by David Nobbs
‘Exactly. So there’s no fun in hammering you. No point at all.’
Nick didn’t mind all this, but when they got home Bernie couldn’t wait to tell Alison. ‘He bought me pork scratchings. They’ve buggered me second left incisor,’ and she gave Nick a look which said, unmistakably, ‘You and your little chats!’
And then she screamed, ‘My God! Look at the Axminster! Who had that on his shoe?’ (It was the carpet when she dirtied it, the Axminster when Nick did.)
It was Nick, of course. It always was. He suspected that dogs lay in wait until they heard him coming and then slunk forward and shat all over the pavements in front of him because they knew he didn’t like them, as a result of which he liked them a whole lot less.
They drove into town on the Saturday morning. Nick hated shopping at the best of times, and this was the worst of times. He had to buy a complete wardrobe of women’s clothes. He’d been putting it off and putting it off and now he could put it off no longer. He made for Castlegate Long Stay (there hadn’t been a gate for ninety years, there hadn’t been a castle for three hundred, if Throdnall saw anything old it shuddered and pulled it down, goodness knew how they had the cheek to put up those new signs ‘Throdnall – Historic Market Town’).
‘Use your reserved space, for goodness sake,’ said Alison.
‘No. That’s my work space. If I’m not working, I don’t use it.’
‘Oh for goodness sake. Who’s going to know? Is somebody going to ring Head Office? I mean, it’s yours, it’s there, nobody else can use it, it’s ridiculous.’
‘There’s a principle.’
‘Oh for goodness sake.’
‘Well I’m not using it today, anyway. I’ll never live it down if Ferenc sees me coming back piled with bras and knickers.’
‘He’ll see you wearing bras and knickers on Monday.’
‘That’s different. I’ll be prepared. I’ll do it with dignity.’
They walked to the High Street from Castlegate Long Stay. There were crowds of the most horribly dressed people. Throdnall isn’t Paris, not by a long chalk. In fact it’s the World Capital of Leggings. The sky was the colour of old men’s skins, and there were the faintest specks of rain on the prowling wind. Winter was coming. Nick felt very depressed. This should have been his first brave step towards womanhood, and he was hating it.
‘We could try Next first,’ said Alison, ‘and Dorothy Perkins next.’
‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I can’t go through with it. It’s too horrendous.’
She squeezed his arm.
‘You must!’ she said. He found her fervour strange. ‘You must! You’ve set your heart on it.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t talking about the sex change,’ he said. ‘I was talking about shopping in Throdnall. I just can’t do it here. I’ll see people I know.’
‘You’ll see people you know when you go to work.’
‘I know, but then I’ll have to face them. I don’t have to now.’
They decided to shop in Stratford. It upset Nick to leave several hours of a parking ticket unused, it went against the grain, but there was nothing else for it. Stratford is full of tourists, so nobody they knew would be seen dead there, and, as Alison pointed out, Shakespeare made cross-dressing very respectable. (In his plays. As far as we know he didn’t visit Anne Hathaway in twinset and pearls.)
There were some great challenges ahead, but Nick was beginning to realise that it was the little things that were going to be the hardest. He found that he just couldn’t go into shops and say, ‘Good morning. I am going to have a sex change and before that I have to live in society as a woman for two years, so I need a complete wardrobe suitable for working as General Manageress of a leading hotel in Throdnall, plus assorted leisure wear for a middle-class lady of forty with a wide range of cultural and sporting interests, including golf and bridge.’
He knew that if he had been able to say all that, he would have mounted the first hurdle with ease, but if he could mount hurdles with ease he wouldn’t have been Nicholas Divot Esquire.
What he actually said, amazing Alison even more than the assistant, was ‘I want some clothes for my sister. She can’t get out as she’s severely agoraphobic’
Oh God. A great new adventure, one man’s heroic journey into womanhood, and they were straight into farce. Nick had never been at ease with shop assistants. In Austin Reed in London an assistant had once said to him, apropos of collar size, ‘Are we fifteen?’ and he had said, rather wittily he’d thought, ‘I wish I was’, and the man had flattened him by saying, without a flicker of amusement, ‘Sir is a wag.’ In Dobson’s, Throdnall’s own family department store, long gone, an assistant not only measured his inside leg, but stroked it, and Nick couldn’t say anything: the assistant knew his mother, she went in every Thursday lunchtime for a cheese omelette and a glass of sauvignon blanc.
There was no stopping the agoraphobic sister, once she’d been invented. When Alison said, ‘She’ll need a full outfit for work’, the assistant said, ‘Will she be able to go to work if she’s agoraphobic?’, and Nick had to improvise with ‘No, but luckily her work comes to her. She’s a consultant’, and Alison said, teasing him with just a touch of irritation at his stupidity and weakness, ‘But we do hope to persuade her to go out, don’t we, darling, and if she’s got nicer clothes that she feels good in she might find it easier.’
Then the assistant said, ‘What size is your sister?’, and Nick had to say, ‘Er … much the same size as me, funnily enough. Quite tall, flat-chested, slim hips, big feet.’
He really did think that Alison was going to giggle. He went red and began to perspire. Oh God, if this went on he’d make the clothes sweaty as he tried them on.
He tried a fairly sober skirt suit and the assistant said, ‘Oh, yes, sir. It’s … her to a tee.’
He almost confessed. Wanted to. Couldn’t.
They bought a few oddments – bras and knickers and tights and a handbag, and as she packed them the assistant said, ‘Funnily enough I have a cousin who’s claustrophobic. It’s a small world, isn’t it?’, and Nick said, ‘I hope it isn’t if she’s claustrophobic. It certainly is if you’re agoraphobic.’
He couldn’t wait to get out into the street. The air smelt so soft and sweet. He didn’t know if he’d ever smelt air as sweet as on that November day in Stratford.
They took their purchases back to the car and went for a reviving coffee in Ye Olde Falstaffe Coffee Shoppe.
Alison gave him a warning frown as he said to the waitress, ‘I’ll have ye olde toastede tea-cakey, pleasy.’
‘Nick,’ she said very seriously, after the waitress had scurried off with some relief.
‘That’s an ominously serious tone,’ he said.
‘Well I’m being serious,’ she said. ‘I think you just have to start telling them the truth. That sister of yours is grotesque. You have to jump your first great hurdle. You have to think of yourself as Nicola. You are Nicola now. You’re wearing men’s clothes because you’re odd. This afternoon you are going to begin to cease to be odd. You are Nicola, not Nick or Nicholas. Concentrate on that.’
‘Right. I am no longer sick Nick who gets on your wick. Ah, waitress, I am not Nicholas and I am definitely not knickerless. I am knickerful Nicola.’
The waitress gave them their coffee and toasted tea cake as rapidly as she could, and beetled to the safety of the kitchen.
‘Don’t be so silly, Nicola,’ said Alison severely.
‘I can’t help it. This is frightening.’
‘It won’t be frightening once you’ve faced it.’
It helped that the clouds had been blown away, and it was a gusty but sunny afternoon, mild and soft with just a hint of invigorating crispness.
Nick – he couldn’t see himself as Nicola yet, not in his Nick clothes – barged into the first women’s clothes shop he saw, he didn’t even know which one it was.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have a …
’ He swallowed.‘…a sex change.’ There! He’d said it. What a relief. ‘Before I have the operation I will have to live as a woman for two years. I need quite a lot of clothes.’
‘I’ll take your measurements, sir,’ said the assistant calmly.
While she went for a tape-measure, Alison said in a low voice, ‘You see. No problem. She didn’t bat an eyelid.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Nick. ‘How do you bat an eyelid? Have you ever seen anyone batting an eyelid? Have you ever heard anyone say, “Oh look. There’s a man over there batting an eyelid”?’
Alison was happy to let him waffle on. She realised that in his nervous, self-conscious state he needed the outlet.
By half past five he was the proud possessor of bras, panties, underskirts, blouses, tights (not stockings – he wasn’t going to titillate men with glimpses of his marble thighs), smart jackets, skirts, medium-heeled shoes for work, low-heeled shoes for home, outdoor coats, scarves, woolly gloves (couldn’t find any other sort to fit – large male hands – problem), handkerchiefs, high-heeled boots, low-heeled boots, ankle-length skirts, twinsets, cardigans, skirt suits and an evening outfit with evening bag.
‘Why do I need an evening outfit?’ he had asked.
‘For evenings. When we go out.’
‘Out? Where will we go?’
‘Well, the Collinsons’.’
‘They’ll drop us when this comes out.’
‘The golf club dinner.’
‘Oh God. I can’t go to the golf club dinner.’
‘I’ll support you to the hilt, Nicola, but I am not going to become a hermit. Real Life Test, not skulking in corners.’
He bought an evening outfit.
As they staggered back to the car with their purchases, Nick said, ‘Well at least that’s over.’
‘Till the spring,’ said Alison.
‘What?’
‘Till the spring fashions come out. You’ll need light clothes. Fine cottons and silks for summer. And there’ll be new styles. New colours. Summer colours. And next winter these colours that you’ve just bought won’t be the colours any more. There’ll be new winter colours. Mauve’s tipped for a dramatic comeback.’
‘My God,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I can afford to become a woman.’
‘And you always thought I was extravagant,’ said Alison.
They got home just in time for his appointment with Karen. Karen was Alison’s hairdresser at ‘A Cut Above’ (Throdnall’s Premier Hair Stylists) and she’d agreed to come and do his hair at home, partly to save him embarrassment and partly for security reasons. (They didn’t want the story breaking before Em got her exclusive, which would give her CV such a boost when she applied to the Nationals.) Karen did a very good job, using Nick’s slight natural curls to create a soft, wavy look. He’d let his hair grow longer than he’d liked over the last weeks, at Alison’s suggestion, even though towards the end he’d begun to feel very uncomfortable and unmanagerial and positively un-Cornucopian. But he saw why now. Cut in a bob with a side parting, and falling over the face to one side, it softened his features enormously. It made him look quite feminine, it really did.
He woke up feeling extremely excited, sexy even. To his horror, with an insensitivity that shocked him to the core, his prick had one of those semi-erections that even he got very occasionally, first thing in the morning. He gave it a little smack, and said, silently, ‘Get down, you insensitive fool. Oh well, I suppose I’d better forgive you. After all, your days are numbered, you sad little person.’
Alison felt the movement as he smacked it and said, ‘What’s up?’ and he said, ‘I thought I’d been bitten.’ He wanted to take her in his arms, but then it might have led to a very rare bout of sexuality and to say that this would have been mistimed would be an understatement. Anyway, the shock of this thought shrivelled his rebuked organ back into its habitual insignificance.
He lay there for a minute or two, more than somewhat shocked. He soon rationalised it, of course. He was feeling sexy because at last he was going to live as a woman, but since the only organs that he had that were capable of expressing sexuality were male, he was forced to express his feminine sexuality through a masculine mechanism. It wasn’t shocking at all. It was complex and absurd, but it was also a perfect affirmation of why he had to become a woman – to free himself from this complexity and absurdity.
He dressed in his new jeans and a lemony blouse, and they went down to breakfast.
‘My God,’ said Bernie.
‘Yes, Dad, very helpful,’ said Alison.
Gray took one look, said, ‘Is it any wonder I’m twisted?’ and took his coffee and toast back to his room.
Em burst in, had a black coffee and a bun standing up, said, ‘Gotta split, ciao’ and didn’t even comment on how Nicola looked. Giorgio was arriving from Modena that day. She’d met him in Venice and had been into everything Italian ever since.
Suddenly she’d bought lovely clothes that made her look elegant, but she got very grumpy if they mentioned it; it embarrassed her to look lovely, she only did it for Giorgio. In the last few weeks they’d all eaten a lot of pasta, for Giorgio, and drunk a lot of chianti, for Giorgio.
Alison suggested that they have a dummy make-up run after breakfast. Nick couldn’t wait. This was it! His transformation was beginning. It was the first day in the existence of Nicola Divot.
He no longer needed to pretend. Never again. Yesterday in Stratford had been a nightmare. Today in number thirty-three was a dream come true.
He tried hard that day to prove that his fabled insensitivity was a myth. Alison and he had spent more than twenty years together. He couldn’t let her see how eager he was to become a woman, how eager he was, therefore, in essence, to cease to be her husband. ‘Can’t I read the papers first?’ he asked. Luckily Alison wouldn’t have it.
They went up to the en suite. First, of course, he had to shave. He took his blouse off. He didn’t want to get shaving cream on it. Alison was touched by the sight of his bra. It was poignant that he had so little to put in it. Maybe with the continuing hormone treatment, and the psychological impetus of living as a woman – she didn’t know.
While he shaved, she laid out the make-up products she had bought. She had chosen Estée Lauder as the right look for Nicola, who gawped at them. ‘What?’ he said. ‘All those?’
‘Now you’re going to find out why I’m always late,’ Alison joked. He was so tense. She longed to put him at his ease.
A wave of excitement shuddered through Nicola. I feel like a little boy in a … he thought. No, what am I thinking? … a little girl in a sweet shop. He had to take a very deep, slow breath to stop himself hyperventilating. He clung to the washbasin. He was frightened of passing out. Alison was very concerned.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Fine,’ he said bravely. ‘Just fine.’
She took him gently and carefully through the process: showed him how to smooth moisturiser over his face and neck, how to apply foundation liquid – she thought he might prefer that to cream – over his face, finishing well under the chin, how to brush face powder over the entire area. His face began to look more feminine. It was an eerie moment for Alison. She began to see the man she loved … yes, loved, she might no longer have been his lover, nor he hers … but, yes, loved … she began to see him disappear before her eyes. She began to see the woman he would become. She didn’t know what she thought about it. She tried not to think about it. She had a job to do.
She showed him … her? … the intricacies of applying eyeshadow, deeper on the outer upper eyelid, and into the socket, and a lighter shade on the inner upper lid, finishing the eyes with a highlighter on the brow bone. Her eyes did look more feminine, they were a very pale blue, it was a very intense moment, there in the en suite, separated from the rest of the world by frosted glass. She wanted to give her a quick kiss, but she couldn’t without ruining the very make-up she was teaching her to apply.
Alison turned away and rushed to the bedroom, and lay on the bed, on his side of the bed, and sobbed. She didn’t really know why, that was the silly thing. For her lost husband? Images of their early days when they seemed almost normal flashed through her mind – the honeymoon in Crete, a midnight swim in Cornwall, the birth of Emma – he’d been there to witness it even though he’d been terrified and it hadn’t yet become compulsory for the man to be present – Gray’s birth. Oh God. Poor disappeared Nick, how devastated he’d be if he ever found out Gray wasn’t his. She cried because she so regretted her sole affair – it stood out in the calmness of their lives like a grain silo among oast houses. Yes, she cried for Nick and she cried for Nicola and she cried for herself and she cried for the world. She had come to crying late in life and, maybe for that reason, she seemed to have no control over it.
Nicola went into the bedroom and put her arms round Alison, and she had a sudden dread that Nicola would say, ‘There there, old girP, but she didn’t. Maybe that would go, now that he was being a woman.
They sat on the edge of the bed, Alison and her … well, her ex-husband who was still her husband … arms round each other. Alison’s sobs ceased, and she blew her nose angrily. She had always found mucus humiliating.
‘I know that this is very difficult for you,’ said Nicola, ‘but I want you to know how much I appreciate how very understanding you’ve been … on the whole.’
Nick might be Nicola but that ‘on the whole’ was so very Nick. Alison half-smiled through the last of her tears.
Nicola led her back to the en suite, and watched as she washed her face and repaired her make-up.
‘A refresher course already,’ said Alison.
They went downstairs. Nicola wanted to settle down to read the Sunday papers; he’d always liked to read the travel sections and dream. He would cut bits out, although they never went to any of the places he so carefully filed away. But Alison wouldn’t let her read the papers yet. There were so many simple things still to learn – how to walk, how to sit down, how to sit in a chair, how to stand up. She tried to inject a bit of feminine elegance into his clunking masculine gait, tried to get him to sit with her legs together, guarding her honour, rather than knees apart like some elderly spinster aunt, with no honour worth guarding, revealing yards of flannelette knickers.
