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.