THE INMACULATE CONCEPTION
Nottingham - 1st 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 4th, 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 No 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 1st 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 31st 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…?
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