1

Dr Strickland said, ‘Of course your thinking is still very dualistic.’

I knew what he meant. I could have told him that he should not talk like that to a person who had not been to university, but there was no need for me to pretend about that. I did not really care that I had not been to university. I knew what I wanted.

If I had gone to university, I would have liked to go to Oxford. I had read about it. The only things I liked doing at home were reading and dressing up.

Dr Strickland was a tall man, lounging in his swivel chair. His face was long and pale. It was a face that would have been more suitable for a young man but it had grown middle-aged. His eyes did not look as confident as I thought a middle-aged man’s eyes should look. He was like a student.

I was pretty. I sat neatly, small and careful in a black sweater. I was conscious of the stomach in the middle of me. In the beginning there was the stomach that reproduced itself without sex. Now there was the stomach, and below it the sexual organs, and above it the brain. Sometimes it felt as though there were two things, the mind and the body, and the mind wanted to leave the body. It felt like that when I was too pure and intellectual. When those times came I was frightened that my mind might float away from my body. I might be sent to Ward Nine for the rest of my life to live in the dream world with the old men.

Dr Strickland was talking to me.

From where he was sitting he could look out of the window and see the wallflowers growing in their little squares in the lawn and the drive with the sun shining on it and the lodge at the gate and the cars passing on the road.

I could not concentrate on what he was saying.

My father had looked ill when he was hitting me. He had dragged me by the collar as though to get me to the sink. Suddenly he had punched me on the top lip. Then he had punched me in the body a few times. If we had been able to stop my mouth bleeding, I would not have had to go to Dr Booth.

I still felt amazement when I thought of that young woman coming to ask for her stolen panties back. But they were her knickers. Perhaps she felt that her vagina had been stolen and she had to have it back. She was a fetishist.

Most people were fetishists. If it was not one thing, it was another.

It would soon be dinner time. After he had finished with me Dr Strickland would go outside and get into his car and go home. His wife would be preparing his dinner. She would be in the kitchen in her clothes. I wished that I were his wife. She had his social position without having to moil with insanity. She did not have to do with all the miserable and hopeless things that crept about in the hospital. She would be cooking dinner. They had a little boy. He might be playing in the garden because it was a summer day. She might go out and pick him up and carry him into the house to have his dinner.

My mother might have carried me into the house once. I could not remember. The main fact about my mother was that she was dead. My sister, Shirley, had taken her place.

Shirley told me that our mother was shouting to the Lord Jesus Christ for forgiveness when she was dying. She died of cancer. Shirley said she was twisted up in the bed through the pain.

Even if I were able to get a lot of money and have an opera­tion, I would never have a little boy. Mrs Strickland did not know how happy she was. It was part of being Mrs Strickland not to know how happy she was. If she did not take it all for granted, she would not be herself; she would be like me pretending to be Mrs Strickland. In her bedroom there would be drawers and drawers and a wardrobe full of clothes. She could choose what she would wear. All the time she was dressed up, but for her it was not dressing up; it was just being herself. There was day after day of being a woman. When she went into a room the gentlemen stood up. When she went to wet she had to sit down. She had no choice. She was always a woman.

If she ever woke up to find that she was Roy Clark, the shock would cause her mind to leave her body, and she would have to be taken to Ward Nine to live with the old men. She would be fortunate if her mind never returned to her body. And all the time I would be Mrs Strickland. I would have her clothes. No one would ever know. I would have to be very careful at first until I learned all about her. I would have to find out about her past life by questioning, without it being known that I was questioning. Dr Strickland would make love to me.

He was saying things to comfort me. He always ended the interviews by saying things to comfort me.