by Fay Weldon
'It was great,' said the Peter body. 'It seemed what my body was made for. What's the point of muscles if you don't use them to bash about with? I smashed the chairs and the computer and found the mother board and stamped on it and destroyed all their stupid records. I swung from the light fittings and brought them down. I poured all the carbon tetrachloride down the sink and kicked their piles of mending stuff around and tangled their embroidery threads.'
'It was great, just great,' said the Trisha body proudly. 'And I wedged a fifty pence piece in the ironing machine so when I turned it on it overheated and burned. And I got all the stuff from the racks and muddled it up on the floor. That'd serve her right, the old bitch.'
'Nobody treats me like that and gets away with it,' said the Peter body. 'Nobody speaks to me as if I was nothing. I'm a lottery-winner; I am accustomed to respect.'
'It might be that the fumes got to her brain and destroyed some brain cells,' said the Trisha body. 'That might even have triggered the swap.'
'But nothing happened,' said the Trisha body, who was not interested in causes, only in consequences, to Doralee. 'She's not my type. Only ever you, darling, only ever you.' And the Trisha body put her arms round the taller woman and stared up at her with Peter's sweet look but smirking, and smelling of the peppermints she had eaten in the car. Doralee distanced herself as best she could.
'And I'm the one who gets the voodoo object or whatever it is,' said Doralee, crossly. 'From the sound of it I'm lucky to have got off so lightly.' She bundled the fragmented dress into a plastic bag and put it down the rubbish chute. She just wanted it out of her home.
'I don't imagine they'll try anything worse,' said the Trisha body. 'They're bound to be illegals. They won't want to risk drawing attention to themselves. And it could have been anybody. They're bound to have enemies.'
Doralee felt immensely tired, all of a sudden. 'Time for bed!' she said, putting the Peter body in the bedroom, the Trisha to sleep on the couch in the office, while she herself slept on the sofa in the living room, the better to keep an eye on everyone. She checked first that the doors to the outside world were all properly locked.
Feminist!
In the mid-Seventies, my publishers, aware of the sudden and insatiable market for books by women about women, labelled me a feminist and the label stayed. I did not fight it, I certainly would not deny that was what I was, but it was not why I wrote novels. I was not a propagandist. Sonia Land of my then agency, Shiel Land, a brilliant enough woman and at one time Rupert Murdoch's right-hand woman, shook her finger earnestly at me one day, when my sales were drooping, and said, 'You write consistent product, we sell,' but I could only ever write what I saw, and then produce a stream of alternative realities, of the kind the real world failed to provide. I set novels in the society I saw around me, and still do, and it changes all the time. If the world would only produce a consistent face, I might be able to do better myself. It is my job to report it, not unify it.
I realised one day, in about 1970, that celebrity was a peculiar process, slow moving but inexorable, which had very little to do with oneself, or talent, or actual achievement, but something self-perpetuating. Every press cutting fed upon the last. Get to a critical mass and there was no stopping it. The less one did the more one's renown grew. It flourished in one's absence. I never sought out publicity, never employed a PR person, never volunteered an opinion unless asked to. I wrote what I was asked to write and spoke the exact truth when asked a question. Only latterly did I so much as have my hair done for a photograph: I thought I was 'meant' to appear as I did in real life, and only when a friendly photographer explained that this was not the case, you were allowed to take measures to ensure you looked your best, and even gave you friendly tips, such as not putting your chin in your chest or lying back in your chair when they clicked, and that bare forearms leaning into the camera look enormous, and if you prop the side of your cheek into your hand you will get a fold of flesh - better to just touch your cheek with your finger tips and not actually lean - and that it was all part of a complex game of perception, did I learn to present myself in the best light. And once discovered it seemed to me a vast and greatly entertaining game - I assumed with journalists that we were all somehow in this together, all in the world of communication, with deadlines to be met, jobs to be done, money to be earned, reputations to be preserved, and fun to be had, so the quotes flowed and the articles wrote themselves and were usually kind, especially in the early days.
I did not make the mistake of believing that the person interviewed was 'me'. The public figure was a fictional character. From the beginning I did not watch myself on TV, would switch off when I heard myself on radio, or read any article about myself other than with half an eye. This was partly because of my awareness that publicity brought endless trouble into the home, partly for my own peace of mind. I would tear articles out of the paper before Ron saw them. I was meant to be the port and lemon girl, vulgarly employed, with few brains, without artistic or aesthetic sensibility, whom he had married, not a literary figure. And up to a point that is what I wanted too: anonymity is a great pleasure and it is hard to give it up. Success is something others observe, seldom the successful, and so it is little comfort. The path towards it is littered with minor failures, rejections, bad reviews and tax demands, and that is what one notices. Ordinary wives are spared all that.
We went out to dinner the night the pilot episode of Upstairs Downstairs was screened - to universal acclaim, as they say - and our hosts insisted on switching on the television and watching, to my apologetic discomfiture and Ron's fury. He thought it was trashy, popular, down-market stuff. That was mid-Seventies. Mid-Eighties, I took the fuse out of the TV plug just before the BBC version of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil was screened. 'Oh dear,' I said, 'the TV has broken down,' and we had a peaceful evening. Otherwise there would have been tears before bedtime. And anyway I wanted to be a private person, not a public one.
'Good Lord,' my mother said, when I once said this to her. 'You! You've no idea what it's like out there. You go into the fish and chip shop and they give you the best piece of fish.' I daresay that is true. Mothers are like that, as in Ruby with Doralee. You think they see you from the inside out, then suddenly you realise they too see you from the outside in, and the ground shifts beneath your feet. It can happen at any age.
By and large, if you get bad reviews and a hard time in the press, turn from a national sweetheart over night to a hate figure, which can happen, people are immensely kind to you, if a little patronising. There, there, my dear - you tried, and failed. We love you all the same. If the reviews are good, they feel free to take you down a peg or two.
You don't win. But whoever was trying to win, anyway? I was only ever trying to find time to write.
By the mid-Seventies I had become accustomed to the table vanishing from beneath my pen to be sold to the highest bidder. But the shop was not doing so well: punters knew more than once they had. They too read Miller's Guide to Antiques and watched the Antiques Road Show, and knew the proper cost of everything if still the value of nothing. The supply of undiscovered, unrecognised antiques was drying up. Skips which once were full of Dutch tiles and Georgian washstands for the taking were now piled with nothing but old bricks: the demolition industry had discovered the value of the past and gone into Reclamation. Being a shopkeeper, not an artist, had its drawbacks. Saturdays were the worst, Ron would complain. Customers came in to have their domestic quarrels in front of him: they would wrangle over a piece of furniture - she wanted it, he didn't, or vice versa - and the quarrels would be bitter and nasty. Others took their power freakery out on my poor husband: he would be asked to take down the highest, heaviest piece of furniture to ground level for closer inspection: twenty minutes of hard toil later they'd say, 'Oh I don't think so, after all. Junk!' and walk out.
He felt it was demeaning, and it was, and not what he wanted from life. The old art-studenty world was going, a new one, fa
r more status-conscious, was coming in. A man was valued by the money he made, not by the books he read, nor the paintings he liked. Class was increasingly determined by income, not education. Worse now, when the front-door bell at home rang, or the phone, it would be for me, not for Ron. It was uncomfortable. We had terrible rows.
The house became full of unsold furniture, overflow from the shop. I had small children and I could scarcely find room for them. To navigate even the stairs was a problem, so cluttered were they and so upset Ron was if anything was moved from one place to another. From the mid-Sixties we'd had a series of au-pairs to help - good, grateful, hardworking, principled, diligent, virtuous girls from Europe, who helped in the house, went to English language classes and then went home. We had been so lucky. Now the spirit of freedom and rights was everywhere. It was the age of flares and sideburns and LSD - the au-pairs had boyfriends, lives of their own and well-developed temperaments. They were as likely to park the baby outside the pub in your absence as look after it.
The whole world was in uproar, not just our house. The price of oil soared as OPEC found its claws, rationing was threatened, a three-day week was imposed, it snowed in June, feminists stalked the land in Doc Martens boots, refusing to smile and demanding their rights, and it was all my fault. I was, Ron reproached me, spending too much time writing popular rubbish; if I must write - and I wasn't exactly Dostoevsky - shouldn't I be looking after the children better? We would quarrel: Ron would go and sleep in the shop - or I hoped that was where he was. I was insanely jealous (his story): he was stubborn and cruel and drank too much (mine.) Heaven knows, in retrospect, what it was all about.
One day, in protest, small children in tow, unable to find a space even to put down the bag of shopping, Ron carousing in the shop (or so I saw it), I started removing things we could do without from the house and putting them in a row along the elegant railings, while the neighbours raised their eyebrows. I put out nine very heavy aspidistra plants, I remember, in their robust Victorian planters, three occasional tables, an ancient olive-wood bench, the head of a Roman emperor and some glass decanters. Ron got to hear, came round to collect them in the back of the Volvo, took them to the shop and sold them. Too late to say but this was not what I meant, not what I meant at all, I was only registering a protest. To this day I regret those aspidistras. You had to dust them leaf by leaf, and what giants of plants they would be now, but spectacular. And that night he did not come back: he set up house in the shop for at least a week. How I wept, until he came back. I did not do it again. I should have.
Even as I write this, Mrs Kovac is putting Trisha's furniture out into the street, for anyone to take who might pass by. Mrs Kovac knows well enough who trashed her shop. There was something about the tangling of the embroidery thread that clinched it. Angry, niggling female fingers, plus the muscle no doubt of male friends. Part of her knows Trisha was right to be angry. She even respects Trisha a little for fighting back. All the same she throws Trisha's chattels out, family photographs and all, onto the street. Thirty years later it will go at once, or will by morning: only Spencer's comfort blanket, worn thin by washing, the one he clutched to his toddler chest when his mother was Trisha and not the economist, will be left on the pavement to rot and disintegrate, finally. In those days even good furniture, flung into a skip, could stay where it was, unclaimed for days.
At Kleene Machine
Everyone was so busy these days it was easier for the authorities to diagnose insanity or criminality, or to postpone judgement to the next meeting of the synod, than get to the bottom of anything. They must not move without caution, as Doralee pointed out at breakfast the next morning, and the Peter body and the Trisha body agreed. They had slept well in their new bodies and seemed more settled in their selves, more adult in their behaviour. Apparently you could get accustomed to a consciousness change very quickly. Of the three, it was Doralee who seemed most aware of their changed state, acutely aware of any confusion in gender behaviour, alarmed at the notion that there was not to be a quick solution to their predicament.
She slipped out herself to bring in fresh croissants: she no longer trusted the Peter body or the Trisha body to go out by themselves. Their account of how they had conducted themselves at the Kleene Machine had alarmed her. It seemed that the new bodies were impulsive, as if the social restraints which operated on one gender did not apply to the other.
In the current climate, if they ended up in court, their pleas of switched consciousness would simply be ignored. No one would have time to attend to them: a great number of those before the courts were on drugs anyway, and as like as not hallucinating. So far, thank God, the couple's sexual impulses had been muted: perhaps sex cut in when basic identity was more established. What she was seeing in Peter and Trisha was the hot-wiring of the personality before the urge to reproduce, and all its attendant passions, took over.
'No work today?' George the doorman asked her. Doormen kept you safe but also under observation. 'A day off for both of us,' she told him. 'A touch of the flu.' 'All right for some,' he said. 'I'm seventy-six years old and never had a day's illness in my life.'
Doralee had once been in an earthquake, and had felt the ground shift beneath her feet. She had been terrified out of all proportion to the actual event, which was quickly over. It was one of the tenets of existence - that the ground stayed still and you did the moving. If it were otherwise, you could predict nothing, be sure of nothing. She felt the same now. What George said was patently untrue. When he wasn't claiming perfect health he was talking about his ailments. She had visited him in hospital once to do an interview, on the subject of out-of-body experiences, which he claimed to have had, under anaesthetic. This George was not the one she knew. He was a simulacrum who had picked up the wrong script by mistake. The body-snatchers had invaded and she was the only one who didn't know.
'Only kidding,' said George. She must have turned white. 'I only wish it was true. I'm getting older. I get these flashing lights behind my eyes. I ought to do something, I suppose.'
She murmured sympathy and bought a dozen croissants from the paper shop. Both the bodies had big appetites. Give people permission to gorge, and they would, that was evident. She bought some butter as well, and some homemade lemon curd. If they wanted to clog their arteries let them get on with it. She crossed the road casually and took a look back at the Kleene Machine. It was closed. There were boards over both windows. With any luck they had closed up for good and gone away. But she could see it was not likely. They would re-open once the place was cleared up and she would not only have to use another dry-cleaners, but if matters escalated she could see herself having to move house. Peter, when he was back to himself, would probably want to do something idiotic and go round and apologise, saying he'd had an adverse reaction to medication, or some such, and offering to pay damages. But it didn't do to show weakness. Better to bluff it out. She could see it was a pity that she had thrown the ripped dress out: it might have been useful as evidence.
She felt she was thinking with unusual calm and clarity. Could this be the effect of having fallen out of love with Peter? She had to accept that she had, or at any rate that these emotions were in abeyance for the time being. At yesterday's dinner the thought of getting married to Peter had seemed even more alarming than that of having a baby. Perhaps love was an emotion which ruled out common sense and self-interest? Yesterday she had wanted only to get the despoiled dress out of her home as quickly as possible -today she was thinking of it as evidence.
There was another rather alarming possibility, of course, which was that mood swings were nothing to with hormones, but with a temporary switching of soul between one person and another. All women were really the one woman: the variations were in circumstance and IQ, not in essence. Religions which believed in reincarnation, that you got the body you deserved every time you changed, saw time as linear. You had to die before you moved on. But perhaps the body, whose memories were perceived as 'yours', hou
sed forever changing souls, which were registered as changing moods? Like in the earthquake, the ground, believed to be steady, moved. You were the one who stayed still.
Her sister Claudette - that was her name, no matter how often her mother called her Claudia - always complained she was another person when pre-menstrual. Perhaps she was. She would have liked to have discussed this with Peter but he was too busy chattering away to Trisha about their physical states to be interested. She was afraid she rather slapped down rolls and butter in front of them, and did not provide a spoon for the lemon curd. They used their knives and the globby yellow substance in the jar was soon messy, and full of bits of butter and pastry flakes.
'I'm not against breasts in principle,' the Trisha body was saying, 'it is quite nice the way they go before like the prow of a ship, but they spoil one's balance. Or are you so used to it you don't notice? And there's a perpetual sense of unrest inside one, a feeling you ought to be doing something, not just sitting about. I feel guilty all the time, but what about? And this cyclical business, connected to the moon like the tides? It's unbelievable. No one talks about it.'
And the Peter body just said he felt great as a man. He loved flexing his muscles. He loved the straight up and down feel of his body, he loved the flatness of his belly, the way he could see sharply and clearly again. He loved the way his thing went twitch, twitch, if he thought of Kylie Minogue, how he had the sense of a future that went on and on as if in a straight line into eternity: as a woman looking ahead there was nothing but hills and bumps and the feeling that the other side of the next hill the road would run out altogether. 'Women expect to die,' he said. 'Men don't.'
It seemed to Doralee that they were becoming altogether too contented in their new shells. The Peter body had taken up the inside pages of the newspaper and was actually reading them. The Trisha body had decided to paint her toenails. Perhaps they were beginning to merge? She made notes. She took photographs when they weren't looking. She would trace the process, however it ended, with integrity and honesty, for a book which would make her millions and help others at the same time. It would be called SoulSwitch. She couldn't decide whether that should be one word or two.