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.