Zac can feel Marianne’s eyes boring into him.
“You have heard me speak of her.”
“I don’t think…” says Zac hesitantly, uncertain what to say.
“Yes, yes,” says Marianne, cutting in. “It is just that you have heard me talk of her as Raymond.”
Zac’s gasp is lost in Marianne’s continuing introduction.
“She was once my husband. Rae, this is Zac. He looks after me. He is the boy we should have had together.”
Marianne was slumped in a corner of the settee, exhausted. Her body had no resistance and the cushion had slid forward under her, forcing her into an awkward heap.
“You don’t look very comfortable,” said Zac. “Here, let me push those cushions up.” Marianne offered no opinion on the matter as Zac hauled her upwards, propping the cushions behind her back to stabilise her.
The flat was empty now. Jasmine and Rae had left them to settle in, promising to return later.
“Emotional effort is always more exhausting than physical effort,” said Zac soothingly. If anyone knew that, he did.
Marianne nodded.
Zac hesitated.
“Why did you tell me Raymond was dead, Marianne?”
“I didn’t.”
“Didn’t you?”
“I said that he was gone. Gone a long time ago. And he was. Anyway, he might as well have been dead.”
“When did he go?”
Marianne closed her eyes.
“Are we having lunch?”
Zac took so long to answer that Marianne opened one eye and squinted at him. Zac almost laughed.
“Yes, we’re having lunch. Will you tell me about Raymond after we’ve eaten?”
“Yes, after lunch.”
“What would you like?”
Marianne perked up. “Crusty bread from the boulangerie below, pâté from the delicatessen, rocket salad with fresh tomatoes drizzled in oil.” She had imagined it so often.
Zac looked surprised.
“You eat like a bird at home.”
“Can we go now? Down below to buy the things?”
The similarities between childhood and old age struck Zac as they stood in the pâtisserie: the fixations and obsessions, the self-centred absorption, the lack of inhibition and the dependency… Marianne, holding a stick of French bread from the boulangerie side of the shop, gazed into the pâtisserie cabinet with a sense of unbridled wonder that touched Zac. It was not the wonder of seeing something new, but the wonder of seeing something that she had thought she would never see again.
What would you like, Marianne?”
Marianne did not answer immediately but her lips moved. “Chocolat,” she murmured, “Crème anglaise, noix de coco, amandier…”
She looked up at the assistant, a young, dark-eyed girl who could not relate in any way to the heap in the wheelchair and avoided Marianne’s eye.
“Avez-vous du ruban lila?”
The girl shrugged sullenly. “Oui.”
She opened the drawer from which rolls of curling ribbon trailed and took out a new one. Lilac.
“Celui-là,” Marianne said, pointing a finger into the glass beside a chocolate tarte, thin and dark and elegant, topped with raspberry and a dusting of icing sugar.
“Deux,” nodded Zac, holding up two fingers. The girl’s dark eyes flashed up at him admiringly and she opened a box. Marianne watched as she pulled and cut a length of lilac ribbon, curling it quickly and deftly with the scissors. Marianne held up her hands to Zac to ensure she got the box, and placed it proprietorially on her knee.
Back in the flat, she would not let lunch begin until she had fulfilled every detail of the fantasy she had so often dreamt of.
“Lay it out on the little table,” she told Zac, when he brought through the rocket and tomato salad. “Here, beside my chair.”
“Like this?”
“Yes. And the window… open the window so that the breeze lifts the curtain and I can feel it on my face.”
Zac sat opposite, a plate and fork in his hand and ate, watching her.
The room was warm, even with the window open.
Marianne was so lost in thought that she did not notice that her fingers rested in the food, covered in pate and tomato seeds, warm and sticky.
“You have hardly eaten a thing,” Zac said, when he had finished his own meal. “Here, let me wipe your hands.”
Marianne looked down at the plate.
“It tasted better in my dreams.”
Marianne wound the lilac ribbon round and round her thin fingers as they talked.
“Cut just a sliver off the chocolate tart for me,” she had told Zac, but even that lay almost untouched beside her, alongside the remnants of a discarded cup of coffee. The strong espresso had been the only thing to cut through her jaded appetite and the metallic residue left by her medication.
“They seemed so pleased to see you,” said Zac.
“Yes,” agreed Marianne, with what seemed to Zac to be surprising neutrality. He didn’t understand this triangle.
“Why did Raymond leave you, Marianne?”
“Luke died. Our baby. We called him Luke though he was never christened. Or buried properly come to that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You want to know because you want to know how to leave Abbie.”
“No, no! I…”
“Don’t you know the song, ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’?” Marianne began to sing quietly.
“The problem is all inside your head she said to me,
The answer is easy if you take it logically,
I’d like to help you in your struggle to be free,
There must be fifty ways to leave your lover.”
“It’s not that easy,” said Zac. “Besides, I don’t know that I want to leave my lover.”
“Just jump on the bus, Gus, make a new plan, Stan.”
“Stop it, Marianne!”
Marianne tried to move the wheel of her chair.
“Please wheel me into my bedroom now. I want to sleep for a little. They will be back this evening.” She looked at Zac.
“Do not look so offended Zac. You know I am right. Come here. Please. No, sit down here for a minute, next to me.”
Zac sat on the edge of the seat.
“Zac, tonight we will go to Bar Patrice. Things will be clearer. I promise.”
“You want to go to a bar?” he demanded, unable to keep the incredulity from his voice. “Are you sure?”
“I cannot come here without going to Bar Patrice. And neither can you. It will explain things to you. And you… you will not be the same again.”
Zac felt frightened suddenly. Alone. He wished Abbie had come after all.
“No don’t be frightened.”
Zac looked at her almost resentfully.
“Let Rae help you. And Jasmine.”
“Are they…” Zac asked curiously and then stopped. Perhaps he was being indelicate.
“Are they what?”
“Partners?”
“Not really. They just live in the same place.”
Zac was uncertain how to interpret that.
“He did not leave me for Jasmine if that is what you think,” she continued. “But I can see that something has happened between them at some stage. Whatever it was, it is over now.”
“I see.”
Marianne smiled. “Do you?”
Not really, thought Zac.
“Isn’t that just life?” said Marianne thoughtfully. “Jasmine wanted me but got Raymond. I wanted Raymond and got no-one. And Raymond… Raymond wanted someone who died a long time ago and has been looking ever since.”
Died long ago. Did she mean Luke? Zac wondered.
“He might as well have had me for all he found in his search. Isn’t that ironic?”
Marianne began half-heartedly pawing at the wheel of her chair and Zac stood up to help, pulling the chair round and pushing her towards the door.
“But who gets
what they want in life when it comes to love?” murmured Marianne as they walked through the doorway, her eyes half closing already.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Marianne
The bedroom is calm, still painted white and furnished simply as it always was. There is a small vase of roses on the heavy, dark wood chest of drawers, pink and vanilla, the pink buds singed at the tips with crimson and bending slightly into the glossy lake of their reflection in the polished wood below. Jasmine has left them there, I am sure, not Raymond. They are so beautiful and so artfully positioned.
The effort of moving through from the sitting room and transferring onto the bed has awakened me but I am glad when Zac closes the door and leaves me alone. He has left the window open for me and the traffic whirls below, the sound of a world I cannot join. Despite closing my eyes, sleep will not come with all this emotion resurrected inside. Seeing Raymond again… the pain of witnessing his shock at my condition. How ugly that look made me feel! How old and ugly and discarded. It was like the time I was confronted by his portrait of me, all over again. The looking glass of someone else’s cruel observation.
The years drift backwards again so easily. Raymond was attentive after Luke died. Attentive but remote. I knew that this artificial state could not last forever and tried to prepare myself for life changing again in some way. But even I had not guessed what was coming next.
“I need to talk to you.”
I was putting a cup in the sink and I turned to see Raymond standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He had just come in from school - late - and he was dressed in black jeans and a black shirt and he held his jacket in one hand and his keys in the other. I knew looking at him that he had talked himself into this conversation on the way home and felt he could not delay one more minute or his courage would desert him.
I did not rush. I dried my hands carefully, knowing that something momentous was about to happen, and sat down at the table, motioning him to do the same. Raymond sat – or his legs gave way - his keys clattering onto the table. He stared down at the wood for a moment while I waited for him to speak.
“I want surgery,” he said. “I want to become a woman properly. No more pretending.”
“Raymond…”
“No, don’t Marianne,” he said. “Don’t tell me this is not what I really want because I do.”
“You are still grieving.”
“Yes, I am still grieving but that is not why I want to do this. Well yes it is… but not for the reasons you think. I am not confused by grief. It has clarified everything. Life is too short. I cannot… I simply cannot…”
His voice was cracking already and I grabbed his hand.
“I am sorry Marianne,” he whispered.
“Raymond,” I pleaded, desperate for him to stop talking, “we have got through this before. Go and lie down for a little.”
“No, I need to talk Marianne! You can’t change my mind on this.”
“But Raymond, nothing has changed.”
“Yes, yes it has,” he said, and I realised that perhaps he was right.
“I need to be who I am before it is too late.”
“Who you are!” I said scornfully, dropping his hand. I flinched inwardly at the hurt I saw on Raymond’s face but couldn’t stop myself. “I KNOW who you are, Raymond. I have loved you for who you are.”
“I know.”
Raymond was miserable. Guilty and miserable.
“You cannot have surgery without having hormones, without living as a woman for a year,” I told him. “How can you possibly do that and keep working?”
“I don’t know,” he said shaking his head. “I don’t know but I know that I have to. Even if it means losing my job. Losing everything.”
“Me?”
“Even you.”
We clung to each other and I knew we were frightened, both of us, of what was to come. There was more serious intent in Raymond’s voice than I had ever heard.
“I can’t bear to hurt you,” he said. “But I can’t bear to live this way anymore. I simply cannot waste any more of my life. Please tell me you understand. Please Marianne.”
I knew how desperate he was but I could not give him the reassurance he needed.
I put my head into my hands on the table and refused to look at him.
“And how do I fit into this plan?” I said, finally looking up.
“I don’t know.”
“You want to leave me.”
It was a statement, not a question. For a moment he refused to look at me.
“I don’t know.”
“We agreed,” I said.
“He is still between us.”
He means Patrice but I refuse to mention him by name. A surge of anger rises in me. Damn Patrice!
“You will be an outcast,” I spat. “Do you understand that? A deviant!”
“I am not a deviant!” he retorted angrily.
“You think men will want you? Do you? Well?”
“Some.”
“Some! Do you know anything about men, Raymond? Real men? For God’s sake, you have been living in a male body for long enough, surely you know something of their ways!”
I was shocked at my own cruelty, but could not stop.
“You think they want a woman who was once a man? A kid-on woman, a sort-of woman, a woman who was once the same as them? What kind of man wants that?”
I was killing Raymond inside, but I could not stop.
“You will fit nowhere. Do you understand that? Heterosexual men will not want you. Homosexual men will not want you. Women will not want you. You will not belong to anyone, Raymond. What sort of life is that?”
“A more honest life than this.”
“Raymond…”
“If straight men don’t want me,” Raymond said with a sudden defiance, his eyes brilliant with unshed tears, “and gay men don’t want me… well, there are those who are attracted to transsexual people like me.”
I banged my hands on the table in anger.
“Like Sebastian? Like SEBASTIAN!” I screamed. “You would be content to live your life with a creature like him? The men who want ‘a girl with a little bit extra’.”
Raymond’s hands literally flew to cover his ears.
“Don’t Marianne!”
“Yes! Yes I have to. You are going to turn our lives upside down because you have some misguided fantasy about who will be in your bed?”
“This is not about sex!”
“No? What is it about then?”
“Identity. My identity. And I do not feel myself to be a man. I never have. You know that. You know that Marianne.”
His voice dropped. “Nobody knows me better than you, Marianne.”
“Nobody loves you like I do, Raymond.”
“Not any more, no.”
If he had not said those words, perhaps I would have thought there was a way to survive together. But when he said them, I knew that what happened the night Patrice died had never gone away, that it was as much that as anything that drove Raymond. Nobody but us knew the truth of what happened - and that had both kept us together and driven a wedge between us.
I could not hide my devastation.
“Marianne…”
“Don’t touch me!”
I wondered if he knew. I wonder if he realised then that I would love him no matter what, that my love transcended gender. I would have stayed with him, even if he had become a woman, though it would not have been my choice. But events were taken out of my hands. And whatever he said, gender was more important to Raymond than it was to me because he was determined to change his.
Raymond let his hands drop from me and shrugged helplessly.
“I cannot speak about this anymore,” he said, turning from me wearily. “Perhaps when you are calmer we can try again.”
“He never loved you like I did,” I said bitterly. “He wasn’t even faithful. He wasn’t faithful to anyone. If you were different, if he loved you, why did he treat you like that?
”
I watched him walk from me and I crumbled.
“Raymond!”
He stopped dead, waiting for another attack.
“What?” He turned round when no answer came.
I could barely speak. I have never been a person who could easily beg.
“What?” he repeated.
My voice when it came was cracked and small and made me ashamed.
“Don’t leave me.”
Professor Ralph Mitchell was unlike any doctor I had ever consulted. I would have said he was about sixty at the time I first met him, a quietly spoken, unassuming man quite without the usual levels of arrogance of medical men at the top of their profession. He would not have spent a lifetime in a Cinderella branch of medicine if he had not had special levels of empathy, though I suppose there is always a certain glamour and prestige in being a pioneer. He was London’s top man in gender reassignment.
I was always struck by the gentleness of his voice, which was often barely above a whisper. Sometimes it was a strain to hear him. I wondered if he had developed it as an antidote to the high emotion his working life was surrounded by: the inevitable outpourings of angst; the deluges of tears. But when you really listened he also had a slight speech impediment, a soft lisp that gave an occasional whistling quality to his speech. Sometimes, it is these tiny little imperfections that make you understand other people’s problems, though God knows there is a difference between embarrassing diction and having a brain that’s a different sex from your body.
Now that there is more open discussion of the transsexual condition, people talk about being ‘trapped’ in the wrong body. That never seemed quite right to me. It was more a mismatch. It was a bit like wearing the green jacket of one suit and the red skirt of another. Each was fine its own way – they just didn’t go together. That’s the way it felt with Raymond: that he was an amalgamation of the brain of one person and the random body of another.
I remember some self-appointed guardian of public morals on television once, talking about the ‘immorality’ of providing transsexual surgery on the NHS. Doctors, he said, were creating ‘Frankenstein monsters’ with their work, abominations of nature. Personally, I wasn’t sure why it should have been any more immoral than sorting out a twisted intestine, or a hare lip. It is nature that tends to create monsters in my opinion - not surgeons.
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