by David Nobbs
Life is short, Nicola, she told herself. Do not wish your life away. Relish these two years. Enjoy Alison’s amazing support. Take comfort from your pleasant, desirable home. Enjoy the growing up of Gray, for all that ninety-seven per cent of it takes place in the privacy of his room. Take pride in how much prettier Em is looking, now that she has met François, even if the gamine, Parisian-waif look that she is adopting sits uneasily on her slightly heavy frame. Enjoy your family.
In the first three months after Nicola ‘came out’, the bedrooms of the Cornucopia Hotel averaged an occupancy rate of 67 per cent. In the Kenilworth Brasserie, 23.2 per cent of the tables were occupied, on average, at lunchtime, and 36 per cent in the evenings. The Warwick Bar served an average of twenty-two meals a day, compared to its theoretical maximum of a hundred and twenty.
Be proud of these improvements, Nicola. Do not long for your time in the hotel to pass, she thought.
Nicola felt that it was churlish of Head Office not to make any comment, modest though the increase in business was. She knew that at least some of it was the result of her sex change. People were curious to catch a glimpse of her. Businessmen wanted to see whether her legs were muscular or elegantly slim, and just how much or how little she had in the bust department. It was a shock to her to realise just how much of a sex object a woman was, but she had put herself into the public domain and she must live with it. Truth to tell, she was just a little excited to be an object of interest. She had never been an object of interest before.
Sometimes, though, it was thoroughly unpleasant. She could never be sure that she wouldn’t be taunted, in the shops or the streets, by someone who suspected. One day a man lurched out of the betting shop in front of her and shouted, ‘Show us your prick, sweetheart.’ She could never be certain who knew and who didn’t. A man she’d nodded to several times over the years stood back in the newsagent’s and said savagely, ‘I can wait. Serve the perv.’ It happened rarely, but the threat was ever-present. On days when she felt weak she had to force herself to venture into the town. She became self-conscious about her large hands, tried to hide them, but you couldn’t sign credit cards with your hands in your pockets.
On the staff front, things went on much as before. She found Paulo a little more difficult, a little less respectful, and she summoned him to her office.
‘Are you not respectful to women in Portugal?’ she asked him.
‘But of course we are,’ he said. ‘We are a romantic race.’
‘I don’t want you to be romantic,’ said Nicola, ‘but a bit of respect wouldn’t come amiss.’
She didn’t have any trouble with him after that.
Emrys, the Welsh commis chef, asked for an interview, at which he requested that there should always be a Welsh speciality on the menu. He suggested a rotation of Glamorgan sausages, and cawl, and of bara brith and butter pudding.
‘I’m sorry, Emrys,’ said Nicola, ‘but I don’t have the authority to change the menu. It’s dictated by Head Office policy.’
‘You have Warwickshire specialities.’
‘Yes, but this is Warwickshire. You know as well as I do that the Cornucopia menu is standard with one local dish and one chef’s signature dish. In any case, nobody ever orders the Warwickshire specials.’
‘No, because they’re not genuine, see,’ protested Emrys. ‘Who ever heard of Leamington Force Meat Balls? Who ever heard of Edgbaston Pie? Mine are genuine, see. I think there’d be a call for them among the Welsh expat community.’
‘Is there a Welsh expat community in Throdnall?’
‘There’s Councillor Watkins.’
‘I agree he’s overweight but he hardly amounts to a community. And he never eats in the hotel.’
‘Maybe he would if there were Welsh specialities!’
‘Look, I appreciate your initiative and your patriotism, but rules are rules.’
Emrys leant across the desk, short, stocky, with his dark eyes glittering fanatically.
‘I want to be head chef,’ he announced.
‘We have a head chef, Emrys.’
‘That long streak of Yorkshire piss. That miserable …’
‘Emrys, please don’t talk about my staff like that.’
‘… plodding journeyman. There’s no love of food in his blood. No passion. He’s …’
‘Emrys, please!’
‘He’s a manager, not a chef.’
‘Emrys, I run this hotel, not you.’
She tried to stare Emrys out, and it worked!
‘My quarrel’s not with you,’ he said.
‘Look, Emrys,’ she suggested, ‘if you’re ambitious, perhaps you should go back to Wales.’
‘I can’t. My wife hates Wales. The kids have settled at school. Settled, do you see? What can I do? The kids come first in my book. I’m trapped, Ms Divot. Trapped.’
‘What can I say, Emrys? Leonard isn’t a young man. He won’t be with us for ever. Continuity is highly valued in the Cornucopia Code of Conduct. Be patient. Your reward will come if you behave yourself. If you behave yourself. So lay off Leonard. There’s no room for hatred in my kitchens. And don’t think, Emrys, that I’ll be a pushover just because I’ve become a woman.’
‘I don’t think any of us think that,’ said Emrys, and he couldn’t quite hide the surprise in his voice.
Two days later, Leonard Balby asked for an interview, plonked himself opposite Nicola and looked across her desk at her with an expression that would have curdled mayonnaise.
‘Has that Welsh windbag asked for Welsh specialities on the menu?’ he asked.
Nicola tried to remain calm.
‘My interviews with my staff are completely confidential, Leonard.’
‘I knew it! Bloody Welsh windbag.’
‘Please don’t refer to a colleague in that way, Leonard.’
‘Colleague? Bloody Welsh toerag.’
‘Leonard!’
‘T’other day – last Tuesday – no, I tell a lie, Wednesday, ‘cos Warwickshire speciality were Coventry Tart – he were cooking gammon chops, he were looking vacantly into space, I said, “Hey, Taffy, what’s up wi’ you?” He said, “Our menu’s boring. I was just thinking about the fricassee of rabbit with leeks my nan used to make.” I said, “Emrys, the man has ordered gammon chop, we can’t say to him, ‘Sorry. We’d rather you had fricassee of rabbit with leeks like Emrys’s nan used to make.’ So, Emrys,” I said, “get real and …” May I swear in front of you, ma’am?’
‘Of course. I want the truth, Leonard.’
‘I said, “and fuck off about your fucking fricassee”.’
Nicola wanted to laugh. She knew that as Nick she would have been very uptight about the f-word. As Nicola she just wanted to laugh at poor Leonard. She couldn’t find it in her to hate him.
‘He doesn’t respect me like what he should,’ said Leonard Balby. ‘He has a look in his eye, contemptuous like. I want him gone. I want rid, ma’am. That kitchen isn’t big enough for the both of us.’
Nicola no longer found Leonard funny. This was intolerable, and she hadn’t liked that ‘ma’am’. There had been sarcastic undertones.
She met her head chef’s eye and didn’t flinch. She was a little frightened of him, and her heart was racing, but she was brave enough not to show it. Compared to the process of changing sex the problem of Leonard Balby paled into insignificance. She realised that she had become at least a slightly stronger person than she had been.
‘Who do you think you are?’ she asked. ‘Wyatt Earp? Gordon Ramsay? Please don’t tell me what I should do with my staff. You are always free to resign – if you believe that at the age of fifty-six you will be able to land a comparable post.’
‘I’ll take this further,’ he said. ‘I’ll complain to Head Office. Don’t think I don’t have the courage of my convictions.’
He had handed it to her on a plate, so much so that she almost didn’t want to take it. It hardly seemed ladylike.
‘I would remind yo
u,’ she said, ‘that Head Office are unaware that your convictions are for GBH, drunkenness and driving while uninsured.’
Leonard Balby’s mouth opened and closed twice, but no further sound emerged from it.
On the whole Nicola was pleased with the way she had handled her first staff crisis as a woman, but she didn’t kid herself that she had solved the problem, and when she saw the billboard, her blood ran cold.
It was the Saturday after the interview with Leonard. She was driving home from the wine merchant’s (she refused to take advantage of the preferential terms she could get on Cornucopia wine; she didn’t think there was anything drinkable on their list) and there it was outside a newsagent’s on Clarion Road.
Chef Drowned In Canal
Her heart thumped. Her head thudded. Her brakes screeched. Which of them was it? She hoped it wasn’t Emrys, because of his children, but if it was Leonard, Emrys would be imprisoned for life anyway.
She ran to the newsagent’s, practically grabbed the paper, hunted through it, couldn’t read for panic.
At last she found it.
When she read that the chef of a burger bar in Birmingham had fallen into the Coventry Canal on his drunken stag night, and drowned on the eve of his wedding, she felt an overwhelming flood of relief.
A wasted life. A distraught bride. Devastated parents. A flood of relief.
Man, woman. Nick, Nicola. We can escape from some things, thought Nicola, but we can never escape from the self-centred nature of our puny little lives.
14 Alison Makes Her Move
It was about six months after Nicola had ‘come out’ when Alison realised that her father had recovered from Marge’s death as much as he ever would. He might live for many years. The time had come for her to make her move.
She had waited so long that she felt more nervous than she had when she had first resolved to do it. She had waited so long that it almost seemed as if waiting was her natural activity.
Having seen how rigorous the examination of Nick had been before he had been accepted, she decided that she would consult the doctors before she took her family into her confidence.
As she sat in the surgery she thought of Nick sitting there at the beginning of his journey.
Doctor Rodgerson was running late. Good doctors always run late, because they take an interest. Bad doctors, unlike bad trains, always run on time.
She tried to interest herself in dreary articles in elderly magazines. She pictured Nick reading similar articles all that time ago. ‘Hedges can be sexy,’ she read without interest. ‘The Walsall Nobody Knows’ failed to grab her imagination. She greeted ‘Bridlington – the new Dubrovnik’ with bored disbelief. She couldn’t concentrate.
She tried a bridge column, but suddenly had an image of herself in the men’s team, playing against Nicola. What a sensation that was going to be.
‘Alison Divot.’
She strode into Doctor Rodgerson’s surgery.
‘Good morning, Alison.’
‘Good morning, doctor.’
‘I’ve missed seeing you round the dinner table.’
‘You could always invite us. Then you’d see us. But of course it would untidy your table. There ought to be signs on the roads approaching town. “Throdnall Welcomes Tidy Tables”.’
Doctor Rodgerson was disconcerted. Alison’s directness often disconcerted people.
‘How’s … er … your … er … your hu … your wi … er … Nick … ola … doing?’
‘Very well, thank you, doctor. I’m surprised she hasn’t kept in touch to tell you. We shouldn’t consider you only when we need you. I hope I won’t do that.’
‘Quite. Absolutely. Good. What? What do you mean?’
‘After my sex change.’
‘What?! You too?’
‘Yes. Sorry.’
Doctor Rodgerson lowered his voice dramatically.
‘You are serious, are you? It isn’t April the First, is it?’
‘It isn’t April the First. No, I’m afraid I’m serious.’
‘I have to ask you, Alison: did you get the idea from Nick … ola? Is this some kind of copy-cat thing?’
‘No!
‘All right. All right. I didn’t mean to be offensive. One has to ask, Alison, if only to eliminate it.’
‘Yes, of course – I’m sorry – and why are we suddenly speaking in such low voices?’
‘Well we don’t want this to come out, do we? It’ll cause a sensation, both of you doing it.’
‘You think so?’
‘Of course. People are fascinated by sexual deviation.’
‘I wouldn’t describe it as sexual deviation.’
‘No, no. No, no. Oh, no, no. No. I know. Quite. But people will. The world can be very small-minded, especially in Throdnall. We need to proceed carefully. The first step is to send you to Langridge at the gender identity clinic’
*
As she drove to the station car park Alison thought of that day when she’d driven Nick to the station. There was nobody to drive her.
As she sat in Doctor Langridge’s waiting room, trying to get interested in an article entitled, ‘We Were All Marsupials Once. Doctor Eunice Barrage Knocks A Hole Through Darwinism’, her mobile suddenly rang in her pocket, startling the living daylights out of her and vibrating her breasts like jelly on dinner plates in a force eight in the Bay of Biscay.
‘Hi,’ said Nicola. ‘It’s me.’
This amused Alison on two counts. As Nick he had hated it when people said, ‘It’s me.’ ‘A phone call is always from “me”,’ he would say. ‘All it means is, “Hello, I am the person speaking to you on the telephone.” It’s a philosophical impossibility for it not to be “me”.’ And he’d never said ‘Hi.’ He loathed ‘Hi’. ‘What’s wrong with good old dignified “hello”?’ he would ask.
Now, after just a few months, he was becoming a thoroughly modern miss.
All this flashed through her mind in seconds, along with her dismay that Nicola had rung her here. She didn’t want the news to break accidentally. She would have to lie.
‘Where are you?’
‘At work. Why?’
‘Well I rang you at work. They said you were off with a migraine.’
‘I say “at work”. I’m just driving to work. I tried to get to work and then the migraine came on and I went home, but then it began to wear off again so I’ve forced myself to go in. We’ve a lot on.’
‘You shouldn’t use your mobile in the car. It’s dangerous.’
‘Well you shouldn’t have rung me.’
‘I didn’t know you were in the car!’ Nicola sounded irritated.
‘What did you ring me for?’
‘To say I was sorry you had a migraine.’
‘But you didn’t know I had a migraine when you rang the office.’
‘No, but they told me.’
‘So why did you ring the office? On the off-chance that I might have a migraine and you could be sorry about it?’ She had never had a migraine. All her migraines had been fictional.
‘Of course not. Actually, to be honest, I just suddenly felt that I wanted to hear your voice, and I rang on impulse.’
‘Oh, Nicola.’
Doctor Langridge emerged from his office.
‘Mrs Divot?’
‘I have to go now, Nicola. I’ve seen a policeman.’
She rang off hastily, and stood up.
‘A policeman?’ enquired Doctor Langridge.
‘It was my husband. I didn’t want her to know I’m coming to see you yet.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He said this drily, meaning, ‘Well, this is a situation, isn’t it?’
He shook her hand. His handshake was like a rock crusher, she expected her bones to shatter, but his voice was pleasant and reassuring.
He led her into his office. They sat in leather armchairs, which squeaked like nervous gerbils. The room was almost aggressively neutral, a place of overwhelming calm. Doctor Langridge made her fee
l calm.
‘Well, this is extraordinary, Mrs Divot,’ he said. ‘Quite extraordinary.’
‘I suppose so. Sorry.’
‘No, no. Don’t be sorry. I’m not sure if I should say this, Mrs Divot, but professionally this is … rather intriguing. A privilege. Your husband is doing terribly well. She really is. Terribly well. Now, tell me how you feel about your gender.’
‘I feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body.’ He frowned.
She had known he would. ‘Well I know it sounds like a cliché, but I can’t find any way of expressing it better.’
‘Did you … this question may irritate you, but I have to ask it. Did you get the idea of changing sex from your husband? Is there … a competitive element in this? A copy-cat element?’
‘No, there is not, Doctor Langridge,’ she said indignantly. ‘I do not copy. I’m not the pathetic little woman who gets ideas from her hubby. I’d intended to do it. I couldn’t do it while my mother was alive. He got in first – the story of the man-woman relationship throughout the ages.’
‘So, is there a political element in your desire?’
‘Doctor Langridge, I am expecting to go through great difficulties and great pain. Do you think that politics, especially sexual politics, which is what I assume you mean, could ever be worth enduring that?’
‘I have to ask these questions, Mrs Divot. It’s my job. I’m delighted to be able to eliminate these irrelevances, believe me. I have my problems too, Mrs Divot. I receive considerable professional flak. Many people dispute the validity of what I do. Many people believe that we are exploiting vulnerable people for our own professional and financial ends. I have to be as thorough as the wind and as pure as the driven snow. I have to be 110 per cent certain that we are doing the right thing for you. If we find out, after the operation, that it wasn’t right, it’s too late.’
‘Yes. I know. I’m sorry.’
He asked her a lot of questions about her childhood, her puberty, her adolescence, her adulthood. She found it quite comforting, surrounded by those carefully restful walls, to talk about herself. She understood why people had psycho-analysis, though she was profoundly sceptical of whether they should, since the unhappy are usually too self-absorbed and she couldn’t see how such people could be helped by being encouraged to talk about themselves. Anyway, she told him all about her youth as a tomboy, and how people who didn’t know her sometimes said, ‘Isn’t he a lovely little boy?’, to her mum’s fury.
