Sex and Other Changes (19 page)

‘I'll get dinner,' said Alison.

They ate in the dining room. For some reason everybody in the family complained when they ate in the dining room, but Alison didn't see the point of having one if you didn't use it. Nowadays lots of homes had through rooms and the dining area was just part of the lounge, and many homes didn't have a dining area at all. Alison found that quite awful. To her having meals together was the centrepiece of family life. She thought that our civilisation was hurtling towards its end, but she kept quiet about it.

She couldn't pretend that their dining room was exciting. It had the chill stamp of disuse upon it, like a roped-off parlour in a damp, stone-built stately home. It was quite small, and you couldn't have the coal-effect fire on full-blast or the person nearest to it roasted.

On the wall above the hostess trolley there was another Ferenc Gulyas – Lake Balaton, he said, although it looked suspiciously like Derwentwater to Alison.

She had done her best to create an atmosphere – lit some candles – dimmed the lights – drawn the curtains against the sodden Throdnall night.

Things passed off fairly peacefully during the French onion soup – Bernie slurped but Alison didn't comment, she didn't want to provoke – but Em and Gray began sniping during the coq au vin. Em had abandoned vegetarianism the moment Giorgio appeared on the scene. ‘It's a battle we're never going to win,' she'd told them, sheepishly. ‘I'm going to support free-range, natural, organic foods from now on. That's a battle we can win. It's fine being radical, but you have to have practical goals.'

Alison had caught Nicola's eye and she'd half-smiled. Before he'd begun his sex change process he'd have made some sarcastic comment about Em's opinionating, like ‘Really? Hang on while I get some paper and make a note of that.' Not any more. She was becoming softer, less sarcastic, gentler. A nicer person.

‘Lovely,' said Em of the coq au vin. ‘Don't tell me you can't tell it's free-range and organic. I mean it tastes …'

‘… happy,' interrupted Gray. ‘It tastes very happy. Bit pissed off about being decapitated, but basically happy.'

‘Do shut up, Gray,' said Em wearily.

‘I was agreeing with you,' protested Gray insincerely.

‘It's expensive, I know that,' said Bernie. ‘I were with her when she bought it. She told me what it cost. “How much??” I said. I were flambergasted.' That would have been all right, but he went on to add, ‘Fads are stupid.'

‘Fads??' said Em, rising to the bait like a starving salmon. ‘Stupid?? Oh. Caring about animals is stupid, is it? Caring about animals is faddish, is it?'

‘Sorry I spoke,' said Bernie complacently.

Alison should have held her tongue, but she was tense, and she wasn't brilliant at holding her tongue, and she didn't.

‘No you aren't,' she said. ‘You're out to make trouble tonight. Snooker not going well?'

‘Switched it off,' said Bernie. ‘Couldn't bear it. Jimmy White's leading Stephen Hendry five-one.'

‘I thought Jimmy White was the one you liked, Gramps,' said Em. She was trying to make amends. There was a good girl buried under all her nonsense.

‘He is,' said Bernie. ‘Marge loved him. I turned to her just now, at the end of the fourth frame, which Jimmy won on the black, and I smiled at her, and she wasn't there. That's one of the saddest things about losing somebody. You lose the pleasures you used to share.'

There was a silence at that.

‘She's been gone months.' He could never bring himself to use the word ‘dead'. He always had to soften it. ‘Months. And I turned to her as if she was there. It's the first sign of Alzheimer's.'

‘It isn't a sign of Alzheimer's, Bernie,' said Nicola. ‘It's a sign of a great and wonderful love.' She seemed almost embarrassed by her emotion, emotion that she could never have shown as Nick.

‘Mind you, to be fair,' said Bernie, ‘she liked Stephen too. But she wanted to mother Stephen, but she'd have fancied a night on the tiles with Jimmy. Vulnerable, you see. What it is with women and sport, they fall for the vulnerable ones. Jimmy White, George Best, John McEnroe. They fall for the ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves.'

They rounded the meal off with tarte au citron. Em was only really happy with French food now that she was in love with François. The land of Em's lovers became paradise, and Alison went along with it for the sake of peace. A pall of garlic had hung over the house since François had come on the scene, but Bernie didn't like garlic, so on that important night Alison had chosen dishes that were French but had minimal garlic. Choosing menus had become a difficult balancing act.

At the end of the meal, Alison stood up.

‘Coffee will be served in the sitting room,' she said, ‘but before that I have an announcement to make.'

Behind her, the coal-effect fire glowed cheerfully.

‘I have something important to tell you. There's no way of breaking it gradually. I'm going to change sex too. After tonight, you will please know me as Alan.'

They all just gawped. Shock united them as nothing else could. The alarm call of a blackbird pinked loud in the silence of the dusk.

‘I've lived too long,' said Bernie.

‘What a story!' exclaimed Em.

Gray didn't say anything. He tried to stand up, swayed, swooned, and crashed to the ground in a faint.

Alison hardly slept all night. Beside her, Nicola slept, woke, pretended to be asleep, fell asleep, stirred, grunted, and, just after four o'clock, said, ‘I really am very sorry, sir', so she must have been dreaming about a customer at the Cornucopia.

Alison dropped off just once, only to be woken a few minutes later by an almighty clattering of bottles. An urban fox was rooting around in the black bags outside number thirty-eight. One of the Parkers, or maybe both, had a major drink problem. It wasn't surprising, really. Their house was up for sale. He said it was because the area was bad for her catarrh, but that was nonsense. They'd been declared bankrupt and they had to sell, and they had to keep it all secret from people they would never see again.

Alison told herself that her problem was nothing compared to the Parkers' difficulties, but that didn't help her sleep. Her mind was too busy.

She was thinking, of course, about the approaching morning, when she would face Mr Beresford for the first time dressed as a man. She tried not to be nervous about it. Damn it, she wasn't a nervous woman – but she defied any woman not to be nervous when facing Mr Beresford at such a moment.

Several very long months had passed since that evening when she had told the family, but she was thinking now of the years she still had to face, the two years of the Real Life Test, the three major operations, this vast journey to an uncertain destination. There was a temptation, just a little window of temptation, as dawn crept into the bedroom like a guilty husband, to give it up, quietly drop the whole thing, take all the clothes back to
London. It was a temptation that made her uneasy, even though she knew that she wouldn't give in to it.

It was absurd of her, as she listened to the magnificence of the dawn chorus, to wish to be a garden bird. How happy the birds seemed, but they weren't free from the fear of predators for one waking second of their brave little lives.

She thought about Em, sleeping … or not sleeping … on the other side of the wall.

She had taken Em to London to help her buy men's clothes. She hadn't dared buy them within a thirty mile radius of Throdnall, for fear that the story of the double sex change might break. That would have devastated Em. This time it had to be a scoop.

They'd gone by car because it would have been hard to carry a whole wardrobe of clothes on the train. They'd gone to Harvey Nicks and Harrods and Selfridges and Austin Reed and Jaeger. The hurt inflicted by Giorgio still ran deep, despite François, and Em saved her mother quite a lot of money by saying, ‘It just isn't you, Mum' about anything by Armani or Cerruti.

They'd done themselves proud. They'd eaten in San Lorenzo in the hope of seeing somebody famous (they didn't, or, if they did, they didn't recognise them) and enjoyed the fusion cooking in a Pacific Rim restaurant. The Pacific Rim hadn't yet come to Throdnall, where the cooking was more confusion than fusion.

In their double room, after slightly too much wine, they had had a giggly girly chat long into the night.

The poignancy of that chat seared Alison's heart on that long, slow, Throdnall night. It was the first truly adult chat that mother and daughter had ever had, and it was the last that they ever would have.

‘Did you enjoy that?' Alison had unwisely asked on their arrival home.

‘Of course I did, Mum,' Em had said. ‘My last ever weekend with my mum,' and she had walked into the house very quickly.

Alison wept silently for her daughter as the birds greeted the dawn.

Then she found herself leaping out of bed, without being aware that she had decided to do so. Her fears had gone. She owed it to Em to be happy about it, otherwise she would have inflicted grief to no purpose.

She pulled the curtains energetically. A charm of goldfinches flew from the cherry tree in the back garden, unaware that their collective name was the prettiest in the language, and almost as pretty as them.

She owed it to the birds to be as brave as they were. No. That was silly.

She owed it to herself.

Alan looked at herself in the … Alison looked at himself in the … Alan looked at himself in the mirror. That was it. You're Alan now, Alison, he told herself. No, you're Alan now, Alan. He couldn't tell Alison that he was Alan. There was no Alison to tell. There was no herself. He was Him Indoors. He had crossed his Rubicon. He smiled at the pretentiousness of the phrase.

He didn't like the look of his face. The sleepless night had taken its toll. He had great black bags under his eyes. Be quite a make-up job, that.

No. He was a man. Men didn't use make-up. Well, not in Throdnall, anyway.

Men didn't need make-up. A woman has bags under her eyes, it's a disaster, her looks are ruined. A man has bags under his eyes, he's been on the tiles, his face looks lived in, he's a hell of a fellow.

‘Good morning, Alan,' said Alan to Alan in the mirror. ‘Are you a hell of a fellow?'

Alan in the mirror smiled ruefully at Alan. ‘Hardly, Alan,' he said. ‘Not yet.'

He examined his upper lip. There had always been, in certain lights, the faintest trace of downy hairs, though one
would have had to be very ungenerous, he felt, to have called it a moustache.

There were also … or was it wishful thinking? … the first faint hairs on his chin and cheeks.

He felt, with a little spurt of excitement, that there was just the faintest justification for shaving.

He opened his brand new shaving bowl, got his beautiful virgin brush from the cupboard – ‘sorry, Brock' – brushed his hairs with hot water to soften them – ha ha! – gently covered his face in the luxurious cream, which was scented with sandal-wood; nothing but the best for the novice shaver.

With infinite care he drew his disposable razor around the edges of his nose and lips, across his chin, down his cheeks, right to the bottom of his ears, so slowly, so carefully, so enjoyably. He felt so wonderfully masculine. It was a real shock, when he went down to breakfast in his smart dark suit and Pierre Balmain tie (‘François would love it') to be greeted with ‘Hi, Mum, where's the Weetabix been put?'

Gray was trying to be extremely cool about the whole thing, as he had done ever since his fainting fit. Fainting wasn't cool.

‘Nice tie, Mum,' he said coolly.

Unfortunately, at fifteen he was not yet mature enough to maintain his cool. When Alan couldn't resist offering to drive him to school, he was horrified.

‘Christ, no,' he said. ‘Do us a favour, Mum.'

He felt tempted for just a moment to make another illegal U-turn in Sir Nigel Gresley Boulevard. No! Wrong! ‘You are Alan Divot and you fear no man,' he told himself. ‘You didn't when you were Alison. Why should you begin now?'

He turned left along the sheds, then right at the end. The Daimler was there. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Thank goodness, he wasn't late, but Mr Beresford would look at him as if he should have been as early as him.

He'd never been very interested in cars, but he found himself gazing longingly at the elderly Daimler, that old gentleman of a car, and wishing that he could have a vintage car, now that he was a man.

He walked along the bare corridor, then through the door into carpeted first class. He suspected that within a few minutes he would be being carpeted. He walked into his office. Mrs A. Divot. Have to get Andy the sign-writer to change that. He sat at his desk and began to open Mr Beresford's mail in the usual manner, calmly sorting it into four categories – urgent, nonurgent, I can deal with and bin – as if nothing whatsoever had happened.

Oh no. There was a nasty one about the faulty coupling incident on the Great South Central train, the notorious 6.22 from Godawfulming, as railway people now called it. You remember the incident, I'm sure. The last carriage of the 6.22 from Godalming – one of their carriages, of course – became detached from the rest of the train. A signalman failed to notice that the three-car train had become a two-car train – he couldn't really be blamed – and the last carriage had slid to a halt between Godawfulming and Hazlemere. Ten minutes later, another train had narrowly avoided running into the back of the stranded carriage, only because the driver had been keeping a particularly sharp look-out because there had been reports of deer straying on the line. The wrong sort of deer, of course. He had pulled up extremely abruptly, causing an osteopath with prostate problems to fall while urinating and cut his head on the flushing lever, thus flushing the toilet and soaking his dinner jacket as his arm went down the bowl. He injured his back in the fall and had to miss the Osteopaths' Dinner, to which he had been travelling. Next day he had endured death by headline, a figure of fun in all the tabloids and indeed most of the broadsheets. There had been no other casualties, but it had all been further bad publicity for Throdnall Carriage Works, not to mention the threat of the
recall of two hundred units for testing of the couplings. Now here was a letter from a potential customer, Northern Vision, threatening to withdraw from a proposed contract if additional safety checks were not introduced ‘at no extra cost to ourselves'. Today of all days.