by David Nobbs
Had she had the operation or hadn’t she?
There must be a bell. Where was the bell? Ah.
It seemed like minutes before anybody came. She felt so alone. She felt so trapped. Didn’t they realise how people felt at moments like this? Fragile. Desperately vulnerable. Full of fear.
Ah. A nurse.
‘Ah! You’ve come round.’
‘Er … yes.’
A starched nurse. White frock, white tabard, red face – all starched.
‘Nurse, have I … had the operation?’
‘Well of course you have, Ms Divot.’
‘Has it … er …?’
‘Mr McWhinnie was very satisfied.’
Unlike you, nurse. You don’t look as if you’ve ever been satisfied.
‘Mr McWhinnie is an extremely good surgeon.’
Rebuked for her doubts, and at such a time. True insensitivity is an art. Only the really talented possess it. In love with Mr McWhinnie. Wouldn’t look at her twice, starched little madam.
‘So, I’m … I’m a woman.’
‘I suppose so, Ms Divot.’
‘Am I … er … doing all right, then?’
‘You’re as comfortable as can be expected,’ she said. ‘Oh!’ she added. ‘Your “wife” telephoned some while ago to say she’d been stuck in traffic but would be here soon.’
They were only the faintest of hints, the inverted commas that The Starchy One put round the word ‘wife’, but they were enough. She disapproved. Personal? Thought Nicola a freak? Political? Resented the waste of resources that should be used on diseases that she thought were real? Regarded this as cosmetic surgery, albeit of a private and very extreme kind?
Not your business, Nicola. Not your worry. It was a shame, though, not to have woken to a friendlier face.
She tried to move. Flames of pain burnt into her insides. Needles of pain thrust themselves into her veins. She gripped the side of the bed. Sweat poured off her. She was sweating down there beneath the bandages. Her new private parts – and after her conversation with The Starchy One she was almost convinced that she did indeed have new private parts – were beginning to itch. She longed to scratch them. She must scratch them. She couldn’t scratch them.
And there was something more than all this, something even more disturbing than all this pain, something enormous, some consideration of vast importance just beyond the reach of her memory, some residue of worry from the anaesthetised nightmares of her unconscious subconscious earlier that day.
She closed her eyes, already weary of it all. She made a great effort to think of more pleasant things, of Alan arriving and smiling at her, of his basically kind if naturally rather severe face, as he stood there looking concerned and holding out a bunch of pink lilies. Alan loved lilies and he would choose pink for a girl; he wasn’t brilliant at flowers and he would go for the obvious.
‘Hello, Nicola.’
She opened her eyes and saw … not Alan holding pink lilies but twenty stone of blubber holding absolutely nothing.
‘Prentice!’
‘Hello, Nicola! Well, well! And how are we?’
‘Singular. Please don’t call me “we”.’
‘Sorry. I’m appearing at the Komedy Klub at midnight tonight …’
‘That gives me a few hours, but I won’t be up to it.’
‘Don’t be silly. I’m explaining why I’m here. I rang the gorgeous Alan, who used to be the even more gorgeous Alison, and he told me about your op, and I thought, “What a coincidence. The hospital’s only a couple of miles away; I can go and cheer her up.’”
‘Thank you.’
‘So I have.’
‘Thank you.’ It’s too early. Too soon. I’m so tired. So tired. Please go. ‘It’s so good to see you.’
‘Of course! Alan!’
Alan moved forward slowly, trying to hide the utter dismay on his face at the sight of Prentice, clutching his pink lilies as if he feared Prentice might steal them.
‘Prentice!’
‘I’m so glad you told me she was having the op today,’ said Prentice.
Alan’s eyes apologised to Nicola. He showed her the lilies.
‘I’ve brought you some lilies,’ he said. ‘Pink for a girl.’
Oh God.
‘They’re lovely.’
He thrust them towards her nose. She sniffed dutifully. She wished they were doused in chloroform. She longed to sleep.
‘They smell lovely.’
‘Good. Well, how are you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How do you feel?’
‘Tired. Very very tired.’
Why didn’t they say, ‘Really? Well we’d better go, then, and leave you in peace’ in perfect and thoughtful unison?
‘It’s no use being tired of life unless you can think of something to put in its place,’ said Prentice.
‘What?’ asked Alan.
‘It’s a joke from my act. Em! The divine and sexy Em come to enchant us!’
Em didn’t look divine or sexy or enchanting. She looked tired and worried and pale. It was one of her heavy days.
‘Oh, no, Mum, you’ve brought pink lilies as well,’ she said. ‘Oh, Dad, how are you?’
She kissed Nicola very carefully.
Alan took the two lots of lilies out to get the nurse to put them into vases. Em peered at the drips and their attached indicators, but couldn’t make any sense of them. Prentice stared at Em with naked lust.
‘Carl had an interview, Dad,’ said Em. ‘Only round the corner really, so I thought I’d pop in. I can’t stay long.’
Good! Good! Love you, Em, adore you actually, but … good! Good! Go! Take them with you!
‘He’s waiting in a pub round the corner.’
Em glared at Prentice as she said this.
‘You could have brought him,’ said Nicola.
‘No. He can’t take hospitals.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Oh, not that he’s a wimp or anything.’ She was clearly very sensitive about Carl.
‘He just chooses … to stay in the pub. Very sensible of him.’ Nicola had been going to say, ‘He just chooses only to confront those bits of existence that he likes’ but she pulled back from the brink. She was just too exhausted to bother to be sarcastic.
‘Anyway, it’s hardly the best moment for you to meet him for the first time.’
‘Absolutely not – but I’m glad you came,’ said Nicola.
She reached out and clasped Em’s hand.
‘The only thing I find difficult is what to call you, Dad. “Dad” seems a bit absurd now. I can’t call you “Mum”. I can’t call you “Other Mum” or “Mum Number Two”. I suppose the best is Nicola, but that sounds a bit distant.’
‘I think “Nicola” probably is the best,’ said Nicola, drowsily. She closed her eyes. She didn’t think she’d have lost her talent for pretending to be asleep.
Alan returned with two vases of pink lilies. ‘You’d have thought I’d asked her to make a matchstick model of the Taj Mahal,’ he said. ‘Her body bristled with indignation. Ah, she’s asleep.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Prentice. ‘I am going to invite you two to see my act at the Komedy Klub. How does that strike you?’
‘I have Carl waiting,’ said Em.
‘Bring him too. The more the merrier.’
‘I’m not sure that Carl will appreciate your humour. He’s American.’
What difference will that make? thought Nicola behind her closed eyes. Nobody appreciates your humour.
‘Do you appear under a nom de plume?’ asked Em.
‘You don’t appear under a nom de plume,’ said Prentice scornfully. ‘You write under a nom de plume. But, yes, I do have a stage name. It’s Prentice Prentice.’
‘But I thought that your real name was Prentice Prentice,’ said Alan.
‘It is, but on stage it’s the other way round. Prentice becomes Prentice and Prentice becomes Prentice.’
&n
bsp; ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It’s a joke.’
‘I’m not sure I’ll appreciate your act either,’ said Em.
‘Well, maybe not. I think what you need to know is that it’s not necessarily funny. Some acts aren’t funny because they haven’t reached the level of comedy. Mine isn’t funny because it’s gone through comedy to the beyond.’
Nicola tried not to listen, but she couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help being irritated. Good God, she’d had major surgery of an incredibly delicate and painful nature, and they were talking as if she wasn’t there.
‘Thank you so much for ignoring me,’ she said with a flash of the old Nick sarcasm. ‘Very thoughtful, because I’m exhausted.’
‘Oh, Dad, we thought you were asleep,’ said Em.
‘Let’s go and get that curry,’ said Prentice.
‘What curry?’ asked Alan.
‘The curry you’re all going to buy me in exchange for free tickets for my act,’ said Prentice, ‘and then we must go to my digs and get my dog.’
‘You have a dog?’
‘He comes on in my act, every time I say I’m barking mad.’
Nicola’s eyes pleaded with Alan and Em. Go. Buy him a curry. Anything, but get him out of here.
The three of them moved towards the door. Oh, please, please, don’t stop, don’t turn round, urged Nicola silently. Please!
Em stopped! She turned! She was coming towards the bed.
‘I love you,’ she said, bending down and kissing Nicola again. ‘I’d love you whatever sex you were, because you’re you.’
Then she was gone. They were all gone. She heard Prentice’s diminishing voice.
‘A word of warning about my dog. I’m not kind to him. His name is Spot, but the only name he answers to is Fuck Off. I’m sure he thinks he’s Russian.’
She breathed a great sigh of …
He was back. He had returned, gasping for breath, heaving massively.
‘Had to come back,’ he said. ‘Had to say “sorry”.’
‘What for?’ asked Nicola, wearily and warily.
‘You lying there, trapped, in agony, and the three of us discussing the wonderful evening we’re going to have. Most inconsiderate.’
When Prentice had gone – and it was several minutes before she allowed herself to really believe that he had gone – Nicola thought about the words Em had spoken.
‘I love you. I’d love you whatever sex you were, because you’re you.’
It never ceased to surprise her that we humans, ridiculous creatures that we are, cry buckets when we’re particularly happy. She was still crying when The Starchy One arrived to take her blood pressure. That stopped her tears in their tracks.
Nicola next awoke in the middle of the night. The anaesthetic seemed to have worn off.
So this was it. She was Nicola. But for two years she had pretended to be Nicola. What was more real about this?
She had a vagina – but she was still the me she had been before she’d had a vagina. She thought that she must have half expected to wake up and feel completely different. Impossible. She had the same brain.
It doesn’t do to think about the brain. The brain wasn’t designed to think about itself. You end up thinking that you’re a series of chemical reactions, that there is no you, that you have no soul, that you cannot have anything that isn’t scientifically describable. What was her soul? Was it different now?
There were moments that night when she wondered if it had all been a huge mistake. All that agony, all that courage, and here she still was.
To think that she had thought that when she woke up she’d feel exhilarated.
Slowly the night sky lightened. The pain kidded her that it had gone, and then came back as bad as before and all the more unbearable for the respite. He’s a sneaky little chap, is pain.
She wanted to ring for the nurse, but she dreaded that it would be The Starchy One.
When at last a nurse came, joy of joys, she was different.
‘Hello, Nicola,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’m Pat.’
Nicola liked her immediately.
‘Welcome to the wonderful world of womanhood,’ she said.
Ah! thought Nicola inappropriately. That’s what you get when you go private. Alliteration.
She was moved, though, and again she wanted to cry.
Pat washed her as much as she could. She was incredibly gentle, but Nicola was still cut by shards of pain.
‘I wanted to spare you Mrs Mussolini,’ whispered Pat. ‘Don’t tell her I call her that. It’s our secret.’
Dear dear Pat. How you cheered Nicola up by giving her a shared secret. It made her feel human.
Mr McWhinnie breezed in at eleven.
‘Well, Nicola, how are you feeling?’ he asked in an urgent, low voice.
‘Not so bad,’ she said bravely.
‘The operation was a complete success,’ he said. ‘I’m very pleased with the way it went. I took great care over you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I don’t need thanking – it’s my job – but I do deserve, and need, proper answers. Come on. Nobody, after what you’ve had done to you, feels “not so bad”. How are you really feeling?’
‘Very, very sore. Moving is agony. Lying still is purgatory.’
‘It will never be worse than it is now, and it will pass, but slowly, I’m afraid. How do you feel … psychologically?’
‘Confused.’
He nodded sympathetically.
‘Depressed.’
He nodded solemnly.
‘Great sense of anti-climax.’
He nodded resignedly.
He was a versatile nodder.
‘Doctor, I don’t really feel … a woman. Am I a woman?’
‘It’s hardly the moment to debate the philosophy of it,’ he said. ‘You no longer have a penis or testes. You do not have female chromosomes. You do have a very nice vagina, though I say so as shouldn’t. You even have a very passable attempt at a clitoris.’
‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’
‘My pleasure. I wouldn’t specialise in this if I didn’t believe it worked, Ms Divot, I can assure you. Relax. Help your body to heal itself and I believe that you will eventually feel good about it all. But you’re going to have to be strong. This is only the beginning.’
‘I thought it would be the end.’
‘Every end necessitates another beginning. It never ends. It cannot end, except in death, and, we hope, not even then. That is the nature of life. You’ll be just fine, Nicola. Just fine.’
*
The next day, when Alan came in, Nicola asked if they had gone to the Komedy Klub.
‘We did, yes. We didn’t know how to get out of it.’
‘What was it like?’
‘Awful. Three-quarters empty, and not one laugh from start to finish.’
‘How did Prentice react?’
‘Smiled broadly and said we’d been a wonderful audience. Oh, and he sent his love. Said he’d always liked you, but now you were a woman – wow!’
‘Oh God.’
Gray telephoned to check that it would be all right for him to visit.
Nicola didn’t really want to see him. The last time, he had been lying naked on top of his bed with a Tottenham Hotspur away shirt round his pudenda. This was something that she didn’t feel well enough to comment on, but she wasn’t sure if it would be possible to ignore it. She had only had the operation five days ago. She hadn’t been allowed to get out of bed yet. She was weak.
She couldn’t hurt him, though, and it had been very considerate of him to phone.
She prepared herself carefully for his visit, so that she would be able to cope. She sensed that the visit was hugely important for their relationship. It was too soon – too soon – but that was life, it wasn’t a neatly packaged commodity.
She had been very moved by Em and she sensed that she was going to be very moved by Gray. I’ve been lucky in m
y children, she thought.
Her children! She felt surprised when she reflected that, despite her inadequacies as the male she never really was, she had managed to produce two children. Especially Gray. He was their little miracle, really. By that time their sex life was becoming very spasmodic, yet she vividly recalled the actual night when he was conceived as having been quite a passionate occasion. Alison had been exceptionally aroused and romantic and had said some wonderful things about him and her love for him, and they had risen to a rare joyous orgasm in a tide of words and compliments. Call me a sentimental fool if you must, she told herself in her hospital bed with the creased sheets and the crumbs, but Fm utterly convinced that it was that depth of positive emotion that enabled Alison to conceive.
She could see all this so much more clearly, now that she was no longer a man, as if she was looking down on it from the best seat in the house. She looked at Gray, on his one and only visit to the hospital, as if she had never seen him before. He took after his mother more than after her. In fact she could hardly see any of her in Gray at all. Perhaps, because of the level of emotion that his mother put into her love-making that night, in a sense Gray was more hers than hers, or, to put it another way, Nick had only been the conduit. Perhaps, though, it was an indication of a certain conceit in her that she’d never thought their gawky offspring to be very good-looking!
All this was flashing through her mind as they steered their way through the first shoals of their conversation. What did you have for lunch? What essays are you writing at the moment? How are Arsenal doing?
She shouldn’t have asked that, partly because Gray was scornful of her pathetic attempts to show an interest in football, but mainly because it made it difficult for her not to refer to the affair of the Tottenham Hotspur shirt. (Alan had explained that Arsenal and Tottenham were intense rivals, and that Gray, a keen Arsenal supporter, had managed to enjoy sexual pleasure while also inferring that the hated Tottenham were wankers, a joke possibly cleverer and certainly funnier than anything Prentice had ever managed.)
Well, she would have to refer to it now.
‘Er … Gray?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I barged into your room without knocking.’
‘It’s something everyone does sometimes, Dad.’
