36

I threw away the return half of my ticket and bought a first-class ticket to go back to Hull. I had a compartment to myself. I cried.

Dwarfs joined circuses. I was expected to go on the stage. Sabina had killed herself rather than go on the stage. What could I do on the stage? I could not sing or dance. I would have to pose and mince about and let people look at me and know that I was a boy dressed as a woman. Drag.

I was a pervert. I was a thing twisted out of shape. I was expected to creep into corners where there were other perverts. I would live to be a middle-aged man dressed a as woman. I would grow soft-bellied, soft and white all over like a skin filled with lard, a loathsome, soft slug of a pervert lusting for hard young men. Now I was pretty, but I would become old and fat, full of lies and gin and sniggering jokes. It might be possible to buy young men to do things to me, but it would not be possible to buy a man like Frank.

Frank was a good soldier.

There were stories of girls who had dressed up as boys to go to the war with their sweethearts. I would dress up as a boy to go with Frank. I would march along by his side all day and at night I would sleep on the ground with him.

‘O grenadier, let me be your mouse. Put me in a little tin and carry me with you.’

I might save his life in a battle, and he might say, ‘Because you have saved my life, I must forgive you everything.’ But he would not be able to forgive my being a boy. I would have to put my gun in my mouth and kill myself. I would be better dead—like my mother.

‘Why can’t I have my mother’s body instead of its being dead and rotten in the ground? Mother, I am a woman, like you. Your suffering is over, but mine goes on and on.’

Frank was a good soldier. He was strong and healthy. He had nothing to do with drag. He had nothing to do with peanuts.

I was a peanut.

Or was a peanut a transvestite who was not a homosexual?

I had told Mr Waites that I was a homosexual. But if I were not in a male body, I would not be a homosexual. It was not my fault.

Yes, it was my fault. I was what I was, and the fault was in me. I was rotten. I had a cancer of masculinity.

Mr Waites had said that I must forget about wanting to change sex. How could I? If I forgot that, I would almost cease to exist. Apart from that desire there was not much of me.

I stopped thinking and cried.

Then I had a phantasy about a kind surgeon coming into the carriage and finding me crying and asking me what the matter was and, when I had told him, saying he would help me.

But then I came back to reality again and cried again. There was no hope for me. My life was stopped.

I decided that I would have to kill myself.

I saw myself as from a distance. I was sitting hunched up in a railway carriage. Other people’s lives were possible, but the life of that creature was not possible. It was a queer, miserable, hunched up little perversion. It should not have been born. It was an obscenity, a filthy thing. It should have been put down the lavatory and flushed away.