Sacred Country (26 page)

I thought it a ridiculous name. It sounded like a corrupted word, short for Destitute. But I didn’t say this. I had to say enough hurtful things already. I had to say: ‘I don’t know whether I love you, Georgia. I would like what I feel to be love, but I have a feeling that it isn’t.’

She would cry sometimes and her mascara tears would make her face stripy. And then she would catch sight of herself and say: ‘My God, I’m a wreck. I look like a badger. No wonder no one fucking loves me!’

She taught me to swear and to drink Campari. She showed me St James’s Park and Heal’s department store. She tried to get me to love my breasts. She invited me to live with her in her flat in Notting Hill Gate, but I refused. I’d become fond of my building and of my grey room. And I didn’t want to wake up somewhere else, in a Heal’s bed, lying with Georgia.

She was proud of the Problem Page. She said: ‘D’Esté Defoe is a woman with empathy. Her readers trust her. And she’s a professional. She has a team of doctors and psychiatrists advising her. She offers genuine solutions.’ She talked like this, Georgia. As if she were always advertising something. She told me her flat was nicely situated. She said London was the toast of the world.

I was going to be twenty-one. I was still small. Sometimes I made myself hang from a door lintel, like in the old days. I wanted to reach 5 foot 4 inches. I hadn’t given up on any possibility, not even on growing. And now I saw that a moment had arrived for action. I remembered Cord saying: ‘Without action, Martin, nothing can be begun, what!’ He said this sitting beside me on the hearth rug making a paper chain. We were both of us drunk. Drunken words sometimes get remembered because they’re unexpectedly wise.

I wrote a letter to the Problem Page. Every letter had to begin ‘Dear D’Esté Defoe’. I made several drafts of my letter and then I typed it out in the
Liberty
offices, during a lull in rejections. This is how it went:

Dear D’Esté Defoe,

You may feel shocked by the contents of this letter. My problem is not one shared by any of your other readers, as far as I can tell.

I am a woman of twenty-one. Or rather, my body is a woman’s body, but I have never felt like a woman or colluded with my body’s deceit. In my mind, I am, and have been from childhood, male. This belief is an ineradicable thing. I am in the wrong gender.

I dress as a man. I loathe my breasts and all that is female about me. I have never been sexually attracted to a man. I do not even dream of Sean Connery.

Please help me. Please tell whether anyone else has ever felt this? Please tell me whether it could ever be possible to alter my body to fit my mind. Since the age of six, I have suffered very much and I want, at last, to take some action. I have no friends in whom I can confide.

I signed myself ‘Divided, Devon’. I thought D’Esté Defoe would be attracted by the letter D. I had no faith in Georgia, but it was the team of doctors and counsellors she had mentioned that gave me hope.

The following evening I spent in the nicely situated flat. Georgia showed me a new kind of grapefruit she had discovered, with pink flesh. She loved new things. As she cut my half of the pink grapefruit she said: ‘D’Esté had an extraordinary letter today. From a transsexual.’

I had never heard this word before. I thought, if there’s a word for this, then it exists outside me, it exists in other people. I’m not alone.

Then I thought, is the time actually coming, is the date actually coming at last for the invention of Martin Ward?

It was difficult to concentrate on anything, on the grapefruit and then on Georgia’s lips, tasting of Revlon. I wished I was in my grey room, sitting absolutely still.

Two weeks later, an answer to my letter appeared in
Woman’s Domain
:

Dear Divided, Devon,

I have given a great deal of thought to your problem, and no, you are not unique. Others have suffered as you are suffering and have been helped by counselling and, in some cases, by surgery. The first male-to-female sex change operation was performed on an American GI, George Jorgensen, in 1952 and he/she is now living happily as Christine Jorgensen. In 1958 it was revealed that ship’s Doctor, Michael Dillon, had been born Laura Maude Dillon and had changed herself surgically.

But a word of warning, Divided, Devon. The route to surgery is long. And it is not a route that all can take. Your first step must be to see your GP and ask him to refer you to a psychiatrist specialising in sex counselling. Only he will be
able to ascertain what path is the right one for you. Only he will be able to discover whether you could adapt to life as a member of the opposite sex. Put yourself in his hands and he will help you towards your future.

Good luck and
bon voyage
!

D’Esté Defoe

The person in whose hands I put myself was called Dr Beales. The teams of experts at
Woman’s Domain
found him for me.

I had thought all people like him had consulting rooms in Harley Street, but Dr Beales did not. He had his consulting room in Twickenham and the journey there from Earl’s Court took an hour and a half Twickenham isn’t really even in London, but in Middlesex. By the side of Dr Beales’s house flowed a slow bit of the Thames, brown as tea. The smell of it was rank. It reminded me of the smell of the Suffolk ditch where I’d found my green tennis ball. And after my first visit to Beales, I had a dream of my childhood on the old farm. I was picking stones and dusk was falling.

Dr Beales had a face like a kitten, squashed and small but with bright eyes. He was about forty. His hair was black. He had a habit of pinching the slack skin under his chin. He dressed like a school teacher, in brown corduroy. He sat me down, within sight of the water, on a leather chair. He stared at me. He said: ‘You’re very small. There aren’t many men of your height.’

I said: ‘Growing is something I’ve been trying to do for years and years.’

He smiled. He had one of those smiles that vanishes the moment it’s there, like English spring sunlight. He began to write notes on a pad. I imagined he was describing me to himself – the open-neck shirt I wore, my jeans and my jeans jacket, my heavy-frame glasses, my brown hair cut in a Beatles style by Rob, my look of dread.

He invited me to relax, to make myself comfortable in the chair, to look out at the water. I felt tired and far away from anywhere that I knew. The dirty river wasn’t a consoling sight.
I thought, if Rob were here he would say: ‘It’s a bleddy cesspit, Mart. Nothing can stay alive in it.’

Dr Beales began asking me questions. He asked me whether I could mend an electric fuse and whether I knew the rules of cricket. He said: ‘Do you enjoy or repudiate domestic tasks, such as hoovering?’ He said: ‘Are you jealous of men’s superior strength?’ He said: ‘Have you ever been train spotting?’

I kept one eye on the water, imagining shrimps and water snakes trying to have an existence there and drowning in sewage and floating to the surface, like feathers and like rope. I said that I had never possessed a Hoover. I said that I thought men used their strength to annihilate women, as my father had tried to annihilate me. I said: ‘If I’d let myself be a true girl in my childhood, I would have been destroyed.’

Then Dr Beales said: ‘I’d like you to tell me about your parents.’

I turned from the river and stared at his kitten face. I was about to say that I still had dreams of being Sir Galahad and going to rescue my mother from Mountview and from Sonny when Dr Beales gave me one of his fleeting smiles and said: ‘You know that they’re going to have to be brought into this, don’t you? Family support for what you’re attempting to do is vital. Patients whose families are opposed have to fight an almost impossible battle.’

So then I saw them arriving here: Sonny in his farm clothes, smelling of beer; Estelle in a polka-dot dress with her grey hair in a tangle.

I said: ‘They’re dead.’

‘Ah,’ said Dr Beales and he wrote this down – parents dead.

I was going to tell him that my father had been killed on the Rhine, but I realised in time that if he had died in the war I wouldn’t have been born. So I thought then, I won’t tell him about my life as it’s been, but as it might have been. I’ll tell him a story.

I said: ‘I was six years old when they died. They died in a plane going from Southampton to Cherbourg. The airline was called Silver City. You could put cars into those planes and fly
them to France. My parents’ car was a Humber Super Snipe and it died in the plane also.’

Dr Beales wrote this down, too – car dead.

‘What happened to you then?’ he asked.

I thought of Cord and Miss McRae and I knew that neither of them would want to come to Twickenham. I said: ‘I went to live with a family called Harker. They had been friends of my mother’s. Edward Harker is a very wise person and he knows about my predicament and he would come and see you if this was necessary.’

‘And your adoptive mother?’

‘Irene. I’ve never talked to Irene. Irene is very simple and good.’

‘If she’s “good”, then she might be in sympathy with you?’

‘No. It’d be beyond her. Beyond her understanding.’

‘You can’t be sure of this.’

‘Yes, I can.’

‘But she’ll have to know, in the end.’

‘You mean, in the end when I’m a man?’

‘You will never be a man. Not a true biological male. It’s important that you understand this. Do you understand this?’

‘Yes.’

‘You will – if you proceed, if I recommend that you proceed with hormone treatment and eventually surgery – be able to pass as a man in ninety-nine per cent of social situations. But you will not be a man. Nor will you any longer
be
a woman. Have you heard me? Are you keeping relaxed? Stay looking at the water while you answer.’

I looked at the water. A barge was passing. Its cargo appeared to be stones. ‘What
will
I be?’ I said.

Dr Beales pinched and pulled his bit of neck skin. I imagined him old, looking like a turkey. ‘You will be a partially constructed male. The world will take you for a man and you will look like a man – to yourself. And so your internal conviction of your essential maleness will receive confirmation when you look in the mirror – and your anguish will cease, or so it is hoped.’

The barge had gone by and was out of sight. The river banks were washed with the brown waves of its wake. I thought, by the time the water is quite still again, my fifty minutes here will be over.

I said: ‘Is this what has happened in the past?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘To other people like me – that their anguish ceased?’

‘It is assumed,’ said Dr Beales, ‘from what they told me. But we are running ahead of ourselves in any assumption about you. Because for all I know at the moment your idea of your maleness could be a delusion or you could be lying. I know nothing yet.’

I said: ‘I lied about one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘About cricket. I do know its basic rules. My adoptive father, Edward Harker, makes cricket bats and he taught the rules to me and I used to practise bowling in his backyard.’

‘Oh yes?’ said Beales. ‘What did you bowl, spinners or bouncers?’

‘Spinners,’ I said. ‘I was a spinner and by the time I was twelve Edward was afraid to face me at the crease.’

There was no way of getting to or from Twickenham by any means of transport, as far as I could see. There was no tube station. It was beyond the end of the line. I never saw a bus pass.

I had taken the tube from Earl’s Court to Richmond and walked from there, following a map, like a lost tourist.

When I left Dr Beales’s house, I decided to walk along the river on the old towpath where the horses used to go up and down long ago. I felt like a horse, trying to pull something, trying to pull along the idea that a surgeon could transform me and I would become Martin. The odd thing was that all my life I had thought this would happen one day, I had believed in it without knowing of any means by which it could happen. And now that I knew the means, I had trouble believing it. I think this happens to the human mind: it
sometimes finds it easier to believe in the dream of something than in the something itself.

And I felt afraid. I thought, will Mary be gone utterly? Do I want her gone utterly, or only parts of her? Is there anything about Mary I should remember to save?

I came to some steps that went down to the dishwater river and I sat on them, watching boats pass. Not far from the steps was an old houseboat slung with tractor tyres as fenders and flying a Union Jack from a metal pole. An area of water between the boat and the bank had been fenced off with chicken wire. In the water, several families of ducks swam in little circles. Duck ladders went up from their pond to the dilapidated deck of the boat. There didn’t seem to be anyone on the boat and I thought, well, maybe no one lives there, only these patriotic ducks. We always think a person must be there, at the centre of everything, and sometimes we’re wrong.

The sun came out and the water was fingered by an unexpected sparkle. I didn’t know what place I was in. It could have been somewhere called Ham. I put my arms round my knees and held on to them. The shine on everything had made me wonder about love. I thought, will Pearl for instance still be fond of me after Mary has gone?

A letter came from Mary to Edward Harker. It was marked ‘Confidential’. Irene recognised Mary’s handwriting on the envelope and said: ‘Is she in trouble, Edward? Is that going to be it?’

Edward took the letter down to his cellar and read it by the light of the parchment lamps. It asked him whether he would come to London and talk to Dr Beales. It asked him whether he would pretend to be Mary’s adopted father.

‘Well?’ said Irene, when he came up.

‘Well what?’ he said stubbornly.

‘What’s happened to her, Edward? I deserve to know. I used to house that girl when she was little. I was like a mother to her once.’

‘I never break a confidence,’ said Edward.

Later, at supper, Pearl said: ‘Is Mary really in trouble, Edward?’

He looked at her and at Irene, at their sweet faces. He wanted no harm ever to come to them.