by Alexei Sayle
This transformation from Clive to Cicely was taking shape in a place called Transformations, which is right opposite Euston Station in Eversholt Street, Camden Town. It is in a row of shops, a couple of the type where you can’t remember what it is they sell even though you looked in the window five seconds ago and two old-fashioned cafés that serve chicken curry with boiled potatoes, and spaghetti with chips on the side and two slices of margarined bread for the consumption of solitary men wearing hats in all weathers. Euston and Kings Cross used to be surrounded with cafés serving this kind of grub, as if the first thing a fellow fancied after coming down from the North was a weird combination of food? As it turned out, what a lot of fellows seemed to want as soon as they got off the train from the North was to be a woman. Transformations was opposite the station so that nervous businessmen from Tring and Liverpool and Glasgow could slip in there and be transformed into nervous women. The windows of Transformations are painted red, the writing on them says: ‘Wigs, waist cinchers, make-up’. There is also a big before and after photo, on the left a young man in chinos who a market researcher might put in the B2 socio-economic group, self-employed graphic designer or something similar, and on the right the young man is now done up as a woman from a Bradford council estate who has had a hard life on account of her daughter being pregnant and on crack and who sings at the Trades and Labour Club on Fridays to keep her spirits up.
Once or twice a week Clive would visit Transformations to change into a woman, then he would go out for the afternoon with his friend Ashlee (usually Archie). They would walk about then go for tea and a bun or maybe for a little drinkie in a fashionable bar. Being Cicely out for a walk was, Clive imagined, rather like being a slightly forgotten celebrity, Mel Smith perhaps or Kenneth Branagh. Most people paid no attention but one in thirty looked once, looked again, saw something not right, a remark or a thought would come up to the surface by which time Cicely was past, leaving turned heads, pokes in the ribs, sometimes aggressive shouts or sniggers in her trail. Being a trannie also resembled being a minor celebrity in that the glances you got were related in inverse proportion to the coolness and hipness of the area and. the inhabitants’ resulting indifference to people from off the telly. In Camden Town, where in the local starship trooper Sainsbury’s there were more pierced than unpierced shoppers, Mel or Kenneth would go a long time before they got asked for their autograph unless it was on their Switch card. Ashlee and Cicely could walk for hours in that neighbourhood untrammelled by any interference.
Cicely had always really enjoyed their walks, they had been the highpoint of her week until Ashlee pointed out the cyclists, then she never enjoyed them again. Clive and Cicely were alike in that they were prone to having things ruined by pointing out. Years ago Clive had loved to take long drives up the motorway in his car which was called a Gordon Keeble and was an Italian-styled Sixties British-made sportscar. Then one day he’d been going to Leeds and he took his friend Leonard with him. After a bit Leonard asked if he could drive, so they pulled into Leicester Forest East Services and changed seats. Leonard raced straight back onto the motorway and was soon doing eighty-five in the inside lane, ahead of them in the distance a small hatchback was travelling at about seventy in the middle lane. Rather than swing across two lanes to overtake, Leonard got right up behind the Vauxhall Astra and started flashing his headlights. Clive was a very conscientious driver, he believed in keeping a safe, two seconds’ distance between vehicles; he achieved this by watching the car in front pass an object — a sign or a bridge — and then saying to himself ‘only a fool breaks the two second rule’. If he could complete this sentence before he passed the same object then they were a safe distance apart. He tried this with his Gordon Keeble and the Astra and got as far as ‘only a f—’. After a lot of flashing, the other car moved over. Leonard passed it then moved back into the inside lane himself.
‘What was that all about?’ said Clive.
‘The middle lane should be solely for overtaking,’ explained Leonard in a pedantic voice. ‘Cars should travel in the inside lane at all other times. If they don’t it slows everybody up, as that only leaves one lane for overtaking. Driving in the middle lane is selfish and thoughtless.’
‘Oh, I didn’t know that,’ said Clive and he never enjoyed a drive again. From then on the motorways, instead of being a ribbon of pleasure for Clive, unrolling with merry welcome, were concrete channels of anger, full of selfish dawdlers creeping up the middle lane with inflaming insensitivity: each licence-plated rump sneered at him personally. Like Leonard, Clive would now get behind them all (and there were thousands once you noticed), blip his lights and if they didn’t move he’d honk his horn, get closer and blip his lights again. Often the cars wouldn’t move, either not noticing or refusing to budge. In the month after his drive with Leonard, Clive had four near crashes, he was shot at once and had two knife fights on a slip road. In the end Clive sold the Gordon Keeble for a big loss, the bottom really having dropped out of the classic-car market, and now, if he ever travelled outside London, he took the train.
So it was with the cyclists. Cicely and Ashlee were walking up Camden High Street one day, chummily arm in arm. They were crossing on the Pelican opposite the Acumedical Chinese healing centre when they were forced to jump back and apart by a cyclist riding the wrong way down the road.
‘They make me so mad,’ said Ashlee.
‘Who do?’ said Cicely with a dizzy sensation in her head as if she were on the edge of a high diving board; she knew something bad was coming but she couldn’t get out of its way.
‘Bloody cyclists, especially round here,’ replied her friend. ‘They’re a fucking menace. They ride on the pavement, they ride through red lights, they ride through red lights against the traffic, they ride through red lights against the traffic on the pavement and worst of all there’s just something so horribly smug about them, like they’re doing you a favour by making the world a worse place to be in.’
Instantly to Cicely Camden High Street was filled with swooping, careening machines and her heart was filled with hate. She had always thought of the bicycle as a rather benign machine but now these people she saw zinging about might as well have been mounted on HI V-infected Rottweilers for all the fear and anger they contaminated her with. They were very various. There were forgetful women on folding shopper bikes, black youths talking into mobile phones while riding no-handed, claimants on wrecks of racing bikes with the drop handlebars turned upside down so as to make sure their brakes didn’t work, serious mountain bikers with front suspensions made from impossibly light alloys found only in crashed asteroids, hip twenty-five-year-olds in big baggy pants twiddling away on chromed BMX bikes (she couldn’t even begin to figure out what that one was about) and messengers, messengers, messengers. These pedalling freelance postmen wore expressions fixed on their faces that said ‘Don’t stop me now, bastard. Last year’s VAT receipts must get to Chemical Bank ere night falls! The script rewrite must be on the desk of Tim Bevan at Working Title by yesterday morning or there’ll be hell to pay! The tickets for the charity ball must get to Mel Smith right now and no old lady on the zebra crossing will stop them’, so up in the air she goes, arse over zimmer frame.
In all his wanderings around Camden Town the only cyclist he saw more than once who stopped at the traffic lights and pedalled on the road and behaved in a generally non-malignant way, obeying the law like in the olden days, was the writer Alan Bennett riding around on his dark green lady’s bike with the wicker basket out front like something from a film about the Cambridge of F.R. Leavis.
Cicely tried to keep the thing about the cyclists from Clive but he heard about it soon enough and his life was ruined too. If anything, it hit Clive harder than it hit Cicely.
Clive was even more prone than she was to taking things hard; he was barred from several 24-hour mini marts and his local Blockbusters Video for arguing about things and he couldn’t go back to Cheltenham any time soon.
They had a good job Clive and Cicely. They were bookbinders. Clive had served his apprenticeship at a venerable firm in Bermondsey. He was amongst the last intake of working-class kids before that craft became a middle-class, Art School shut-out. Now he worked from home, surrounded by glue and card and skin in a council-owned live/work apartment in The Brunswick Centre, Holborn, a bold 1960s experiment in concrete eyesores where a Georgian square used to be. He made a good enough living, enabling him to buy Cicely the finest in giant lace panties, by repairing ancient manuscripts, binding lectures and other modern texts for the nearby British Museum and London University and by doing the occasional fine art job, binding a limited edition set of etchings in rat skin, that sort of thing.
On the days when he didn’t go to Transformations Clive would work all morning then, like ten thousand other lone craftsmen all around London, painters, sculptors, makers of modern jewellery, writers on internet matters, he would stop at one o’clock to have soup and a grilled cheese brown bread sandwich, listen to a politician being toasted on Radio 4’s The World At One, then go for a walk, as himself. Every day he took the same route, past the drunks bungling round the DHS emergency payout place in Upper Woburn Place, then the Kosovans washing car windscreens while their women begged at the corner of Upper Woburn Place and the Euston Road, after that Eversholt Street past Transformations then more drunks at the start of Camden High Street. Clive often thought that rather than being paved with gold the streets of Camden Town were paved with alcoholics, seeing as so many of them were sprawled on the ground. A surprising number were foreign, Clive imagined a lot of them were on drunk-exchange schemes from other countries. One thing he noticed about the drunks was that many of them sported the most magnificent heads of hair. ‘What a waste,’ thought the almost completely bald Clive as he passed yet another comatose figure displaying a splendid mane of luxuriant jet-black tresses. Then one day he heard on Radio 4 while drinking his lunchtime soup that alcohol abuse promoted hair growth and prevented baldness as it led to the suppression of testosterone production in males. Clive reckoned he might have given heavy drinking a go if he’d found out about its tonsorial qualities before most of his hair had gone. He suffered particular hair problems; because of his dressing Clive couldn’t even grow a strange little beatnik beard in compensation as many baldies did, seeing as it would pretty much give the game away on Cicely.
Thirty minutes’ brisk walking would find him heading west up Delancey Street then round Regents Park Road to Primrose Hill where he would have a cup of cappuccino sitting outside one of the many patisseries and coffee bars. Just up the road from where he had his coffee was the headquarters of a big, successful record company, so walking up and down on the pavement was a constant parade of men exactly like Clive, thinning-haired forty-somewhats dressed in clobber aimed at eighteen-year-olds. Like US mailmen who ‘Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds’, Clive and his fellow coffee drinkers would stoically huddle on the outside seats of the cafés of Primrose Hill no matter what the weather. Inside, the patisseries would be empty even in the middle of a January meteor storm. Twenty years ago you absolutely couldn’t get an Englishman to sit outside a gaff. They wouldn’t do it. Even in summer temperatures of ninety-five degrees, drinkers would barricade themselves inside pubs behind frosted glass, glazed tiles and mahogany. Now you couldn’t keep the bastards indoors no matter what.
But even here in this crescent of chi-chi shops the cyclists were up to their dirty tricks. Even when he saw one doing nothing wrong, Clive would find himself thinking ‘Fucking bastard’ before he realised he was riding on the correct side of the road through a green light, not doing no harm to no one.
Until the pointing out of the cyclists Clive had managed to force himself to enjoy, indeed to revel in, the wild drinkers, the dirt, the litter, the terrible record company tosspots, the whole gritty urban shmeer of north London — but the cyclists spoilt it all. Everywhere he went they taunted him with their lawless ways and though he tried there was nothing he could do either to un-notice them or to find a way to cope with their behaviour. Clive tried shouting at them as they hurtled towards him at thirty miles an hour on the sidewalk but one person more or less, shouting in the middle of the street in Camden Town, at either cyclists or lampposts or imaginary six-foot-high dung beetles, was neither here nor there and nobody took any notice, least of all the cyclists.
He tried remonstrating reasonably with them. One time while he was on a zebra crossing, traversing Regents Park Road, a girl zipped across it behind him, clipping him on the ankles as she sped up the pavement. ‘This is a pedestrian crossing not a bike crossing,’ he said quite mildly. She just looked over her shoulder at him but, unusually, he caught up with her half a minute later as she stopped to look at her A—Z. It wasn’t often you got one of them stationary so he went up to her and said, ‘You shouldn’t ride on the pavement and that, you know. It’s really intimidating for old people and stuff.’
She just looked up and said, ‘Who died and left you in charge?’ Then rode off, her behind waggling contemptuously at him. Clive knew then he was going to have to kill one of them.
At nights he couldn’t sleep, imagining arguments he’d have with this girl though even in the self-justifying cavern of his brain he came off worst. She always had the snappy rejoinder: ‘Who died and left you in charge?’
‘You or one of your kind,’ was all he could come back with but you could see on her face that she didn’t believe him. Well, he might not be able to kill a cyclist but he knew a woman who could.
The first thing he did was to become a member of The London Cycling Campaign: it was important to know his enemy. He soon found out that the major cause of death amongst cyclists was them being crushed under the wheels of trucks. Clive reckoned it would be going too far to buy himself a truck and get an HGV licence and so on. However in another whining article about how great they all were, these pedalling pricks, he read what terrible havoc four-wheel-drive vehicles, Range Rovers, Toyota Amazons, Mitsubishi Shoguns, were carving through the pedestrian and cycling population with their big bumpy bumpers. Their huge flat fronts smacked the unprotected human form with a metal punch of bone-vaporising ferocity.
One dark evening a few days later a second-hand car salesman with an ill-lit car lot sold for cash a Mark One Landrover Discovery on an M plate, to a tall ugly woman.
Clive hid it in the parking garages underneath the Brunswick Centre. The Discovery leaked black diesel smoke from its rusty anus and the inappropriate pale blue clunky interior designed by Sir Terence Conran was filthy and falling to bits, but Cicely felt it would do the job. The huge pitted chrome bull bars screwed to the front of the Disco would be especially good at mashing up a biker.
Cicely had great fun clothing herself as a middle-class mum on the way to pick up her kids from one of the posh private schools in Hampstead, then she went hunting for a cyclist pedalling the wrong way down one of the many streets of Camden Town.
As she drove, her eyes swivelling back and forth, Cicely daydreamed about her family life, her husband, her kids, the dinner parties she’d cook for his boss at the bank.
Kate Maguire strapped her small son into the child seat of her bicycle. She was late getting to her friend Carmel’s place where she was going to drop off Milo then go on to work on the night shift at the Neurological Hospital near Russell Square. She had been forced to go back to work at the Neuro after her husband died and the old pig-pink Raleigh ladies bike was the most economical way for her and Milo to get around town. If she’d had to pay bus fares or, heaven forbid, own a car, she and Milo would be having privet leaves for tea every night. Today, though, she had a problem: if she didn’t somehow shave fifteen minutes off her journey she was going to be late for work. That was the thing about bicycles, you always knew to the second how long a journey took. Not like a car, where in central London the same hundred yards could take twenty seconds or t
wo hours to drive depending on what butterfly was flapping its wings in the Brazilian rainforest that day. The simplest way to make up the time would be for her and Milo not to turn left into the long one-way system on leaving her little house in Lyme Street. That was suited to fat-arsed car drivers sitting down but it was an annoying detour when you are pedalling yourself, taking you down Bayham Street along Pratt Street across the High Street and up Delancey Street. It would be much quicker for her to ride the wrong way past the tube station then go against the flow of traffic, up the hill at Parkway, the way she had seen thousands of other cyclists doing. Many times she had sensed other bicycle riders’ perplexity as she stopped at the lights and waited while they bumped up onto the pavement or raced through the traffic lights even though the little green man was showing, scattering pedestrians left and right.
