Mantrapped

by Fay Weldon

  Trisha had an easy time of it, indeed: I did not make rotting wicker baskets full of rusty metal poles fall upon her head and shroud her in slimy waterproof sheeting: I am writing a comic strip, not a horror tale. A story about swapping souls, not moving house. Mantrapped.

  Doralee adjusts

  People can be good at adjusting to new situations, especially when they are young. On the Monday Doralee was living a happy and successful life, by Wednesday it has fallen to pieces. By Thursday it is true she is in quite a state, and it is getting worse not better as the implications of her present plight become obvious. She finds herself out of love with her partner, whose body is inhabited by an older woman she does not admire. When either Trisha, who is really Peter, or Peter, who is really Trisha, attempts to so much as touch her, she tends to pulls away. She is confused.

  She must face her responsibilities. She must give up thoughts of running away to Australia. She might well get her book SoulSwitch published, and it may even cause quite a stir but it is unlikely to make her a fortune. No one is going to believe something so profoundly unbelievable. She will still need her job. Rescue needs to come soon, before the new personalities harden into their bodies and turn into just more people, but people without much hope of earning a livelihood. Will she, Doralee, be expected to support all three of them? The Trisha body is of course qualified to do the Peter job, but who will employ her? She has Peter's intellect and store of memories, which includes everything there is to know on weapons of mass destruction and so forth, but no certificates to her name, and no qualifications other than an unfinished course in embroidery and patchy employment on the stage: lottery winning is not a recognisable craft. The Trisha body could settle down to winning pub quizzes, but there's no money in that. Peter might just about manage a job as a male model but he's already in his early thirties, well over the hill.

  And where is rescue going to come from, Doralee asks herself. It is she who has squeezed the orange juice and run round for the croissants. She left them to make the coffee and instead of grinding it and using the percolator they have spooned instant powder into their mugs. Peter in the new Trisha body seems to like to just sit and accept what happens next. He does not think of the medium and the hypnotist, Doralee must do that. Not that she has many hopes of them.

  Trisha in the Peter body is making Peter slovenly. She has lottery-winner standards of idleness but has lost the lottery knack of being lucky. Or perhaps not? Was it not Trisha's luck and Peter's unluck that led them to the change? Perhaps Trisha is a witch and is not as innocent as she appears and has stolen Peter's soul: but Doralee dismisses that thought. Doralee does not believe in witches.

  But what is she to do next? She hates the feeling of being at an impasse. She can consult other authorities of course and probably will. There must be other, better psychiatrists, wiser priests than the two she has so far encountered. She could, and perhaps should, hand over Peter and Trisha to the police or the intelligence services. They might be one of the first of an alien infestation from outer space; the authorities might be looking out for such specimens, she has no way of knowing. Really it is nothing to do with her, she is just an innocent bystander, and she has no legal responsibility towards Peter. He is not even her husband.

  She took a shower. That cleared her head a bit. She was a perfectly ordinary person, living the life someone with a middle-class background and a proper education could be expected to live, with a loving partner and a pleasant home. It was true her parents showed signs of eccentricity, but that was not unusual in the elder generation, as the reports of friends suggested. Her anxieties at work she could now see were trival - whether Heaven Arkwright was taking advantage of her absence, whether Heather would actually come back to her desk after maternity leave, was unimportant.

  And now suddenly out of the blue, this. Nor were the ordinary agents set up by society to return everything to normality as soon as possible - police, fire, ambulance - of any use to her. She could not claim on insurance: there was no victim-support group in place to help.

  She could hear the low murmur of Peter and Trisha chirruping away over Scrabble and it annoyed her. Neither had bothered to have baths. They seemed too happy in themselves to want to do anything. They were not anxious about the future. It was as if being female permanently entered by the male, and male permanently embedded in the female, brought great benefits to the individual but none whatsoever to society.

  She sat at her computer and wrote her next week's column on a report that David Beckham had performed a miraculous cure on a deaf child at a football match. As David scored the first goal of the match the child's hearing had been restored: he had heard the roar of the crowd. Doralee called various press departments for their comments. The Archbishop of Canterbury's office said the whole matter of miracles was currently under review, and the girl at the Archbishop of Westminster's office, who was on work experience, said it was a lot of old rubbish. She didn't herself go along with Mother Teresa being canonised, the old witch hadn't been dead long enough, and personally she loathed football. But she'd go away and find someone who knew. She went away and no one returned to the phone. Doralee hung up after five minutes.

  She then called the BMA who found an expert who said that in rare cases, mostly in children and when the incapacity was hysterical in origin, hearing could indeed unexpectedly be restored, but obviously they would need documentary evidence before they could make a proper comment. Doralee wrote a thousand words suggesting that deafness in itself was not really a disability, rather a different state, and that the silent world had its own pleasures, and look at the deaf couple who had chosen to give birth to a child who would inherit the genes of deafness.

  And then she wrote about the real miracles all around, the growing of the seed into the flower, the rainbow, the smile on the baby's face and so on. Then she deleted the whole thing. It was nonsense. You could believe in Trisha and Peter swapping, indeed you had to, but if you did there was nothing else you could take for granted. Write an article today and by tomorrow the whole world might be changed. The ground had shifted beneath her feet.

  Then she went to her recycle bin, thankfully unemptied, and restored the article. There was nothing wrong with it at all. It read perfectly well, so long as you looked at it through yesterday's eyes, not today's. Science just needed to come up with an explanation, and the terrible feeling that the world was falling to pieces would depart. It must have been equally terrible when word got round that the earth wasn't flat but round like an orange. Life might not continue as normal but work could. She put up SoulSwitch on the computer and wrote up her notes.

  There was a small argument that evening about toothbrushes, which Doralee solved by going out to buy two new ones. The Peter body didn't want to use the one in his tooth mug, but the one he'd brought along with him from Wilkins Parade, along with a nightie, some face cream and some hormone replacement pills. The Trisha body wasn't sure that she wanted him to do so. The inside of the body, the mouth, was apparently still an area of indecision. Whose was it? And which one of them was going to take the hormone pills? Doralee thought the Peter body should because it would increase the chance of a transfer back, but the Trisha body got panicky at the thought of not taking them.

  In the end they both ceremoniously took an orange pill, though the Trisha body disliked the fact that now the succession of pills in their foil sheet, marking the passage of the menstrual month, would be disrupted.

  Before they went to bed, encouraged by Doralee, who surreptitiously made notes, they spoke about their new bodies, their new selves.

  The Trisha self in the Peter body liked the feeling of being young again, and healthy, and without the little niggling aches and pains, which could only get worse over the years, and being able to see so sharply, and not have dots swimming in front of her eyes, not having breasts and being flat down her front, and never having to have a period again, but on the other hand always worried about having genitals which were on th
e outside and made you feel vulnerable.

  There were benefits to being a man, the Peter body said, like pissing standing up, and feeling you could batter your way through anything that stood in your path, and the kind of underlying grey cloud, which he guessed was guilt, simply not being there any more. But he acknowledged Doralee's right to have her partner's body back, and he wouldn't try to keep it if he felt it going. But he could do with a little financial help to set her on her feet again, as Trisha. She had no money, nowhere to live, and no job.

  And how was she to earn a living, if she stayed in a man's body? Too healthy looking and too tall for a rent boy, no memory, no good at facts and figures, and not temperamentally suited to physical work.

  'I could just have babies, I suppose,' the Trisha self said - he was changing out of jeans and T-shirt into a long pink designer dress of Doralee's in which he planned to go to bed - it just felt right, he couldn't explain it, but it expressed his personality. The dress looked quite good, Doralee realised, the delicate hem revealing black-haired male ankles, and black chest hair sprouting through the fine material which had once shown Doralee's dainty breasts to advantage. His body seemed to be compensating by a rush of testosterone to the glands. It was as if the body had decided the time was ripe and was beginning to flower.

  'There's always the State,' said the Peter body. 'I could just have babies, couldn't I, be a single mother and get benefits?'

  Doralee said women who lived off the State were pathetic and she hoped the Trisha body would do nothing of the kind. At which the Trisha body raised her eyebrows in a particularly Peter-ish way, and reproached her for being uncharitable. And Doralee felt a pang at being thus betrayed by her partner. It must have showed in her face because the Trisha body first tried to take Doralee in her arms and hug her, but the arms were too short, so she gave up and said why didn't they all open a bottle of wine. So Doralee did.

  They sat and drank and listened to Johnny Cash - the only music they could all agree upon; sad songs about mortality -and looked out over the city, and Doralee was almost content. The sky was blue and pink around the edges, and you could see Canary Wharf in the distance, and the light on its top winking like a steady heartbeat, and a plane coming down into the City Airport, and the hum of the city, if you listened hard, pulsing first loud, then soft, all around. But that might just be your own blood surging through the arteries next to your brain. It was a wonderful place to be, all agreed.

  The Peter body chattered on about how she had once had an affair with a woman, Thomasina, and how nice it had been, soft and gentle and safe, only they'd such terrible rows, they had to part. Trisha had been black and blue. 'And I'm a mass of scars,' said the Trisha body. 'Look!' And the Peter body pulled up the Trisha body's skirt to show the shins, which were indeed dotted by little white patches. 'Cigarette burns,' said the Peter body. 'It's how she'd punish me for saying the wrong thing. And she was very jealous. I'd explain and explain how I was bisexual but she didn't want to listen. Perhaps it's all my fault this has happened. I should have been more one thing or the other.' 'Not necessarily,' said the Trisha body. 'I've always rather liked dressing up in women's clothes. Sometimes when Doralee's out and I'm stressed I wear her knickers. If you put them on back to front they fit really well, and the silk's comfortable.'

  A few days ago, thought Doralee, she would have been horrified, perhaps even asked Peter to go to counselling, but now it was trivial, nothing. And what support group could ever help her through this?

  The Peter self had more to say about the female state. He loved the underwear, and was coming round to the breasts, a sort of decorative optional extra, even though they were far from perfect, and he actually quite liked having this kind of closed-up neatness between his legs, which gave him a moral superiority over men, whose genitals hung indecently as appendages. Those seemed to have a life of their own, and to be a kind of second self, not totally under the control of the rational brain. A built-in disapproval factor of the male seemed to go with the knowledge of containment and neatness, which compensated for the untidy whooshiness of the womb. He could think of no other word… And the Peter self liked the lightness of being Trisha, of having such tiny feet, but he did think she should go on a diet. The Peter body said that was fine by him, it was up to the Trisha body. If when she got back to being herself she was a stone lighter, she could live with that. The Trisha self, whom Doralee suddenly felt quite affectionate towards, undertook to eat well while in Peter's body and try to stay off the junk food. Whether it would happen of course was another matter.

  'But the great disadvantage of being you,' said the Trisha body to the Peter body, 'is the age thing. Otherwise there might be some point in calling it a day and you and me getting together. But I want to have babies and I had hoped that Doralee would finally come round to it, but the Trisha body might not be able to do that, might she.' If he stayed a woman, and added the two disparities up, the fifteen or so years lost by losing his own body, and the seven years by which women normally outlived men, the original Peter would lose out on more than twenty of life. He would have the worst of both worlds.

  'What about me?' asked Doralee, pained. 'Am I of so little account? Don't I come into the equation?' 'I care about you very much,' said the Peter self in the Trisha body, 'but you must see I am not much use to you as I am. And statistically the odds always were that without children we would split apart. We were not married, after all.'

  Doralee stared out at the darkening sky and thought of life alone, without a man, back to dating and socialising, and thought it wouldn't be too bad. She had allowed herself to get stuck in a rut. She should probably look for someone in science or philosophy. Peter had a practical brain: she needed someone with more imagination, more capacity for speculation. But she did not want to think of the Peter body in bed with the Trisha body.

  The Peter body said he'd take a raincheck on that if no one minded. God had given him this great opportunity and a great body and it would be a sin not to go out there and use it. He wouldn't be true to himself if he didn't go out there and play the field. Nineteen wasn't too young for him, was it?

  'Nineteen will need to be in a position to support you,' said Doralee snarkily. 'I don't see you doing it yourself. And I certainly won't be.' Well, she was hurt. The Peter body, which housed Trisha, took Doralee's hand and stroked it.

  Doralee withdrew her hand and said briskly you never knew, the new selves might not age at all. They could be anything. They could be immortal. They could be from some other universe: astronomers now accepted the fact that there was most likely to be intelligent life on other planets, it was just a matter of finding it. Or of course if there were alternative universes, which lots of nuclear physicists now claimed there were, what with string theory and suchlike, some bug thing might have slipped through - and brought a soul-swap infection with it. Or it was intentional, a deliberate Mars, or even Venus, attack?

  But the others looked at her so reproachfully she apologised. That was a horrid idea, and should not have been suggested. There was no more talk of Peter and Trisha getting together, but when she went out to the kitchen for more wine, she wrote down Soul Swap, the Sars of Outer Space. It had a terrible ring of truth.

  Doralee brought back more wine, and had to open it herself, of course. The pink in the sky grew vivid, the blue faded, the sharp shapes of towers and spires faded, like Trisha's eyesight with encroaching age. The moon was up, a couple of days beyond full, just a flattening out from perfect roundness. 'Gibbous,' said the Trisha body. He would.

  Normally prudent herself, Doralee drank less than the others, and kept filling their glasses. She needed every minute of this experience, however it pained her.

  A home to go to

  Winter, 1975. Removal vans came and went. Our worldly possessions went into store.

  Jane Bown came to photograph me. I was honoured. Jerry Bauer, too. Lord Snowdon as well, though I think that might have been later. I remember the good and talented Lo
rd rifling through my wardrobe to find something suitable for me to wear, and finding nothing but a quilted coat in a pretty sprigged material fashionable at the time which would do to wrap around me. He set me under a tree and put a dog beside me, so I daresay that was indeed later, in a more rural phase of life. Wind swept through my hair.

  A film crew making a documentary about the new feminism came to the house and found the electricity switched off, no furniture and me with scrubbing brush and mop. I take care to clean all the houses I leave as best I can, as evidence of my willingness to be a good citizen, earn the respect of others. That was one of my mother's legacies. She moved house as often as she could, always in search of something better, and always left them spotless and herself exhausted. I knew it was the thing to do. But it was so cold.

  The day came when the new owners moved in. Ron went off to the shop as usual with a few things thrown in the back of the car. I wrote another sentence or so of Little Sisters. It was about a nineteen-year-old girl off on an illicit weekend with an antique dealer.

  Elsa is abundantly lovely. She weighs twelve stone four pounds and is five feet eight inches tall. Her swelling bosom and rounded hips give promise of pneumatic bliss… Ah, she's beautiful, lush but not louche. 'You would have forgotten these,' says Victor, handing her the pink sachet of contraceptive pills. He'd picked them up from where they were hiding between the claws of a nine-foot Yogi bear.' 1 wouldn't,' she protests. But she would if she could.

  I went to the new house and turned on the heating. It did not work. I went to collect Tom from his infants' school on Primrose Hill, and we went home to our cold new little concrete house. When Dan came back from school it was here he had to come. And the white cat got out and ran away and we looked and looked but couldn't find him. That evening Ron came home. But without his accustomed house around him he seemed denatured; I had never known him without it. I could hardly recognise him as having anything to do with me and I daresay he felt the same when it came to me. We went out to dinner with our friends Evie Williams and her new husband Anthony Perry and came back to the freezing house and Ron stayed the night. And in the morning he said he could not possibly live in such a place, what had I been thinking of, it was made of concrete and he was going to live in the shop until there was somewhere proper for us to live. We looked some more for the cat but couldn't find it.