to the top, all in their early twenties with double firsts from Oxford, and they might possibly be a temptation, but men like Peter did not go off with women like this. But then her mother had despised Eve, for all manner of reasons, and it had happened. The other, lesser woman was preferred, just because she was lesser.

  'Shut your eyes, Doralee,' said the woman. 'Try just listening and believing. I know the voice is peculiar but I'm pitching it down for you, so it sounds more like the real me.'

  Doralee's eyes stayed open and staring. The woman clicked her tongue in annoyance, sounding like Peter when the computer crashed or he found George had failed to bring up the mail. Did Peter perhaps have an older sister he had never acknowledged? The woman pushed past Doralee, and walked as if by right to the desk and straight to the drawer where the pens were kept and took Peter's favourite. 'Doralee,' said the woman, 'try and adjust. This isn't like you.'

  'It's the middle of the night,' said Doralee, feebly. 'I'll write it down for you. I know you. You only believe things when you've seen them in black and white. Little Miss Cynical!'

  Peter would sometimes call her that when she doubted one of the more extreme conspiracy theories he would bring back from the office. Doralee realised she was gawping, as she tended to do when taken by surprise, and shut her mouth. 'Stop looking like a goldfish,' her mother would sometimes say to her. The woman wrote and studied what she had written.

  'Thank God,' she said. 'At least my writing hasn't changed. Or not much. It shouldn't, of course. Individual handwriting is conditioned by personality and muscular movement combined, and no two handwritings are the same, in the same way as fingerprints. Not many people know that.' Doralee felt cold and wrapped the pashmina more firmly around her. She felt the more vulnerable because her feet were bare.

  'You should have bought slippers when I told you,' said the woman. That was the kind of thing men said, not women. Men hid their concern behind reproaches. It was annoying, but forgivable. She was wearing a short suede skirt and a white frilly blouse off which a button had burst and a horrible jacket with fake fur collar. There was a tear in her fishnet tights and black smudges beneath her eyes where her mascara had run. Doralee had the feeling she had just been in some kind of fight.

  The woman handed the piece of paper to Doralee. On it was written in capital letters which could be Peter's handwriting or not, 'This is not me. This is Peter. I am in the wrong body.'

  'Hang on a moment there,' said Doralee. 'Are you in the wrong body, or is it the right body and the wrong you?' 'Doralee,' said the person, who might or might not be Peter. 'Please don't get metaphysical at this point. It's the middle of the night. We have to do something, and fast. I have a feeling the longer this is allowed to go on the more difficult it's going to be to get back to normal.' She walked briskly round the room; she was like Peter, anxious and active, making little nervous movements, yet not like Peter. Perhaps this was his mother, a teenager when he was born, and Adrienne only his adoptive mother? That would explain a lot. But why would he send his mother along and get her to pretend she was her own son? Or perhaps she was deluded, insane? Perhaps he visited his mad mother in the loony bin every week and talked to her about hermit crabs and so on. How would one ever know where men really went? They said they were at the office and you couldn't be checking up on them all the time. In the meanwhile the woman was wearing thin stiletto heels which could only be bad for the floorboards. 'If you're going to walk about the room could you kindly take off your shoes to do so?' she asked. 'That's better,' said the woman. 'That's my Doralee.' And she took off her shoes and sat down with a thump. 'I really like heels', she said, 'but you have to get used to them and they don't half pinch. When I come to think of it, she's got far the best of the bargain. My body is fifteen years younger, and see these varicose veins? They're disgusting. And I keep wanting to pee and I hate being so short. I can't reach things. And I have a wrinkly belly. I tried doing a press-up and it was hopeless. At the same time it's kind of cosy in here. But it can't be allowed to go on. Now Doralee, we have to keep this very quiet. I guess we'll both have to take time off work. I don't know who you see about this kind of thing. Doctor? Psychiatrist? Priest? Rabbi? Somehow I think the Rabbi would have the best grasp of what was going on, all those golems and so on. If only I believed in God.' There was a ring on the bell. 'I expect that's the men in white coats,' said Doralee snarkily, 'come to collect you.' She was still angry with Peter. He had left her with uncooked couscous, failed to return with her cleaning, hadn't even bothered to phone, and worried her to pieces. She realised she was now on the verge of accepting that what he said was true, that this was Peter in the wrong body, and it made her crosser still. There was now untold confusion and trouble to look forward to. 'It'll be Trisha,' the woman said. 'I told her to come here. She went back to her flat to collect a few things. But we had to get out of there fast. I would have gone, but she's in the man's body so she can look after herself. At least physically - mentally I reckon she's in a worse state than me.' 'Trisha?' said Doralee. 'Trisha!'

  'Not your type,' said the woman. 'I'm sorry about that, but I wasn't doing any choosing here.' Doralee went to answer the door.

  'It occurs to me,' said the woman, after her, 'it might be some kind of alien attack. There may be hundreds like us out there. We might need the CIA.'

  'That is just simply not on,' sa
id Doralee, and opened the door to Peter, His clothes were dusty and looked as if they had been slept in. His nails were broken and his hands were dirty. There was something tentative and empty about him: he looked ripe for throwing away, like a soft toy that had lost its stuffing, or a discarded handbag. But perhaps he just needed a bath and some sleep. He had two black plastic sacks with him, stuffed with God knew what.

  'What on earth has happened to you?' asked Doralee. 'And where have you been?'

  'Didn't he tell you?' said Peter. 'Men never get to the point, do they. I'm not Peter, I'm Trisha.'

  Doralee held the door open and Peter walked in.

  'I don't want you to think -' said Peter, '- I mean, there was nothing going on. We were just passing on the stairs. It felt ever so strange.'

  'Have you told the police?' asked Doralee. What did he mean, there was nothing going on? Why did he even feel the need to say it? 'Isn't that the first thing to do?'

  'Try telling a call centre this kind of thing,' said the Trisha body from the sofa. 'They'll only ask you for your mother's maiden name and send round the social workers.'

  'And what is my mother's maiden name?' asked Doralee.

  'It's O'Neill, of course,' the Trisha body said. 'One of the Liverpool O'Neills.'

  Doralee was finally convinced.

  Back to the past

  Louis Simpson's advice had borne fruit. He had explained to me how a novel was written. The first two I wrote were written out of ignorance, merely the novels I wanted to read which no one else had yet written, so I'd better get on with it. Others have since caught up with me of course: the unreflective present tense abounds in contemporary fiction: it is appropriate for drama - she walks across the stage - he lights a cigarette - but doesn't add much to fiction other than to give a spurious sense of immediacy, limiting the right to overview, to the god-like status of the author, to the moral intervention made possible by the past tense. The stage author, other than by choosing and shaping the subject and writing the dialogue, has no intervening power. It is left to action and event to convey such wisdom as the head of the writer contains. Those early present tense novels of mine were written in the present not because I had thought about it, but because I had started writing in play form and then, novelising what I had written, simply neglected to change the tenses. It worked well enough. So well that in the meanwhile the Gods of the past tense have all but fled. Even history documentaries on TV prefer the immediacies of the present tense to any serious consideration of the past. 'Henry VIII strides through the palace in a temper. His wife is betraying him. "Cut off her head," he yells.''

  Now I started to write Female Friends. By this time I was being described by my publishers as a 'feminist' writer. Or as in a TV documentary, 'By this time her publishers describe her as a feminist writer.' The description comes from them, not her, but she suspects it is in the eye of the beholder. She writes about women in relationship to one another, not to men. This is a shocking divergence from tradition. What she says is disconcerting to others. Friends leave rooms when she comes into them. She is by implication suggesting a revolution: that women need not be men's victims, that men are not automatically objects of adoration, that women are people too. Nobody wants to hear this at the time. To women it suggests that whole lives spent as daughters, sister, wives, mothers, to the abnegation of the self, have been wasted. It denies the past. To men it suggests a terrifying future in which women no longer automatically wash shirts because they are women.

  But Fay cannot help what she writes: she describes the world around her; this is not propaganda, simply what she sees. She is bemused by the hostility she meets. She is not trying to change, just to describe. Twenty-five years later, addressing a festival in Chicago, she tries to recant in public, but every time she quotes passages from her early novels which could be fairly said at the time but no longer can, the audience cheer and laugh. 'Men,' she quotes herself from the platform, 'are like little boys behaving badly at a birthday party. They get away with what they can.' Such casual generalisations, she murmurs to her audience, are unfair, prejudicial and old-fashioned. She wastes her breath. The triumphant army of women exult too much in victory to understand remorse. Everything turns into an anti-man fest. The way to make an audience laugh is to utter anti-male sentiments, and the men laugh louder and more nervously than anyone.

  Fay has a little glass pyramid of a paperweight she keeps on her desk to remind her of the occasion. Engraved in the glass are the words Chicago Humanities Festival III, From Freedom to Equality. She loves it dearly, but thinks it would make just as much sense if it read From Equality to Freedom. Did women need to be free before they were equal, or equal before they could be free? Abstract nouns get flung about these days any old how. Women are neither free nor equal, of course, but we can be fairly sure these days that it is not men's fault, at least not men in general, though no doubt blame can be attributed to individual men. We will see how Trisha gets on in Peter's body. Who then will she blame for what goes wrong?

  The glass pyramid is chipped - perhaps someone flung it across the room once in a temper, but Fay cannot remember, fortunately, who it was who did the flinging, just as Trisha can't remember who it was who spilt the wine upon her mattress.

  The third-person present works well enough, I see. Should I continue further with the real-life story of my life in a further book, it could continue in the same vein. 'She does this, they do that: moving swiftly across the room she faces her opponents' etc. It could be mistaken for a novel. Its predecessor, Auto da Fay, was conventional enough, other than - when I could no longer bear to incorporate the reality of certain sections of my past, I slipped over into the third person for a time. This book, Mantrapped, is the second volume, and presents novel and autobiography side by side, leaping from one to the other, but related.

  Doralee, Trisha and Peter

  'I'm truly sorry, Dor alee - pretty name, that,' said the Peter body. 'You must have had a really nice mother. Nice mothers give their children nice names. I hope you don't mind me settling in here for a day or two. I'm not one to stay where I'm not wanted. But your husband here, sorry, partner, doesn't think it's wise for us to be separated. And he's right, we don't want to be too far away from one another in case whatever it was that switched on the stairs wanted to hop right back and distance might make a difference. How would one know?'

  The voice washed over Doralee. It was strange to hear Peter's voice in this mode, non-stop, hesitant, confiding, nervous and endearing all at once. Had the voice been female she could have ignored it altogether, since it seemed to have so little sensible to say, but being male, and Peter's at that, it kept catching her attention. She was on the Internet, trying to find out some kind of information, any kind of information, about body swaps, and not getting very far. She couldn't concentrate. The Trisha body lay sprawled out on the sofa, taking a nap. The Peter voice burbled on.

  'There must be someone we can ask out there. I'm sure you guys know the right kind of people. I tend to know theatricals and racing drivers and in any case I've been rather out of touch lately. If this goes on for any length of time I might consider becoming a male model. I have the contacts. Has your partner ever thought of doing that?' 'It's not quite Peter's scene,' said Doralee. 'I'm not going back to Mrs Kovac's no matter what,' said the Peter body. 'That woman is a toe-rag and a bitch. She was taking advantage. But how am I meant to claim housing benefit if I turn up as a man when I've said on the forms I'm a woman? They're really funny about things like sex change.'

  'I'm sure Peter and I can help you out,' said Doralee. 'That's a comfort to know,' said the Peter body. It was studying its nails. 'Look,' it said. 'All perfect. Your partner has very strong nails. That's nice. Mine do tend to go brittle and flake. Well, that's his problem, now. None of this is my fault.'

  'I'm sure this won't go on for long,' said Doralee. 'We'll work on it, get it sorted.' She did not know what else to say. She was in uncharted territory. Who could she talk to? S
he did not trust Peter to be wholly Peter. To confide in Heather would be rash. She couldn't trust her any more than she could Heaven. She was still chafing from her conversations with her family. The Internet, instead of a fountain of wisdom and information, seemed a broken reed.

  Dawn was breaking over the city skyline: indeed, an early shaft of sun shone onto her computer screen and made it difficult to read. She had found life swap and spouse swap and surgical sexchange and transsexual and intersexual chat rooms, and TV programmes a-plenty, hermaphrodite counselling, and cross-dressing and troilism and meet your partner here, and porn sites kept breaking through, but nothing relevant that Doralee could find, other than in the witches' Sabbath, where the devil sometimes changed into a woman. And of course Zeus could change into all kinds of things -bulls, swans - but always kept his own gender, even when old. And women in mythology could change into trees or spiders but never anything male. There were cases in psychiatric literature of males who believed they were female, or females male, but they were deluded. She switched off the computer. It took its time fading.

  The body Peter sat primly on a stool and chattered on, male knees genteelly together. And the body Trisha sprawled on the sofa, dozing, legs akimbo, knickers actually showing, and then stirred and woke, and Doralee frowned at her, and the Peter body took time to realise what was wrong before moving her legs together. Gender mannerisms took time to kick in, it seemed. But over the next hour, while the Peter body flicked through the glossies, and the Trisha body took a bath, and Doralee waited for offices to open and the fresh day to begin, new habits were quickly learned, so soon the body Trisha was taking little mincing steps and the body Peter beginning to stride about. Doralee worried that the same might happen to their mental habits and personality traits - they would begin to meld into one. She opened a file on her computer, ready to record case notes from time to time. She would turn this into a book, before she was through.