CHAPTER ONE

THE INMACULATE CONCEPTION

Nottingham - 1^st June 1965

So here they all are: the angels and saints, the seraphim and cherubim, the holy chorus gathered together to welcome into the world a new born child. How many times does it happen? Every single second of the day, somewhere in the world yet still the massed ranks of heaven descend from on high to serenade them.

Depends on where in the world you are but ninety-nine times out of a hundred everything goes according to plan. The queue of expectant souls trembles in anticipation as the first in line takes human form and is dragged into daylight from its mother’s womb. Siân Lacey Taylder’s entrance will be no different; she will arrive at four in the morning, after a brief struggle, for hers will be a breech presentation - there’s always one, isn’t there? The gynaecologist insists that there will be no long term consequences.

How was he to know? He was responsible only for the safe arrival of the newly born babe, what became of it later was of little consequence to him as he dashed from one operating theatre to the next. If he chalked up a dozen deliveries in a day he could go home a happy man.

How was he to know? To all extents and purposes, and after a bit of fumbling around, Siân Lacey Taylder emerged as a healthy specimen: all seven pounds of her, so I’m told. Neither he nor anyone else in the delivery room would have heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth as the waiting souls above realised God’s terrible mistake. This was not supposed to happen; something, somewhere had gone horribly wrong for the infant that eventually showed its face to a small gallery of spectators was not Siân Lacey Taylder but a shrivelled and screaming impostor. Worse than that, the poor girl was not, in fact, a girl at all; that much was immediately apparent from the shape of its distended genitalia. In a cruel act of deceit her nemesis and rival to life, henceforth to be known as Simon Taylder esquire, had seen and seized his chance. God’s omniscience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and the moment His eye was elsewhere Simon Taylder’s soul silently jumped the queue, stole the as yet unshaped vessel that had been allocated to Siân and claimed it for his own.

Meantime, the bodiless soul of Siân Lacey Taylder crept into the shadows, furious and full of revenge. And there she remained for thirty-one years, one month, twelve days and a couple of woozy hours, until the surgeon took the scalpel and made his first incision into his patient’s shaved flesh; the first incision but the final cut.

Let’s not pretend that, despite God’s omnipotence, this hadn’t happened before; Siân Lacey Taylder wasn’t the first and I’ll bet you all the meagre royalties this memoir earns that she won’t be the last. There are those – and they are the vast majority – who accept their fate and crawl back into the half-light where they remain for all eternity, deprived of human form. I suppose we should feel sorry for them, walking the earth as nothing more than ghosts but then again we might, in the overall scheme of things, consider them the fortunate ones. I would invite you now to take a look at Ms Lacey Taylder, sitting at her keyboard, angrily tap-tapping away, and consider the legitimacy of her existence.

What do you think? Oh, but you barely know her, thus far you’ve seen her only as the innocent victim, tricked and duped by her obnoxious near-namesake, Simon Taylder esquire. Much as I love her I feel obliged to tell you a few home truths. She’s a rebel without a clue, a rebel without a cause, a woman who likes to bang her head against a brick wall no matter what the consequences might be. But there’s more than this, much, more. For all that she believes in God and the catechism of the Holy Catholic Church, for all that she kneels at her bed after nightfall, saying her rosary, Siân Lacey Taylder will never make it to heaven. She is, after all, a murderess; blood has stained her soul.

She sat like a hawk on the edge of darkness with her eagle eye firmly trained on Simon Taylder esquire: watching, analysing his every waking thought and move. She peered into his dreams, directed and dictated his fantasies to her own ends. Wicked woman; she had resolved, already, to put an end to his life, to erase every trace of his existence and put herself in his place and, like a cold and clinical assassin, she did her homework, bided her time. It didn’t take long for the cracks to show, for the weaknesses to make themselves known and if Siân Lacey Taylder had possessed bodily form a huge, wry smile would have taken over her face: she couldn’t believe her luck.

Even at tender age of fourteen he was beginning to entertain doubts, making it so, so easy for his nemesis to destroy him. Why, she barely needed to lift her little finger. She simply baited a trap into which, after years of successfully undermining his masculinity, he walked into of his own accord – on the morning of the thirteenth July, 1996, to be precise.

* * *

Allow me, if you will, to take the liberty of pre-empting the questions I know you’re dying to ask. ‘Who are you, Siân Lacey Taylder? Who are you, what are you and why, after all these years, do you suddenly feel the urge to make your confession? Don’t you believe in letting sleeping dogs lie?’

What would you prefer, the myth or the reality? I’m not sure I can make the distinction any more; that is, I’m not sure I really want to. I’ll do my best to stick to the truth with the proviso that the truth tends to be dictated by the victorious and I’ve always sat alongside the oppressed and the vanquished. Not out of choice, you understand; it’s just turned out that way and I’ve long since lost the ability to fight back. I turned in on myself, instead; the way that half-hearted assassins always do.

What you would like are hard facts and a neat chronology that will take you from A to B onwards before – on page 453 – safely depositing you at Z. That was my vague intention when the notion first came to mind; to make a map of my experiences and unfold it, sheet by sheet, so you could follow my trajectory as it sank into oblivion like Satan’s lieutenants falling from Heaven. It didn’t take long to realise that wouldn’t work, not least because I was entering uncharted territory, a landscape I had to create as I went along; talk about the blind leading the blind.

You want hard facts? Here’s a few for starters. I am certainly not a product of my own overly fertile imagination, no matter how tenuous my existence might be. Neither is the story I’m about to relate a carefully constructed fiction to win myself sympathy or justify my actions; it’s not that sort of book. I’m not looking for pity, I don’t want empathy or understanding and I’ve no intention of tugging on your heartstrings to have you weeping at my plight. I’ve done my best to keep pathos at an arm’s length, if I’ve failed in any respect then please feel free to ask for your money back.

Like I said, it’s not that sort of book. I can consume as much gin as the most miserable alcoholic but you won’t find me standing up in front of all and sundry, telling them what a weak and pathetic creature I am. And if you’re hoping to wallow with me in a mire of self-indulgent melancholy or take my hand through a dark night of the soul into the light of a golden dawn then I suggest you look elsewhere, there’s enough navel-gazing in your local bookshop without me adding to it. I’m fed up to the back teeth with self-confessed victims who feel obliged to wash their dirty linen in public. Whatever happened to self-respect and dignity? They come out with their puerile clichés along the lines of ‘I realise now I’m an alcoholic but I didn’t realise I was an alcoholic until I first started to address the problem’ then ramble on about being offered ‘the gift of recovery’. Well bully for you, but do you really think I give a fuck? I can at least guarantee you no saccharine stories of ‘triumph over adversity’; if I start making hand-wringing admissions of guilt you have my permission to shoot me.

Let’s get back to the facts, shall we? If Siân Lacey Taylder is as real as the dawning day then so is – or rather was – the late but not much lamented Simon Taylder Esquire. You don’t believe me? I’ve got the paperwork to prove it just as I’ve got the documentation that confirms I am what I am and not what I was before. But it’s just paperwork, nothing more; there were half a dozen photo albums but I burned them all as soon as I’d buried him. I didn’t want images of him hanging around to haunt me; it’s hard enough looking into the mirror and seeing him, like Banquo’s ghost, staring back at me.

Yes, it was I who put and end to his sad and sorry life. I didn’t quite put the pillow over his head and smother the life out of him, in truth it was diazepam and general anaesthetic that did the trick but you get the gist of my metaphor, don’t you? The surgeon and his knife simply put him out of his misery, I’d wounded him – fatally – long before that, injected him with the virus of a terminal disease. It’s not that I’ve come here to gloat, only to set the record straight because there are, believe it or not, those who still argue – in the face of incontrovertible evidence – that Simon Taylder’s demise was more neurobiological calamity than brutal crime. Let me remind them that to be a successful murderess you don’t have to take a crowbar and stove in your quarry’s skull; violence, at its most beautiful, is as subtle as is it sublime and I like to think I’ve turned psychological persecution into a fine art.

As a devout Catholic I have to believe that we sinners are called upon to account for our actions before the Blessed Virgin Mary; that divine justice will be meted out with compassion and mercy as we approach the end of our days upon earth. Trouble is, given the events of the past couple of years I can’t help worrying that judgement day is upon me already; someone, somewhere has really got it in for me and I suspect the consensus will be that I’ve got my comeuppance. Not quite an eye for eye, perhaps, but uncannily symmetrical, never the less.

Dates would help, I suppose. If I can attach an event to a fixed moment in time then chances are you’ll be more disposed to believe me, as if my word alone counted for nothing. You’re not alone in that, there’s several in ‘The Village’ who’d be inclined to agree, they think I’ve made it all up, or that I’ve turned myself into a victim simply to get even with the male sex and thus, by extension, Simon Taylder esquire. Yes, even though he’s been nearly fifteen years in his mouldering grave for I am a woman who exists only for revenge.

Listen, I’m under no illusions; even those who believe that it happened tend to think I was ‘asking for it’ and I have a horrible feeling that the jury, when they finally convene, will be of a similar opinion.

But I’m dabbling with the future without yet having to come to terms with the past and that’s no way to deal with history. I can tell you, categorically, that it all began on the first of June 1965 and that thirty-one years later – on Saturday the thirteenth of July 1996, to be precise – my nemesis lay lifeless on an operating table without a breath to call his own. There was no mourning or wailing or gnashing of teeth, except from one small corner of heaven where the smug and the sanctimonious ranted about flouting God’s law. It was, no doubt, those self-same self-righteous bigots who laughed and clapped with glee in the early hours of July 4^th, 2005 whilst I, Siân Lacey Taylder lay naked and unconscious on a stranger’s bed. They could hardly contain their joy when, on 9/9/06, history repeated itself, this time over the dining room table whilst I mouthed silent screams of pain.

Enough already, I’ve said too much. Thirteen months of living sub judice have taken their toll; I’ve lost the ability to tell it like it is, everything is metaphor and allusion – or whispered in hushed tones when the rest of the world isn’t listening. You’d have thought I’d have learned my lesson by now, I was sufficiently arrogant to start boasting about how I put an end to Simon Taylder esquire, didn’t think for a minute that someone, somewhere, might want to exact their revenge. It had been my intention to give you a blow-by-blow account of his fall from grace; to list, in loving detail, the shame and humiliation I piled upon him, the depths to which I drove him out of sheer pleasure even when the war was won and he’d agreed to take on my name. I spent the best part of decade gloating so I suppose I’ve only got myself to blame now it’s all gone tits up.

And there, dear reader, lies the unbearable irony. I should have spent more time boning up on Newtonian law rather than burying my head in romantic poetry. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. When it comes to physics I might well be an aberration (I am, after all, a biological curiosity) but I swear that the consequences of my minor indiscretion pale into insignificance compared to the retribution I’ve had to endure; in adding insult to injury by offering my account of Simon Taylder’s cold-blooded demise I shall probably attract a good deal more.

Which is why I’ve had to dress up this narrative as something it’s really not, an accusation that’s been levelled at me on more than one occasion; more wolf in sheep’s clothing than mutton dressed as lamb. What was intended as irreverent pastiche has metamorphosed into a biopsy of both my psyche and my soul. All I wanted to do was take a couple of pot-shots at those feeble-minded bastards who’d wronged me, kick sand in the faces of the self-righteous bullies who insist that people like me have no right to exist, that we contravene some sort of divine law. What the fuck do they know? They talk about the sacred as if it were a local government line manager; they haven’t looked it straight in the eye and asked the sort of intimate questions you might reserve for your lover. What do they know of love who’ve never screwed around? What do they know of God, who’ve never supped with the devil? It’s always the bigots who want to throw the first stone, the ignorant and the inexperienced, and now I find myself in the dock, having to justify my every move and motive.

Look, I’m not just holding my hands up and admitting to my role as a murderess, I’m trying to get you to understand why this usurper had to be wiped off the face of the earth and erased from the pages of the past. Yet even I’m beginning to ask myself, ‘who’s the villain here?’ I can’t help thinking that history is trying to absolve Simon Taylder esquire and cast me as the guilty party, notwithstanding the fact that it was he who stole what was rightfully mine; that from the beginning of time this body I now inhabit was always destined to be female. I have simply reclaimed what he unlawfully – and, I must say, most unnaturally – possessed. Still, since when has history cared for the truth and since when have you cared for anything more than a titillating story?

‘You can’t write that?’ they told me, every time I showed them another chapter, so raw with emotion you could see the blood dripping from the pages; like an Aztec heart, torn, still beating, from its lifeless body. ‘Never speak ill of the dead’ they would say, ‘they can’t defend themselves’. Well, thank fuck for that! No lawyers in heaven, but plenty amongst the fires of hell. Do you know what? I’ll kick the metaphorical shit out of anyone I consider inferior, be they living or dead. I don’t see why Simon Taylder esquire should be granted an exemption.

‘Perhaps’, they suggested, ‘you could tone it down a little.’

‘Okay’, I replied, ‘I’ll take out the four letter words’.

But that wasn’t what they meant. Faced with a manuscript that praised the virtues of excess, that ran counter to the zeitgeist, their enthusiasm suddenly waned. What they wanted was protestant, Anglo-Saxon sobriety: temperance, chastity and self-control; what they got was Catholic, Latin excess: hedonism, licence and sexual sedition. They wanted me to dissect the nature of my ‘problem’ – which they preferred to call ‘dysphoria’ rather than my ‘demon within’ – to offer my readers (‘who, after all, are a discerning and eclectic lot’) an insight into what it means to live with what they liked to label ‘dissociative identity disorder’.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my ‘heartbreaking battle’ with this ‘unusual but distressing’ condition it’s to play along with those who prefer to patronise with tired clichés and platitudes. Learn the rules and then, when they’re not looking, start to bend them, little by little, until you can slip out of the cell they’ve been building around you. The professionals call it reality, urge me to get a stiff dose of it and pull myself together; I pretend to listen but when I get home I creep back into my crepuscular world and continue to plot my eventual demise. Yes, that’s right, I’ve blotted out one life; I’ve no qualms about eradicating another. It’s called reinvention and I’ve become addicted to it – big time.

Be honest with me, what would you prefer? Would you rather shell out the best part of eight quid for a tale of unrelenting heartache in which the nicely-spoken middle-class heroine inevitably triumphs over adversity? Unrelenting dross, more like; suburban and banal.

Or would you rather bury yourself in a polemic, a diatribe against every value you’ve been taught to respect; loyalty, hard work, self-discipline, sobriety in all matters and ‘everything in moderation’. Don’t worry; you know full well I won’t succeed in undermining your standards because if a person – a freak – as reprehensible as myself can find the time to rail against them so neurotically, then they must be worth defending.

It’s a classic case of self-justification by proxy. I do it all the time, to protect myself from people like you. We shore ourselves up, hide behind a wall of insults and expletives in a sorry attempt to claim the moral high ground, or in my case, its antithesis. Just to prove my point, let’s take a look at our respective daily lives, shall we?

You’ll have been sat at your desk all day with barely a minute to surf the internet and book that holiday in the Algarve. You’ll have bolted down a sandwich and a can of Coca-Cola Lite at one o’clock then returned to writing that report for your tabloid-reading boss who’d probably sack you if she caught you reading this book during office hours. You’ll tell yourself you work to live and you almost believe it but as you trudge across the car park at six in the evening you begin to worry whether it’s not the other way round. You’ll fall asleep worrying about your mortgage and/or your credit rating and dream of sheep.

I crawl out of my bed during Woman’s Hour, coughing up the remnants of a hangover. I’ll sit on my (not-so-fat anymore) arse and churn out another thousand words of rhetorical bile. I’ll nip out for a walk, kicking out at anything in anger and ploughing the furrow that is my distorted imagination, before returning to my laptop to direct some more abuse at anyone who takes my fancy. I’ll take a long, hot bath, attire myself in something less slovenly and then, and only then, will I open the bottle. I try to hang on until four o’clock but I no longer have the patience of a saint. A couple of gin and tonics first, to refresh my stale, undernourished taste buds, a can of cold lager then half a bottle of vodka – or wine if I’m feeling particularly abstemious. I used to go to the pub but I’ve developed an allergy to ‘The Village’ so now I stay home and watch videos of Joey Tempest on You Tube.

That’s right; it’s hard life if you don’t weaken. Let’s compare the products of our labours; yours, that crucial report on a carbon-neutral waste management strategy; mine, a slim volume of literary erotica entitled the Society of Sin. Yours: read by a handful of bureaucrats; mine: purchased by over five thousand discerning readers whose taste cannot be faulted – except for that bastard who gave me a two-star review on Amazon last week. Yours: free of charge to anyone who gives a toss; mine: seven pounds ninety-nine from all good bookshops (though most prefer to buy it anonymously on the internet).

So we’ve established your penchant for taking criticism on the chin; it’s character building, after all, sticks and stones and all that. Still, I’ve been advised that toning things down a bit might make the project more marketable and once the word ‘sales’ was mentioned I was all ears. Do you know what? Now I come to think of it, there may well have been mitigating circumstances – not that I’m trying to excuse myself in any way. I want to state categorically that I, Ms Siân Lacey Taylder, was responsible for the untimely passing away of Simon Taylder esquire; I set the trap, he took the bait and I, alone, finished him off. Yes, I was responsible, but not, perhaps, solely responsible. It’s about time I gave my accomplices some credit.

Let’s get one thing clear, all the usual suspects emerge from this sob story free of blame. Indeed, they’re the only ones to come out it with any credit. There is no broken childhood, no alcoholic parents or siblings, no litany of abuse or neglect I can call upon to excuse my deplorable behaviour. If you’re after an example of middle class stability then you need look no further than number 75 Denton Road; there’s no grubby secrets within its worthy, dependable four walls.

Talking of sob stories and tales of triumph over tragedy, of kicking sand into the face of adversity, it’s never been my intention to appeal to the mis-lit genre – even I have a modicum of pride. I grant you, at first glance I seem to tick all the right boxes but by the end of the second chapter the nature of my suffering will become brutally clear; it’s all self-inflicted. I drink too heavily, too often but I couldn’t claim to be an alcoholic. I’ve carefully nurtured a complex eating disorder but I’m neither bulimic nor anorexic. I carve vile words into my arms, stub out cigarettes on my bare flesh but I don’t have the guts to take my own life.

But I’m not looking for sympathy; I don’t want anyone to champion either me or my cause. I’ve taken my place in the dock, pled guilty to murder and accepted my punishment like the masochist I’ve always been – only this time the pain and the suffering are distinctly lacking in appeal. I wouldn’t wish them on any of you, no matter how much you come to despise me. Naming my accomplices won’t get me a reprieve, won’t even earn me some much needed remission but I’m told it will make for a more commercial genre. Death by Eyeliner; there’s a certain ring of truth to it, like the junkie’s needle, the instrument of execution. I suppose you could argue that if Simon Taylder esquire had never got his hands on a Boots N^o 7 eyeliner pencil I wouldn’t be here today. True enough, but you’ll remember the old adage; you can lead a horse to the water but you can’t make it drink and he knew – instinctively, thanks to my intervention – what to do with it. Not only that but he applied it with great dexterity then admired his fine work in the mirror. I have to admit that he did look cute, what with the long eyelashes and the lithe body, a vision of what was to come. You can see how he moved on to mascara; like I said, he was a junkie. A few puffs of dope will take you to heroin, a couple of dabs of eyeliner and the next thing you know you’ll be wearing a dress. Well, that’s what happened to Simon, anyway.

And the eighties? How the hell am I going to inveigle them into the list of the guilty parties? You can see my point about the eyeliner but perhaps this is a tenuous link too widely stretched. But then again, perhaps not. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that the era that began with a fanfare on January 1^st 1980 (the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall was number one in the hit parade, a 15 year-old Simon Taylder had celebrated New Year with too much Watney’s Red Barrel) and came to a sad and sorry end on December 31^st 1989 (The USA had invaded Panama, Band Aid 2’s Do they Know it’s Christmas was top of the pops, Simon was celebrating New Year with his partner in Guatemala drinking magic tea) will be remembered as the greatest decade in history ever. And that, unlike much of what you will read in here, is an undisputable fact.

It’s obvious, isn’t it? Big hair bands (think Guns ‘n Roses), glam metal (think Bon Jovi), the new romantics (Duran Duran, of course), the rise of the power ballad (can anything top Jennifer Rush and The Power of Love?), Nena’s 99 Red Balloons (Just thinking about her hairy armpits makes me drool like a lesbian wolf on heat) and that’s just the music. Can you spot a theme emerging? Plenty of pretty young things wearing their hair big and long and not afraid to apply a little (or, in the case of Duran Duran, rather a lot of) make-up. After decades of short-back-and-sides tyranny, of gender boundaries so rigidly policed they made the Berlin Wall look like a hop and a skip and a jump across the school playground, the world of stiff, unyielding masculinity came tumbling down. Didn’t take much, did it? The way some parents swore at Boy George on the television you’d have thought civilization itself was on the verge of extinction although, ironically, as far as Simon was concerned, Boy George never really entered the equation. Simon wasn’t alone in finding the Culture Club singer curiously exotic, and like everyone else he engaged in the compulsory ‘is it a he or a she?’ debate until the truth became depressingly clear to him; just another celebrity gender-bender.

Simon was, if I remember rightly, at the beginning of his androgynous phase, looking for the notorious and non-existent ‘third way’, I suppose; neither male nor female but something inbetween. You don’t have to have a master’s degree in political science (like what I do) to see the fundamental flaw in trying to tread the middle ground; it’s just another way of sitting on the fence - and with a bunch of hand-wringing wishy-washy liberals, to boot.

But Simon was born five years too early for androgyny, it was always going to be a nineties thing and by New Years Day 1990 (which he spent in a bar in Antigua, Guatemala) the die had already been cast. Curiosity had long since got the better of him, he’d wondered from the paths of righteousness too often and more importantly, too far. You know what it’s like, or maybe you don’t; the confines of gender, like the confines of the straight and narrow, will wreak havoc upon your character if you have neither the self-discipline nor the moral fibre to knuckle down and accept your lot. Those words never existed in Simon’s vocabulary, never have in mine, either and they weren’t much in evidence throughout the nineteen-eighties. I’m not saying the ethos of the decade dragged him down the road of no return but when you sift through the evidence it soon becomes clear that fate conspired against him almost as much as me. The wrong place at the wrong time; that sums up the history of Simon Taylder almost to a tee.

But it’s not for me to put words in your mouth. You’d hardly let a condemned woman have the final say, she’d twist the truth and pass it through a sieve so fine you could barely see the holes in her story. We live in a blame culture, where the victim calls all the shots and rewrites history from her own perspective. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been there myself, thirteen months ago, to be precise, so I can understand where Simon was coming from, that the victim gets the blame because he or she was asking for it. It is he – and I – who are guilty; the perpetrator did – and will – get away with it. Alas, Simon Taylder’s untimely demise on the thirteenth of July 1996 leaves us without a victim to indulge so you’ll just have to listen to me, instead. Not quite the same thing, I’ll agree, but as nobody’s ever accused me of having rose-tinted spectacles you might even learn a thing or two.

Now, where shall we begin…?

CHAPTER TWO

OUR LADY OF THE OPPOSITE SEX

This bed is on fire
With passionate love
The neighbours complain about the noises above
But she only comes when she’s on top

My therapist said not to see you no more
She said you’re like a disease without any cure
She said I’m so obsessed that I’m becoming a bore, oh no
Ah, you think you’re so pretty

Caught your hand inside the till
Slammed your fingers in the door
Fought with kitchen knives and skewers
Dressed me up in women’s clothes
Messed around with gender roles
Dye my eyes and call me pretty

Moved out of the house, so you moved next door
I locked you out, you cut a hole in the wall
I found you sleeping next to me, I thought I was alone
You’re driving me crazy, when are you coming home

*      *      *

You’d like to know how and when it happened and how I manage to sleep at night with his death on my conscience. Do you know what? Now I’m sitting down to write about it I’m almost inclined to forget the whole fucking project. Why should I put myself through it all over again just to entertain you?

Because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Let’s not pretend that either of us has any claim to the moral high ground. I’m writing this for filthy lucre, you’re reading it because you’re a voyeur; you want to look into the mind of a self-proclaimed murderess and you just can’t wait for me to get my comeuppance. I might as well inform you here and now that I have no intention of telling the truth; I simply can’t be bothered to separate fact from fiction, I’ll leave that tedious exercise to you.

Life imitates art. One can, with a little imagination, bend it to one’s will, like bars in a cell, and then simply slip between, beyond the borders of reality. They’ve told me time and time again that I’m only pretending to be a madwoman, what do they know?

Life imitates art and I have to realise I’ve reinvented myself once too often; a plot can only be stretched so far before the gaping holes become apparent - even to a second-rate writer like me.

It always happens to someone else, doesn’t it? It’ll never happen to you. I think you’re probably right because it always happens to people like me, and not just once but time and time again. We mop up the world’s woes on your behalf, we protect you from violence, violation and shame by allowing them to be visited upon us. I would like to call myself a martyr but the unpleasant truth is that I’m as addicted to victimhood as I am to alcohol, cigarettes and self-mortification.

You think it will never happen to you but you’d be wise to prepare yourself, just in case. Don’t forget, that’s what Simon Taylder thought until the unpalatable truth finally dawned upon him at the tender age of twenty one. The eighties were in full swing, he had the world and several of its women at his feet. Didn’t I promise to tell you all about him? I will, in time, but first let me tell you a salutary story.

Tuesday 12^th September 2006: The Village

I remember the police taking control, escorting me to the surgery where I was probed, pricked and prodded for the second time in less than twelve hours. I was watching myself on the television, reading about myself in a novel through a lens which had turned objective reality on its head. I was watching that poor woman dressed, ironically, all in white, as she stumbled through her nightmare. They held the door for her as she approached – she could do nothing for herself, merely nodded or mumbled almost unintelligible answers to their incessant stream of questions. She sat like a crumpled figure, her head in her hands, oblivious to what was going on around her.

But they all knew, of course. Why else would she have been brought there, so late in the evening when every normal, decent patient had long since been examined and despatched? I would have liked to feel sorry for her, to have shown pity but she’d exhausted every ounce of compassion I once possessed. I was beginning to dislike her.

They were back the following day, took her to the safe house and grilled her for six, long hours; made her go through every single minute of the ordeal until the images were engraved as deeply in her psyche – forever – as they were on the DVD. It was only then I felt sorry for her, twisting and turning at every recovered memory, reliving the agony and recreating the pain; only the most callous sadist would have taken pleasure in her distress.

I can no longer work out whether the nightmare was real or imagined. Whether it was her or me who crawled out of bed late this afternoon to continue this narrative which begs the question: how far you can trust my account of Simon’s demise? I am a work of art continually in progress; I can mould myself into any shape or form. I can change my name or even my gender, to fool myself as much as you. I’ve already erased one person from history; I’m quite capable of doing it all over again.

*      *      *

He was born in … no, it’s enough for you to know that had he lived he’d be the same age as me; I don’t want you rooting around looking for his date and place of birth, have some respect for the departed and those they have left behind. He was not an exceptional child, I suppose he might have been considered bright if he were not so doggedly lazy; I seem to recall him winning a scholarship to a minor public school for boys which for various reasons he was unable to attend.

What if … so many ‘what ifs’ litter this confession I’m beginning to wonder how on earth he was able to survive. Every move he made was the wrong one, every decision he took drove him further to destruction until he’d ran down a road from which there was no turning back. Could he have saved himself or was he simply programmed to fade away, unloved and unmissed? Had fate dealt him such a cruel hand or was he the agent of his own demise?

Where should I begin? As a sworn enemy of order and organisation I really feel I should employ a variety of perplexing postmodernist techniques and create the meta-narrative to end all meta-narratives but that, I fear, would confuse you all the more. The past and the present have always had a tendency to merge into one, like the blurred line between myth and reality so I think it only right to take chronology as our guide and return to the god-forsaken, fashion-free days of the nineteen seventies when Simon Taylder was already a lost child. To be perfectly honest there’s not a lot to say, nothing that would titillate or turn you on; that will come later, you’ll have to wait. I’m not a great fan of the preamble but I couldn’t eke out a living as a teacher of Spanish without subscribing to context. Whether I like it not – and if you want to know the truth I utterly detest it – I cannot get you to understand Siân without having you understand Simon first and that includes the first eighteen years of his life.

That’s right; I waited eighteen long years before inserting myself into his life and systematically dismantling what little consistency he’d managed to cling on to during adolescence. I waited eighteen long years but I wouldn’t want you to get the idea that I idled away my time glowering and getting bitter in my own little corner of limbo. Oh no, I was busy sowing the seeds of his eventual demise and putting things into place so that when his life finally fell apart it did so in quite spectacular fashion. I suppose I could have brought matters to an end more swiftly but I’m afraid to say that schadenfreude got the better of me and I took a great pleasure in watching his fall from grace.

Sure, I could have caused him problems from the very first onset of puberty but that would have defeated my ultimate purpose. Think about it; if Simon had done in public what he did in private he’d have had a long line of child therapists queuing at the door trying to save him from the inevitable. Fuck knows, I’ve come across plenty of shrinks during my career as a deviant and none of them has met with any success because I learned to play the game at an early age. But you never know, Simon was so gullible they might well have succeeded and where would that have left me? No, it doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? A bit like an abortion, only in reverse.

I had to play it very carefully. Simon’s parents knew full well what he got up to behind closed doors, when the rest of the family was out for the day, but as long as it remained behind closed doors there seemed little point in making an issue. Let’s face it, it would’ve been embarrassing for everybody and it wasn’t as if he was gay, was it? I mean, he’d already had a string of girlfriends and they knew nothing about the so-called male friend who got him drunk one night and abused him in his own home. Jesus fucking Christ, for how many years did I manage to block that out, I’d completely forgotten until the bastard had the temerity to contact me six months ago via a certain website that wallows in nostalgia. Needless to say I’ve removed all my personal details from the internet so you won’t be able to trace me that way.

I had to play it very carefully, get him to understand that he wasn’t like other boys and that he couldn’t expect to live the sort of life his contemporaries aspired to. That for the remainder of his days it would be sex and gender that determined almost every move he made, that they would define – and ultimately destroy – every relationship he managed to forge, that they would rule out any possibility of his ever pursuing a career, that they would paralyse his feelings and reduce him to an emotional cripple incapable of love or affection.

So how on earth did I manage to pull it off? How was I able to get him to act as accomplice in his own assassination? I might as well have stuck the gun in his hand and asked him to pull the trigger so pliable had he become when the final moments arrived. I don’t doubt that his lack of judgment was a contributory factor but I’d like to think that my judicious use of temptation and the manner in which I appealed to his baser instincts persuaded him to forfeit his life for me.

I don’t think you’ll understand but I’ll do my best to elucidate. You’ve heard of the phrase ‘red rag to a bull’? Well, something similar was happening to Simon in those formative years and I did my best to expose him to his secret proclivity at every available opportunity. You must realise that this was no common or garden fetish that could be switched on and off at a moment’s notice and it came as a shock to me – albeit a pleasant one – to discover how serious and devoted he was. The odd hour here or there didn’t interest him, the odd garment would not suffice; the appeal of lingerie and lingerie alone was not for him. I’d be telling an untruth if he didn’t find it alluring but he wasn’t alone in that and I can’t say I really blame him – it still does things for me today. The same with shoes, I suppose, though it took me a while to get used to teetering in heels whilst not looking like a second-rate drag queen.

You see, for Simon dressing up as a woman – or should we say a girl – was a quasi-religious event which had to be carried out with as much ritual as the Latin mass – unlike the puerile act of modern liturgy which is over and done with and a matter of minutes. I don’t think you can possibly comprehend what pleasure that transition from male to female gave him, no matter how superficial and temporary it might have been. By the time he’d reached fourteen they considered him old enough to stay home alone and even if that was only for a matter of five or six hours it was long enough for him to metamorphose into what would ultimately become his nemesis. Talk about walking open handed into the arms of the enemy.

Yes, I’m still full of vitriol and still I can’t bring myself to utter a single word in his favour but when I rewind history and come across these moments of epiphany I find myself wiping a tear from my eye and reaching once more for the gin. Pathos? That doesn’t come close to describing the intensity of my emotions; I come that close to acknowledging my guilt and offering up a prayer to Our Lady of the Sorrows for forgiveness.

*      *      *

He’ll wait until the coast is absolutely clear; give them half-an-hour’s leeway to make sure they won’t come back for anything they might have forgotten and then and only then will he let the ritual begin.

The first thing he must do is cleanse himself, as best he possibly can, from all the filthy detritus of manliness as much as it exists in one so young. Even at this tender age he has started to despise them though he’s barely old enough to sprout a light and downy body hair let alone the much-hated facial stubble. Thus far he is still blessed; the surge of testosterone that will propel him, kicking and screaming from boyhood to manhood has not yet manifested itself in his testes. This I took as one of the signs, that physiologically as well as psychologically, Simon Taylder was not like other boys; size-wise his testes and his penis are below average. Most young men would have viewed this prospect with teenage angst but he seemed rather proud of it, as if he realised, even then, he was different. But here’s the irony, the diminished size of his genitalia would have unfortunate consequences sixteen years later when my body was carved from his.

But I’m running ahead of myself, let’s go back to Simon running his purifying bath and pouring into it small amounts of whatever lotions and potions he can use without their reduced volumes being noticed. Call it fortitude, coincidence or divine intervention; I breathed a sigh of relief when Simon was followed, in almost regimental Catholic succession, by three sisters. So far so good. He won’t want for feminine influence and now I have unwitting allies whose resources he can call upon with increasing frequency. Doesn’t alter the equation, though; there should have been four sisters, without him knowing it I swore I’d redress the imbalance.

He’s breaking the first taboo. By emerging, fragrant, from the waters he’s already violated the first law of gender orthodoxy but he doesn’t give a fuck. On the contrary, he takes as much pleasure in being subversive as he does in looking at himself in the full-length mirror. His youthful body is as supple as a birch twig, there are, as yet, no unyielding angles or hard edges He can put his hand between his legs, close them tight and see the woman he would like to be. More importantly, I can see the woman I will be, given time, when neither of us will have to put our hands between our legs and close them tight because, as from the thirteenth of July 1996 there will be no defect left to hide.

He layers himself in scents and perfumes, but not before opening half a dozen windows in the hope that every incriminating odour will have dispersed by the time his family returns. He moves to what should be his parents’ bedroom but what has now become a luxurious emporium which offers him all manner of proscribed but decadent pleasures. You must understand that by now number 75 Denton Road has ceased to exist in the way in which polite society would like number 75 Denton Road to exist; my predecessor’s exquisite rituals have become a rite of transition which has removed not only him but his entire world from the masculine society he so bitterly despises. The spell has been cast; he has become a witch, using the gentle contours of his body to blur the boundaries of male and female and thus create his hex.

He doesn’t need a bra, if he were really were a girl he still wouldn’t need a bra but he slips one on anyway, clumsily, back to front then pulls on a pair of the skimpiest knickers he can find. This is the worst bit, the moment when the magic threatens to come crashing down around him like Samson in the temple. He ignores it as best he can but can’t evade the unfortunate truth: women’s knickers are patently designed and manufactured with the average woman’s body in mind. Simon, I’m afraid, does not have the average women’s body – not yet, anyway – and the satin fabric bulges in all the wrong places.

So he climbs into a skirt and buttons up a blouse – one with nice pussy cat bow which he thinks is the epitome of femininity. He can, with a little pain and effort, squeeze into a pair of opened toed courts with heels he can just about handle, in the house, at least.

What does he look like? You ask. What does he look like? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, whether to commend or condemn him because, even though he’s going about things in entirely the wrong way, he is, at least, going about things and the poor kid’s emotions are being torn in two. He stands, again, in front of the full-length mirror, admiring himself. Did I say himself? Neither he nor I knew what he had turned into because there are no words sufficiently flexible to describe this strange creature who flounced around the two storeys of 75 Denton Road, carefully avoiding the front windows. He was a boy who wanted to be a girl dressed in the clothes of a middle-aged woman, a would-be feisty female who knew only how to look like a frump. I don’t think anyone would have taken him seriously, I don’t for a moment think he would have fooled them but at that point in his career it didn’t really matter. The apprentice woman still had much to learn and I was on hand to help him.

All good things must come to an end and Simon was such a cautious child, always on edge, paranoid  at times. And who can blame him? What ignominy would he have suffered had they returned home, en masse and unlooked for, and caught him in the act? He had no pre-prepared excuse, what other explanation could he have offered beyond the self-explanatory ‘I like to dress up in women’s clothes’. He’s only been rumbled once, by his eldest sister. He mumbled something so pathetic that I nearly threw up with the shame. ‘Tell her the fucking truth!’ I shouted from my little corner of limbo. ‘Nobody can stop you now; I’ve groomed you too well, you’re well beyond the help of even the most persistent psychiatrist. Do yourself a favour and jack it all in. I don’t want to wait another sixteen years. For fuck’s sake, let me into your life!’

He didn’t hear me, couldn’t possibly hear me; wouldn’t begin listening to me for another six years when the eighties would be in full swing. So I looked on in floods of tears as he slipped off the skirt and blouse and carefully replaced them in the wardrobe, in the correct, precise location. That was what he assumed and, truth to tell, if some androgynous urchin had been rumbling through my own wardrobe I don’t think I’d have the nous to notice. But, like the princess and the pea, if someone were to take the merest sip of my gin I’d have them done for larceny.

The spell is broken. He pulls on his ubiquitous jeans and t-shirt with little to no enthusiasm, as if his spirit has been broken. It’s true, there are other things in his life, he’s recently discovered women – real women, I mean – and will, within the next few years, lose his virginity but even he would have to admit that his interest in the opposite sex carried an ulterior motive. It would be a while until he plucked up the courage to admit to them his curious little penchant but he didn’t object when they thought it fun to paint his face with lip gloss, mascara and eyeliner. Not at all. But when they stood back to admire their work and cooed ‘doesn’t he look pretty?’ I could feel his seismic convulsions and the rage within his soul, even from my vantage point on the edge of the underworld. Like him, I didn’t know who to rail against, the tyranny of gender or the vagaries of fate. 

CHAPTER THREE

OUR LADY OF THE WRONG TROUSERS
A boy tries hard to be a man

His mother takes him by his hand
If he stops to think he starts to cry
Oh why

Transvestite.

There, that’s it written down in black and white, bright and bold in twelve point Gill Sans MT. Even though I can barely bring myself to utter it out loud I’ve finally managed to put it on the page without reaching for the delete button though I’ve I had to keep my eyes tight shut as I tap-tapped away at the keyboard.

Just mouthing it silently makes me feel sick. Does the English language possess a word more ugly, more loaded with nauseous insinuation? Every syllable seems weighed down with revulsion and tumbles from the tongue like a torrent of foul-smelling sewage. Now I come to think about it, I can’t think of a more appropriate term to describe the late Simon Taylder esquire.

I remember him first discovering the word, in Robert Stoller’s seminal Sex and Gender in Denton Public library; he was barely into puberty and the nuances of sex and gender were a world he’d yet to set foot in. Not that I’d been idle, I’d been working hard on his malleable little brain from the moment he’d learned to open his mouth; it was more a case of leading him in the right – or perhaps, as far as your concerned, the wrong – direction rather than adopting a more autocratic approach.

Do you know what I did? I was extremely ingenious, even though I say so myself. Having already established his predilection for bands with big hair his grandmother would deride whenever they appeared on Top of the Pops, I deftly pointed him in the direction of ‘The Who’ knowing full well that the long, blond curls of Roger Daltrey would prove irresistible to a boy of his disposition. Not that I’m questioning Mr Daltrey’s masculinity, you understand, it’s just that he offered a useful stepping stone; Mr Daltrey was followed, almost seamlessly, by Mr Robert Plant who eventually metamorphosed into Mr John Francis Bongiovi (that’s Jon Bon Jovi to you) from whence it was but a small step to the likes of Messrs Simon le Bon and John Taylor of Duran Duran.

By that time the eighties were in full swing and I’d unleashed upon him a veritable Pandora’s Box of glam frontmen that included Messrs Steven Tyler and William Bruce Rose, Jr (better known to you as Axl Rose) of Aerosmith and Guns ‘n’ Roses fame, respectively. Contrary to popular opinion it was not Mr George O’Dowd (aka Boy George) that brought out the feminine side of Simon Taylder esquire, it was that gorgeous Nordic glamour puss Joey Tempest of Europe. Check out the video of The Final Countdown on YouTube; it’s disturbingly uncanny, the way he tosses his head back and shakes his curly mane – he could almost be my nemesis. Check out the video of The Final Countdown on YouTube; it’s disturbingly uncanny, the way he tosses his head back and shakes his curly mane. If you pause the video at three minutes and two seconds you will see an almost perfect likeness of my nemesis.

Jesus, it’s enough to send me into a cold sweat. I’ve burnt every photo I had of him but still his image comes back to haunt me.  

There was a time when Simon would have given everything to resemble Joey Tempest but I had alternative plans for him and being a poodle-haired pop star was definitely not one of them. I soon put the mockers of that joke a rock band he formed with fellow members of St Michael’s School sixth form. I shall spare them the embarrassment of naming them individually, suffice to say they were known, collectively, as Nöggin the Nög and were very nearly expelled for skiving off to play a lunchtime gig. Talk about sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll! He was on rhythm guitar; or rather he strutted about the stage whilst strumming one of the three chords he could play proficiently. Musician? Never. Poser? Big time, my love. Big time.

But I’m running ahead of myself once more; trying too hard to sound like Virginia Woolf whilst coming across like Jackie Collins morphing into a second rate Thomas Hardy. I didn’t introduce Simon to The Who to give him an insight into late sixties R ‘n’ B – what a godforsaken decade that was – I only took him there to send him scurrying to the dictionary where he discovered a new word and thus, by definition, a new world.

I daresay the lyrics of The Who’s I’m a Boy weren’t written to encourage the likes of Simon in their unfortunate habits; the ‘poor’ subject of the song was, of course, compelled to dress and behave like a girl and for the life of him Simon couldn’t understand what the fuck he was moaning about. To him it seemed like paradise, a scenario he daydreamed about day-in day-out and that filled his every fantasy, both sexual and cerebral. The blurb informed him that the song addressed the thorny issue of ‘enforced transvestism’, a concept he didn’t comprehend so he went and looked it up in Denton public library – furtively, because he knew what he was doing would be frowned upon. Even at that early age he was beginning to develop a guilt complex. 

‘A propensity to dress in clothes of the opposite sex’. That’s what the dictionary told him, so now he knew what he was doing. More importantly, he knew it wasn’t right, that it was a practice he should keep utterly secret for fear of ridicule – or worse.

It was that ‘worse’ I feared the most. It was to avoid the likely consequences of that ‘worse’ that I decided to let Simon think he was indeed nothing more than a mere transvestite when the real diagnosis was of a far more serious nature; fatal, to be precise. Well, you wouldn’t want to lumber a fourteen year-old with that kind of news, would you? And it’s not as if his untimely end was imminent. He’d have more than enough time to live the sort of life fourteen year-old boys do except that he never really would live the sort of life fourteen year-old boys do. Not quite.

I say ‘mere transvestite’ as if it were an ailment as widespread as the common or garden cold but it struck Simon like a thunderbolt from the blue beyond; no matter how ugly the label, somehow it seemed to vindicate him, as if he had a legitimate medical condition. Perhaps he was right; if so, the prognosis was grim.

Much as I hate the terminology, if Simon could live with transvestism then so, for the time being, could I. Besides which, the alternatives – the ‘worse’ – didn’t bear thinking about, even at this early stage of the narrative I had to proceed with extreme caution lest the dreaded powers-that-be cottoned on to his behaviour and attempted to do something about it. The world is full of well-meaning but misguided psychologists who seek to tinker with reality not as nature intended it but as how they’d prefer it to be. I should know, I’ve been on the receiving end of their trickery often enough and not one of them has managed to make a difference – although I confess that I’ve never walked into their clinics with the intention of allowing them to. It’s all about power, isn’t it? They try to impose their authority upon us; we have an obligation to fight back.

They sit you down, they try to put you at ease; they try to lull you into a false sense of security. They butter you up with flattery and fine words, use smooth talk and sweet nothings in an attempt to gain your trust then come at you, thrusting and parrying, looking for your Achilles Heel. Credit due where credit’s due, ninety nine times out of a hundred they’ll succeed but only because the likes of you let them!

Have you no sense of dignity? Do you let every Tom, Dick or Harriet run roughshod over you like that? Small wonder that I, the writer, have been cast in the active role while you, the reader, are content to take on a more passive disposition. Small wonder the world’s the way it is, sycophants and parasites on every street corner; it would never have happened in the nineteen eighties.

But you understand why I had to keep Simon from the psychologists prying minds, don’t you? They’d have dissected his psyche, turned his consciousness inside out and opened the doors of perception so fucking wide that the wind would have gusted in and blown me away. Yes, yes, yes. Simon was such an ineffectual, impressionable fool that even the most inept cognitive behavioural therapist (and they are legion) would have restored him to what they laughingly call ‘normality’. And what, then, would have become of me? I’m afraid that for all your liberal protestations, when it comes to the crunch it’s the survival of the fittest and I know who I’d put my money on if came down to a catfight between you and me.

Whatever. Somehow Simon managed to struggle through puberty and adolescence without being taken away by the men – and women – in white coats though I know for a fact that his family knew what was going on. I guess they thought he’d eventually grow out of it; if they’d known then what they know now I’m sure they’d have been on the ‘phone to the local child psychiatrist demanding an appointment but once he’d reached eighteen and left home there was absolutely nothing they could do. The moment he set foot on the train to Weymouth I was safe, I’d cleared the first and most formidable hurdle. From now on he could do what he wanted whenever he wanted and I’d always be there to goad him on.

But I’d be doing you a disservice if I pretended those eighteen years passed by without incident, the stress and the anxiety took its toll on both his nerves and mine. Call it a lack of imagination on my part if you will but at the time the only means of dealing with the constant procession of crises and catastrophes was to resort to alcohol. It stifled his wit and dulled his brain whenever anticipation threatened to get the better of him. More importantly, it snuffed out what little passion he had, emotionally and physically. ‘Too drunk to fuck’, sang the Dead Kennedys, ‘too drunk to fuck’ muttered a string of short-term female lovers as he turned his back on them and fell into a inebriated stupor. You can see what I was trying to do, can’t you? To say he was paranoid about sex and sexuality would be risking hyperbole but insecurity was growing inside him like a cancer and I made it my business to spread it about his body.

Freud wrote an awful lot of rot and nonsense about penis envy, he’d clearly never come across the likes of Simon Taylder esquire or he’d have to revise his so-called ‘theories’. There was, for the time being, nothing I could do about his offending – and offensive – member; I’d not yet reached that stage of the plan, I was still wondering how I might introduce the idea to Simon. Never mind, if I couldn’t get rid of the damn thing I could always make sure his attachment to it remained purely physiological so that when it came to the crunch – no pun intended – he’d be glad to kiss it goodbye.

Metaphorically, of course!

Jesus, what a fucking monster I turned out to be! Still, beats being a boring non-entity hands down. Rather a bad reputation than no reputation at all, better to be hated than to be considered irrelevant. Tell me, on a scale of one to ten where one is loved and ten is loathed, just how much of a tyrant do you consider me to be? Seven or eight? Listen, you ain’t seen the half of it yet. By the time you get to the end of the next chapter you’ll be giving me a nine or a ten and if/when you get to the end of the narrative you’ll be on the ‘phone to the police, demanding my arrest.

But it’s too late for that. Much too late, I’m afraid.

CHAPTER FOUR

OUR LADY OF WEYMOUTH

What do you want?

What do you need?

My stony eyes

Leading down over flat shingle?

Crumbling sea-boulders?

Drifts of milky froth breaking over your lovespots?

Surging sea stacks?

My warm, sticky oceans?

My crumbling obelisk?

Or do you desire?

Simply lust?

*      *      *

I waited eighteen long, tedious years to get my revenge but – Jesus – wasn’t it worth it? I can’t describe how proud and excited I felt that cool October morning in 1983 when Simon set out for Weymouth and what would be an unsuccessful relationship with academia. Everything was going according to plan, so much so that I even allowed him a little leeway. Well, perhaps I’m sounding a little over-generous. That summer he met up with Sarah again, a public schoolgirl from Templecombe with whom he’d lost his virginity a couple of years before. He’d only been sixteen then; when he got back to school he casually let it slip that he’d popped his cherry; it was the closest he ever got to sexual bravado.

‘Tentpole Taylder’ they called him. His regular girlfriend got wind of the story and ceremoniously chucked, the girls of St Angela’s sixth form (St Michael’s ‘sister’ school – neither exist any more) expressed their solidarity and shunned him too but Simon didn’t care. To his final day he remembered the illicit pleasure of that first bona-fide sexual encounter. How Sarah had allowed her body to rub up against his back as he stood against the bar. How she flicked the fronds of her black fringe from her eyes as she caught him looking in her direction. She pounced; he let her – wasn’t it ever thus? No doubt the ensuing sex was a messy business – he threw up outside her tent – but at least it got that important life event out of the way. I didn’t have to worry about that any more.

This time he and Sarah were a bit more grown-up about it; he drove her to pre-Rick Stein Padstow where they dined in what they considered sophistication but what would more accurately be described as an adolescent experiment in adult affection. You have to laugh; eighteen year olds aren’t geared for love, let alone affection. All they want, all they need and all they should be given is lust and a little tiny tug on the heartstrings.

There was a lot of adolescent poetry, a lot of silly, self-indulgent lyrics about the pain of unrequited love because Sarah had pulled just a little too hard on Simon’s heartstrings which was just as well as I didn’t want him enjoying himself too much and I certainly couldn’t allow his love to be reciprocated. I permitted him a couple of shags to keep him content and to make him realise, later in his life, how much he would miss it. His ‘A’ level results soon brought him back down to earth but I was pleased to note how casually he dismissed his spectacular failure; it boded well for the future. Matters of the heart were already taking precedence over matters of the head and both he and I always have been/are martyrs to the dictates of pure emotion.

No self-respecting university would have him, polytechnics he considered plebeian but even they would have read his UCCA form and dismissed it with contempt. If, as Samuel Johnson, suggests, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel then geography is surely the last refuge of the indolent as well as the great unwashed. The Dorset Institute of Higher Education offered him a place; he snapped it up without a second thought.

Did I say that everything was going according to plan? I’ve always been conscious of complacency creeping in and tried to guard myself against it but a vainglorious fool is a vainglorious fool and the shit hit the fan just as I was looking elsewhere. I thought I’d drained Simon’s soul of every ounce of self-determination, that nothing would deflect him from the spiral of self-destruction into which he was about to descend. He would never fall in love with the Woman of his Dreams because the Woman of his Dreams would ultimately turn out to be himself.

Does that make sense? For me it seems so utterly logical I’m not sure I can explain it. Let’s take an example. You, dear reader – assuming heterosexuality – fall in love with a member of the opposite sex. You fall in love with him/her for a variety of reasons all of which are perfectly compatible with both your gender and your sex. Perhaps you want nothing more than romance, to whisper sweet nothings to one another under a swollen moon. Perhaps you enjoy nothing more than an honest-to-god fuck as often as you can get it or perhaps you enjoy your partner as much for their mind as their body. You might enjoy ogling her/him in stockings and suspenders, spanking her/his pert backside whilst draped over your knee or engaging in role-play in the privacy of your own home. It’s not my position to comment on or criticise any of the above – suffice to say that Simon tried each and every one and found them all lacking. He might, at first, have fallen for charm or physical attraction but it was only a matter of time before envy took over. Put it quite simply, he didn’t so much want her as want to be her.

How the fuck does that work? Allow your imagination to wander a little, to places you’d rather not let it go. This scenario works better with women but male readers might like to give it a go too.

You are making mad, passionate love. You have committed every sinew and sentiment to satisfy your partner and the way in which his/her body is responding suggests he/she feels the same way too. You’re thinking to yourself that, when practised like this, the act of sex represents the most sublime and insuperable pleasure that exists on God’s beautiful earth. You climax together then lie in each other’s arms, preferably enjoying a post-coital cigarette. You know perfectly well that this bliss won’t last for ever, that it might not last beyond the next morning but at least, while it does, it’s as good as it gets.

Simon was incapable of such devotion. On the few occasions he had the gumption to make love, on the even fewer occasions when he was sober enough to perform, he would close his eyes and all the while pretend that he was her. If he coveted a particular woman it was not because he wanted to possess her for his own pleasure and delectation, hell no; in his eyes that would be tantamount to violation, the four-letter r word I’m still unable to type.

It’s a bit like your lover crying out the name of his/her ex at the moment of climax but possibly doubly duplicitous and fake. He doesn’t want you, he wants to be you. How would that feel? You might not mind a bit of cross-dressing as long as he tolerates your own little deviations; you might even, once in a while, have sex with him wearing some tacky satin lingerie, as long as it’s not your own. For Simon that would never suffice; the next thing you know he’d be raiding your wardrobe unless, like him, he’d acquired one of his own. Which was, of course, more or less the first thing he did when he left home.

That’s what I’d been waiting for; he’d been sniffing independence all summer long and been planning how he’d make the most of it. It was, to all extents and purposes, the beginning of the end; from hereon in, things would slowly fall apart. The only fly in the ointment, so to speak, was the town in which he’d decided to live. With the eighties raging all around us, Weymouth seemed the perfect place to be. I thought he might fall in love with the town, I didn’t think I would too.

So we must put the ‘Naples of England’ in the dock and ask her to account for her role in the unfortunate and untimely demise of Simon Taylder Esquire.

You think I’ve completely lost the plot? That in accusing a seaside resort of complicity in murder I’m pushing the boundaries of credibility too far? I can hear my few remaining readers slamming down their books in anger and asking themselves why on earth they shelled out £7.99 on such turgid nonsense. ‘What the fuck is she on?’ I hear you ask to which I will inevitably reply, ‘what the fuck possessed you to purchase a memoir like mine. Is it because you’ve got something to hide? What exactly are those skeletons nudging themselves out of the closet? Is there something in my life you see mirrored in your own? ‘

Don’t want to talk about it? Just as I thought. So shall we enter into a conspiracy of silence and carry on with my sordid tale?

John Cowper Powys got it right. If you put your ear to Weymouth Sands you can hear a heart beating. The town has a life of its own; coquettish and fey, it will lure you away from the tedious and the banal, ask you to throw your lot in with hers then take it all for her own. Your head will tell you to get away on the next London-bound train; your heart will stay put and stubbornly refuse. Simon found it almost impossible to leave, so did I.

What if he’d somehow managed to wangle his way into a second-rate university rather than a poor excuse for a third-rate educational establishment. What if the suburban red-brick of a Keele or Kingston had seen fit to offer him a place with the proviso that he gave Geography and Landscape Studies a wide berth? Nudge him in the direction of soils, perhaps; he’ll display a rare talent for working with mud later in the narrative.

What if … here we go again. Talk about death by subjunctive. Could he have saved himself or was he simply programmed to fade away, unloved and unmissed? Had fate dealt him such a cruel hand, did I lead him successfully to the brink or was he, ultimately, the agent of his own demise?

That’s not how it seemed at the time. Simon Taylder esquire strutted the streets of Weymouth as if he’d never heard of determinism; as if fate limped along twenty paces behind him, her grasping arms tied behind her back. Untouchable, indestructible and, ironically, inviolable, the pumping hormones of adolescence offered both him and me a screen behind which we could focus on the task in hand without distraction. He on his pursuit of leisure and pleasure, me on the more refined requirements of that self-same fate with whom I had fallen, hopelessly and masochistically, in love.

If you are of a similar vintage you will recall that this was an age when gods and heroes were the essence of the universal dream, the democratising of myth and religion which culminated in the cult of the celebrity. How heady was that cocktail? Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven! Unfortunately, it was the also the age in which that dark Machiavellian creature, schadenfreude, made its first appearance on these shores. What Weymouth gave with the one hand it took with the other and it kept on taking and taking until Simon had nothing left to give.

They christened him Bushman on account of his taking a short cut through a hedge from his flat to the bar where, let’s face it, he spent most of his academic career. Bar, beer and bed, bar, beer and bed; that might be the sum total of the three years he drifted through the Dorset Institute of Higher Education without an apparent care in the world. But like him, the Dorset Institute of Higher Education is no more, its buildings have been pulled down and a modern façade, in which function is valued over form, constructed in its place. Something of a barefaced metaphor there, I suspect.

As he sauntered casually about the campus, steering well clear of the Department of Geography and Landscape Studies, he came to resemble the product of his time, a young man destined for nothing more than the bog-standard mediocrity he and his contemporaries were destined to enjoy. Of course he thought he was the bees’ knees – or should I say, perhaps, the dog’s bollocks. If conformity had been half the driving force its adherents consider it to be I wouldn’t be sitting at my laptop now, tap-tapping away at this interminable yarn which will soon lurch alarmingly from the mundane to the miserable. No, because if conformity had been half the driving force its adherents consider it to be I simply wouldn’t exist. They are my enemies; they hate me and I hate them back but with an ever increasing magnitude for what I lack in love I more than make up for in my capacity to loathe. Conformity would have awarded Simon a 2:2 and have him fall in love – with a woman – marry and settle down with children in a matter of five or six years. Conformity would have offered him that job with the local council that seems to be the natural haven of all but the most talented geography graduates. Conformity would have persuaded him, over a given period of time, to refrain from his habit of wearing eyeliner in public, from dying his hair, from shaving his legs and from slipping into a frock every time the words ‘fancy dress party’ were directed his way. Conformity would have bullied him into burning that little pile of women’s clothes he secreted at the back of his wardrobe, to go to the barber and buy himself a suit and tie.

But as far as Simon was concerned, conformity lay blood-splattered and breathless at the bottom of the abyss, tipped over the edge by his inability to toe the line. He’d have you mourn him as a wild, unsteady rebel; the truth is he had no choice but to dissent, it ran with the blood through his veins. The eyeliner and smudged mascara might have been taken as tell-tale signs in any other decade but this was the eighties and its defining traits were beginning to come to the fore.

You might well argue that for all my cold-blooded calculating I still required a generous dose of luck to be able to undermine my nemesis and consign him to history. That if Simon had been born ten years earlier or even ten years later the gender-bending eighties would have passed him by. You’re probably right but no matter how much you might want to, you can’t turn black the clock and restore him to life at the expense of my own existence. Given the misfortune that has visited my troubled years on earth I think I deserved a little luck. Yes, the eighties came along at exactly the right moment but they wouldn’t have left such a lasting impression had I not been on hand to act the accomplice.

The eyeliner alone was not enough; in drab municipal boroughs and less enlightened circles it might have earned him opprobrium and even a bloody nose but for his peers, both male and female, it was nothing more than a fad he’d latched onto in an attempt to be perceived as trendy. Let’s face it, he was a geographer and geographers, for all their endearing qualities, can hardly be considered paragons of style. For Simon, eyeliner was an excuse; a gateway to a more attractive but proscribed world. Eyeliner gave him that little bit of liberty I needed to set the process in motion, the domino effect; it gave him licence to express the desire I was nurturing inside him. I knew full well that it wouldn’t stop there; that eyeliner was only beginning, that mascara and blusher were just around the corner, that lip gloss and rouge were lying in wait. You could bet your student grant on that. There are those who consider self-restraint a virtue, who take pride in looking temptation in the face before walking away, squeaky clean. Words alone cannot express the contempt I feel for those fools who squander their lives in pursuit of self-righteousness, who live in constant fear of their own imagination. Listen, if anyone knows what they’re talking about it’s me. Don’t forget, I was locked away for thirty one years, one month and thirteen days; every moment of the life that remains is precious.

You’d have had to look close to see the cracks, to follow him around, like I did, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week until I was bored to tears with his tedious and predictable routine. You’d have had to be able to see inside his soul and anticipate his every next move, you’d have had to sneak into his dreams, toy with his ego and stifle any inappropriate ambitions. I’d invaded almost every inch of his psyche; his internal territories were on the verge of yielding to mine. So close, so fucking, fucking close; I wasn’t going to let anyone get in my way.

I didn’t have to wait long for the first opportunity to present itself, some five weeks into term, to be precise. Along with Pernod nights and subsidised alcohol, themed discos were always going to be a godsend but I never thought they’d play so blatantly into my hands. It was a ‘hen night’, complete with male strippers and the ubiquitous cheap Pernod. Of course, the Dorset Institute of Higher Education Student Union hadn’t yet woken up to the concept of a women-only night. This was, after all, 1983 and, stuck out on a geographical limb, Weymouth was about as far from Metropolitan sensitivities as it was physically possible to get. No, the beauty of this ‘hen night’ was that men were permitted provided they were appropriately dressed.

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. Not only was Simon given express permission to indulge his penchant, he was actively encouraged. From the moment he first set eyes on the poster advertising the event he could think of little else, certainly not Christaller’s frankly ludicrous Central Place Theory or the orientation of glacial cirques in the English Lake District. Geography? Who gives a fuck? Simon was about to reveal his true colours to all and sundry.

Do you know what? I can still feel the thrill today.

As critics of Christaller point out, theory’s all very well but the devil’s in the detail and more often than not practice does not produce the desired effects. That’s once thing in common that geographical models have with sexual fantasies, they rarely work out in so-called real life – except where pain is involved. That’s never been an issue for me. I’ll gladly consume the anticipation with wild abandon without a giving a thought to the consequences; the mere thought of pleasure is sufficient to set my juices flowing and once the dam’s breached the only way to staunch the flood is to stick your finger in the hole!

I laid myself down and allowed myself a dream of the future in which Simon was my Cinderella, scrubbing the detritus of life in the scullery of eternity which was dominated by the ugly sisters of orthodoxy. I woke in a cold sweat; I had to get her to the ball.

Shoes. They’ve always been the biggest hurdle; still are, to a certain extent. Once he’d plucked up the courage to trawl the town’s fancy dress shops selecting an outfit became a pleasure, the first time he’d experienced to deep joy of wondering what to wear. Once he’d plucked up the courage? Why on earth did he need to do that? It wasn’t as if he was partaking in anything illicit, this was a bona-fide event, the sort of occasion fancy dress shops exist for. Why the guilt and the secrecy? It’s almost as if he was ashamed.

I suppose you’re thinking, ‘and who can blame him. There’s nothing more pathetic than a man in drag. I’d be embarrassed, too’. Well, let’s get a couple of things straight. One, Simon never did drag and he despised drag queens with the same fervour as myself. He, too, saw them as products of misogyny, caricatures of women that revealed a hatred of all things feminine. In the pecking order of cross-dressers, drag queens come even lower than the common or garden transvestite, men who have not the slightest desire to become women but whose behaviour ridiculed that elite minority who did.

Two, Simon was not at all ashamed about putting on a frock in public, a little nervous perhaps, but not at all embarrassed. It’s not as if he wasn’t used to it, he’d be far more adept at it than any of his male friends – and some of his female ones, too. And there, as they say, lies the rub. Simon worried that the ease with which he adopted the female form might be picked up on, might become the topic of unwelcome conversation. He wasn’t ready for that yet, I wasn’t ready for that yet; I needed more time. His conundrum showed just how deep he’d dug himself in already; it was unthinkable for him to approach the evening with anything other than the utmost gravity. Not for him the luxury of treating it as the lame joke it clearly was, not for him the comfort of remaining a wolf in sheep’s clothing, of remaining a 100% red-blooded male beneath a female form. He shaved his legs, plucked his eyebrows and concealed as much of his masculinity as was physically possible. His friends could piss about as much as they wanted; give out blatant clues as to the true nature of their gender in case they felt uncomfortable but Simon wanted to stand out from the crowd.

Or rather he didn’t and therein lay the source of his shame. For Simon it was imperative that his true gender remained completely obscured, that he would not, could not, be identified as a bloke in a dress whose masculinity shone through his female attire. He wanted to be considered part of the crowd for whom hen nights were specifically invented. He had begun, however subconsciously, to detach himself from 99.9% of ‘real’ men. That was the night when the isolation began, when it suddenly became clear that he was not like them at all, that he might have more in common with members of what he’d previously taken to be the opposite sex. He slipped out of the door, into the dark but very public and all-seeing night air. He felt alive, so very fucking alive and so very dangerously beautiful. He watched others watching him, looked hard for unwanted reactions but he was getting away with it. For the first time in his short life, Simon was slipping away, metamorphosing into something and someone else but I wasn’t yet there to fill the void.

Oh! The shoes! I got quite carried away, forgot all about them and everything else he wore. It was a little black dress, I think, a fancy dress costume he’d bastardised to look like conventional nineteen eighties evening wear. Fishnet tights, too; a hint of fetishism there, perhaps, though he mercifully drew the line at stockings and suspenders. The shoes? He had to settle for a pair of black pumps, I’m afraid, which was probably just as well. Finding a pair of size eight courts would not have been impossible but, at this delicate stage of his development, just a little bit too much to ask. Going into a fancy dress shop and trying on a costume was one thing, the more rarefied atmosphere of a high-street shoe store was a step too far and ran the risk of stating the bleeding obvious. The following summer he would find a shop in London that catered exclusively for people like him where he would purchase a pair of impossibly high heels he never quite managed to get the hang of. I didn’t want him teetering around like a common or garden transvestite; it would have given the game away. No, pumps would do, there would plenty of time for heels in the future.

Could we now say that the die was cast? That night I crept into my corner of limbo and slept the sweetest dreams, a vision of the future that had somehow sneaked into the present. What did I do? Did I sit back and bask in my glory and let history take its course? Did I fuck? I woke with the fear that if I let history take its course I might have to hang around for a long, long time to become part of it. I turned greedy overnight, like a little child I wanted to gorge myself until satiated knowing full well that I would never be satisfied, that I would forever be demanding more.

That, I suspect, is how the depression set in. It had never been my intention to weigh the poor boy down with yet another burden, there’s only so much a man can take and as we’ve already witnessed, he wasn’t a particularly fine example of the species. If I’d known then what I know now I might have acted with a little more caution but then again, chances are I might not. In hindsight it’s obvious that I pushed him too hard, that there were times when I pushed him too close to the edge. When the winter set in and a bitter easterly, encased in iron, whipped snow and ice from northern hills and blew it hard across the beach and the Esplanade Simon began to seek solace in myth and imagination.