by Liz Byrski
Indeed, how can they? But they do. I know my sister has vanished, has ceased. She will never come again.
In Little Women, Beth’s death is a ‘benignant angel – not a phantom full of dread’. Birds sing over her soul. In dying, ‘Beth was well at last.’ I hoped that becoming a man would heal my sister, that her metaphorical death would be that same benignant angel. That my new brother would be able to have conversations with people, would be able to work, would even find love. I hoped it would tweezer out the pain of the previous twenty-five years of being thought of as one thing, the wrong thing. That it might bandage up the deep wounds caused by thousands of thoughtless actions – the gifts of dresses and dolls and jewellery boxes from well-meaning relatives – and my own actions as a child in casting her as the ideal sister from a storybook, which was the exact opposite of who he wanted to be.
I wanted my brother to become someone who could smile occasionally, someone who would answer the telephone, someone who might venture outside into the sunshine. But that never happened. Instead he became more withdrawn, overcome with fears and phobias about dirt and illness, unable to eat, anorexic, declared mentally unable to work, alive only in the mechanical sense that his heart continues to beat and his brain stem allows him to perform the basic tasks of movement and breathing.
I’ve tried to do what I thought was right. I’ve put away the photos of my sister, I never speak about our childhood except in the vaguest possible terms, I tell everyone that I have two brothers and no sisters. On the rare occasions when I see him, I say hello and he nods at me. He doesn’t speak, ever.
I wonder at what he cannot say.
‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir states in The Second Sex and the thinker in me understands the notion that gender is socially and culturally ascribed, whereas sex relates to the anatomical body one is born with. But gender is one of the primary labels we attach to people. We immediately identify people as woman or man based on the way they look. Ideas of gender are assumed to shift and change over time as society and culture changes, but, regardless, one’s sex and one’s gender are thought by most people to be fixed and the same. If someone looks like a man, they are assumed to be a man both physically and categorically.
To change one’s gender – the M or F label they tick on a box on a form – and their sex – their physical body – requires medication, psychological assessments and staged surgery so that one’s anatomy remains, for a time, in a state of flux. In fact it often remains forever in a liminal space because the final stage of gender reassignment surgery is far too costly for most people, including my brother, to consider. But, as well as this, it requires a change of name on all documents validating one’s identity. It requires new clothing, new hairdos. It requires everybody who knew what you once were to remember to use the pronoun ‘he’ rather than the pronoun ‘she’ and, after nearly thirty years, this is a hard habit to break.
How many times have I heard relatives, my parents, myself in the first few months, accidentally say ‘she’. How it must have hurt my brother each time we did. But that is just one of the small shifts required. The bigger shift is to realise how hard it is for someone to change gender and sex, but still have the world treat them the same as anybody else.
If one is not born a woman, but then becomes a woman, that is the way our gendered society largely expects one will stay. These expectations have been so damaging to my already fragile brother. I imagine he sees how easily other categories in our lives can be changed – I shifted from marketer to writer, from daughter to mother – and these changes were celebrated, and even expected as part of my growing up. I announced the new label I was to give myself – ‘I’m going to be a mum!’ – we raised our glasses, moved on and no further explanations were required, the evidence of my children being enough to testify to my new state of being. But, fifteen years ago, nobody popped a champagne bottle to salute my brother’s more courageous and more significant transformation.
In fact, for some people, my brother’s decision to inhabit one box instead of another still has the dark cloak of a secret about it. Recently, my mum gave me some of the books we used to have as children, for me to pass on to my children. She opened the front cover of one, pointed to a white streak of liquid paper on the title page and said, ‘I whited out her name.’ (It was a book that had been my sister’s.) My mum continued, ‘Because you wouldn’t be able to explain to your kids who this person was.’
In one sense, my mother was right. But she meant it in a different way. She meant that explaining to my children that their uncle used to be a girl would be an impossible thing. Why? Kids are probably the best people to tell. They accept that almost anything is possible, even fairies.
My mother was right only in the sense that, for me, the fact I am still holding on to the sister I used to have is the one thing I cannot say.
I’m aware of how I must sound. As if I’m complaining, when it’s my brother who has had so much more to bear. It’s why I go along with the pretence that my whole childhood is an invention, a dream of weekend games, a story of lying beneath a purple quilt in a shared bedroom and having whispered conversations as we read the same Enid Blytons one after the other, about what boarding school might be like.
My games were played, my conversations were had with a ghost-girl who still haunts me. My sister is a secret I must keep close, hidden in my heart. It is the only place where I can stop pretending, where I can remember that once, long ago, my sister really did exist.
And then comes a breakthrough. My brother has moved back in with my parents for a short time. There is an issue to do with my parents’ unwillingness to explain to some of their old friends the new state of things with my brother. Of course, it isn’t a new state given it’s been this way for fifteen years but my parents are still unable to talk about it.
I’m shocked. Driven by this, I reach out to my brother again and we begin an email correspondence. He asks what books my children would like for Christmas. I try to make sure he doesn’t rush into a rental tenancy that isn’t right for him. It is like thin ice, this correspondence. Shards of our renewed relationship might break off at any moment. But there is also beauty reflected there, in the possibility of the ice strengthening, of not breaking, of a new world of love forming.
Maiden Aunts – Liz Byrski
It’s on a cold grey afternoon, a couple of weeks before Christmas 1949, that I first meet the maiden aunts. I’m five years old and grumpy after the long drive from Surrey to the East End of London through the Blackwall Tunnel; Dad behind the wheel, Mum alongside him and me whining in the back. Dad pulls up outside a two-storey terraced house in Hackney, and I see a woman’s face looking out between the lace curtains.
‘Aunt Lil’s spotted us,’ Dad says. He turns to me. ‘Best behaviour now,’ he says as the woman appears at the front door. ‘Can you remember their names?’
I recite the names: Olive, Violet, Gladys and Lily. I’ve heard them often enough, always in this order, listed by my parents and their sister-in-law, my paternal grandmother. Until today I have only known one real aunt and one pretend one, and now I am getting a job lot of four. They are Dad’s aunts really, my great-aunts, but in my very limited experience aunts mean presents and so grumpiness turns to anticipation.
Aunt Lil is short and thickset with fuzzy reddish hair flecked with grey. She is dressed entirely in black, with a white lace collar, and wears round spectacles with metal frames. When she bends to pat me on the cheek I notice that there is ink on the first two fingers of her right hand.
‘Last time I saw you was at your christening,’ she says. ‘You were just a baby then.’ And she leads us in through the front door along a passage lined with pressed tin and painted in an ugly tobacco brown, through to a large room with French doors leading out to a neat patch of garden. There are comfy chairs, an upright piano, and yes – a huge aspidistra in a brass pot. From its perch in a cylindrical cage a large black minah bird glar
es at us with beady eyes. The round table is set for tea with fine china, plates of tiny triangular sandwiches, and a three-tier cake stand loaded with scones and cakes.
Standing with her back to the fireplace is Aunt Gladys, wearing a dress in maroon crepe and a handsome string of pearls. She is a couple of years older than Lily and they are so much alike that they could be taken for twins. Beside her is Olive, the eldest of the four, shorter than her two younger sisters, and shaped like a cottage loaf, with iron grey hair twisted in to a tight bun on top of her head. She is wearing a dull brown dress covered in a floral wraparound overall. I am drawn to her immediately as she looks very much like Mrs Smith who comes to clean for Mum, and who, despite the fact that sweets are still on ration, always carries a supply of toffees in her overall pocket.
Memory is such a fickle beast; it scatters the past with its broken glass, a mix of sharp and dazzling shards and misty powdered fragments. Snatches of that afternoon are clear as yesterday, the rest just vague impressions: the trio of aunts, the piano, the ugly aspidistra and the scary minah with its raucous squawks. I can almost feel the tension – the awkwardness of relatives who rarely see each other and have little or nothing in common. I am hugged and kissed and Olive gives me a peppermint lump. I am soon bored; there is too much talking and not enough action. The minah glares at me and I glare back, but my thoughts are with the cakes, the box of chocolates on the piano, and those tantalising presents in the corner.
There are questions about Vi, the fourth aunt, and whether or not she will make an appearance. I have just completed my first term at a Catholic convent and am enchanted by the story of the Virgin Mary appearing to St Bernadette of Lourdes. Will Aunt Vi’s appearance be similar – a vision out of nowhere, hands clasping a rosary? Will I too become a saint when I have seen her?
Eventually Olive gets up. ‘I’ll make the tea,’ she says heading for the kitchen, but stops at the foot of the stairs.
‘Vi,’ she calls, ‘Vi, they’re here, I’m making the tea, are you coming down?’
There is the sound of movement upstairs, a chair moving, footsteps, a door opens with a creak and a shadowy figure appears on the landing, and descends the first few steps. Not the Virgin Mary, but a tall woman in a purple satin nightdress, a matching purple dressing gown slipping off her bony white shoulders. She pauses, surveying her audience; her timing is perfect, her expression haughty. Silver hair falls in lustrous loose waves to her shoulder blades. In one hand she trails a lavender swan’s-down boa, in the other holds a lighted cigarette in a long black holder. Her gaze settles on me.
‘Is that really little Elizabeth?’ she says. ‘My goodness how you’ve grown! I suppose you don’t remember me, I’m your Aunty Vi.’
I am mesmerised. She doesn’t look like the Virgin or a saint, but she is, without doubt, the most exotic creature I’ve ever seen. As I wait for her to move I can barely breathe, and strangely now, even as I write this, I find I am holding my breath. Vi completes her entrance, gliding barefoot into the room, smelling of violets, pecking my parents on the cheek and patting me on the head as we take our seats at the table. I suppose we ate tea, and I know we opened presents but even these do not claim my full attention. I have eyes only for Aunty Vi, who smokes one cigarette after another, sighs a lot and barely speaks. Everything else is a violet scented blur until hours later, as we are about to leave, Vi gets up and beckons me to follow her.
‘Come with me, I have a special present for you,’ she says. And I follow her up the stairs where she stops halfway to blow air kisses to Mum and Dad. ‘Take care, my dears. I won’t be coming down again.’
The house itself is somewhat austere, the decor in dull or dark colours; it is excessively neat, well organised, well polished, spotlessly clean, kept as though in readiness for an unexpected but important visitor. But Vi’s room is Aladdin’s cave; fringed lamps cast a soft light on the purple brocade chairs, the embroidered cushions, on the purple satin bedspread, and purple velvet curtains, trimmed with gold fringe. There are piles of books with tattered covers, clothes scattered across the bed and on the floor, as though their owner had just tried on and discarded a complete wardrobe, and there is a shelf of foreign dolls in national costumes. I already own two like these, one bought for me during a holiday in France last year, another in Spanish national dress, sent by a friend of Mum’s who lives in Barcelona. I make for that corner of the room and stand on tiptoe to look at them, reach up to touch them. Will my present be a doll like these?
‘Look,’ Vi says, drawing me over to the window. ‘It’s starting to snow.’ And we stand there in silence, Vi still smoking, watching the first few flakes dancing on the wind against the background of the darkening sky. There is a call from below; Mum and Dad are by the front door waiting to leave.
‘I want you to have this,’ Vi says, turning away from the window to give me a bundle wrapped in calico. ‘He was very special to me, so make sure you look after him. Don’t unwrap him until your daddy drives in to the tunnel.’ She kisses me on both cheeks. ‘Run along then,’ she says. ‘Have a lovely Christmas and I’ll see you next year when you will be six.’
‘So what did Aunty Vi give you?’ Mum asks when we get to the end of the street.
I hug the bundle to my chest. ‘I’m not allowed to open it until we get into the Blackwall Tunnel,’ I say, rocking back and forth with impatience. I loathe the great dark entrance to the tunnel, but now I can’t wait to get there. As we pass through the gatehouse, Mum turns in her seat to watch as I unroll the calico wrapping.
‘Oh my God, Len, it’s a dead bird! Vi’s given her a dead bird.’
It is indeed a dead bird, a very large, evil-looking, stuffed parrot, dusty but intact. A parrot with amazingly realistic glass eyes and real claws, mounted on a wooden plinth, with a small metal plaque engraved with ‘Hamish 1937–1943’. Hamish smells of the same violet scent as Aunty Vi. I adore him. Mum hates him with a passion, especially when he is given pride of place in my bedroom alongside the foreign dolls.
I long for our next visit, dream of being allowed back into Vi’s purple room of treasures, about the possibilities of another special present: a doll perhaps, the tambourine hanging on the wall, maybe even the zebra-skin rug? The visit comes, months – almost a year – later, and I am immune to the kindness and generosity of the other aunts, waiting only for Vi’s second coming. But this time Vi is ‘resting’, just as she is on the next visit, and the next. There is talk about her rarely appearing these days, about how she wants all her meals upstairs, about what horrors may be hidden in that room now that Aunt Olive is no longer allowed to clean it.
Vi’s non-appearance was a huge disappointment on these visits. I grew angry and resentful. She appeared only once more, about three years later. The same stagey entrance, the purple nightwear, the cigarette in the same holder and this time a bunch of purple artificial violets pinned into her hair. I was enthralled but determined to punish her for her absence and pretended to ignore her, but she barely noticed me, and when she did she couldn’t remember my name. I was not invited to her room, there was no special present, only the perfectly nice and appropriate ones from Olive, Gladys and Lily.
Years passed and I began to rail at the prospect of the long drive to London and back, the dull conversation, and having to be on my best behaviour. Even the possibility of an appearance by Vi failed to attract me. She had singled me out, made me believe I was special, then cast me aside. I usually enjoyed the company of elderly people; I was an only child living a distance away from school friends, so spent long periods with my parents and grandparents and their friends. They were all lively people who liked a party; many had travelled widely or lived and worked abroad, there were dinner parties and dances, and they were frequently heading off to London for formal dinners or the theatre. They danced and drank, and sang songs from the latest musicals, the men smoked cigars and wore dinner jackets, the women were frequently dressed to the nines in long evening dresses with matching elbo
w-length gloves with tiny buttons at the wrist. A lot of gin and champagne was consumed. I wanted to be like those old people, but I was scornful of the stuffy old maiden aunts, their anachronistic decor – the aspidistra, the minah bird, the piano that was never played. In my teens I rolled my eyes at the memory of Vi and the eccentricity of that chaotic, overcrowded purple room. We were a somewhat fractured family, my parents rarely mixing with other relatives, and they did not press me when I said I didn’t want to trek up to London to see the aunts.
Some years later, long after I had moved out of home and was married with my first child, Mum asked me to go through the things I had left in my old room. Dad was going to paint it and turn it into a study. There were clothes, and old exercise books, some framed photographs, ancient toys and ornaments, various craft projects that I had started and abandoned, and Hamish, still wrapped in his original calico. I unwrapped him for a last look, and handed him over to Mum for the church jumble sale.
‘Poor old Vi,’ she said, packing him into a box with my other cast-offs. ‘Oh well, they’re all gone now, the maiden aunts.’
‘All of them? I thought Vi was still alive.’
She shook her head. ‘Good Lord, no. Vi’s been dead for years. Don’t you remember, when you were in Paris, we wrote and told you.’
What happened to that letter? Was it lost in the post, or was I so caught up in the excitement of living and working in Paris, of falling in love in a café on the Boulevard Haussmann, and walking hand in hand along the banks of the Seine that I simply didn’t read it?
