5

When I came back from posting the envelope to Shirley on Friday morning Mrs Wilson had arrived for the dinner time opening and was sorting out the white coats. She was a very clean woman. Her appearance suggested a Protestant con­science. It was difficult to imagine her going to the mass and hearing Latin and smelling incense.

She seemed pleased to see me. ‘How are you now, Roy? Are you feeling better?’

No doubt my father had told her what I had done. He told her everything. He told her about Uncle Arthur having been in prison for getting credit without disclosing that he was an undischarged bankrupt. I was sixteen before I knew that Uncle Arthur had been in prison. Perhaps she had given my father advice about me. I remembered once she had been talking about a boy who lived near her who had stolen clothes off a washing line. She said that the thing to do was to catch him wearing the clothes. She said that always cured them. She had not said it with any moral vindictiveness but simply as a statement of the way in which a cure might be obtained, in the same way that she might have recommended a cure for a cold in the head.

I said, ‘Yes, I’m all right now.’

‘I thought you would be. I told your dad that they wouldn’t have sent you home if you hadn’t been cured. The main thing is not to think about it anymore.’

‘I don’t.’

‘You don’t want to. What’s passed is done with, I always say.’

I wondered if she would be allowed to say that when she got to the Roman Catholic next world. Probably she would have to go to Purgatory to be made to forget her love. I thought that places where people were operated upon to make them into women were rather like Purgatory. One went in as a pervert, and one came out entitled to use the Ladies’ lavatory and get married.

‘The great thing,’ she said, ‘is to get out and see the world. You’re too much stuck in the house.’

It would have been incestuous for me to want to be Mrs Wilson. The best arrangement would have been for her to be my mother and me to be her daughter. She would have given me advice about my periods and told me many frightening things. I might have become Irishly Catholic and lit candles and prayed to Mary. I might have been a young girl with a body like an autumn pear and a mind like the window of a shop where devotional objects were sold, all wine red and pale blue and cluttered and piled up with sanctity and bad taste. At worst it would have been better than having to be a man. And, whatever ideas I might have about religious matters, my knickers would have been modern.

Mrs Wilson had once had a baby. But it had died. I wished I could have a baby.

Before the shop opened we always washed ourselves and scrubbed our nails even if they were clean. My father and I combed our hair carefully before the mirror over the fireplace in the kitchen. Then like surgeons we put on our white coats and went into the shop.

The gas burners under the pans were lit and the fat in the pans began to melt. I watched it melting in the chip pan. It was like sand-coloured ice turning into dark brown water. As soon as the fat was melted my father went and unbolted the shop door and fastened it open. I put the first lot of chips into the pan. They did not cause a boiling as they would have done in a hot pan. They sank with lazy, oily bubbles. Mrs Wilson looked in the pan and said that it was not hot enough. I agreed. I looked to see if the gas was full on. It was. We always had the gasses full on for Friday dinner time opening. Mrs Wilson said I should have waited because the chips would be soft if they fried slowly. I said that I thought that some people might like soft chips. I closed the lid of the chip pan. My father told Mrs Wilson that he had put five pounds worth of floater in the till but that there wasn’t as much copper as he would have liked. She opened the till and had a look and said that she would be able to manage.

The first customer arrived, a little woman putting a basket on the counter and asking for four times a haddock and sixpennyworth. My father told her that he was waiting for the fish pan. The little woman praised the weather. My father said that the nights were drawing in.

I told myself that I was as much a female as Mrs Wilson and the little woman with the basket. But I did not believe myself.

My father started battering fish and putting them into his pan. I opened the chip pan and found that it was boiling. I lifted out a scoop of chips and tried one with my fingers. It was very soft. I wondered whether some people did like soft chips. I started getting the chips out of the pan and putting them in the chip box. Mrs Wilson started filling grease-proof bags for the little woman’s order.

Another woman arrived. She wanted three fish-and-sixpennyworths. Then a little girl came in. Mrs Wilson asked the little girl how her mother was. The little girl said that her mother was a lot better.

Soon a queue was growing. I had to go and fetch bucketfuls of potatoes to put through the chipping machine. Mrs Wilson was serving and giving change at her best speed. My father was tossing out fish and arranging them cleverly.

Some of the customers in the shop must know what I had done. The young woman whose panties I had taken must have told every woman she knew. I had demonstrated that her clothes were desirable.

People were looking at my back while I was standing at the chip pan.

I told myself that it did not matter. I should not care what was going on in their heads—there was enough going on in my head to keep me busy. No doubt they talked about Mrs Wilson. Yet she could face them and give them their change. There was no need for me to blush. But I was blushing. I called myself a fool. If Mrs Wilson could face them, I should be able to face them. Most judgements on sexual behaviour were nonsense. Even when people were so feeble that they never misbehaved themselves there were always their thoughts trot­ting about in their heads doing the things that their owners dare not do. And if there were people with no lascivious thoughts, those people were the same as dead, and thus beneath contempt.

I was happy when I was dressed up. I knew what I wanted. Many people became so confused through telling each other lies that they did not know what they wanted.

And yet, if I could get onto the other side, I would live happily with inhibitions in me because they would be the inhibitions of a woman. I wanted to be one of them. I did not want to stand apart and see them as fools, I wanted to be foolish with them. I wanted to suffer everything that they suffered. I wanted to be limited and mistaken. I wanted to be part of the world that was wrong instead of being shut in with my meaningless mathematics of thoughts that were right. A woman’s body was a better place to live in than a man’s brain. All real stuff was woman stuff. Mother and daughter and mother and daughter were one flesh going back and back in time to the female stomach creatures that needed no male. The male was outside. He might master the world, but he was not part of the world. When the sadist tortured the bound woman his cruelty was his anger that he was not the woman. She might have pleasure in pain, she might be bound and helpless, but she was still the woman, the centre. Her helpless­ness emphasised the truth that she did not need to act in order to exist. A man might make his gentlest love to a woman and serve her powerfully and well, and in the moment of the orgasm he might feel that they were one. But two had not become one. The moment was gone, and he knew that it had been an illusion. He knew that he was still outside, still not a woman.

I felt pity for men.

Mrs Wilson was most jolly when the shop was most busy. She jollied me. ‘Come on, Roy. We want some more chips. What are you thinking of?’

Some of the customers would know that I had been in a mental hospital. I could dismiss them easily. There could be hope of a cure for a mental illness, but for stupidity there was no cure.

My father had to go to fetch some more trays of fish. I went to look after the fish pan while he was away. I battered fish and dropped them in. They bobbed up in the fat, frying and bubbling. Frying fish was more entertaining than frying chips. With fish one felt that one was cooking. Chips were just a process.

After a quarter-past twelve the queue had disappeared and by half-past twelve the shop was empty. My father closed the shop door and we took fish and chips for ourselves. Mrs Wilson always had her dinner with us after a dinner time opening.

In the afternoon I cleaned down the pans and swept and tidied the shop while my father was cutting the fish for the evening opening.

Friday evenings usually began quietly. Many people in the district had had enough fish-and-chips at dinner. Sometimes my father would say that it was hardly worth the gas and electricity to open on a Friday night. But after the pubs had closed it was as busy as a Saturday night. Then talkative men would arrive flushed with beer. Just before the pubs closed on a Friday night there was a period of about a hour in which there were hardly any customers at all. We would stand about in our white coats. My father would tell about the war, and Mrs Wilson had stories about her girlhood that wandered on and gave the impression that she had been a girl for about a hundred years.

I settled down to be as I had been before. I did my work with that useless conscientiousness of people like me, as though I thought that, if I behaved myself extremely well, in the end I might be allowed to be a woman. On Tuesdays and Thurs­days I dressed up, and all the time I was fixed up underneath. I hoped that the physical pretence might lead to real physical changes. Almost every night I inspected my chest to see if anything was happening, and often I persuaded myself that there were signs of the beginning of an alteration. But, when I was honest, I could see that nothing was happening. The real changes that would come would be changes that I did not want. My beard would grow stronger and my shoulders would begin to spread. I supposed that what successful transvestites reported about changes that had taken place before treatment began were lies told to make themselves more acceptable.