by Fay Weldon
The She Devil more or less apologised saying she had done the best she could within the limits of her own nature. Nicci said she supposed she could say the same about herself and now Tyler was a Tayla they might have an easier relationship. Would her mother please give him/her – Tayla – his/her mother’s best wishes for the final procedure? Madison and Mason, cautious, thanked their grandmother for her offer of jobs at the High Tower, but said they were already sorted for jobs.
Nicci asked if Bobbo had left her any money, and the She Devil, seeming a little surprised, said no, he’d died penniless and a dependent, mentioned that the IGP, who’d done the supporting, was a co-operative into which she’d paid all her own wealth. After that the meeting was a little cooler.
The cream meringues were excellent, the oyster patties superb. Luxuriette had been paid.
The Charity Commissioners would be arriving on the 3rd of January to examine the books but Valerie said there were no worries; she had everything under control. They had three whole months! The charity that was the co-operative that was the IGP was in thriving financial order. Cheques, postal orders and BACS payments were pouring in. All IGP members could rest assured that their money was safe. She was believed.
A little later I look at the screens, and what do I find in one of the committee rooms? Valerie come to ask Dr Simmins for a top up of Ritalin. In the days after the marriage Dr Simmins and Valerie seem to be getting on rather well.
Valerie: He says he doesn’t like being Mrs Valeria. He thinks people are laughing at him. But it’s such a nice name. I don’t see what’s so good about being called Patchett. It’s so sort of anyone’s.
Dr Simmins: It was his grandfather Bobbo’s name and he honours him.
Valerie: Well, he’s the only one who does.
Dr Simmins: He’ll feel much more relaxed about everything after the final op: more amenable. Passing post-wedding doubts are pretty normal. And poor girl, she’ll be having pre-op nerves.
Valerie: Not that I’ve noticed And I love her to bits and I still can’t orgasm with him. Do you think that’s going to get better? Is it the penetration that puts me off?
This is getting far too personal. But what does one expect if one eavesdrops? Bugger Momus. Anyway, Dr Simmins says she hopes so after all this, and perhaps it is that Valerie’s still feeling guilty about poor Leda. Valerie says she’s never felt guilty in her life and she’s totally given up Leda. Dr Simmins hopes she isn’t lying. Valerie is now Dr Simmins’ patient: the latter ups the lithium to even out her bipolar swings, and the Ritalin to counteract her depression.
When procedure day, the 6th of October, dawns bright and fair, I watch as Leda drives the Iron Maiden out on to the London Road. Tayla, Dr Simmins and Valerie are in the back. Of all of them Tayla seems the most relaxed. She’s wearing the pretty red-flowered dress again. Five hours later they come back but without Tayla. From their faces I can tell that the operation has gone well.
On the 8th an ambulance brings Tayla back. She’s a little pale but rejects the offered wheelchair, and walks on through Security to cheers from a gathered crowd. The She Devil is there and applauds politely. Tayla goes through to the canteen, takes up her guitar and sings ‘She’s a Woman’ by the Beatles. She finishes. Valerie goes up to her and says:
‘Wife.’
‘Husband,’ says Tayla.
They embrace. Cheers all round. The She Devil goes to her room. I can’t see the expression in her face – which is probably just as well.
Two weeks later I look in to Dr Simmins’ surgery and Valerie is there and she is crying. I almost turn off the sound out of respect, because I think I already know why: M to F has made no difference. Dr Simmins is writing out another prescription. Perhaps she fears suicide.
Tayla has been spending too much of his time on his computer with a headset on playing noisy and violent virtual reality games. I actually thought I had a glimpse of nasty old Bobbo staring in the Lantern Room window – perhaps he is still around after all, trying to stir up the old Adam in the new Eve? And using musical taste to do so! In which case double bugger bloody Momus! I just knew he was playing games with me, not allowing me the whole story. That transition did go suspiciously well. Not even any need for dilation – when the urge of the body simply to close up after a wound is so strong!
But no sooner was Bobbo there than he was gone. Just in a flash. Will the old dinosaur never give up? He’s so wily. Oh Momus, what have you done, with your gift for upsetting apple carts? I thought we were friends? I thought we were going for a happy ending?
But when I look in on Tayla in the Lantern Room myself, I feel comforted. She is wearing some kind of helmet and staring into a computer and looking so pretty and innocent. No harm done. It might have been my imagination. What they call a third-person action game, presumably, when you use avatars to do all the dirty work. I believe they can be addictive, and Tayla certainly seems intent. But I’m sure she has strength to resist the old Adam anyway.
And later, when I look in through Housekeeping’s window there are the three of them, the She Devil, Valerie and Tayla, all girls together, dressing up for the Widdershins Walk ceremony. Tayla is trying on a laurel wreath, and the She Devil is actually holding her hand, while she herself is having a fitting for the old red dressing gown, transformed with ermine and gold trimmings into a truly regal cape; Valerie looking on. All is well.
It’s all so exhausting for me – running a successful internet business was nothing compared to this. But then work was always a piece of cake compared to friends and family. I doze right through the Christmas season and wake up with bells ringing in the New Year, at least I think that’s what it is: the ragged sound is overtaken by the noise of the wind.
Don’t ask me how I hear it, having no actual ears, but I just know, as I know what I see without actual eyes. Ask Momus, whose press-ganged servant I am; his reporter, some kind of unreliable cosmic, comic journalist. Why me, I cry, why me? Because I spent those years with Ruth and then failed to keep in touch? Well, I did all right, didn’t I? Humble mental nurse makes good! I’m not a bit-part player in the She Devil’s life, any more than she’s a bit-part player in mine. I ask Momus – why should I deserve this? I have no choice but to trust you, but do you actually know?
Down there at the foot of the High Tower it’s mayhem. A dreadful dawn is breaking on New Year’s Day: the day of the Widdershins Walk. Stupid Valerie, so sharp she cut herself! Anyone could have told her it was unlucky: many did, actually.
They’d all been working down there through the night – the sound of voices, little piping squeaks from all the women, stentorian tones from the FTMs in Security, mixed with hammering and the clanking of scaffolding poles and everything lit by full moonlight.
A romantic scene is brought to a sudden end.
Faster than is possible a twisting tornado approaches over the sea from the horizon. It heads straight for the High Tower.
A banshee wind so strong, nothing like Mary’s gentle wooo-h, wooo-h, wooo-h: more like Momus himself, blasting away and laughing.
The Powers have been saving up their energies for this for months and it shows.
All goes dark.
The searchlights go on – at least they are ready and prepared, in spite of Valerie’s inefficiencies, thanks to Leda. Valerie was all froth and bubble. Leda was for real. Dark-coated shapes at the bottom of the High Tower move about on the rocks. They are trying to salvage aluminium tent poles, rescue torn awnings, hold down the podium for the speeches. The high tide is receding fast but that’s no great comfort: it’s probably drawing back only in order to return in tsunami-like form and overwhelm everything. The searchlights go off. The power has failed.
What were those flames running round the wooden walkway? Fire, in this weather? There’s been no lightning strike? Or arson? But there was no time for that. The elements seem determined to wipe the High Tower off the face of the earth. The emergency power goes on. Bless Leda again, ever forethought
ful!
I watch the great garage doors at the foot of the Castle Complex slowly open and the Iron Maiden ease out. In the front, revealed by the rapid swishes of the great central windscreen wiper, sit Valerie and Leda. It is Valerie for once who is driving. Leda sits beside her, beaming, in the passenger seat. Valerie, as ever, exudes brightness and confidence. They are running away, rats leaving a sinking ship. The New Year’s Widdershins Walk was obviously cancelled and the Charity Commissioners were due on the 3rd.
The honking, piercing yar-hoo, yar-hoo, yar-hoo of emergency vehicles is approaching.
Then the scene closes down on me. Fucking Momus again! He’s got his cliff-hanger, that vulgar bastard...
After The Ball Is Over, After The Break Of Morn, After The Dancers’ Leaving...
Though the rain had stopped, water still dripped in slow heavy drops through cracked windows onto the inner sills of the Lantern Room. An ominous peace had descended on land and sea. The sense that the weather was merely holding its horses for something worse was very strong.
In the High Tower the lights flickered: the reserve generators were struggling to keep up with demand. Ms Bradshap’s store of emergency candles had been ransacked. Ms Bradshap had broken an ankle when the walkway collapsed and been taken off with the others in the fleet of ambulances: fifteen injuries, but no fatalities.
At the foot of the High Tower all was quiet, ambulances and fire engines had left, guests had departed. A few girls from Security kept an eye on burned timbers, charred rocks and a fast retreating tide. Bobbo’s body had surfaced again, the stray arm reaching up to heaven once again, and had been removed to the cold store on the fire chief’s say so, to await collection by the local morgue in the morning. Dr Simmins had signed all appropriate forms without argument, upset as she must have been, thought the She Devil, at seeing the Iron Maiden escape before her very eyes.
Bobbo’s body was in surprisingly good condition: the fire chief observed that sand was a great absorber and filter of bacteria and pathogens, and could act as a preservative. Ms Octavia was even able to retrieve her shroud, and when the electricity came back on it would be laundered well, of course at the IGP’s cost, and replaced in her cupboard.
The She Devil had watched the great garage doors slide open and the Iron Maiden nudge forward into the drive, Leda in the passenger seat, animated by excitement and happiness: no longer glum, Valerie at last all hers. Leda’s resolution and perseverance had paid off. It had been hard for a moment to recognise her.
The She Devil wondered if the fires had been set on purpose and the lightning strikes had been pure coincidence. What Valerie would think, did a little arson matter? The ends justified the means. She had set the scene for her departure, used panic and confusion the better to get away with all her ill-gotten gains. It was in the nature of the High Tower to attract conspiracy rather than coincidence, and buildings, like people, had their own souls.
True, as Dr Simmins would warn, the old had to fight against paranoia, but even so it was clear enough that Valerie had chosen Leda as the more reliable partner, filled the 350-litre boot of the Mercedes to the brim with unbanked cheques and postal orders from the membership, set a fire and absconded, scarpered. There’d been no one to check that she’d actually banked them – all those unopened envelopes – and she was tempted and she gave in, true to her own nature if not the principles to which she pretended.
Good no doubt that Leda – older, wiser, sadder – had found happiness and completion with Valerie, or at least Valerie with Leda, and were off to South America or who knew where. Somewhere where names could be changed and new lives begun with such untraceable funds as they had purloined. Very Thelma and Louise.
The She Devil found herself amused and almost admiring, instead of angry. A case of the Stockholm Syndrome, of falling in love with one’s kidnapper?
But oh, the elegance! The chutzpah! The style! The timing!
Oh, Valerie Valeria!
The She Devil Comes To A Decision
The She Devil, Ruth Lady Patchett, finally divested of the sopping wet red velvet cloak and green victor’s wreath that she’d donned to go and help her women with the clearing up, but a damp red skirt still down her ankles, followed her granddaughter Tayla up the stone stairs to the Lantern Room, arthritic legs aching, eyes blurry from exhaustion. She wore the costume prepared for the Widdershins Walk that would never take place. She was their Queen, their leader.
She was weighed down by the leather suitcase with the chrome locks. She had been down to the Archive floor to retrieve it and found it open. Obviously some cash missing, but more than enough was left. Valerie had at least had the grace to leave the suitcase behind.
It was the same suitcase she had carried when sent off to boarding school all those years ago. She’d been seven. She could scarcely carry it then and she could scarcely carry it now. Then it had contained the few light belongings of an unhappy little schoolgirl, now it held stacks of £50 banknotes, bonds, the deeds of properties bought forty years ago – what had once been reckoned in thousands would now be reckoned in millions and even a diamond necklace, all held in Bobbo’s safe for decades, in trust, stolen by little Elsie Flower way back then and retrieved lately by a very pregnant Samantha Travers.
Poor Bobbo, thought the She Devil. No wonder he’d gone on waving his fist and pinching bottoms from the grave. Ten years in prison and all her fault. But she’d been so angry!
Tayla, ever genial, relieved the She Devil of her burden and leapt ahead undaunted up the stairs on good, strong, long legs, female enough, if perhaps a little muscly round the calves. The ballet flats seemed a good size 10, and did not flatter. Well, if you lived on the ninth floor with no elevator from the third, a girl’s passion for drag-queen heels might well get discouraged.
Once in the Lantern Room Tayla went immediately to her desk and switched on her desktop PC. The She Devil sank down onto the antique white velvet sofa, which always seemed to her vaguely familiar, though she could no longer remember why, to recover and catch her breath. The suitcase stood between them.
‘I need to talk to you, Tayla,’ she said. ‘Valerie has gone, and many things have changed rather quickly.’
‘That’s one way of putting it!’ said Tayla, in the voice that was still Tyler’s. She looked longingly at her screen as the computer booted up, then back at her grandmother. ‘Okay. I’ll pay attention.’
‘I am going to retire,’ said the She Devil. ‘And what will happen to the IGP then? How will you manage now Valerie has gone?’
‘I’ll manage,’ Tayla said. ‘Bunch of old ladies. It hasn’t been too difficult so far. Val sorted everything out financially. She told me so before she left with her diesel dyke.’
So they’d all three of them worked it out between them, the She Devil realised. That was a turn up for the books. To hell with it. Good for them.
‘And I have you to advise me,’ Tayla added, prudently.
‘But I’m going to die,’ said the She Devil. ‘What then?’
‘Not for a long time, Grandma,’ said Tayla, piously. ‘There’s life in the old girl yet. Let’s worry about that when it happens.’
The She Devil clicked the chrome locks of the suitcase, held open the lid and Tayla’s lovely black-fringed blue eyes widened.
‘This will be all yours when I die,’ said the She Devil. ‘There’s rather a lot of it. The IGP has my money, but this is your grandfather’s. What will you do with it? Bail the IGP out, because it will need a lot of bailing, no matter what Valerie told you? Or what?’
Tayla thought for a moment, eyes darting to and fro, finally speaking.
‘If it goes to me I’d better carry on in your footsteps,’ Tayla said in his man’s voice. ‘You were the first Lady of the High Tower and I will become the second. I will carry on in your footsteps.’
It was what the She Devil wanted to hear, but she knew better than to trust a grandchild to speak the truth when it came to matters of inheritance. It m
ight be true but it might not.
The She Devil asked Tayla if she minded if her old Grandma put her feet up and had a little rest. Tayla said fine, go ahead, did the She Devil mind if she, Tayla, went back to her MMO game?
‘MMO?’ enquired Lady Patchett.
‘Massively Multiplayer Online,’ replied Tayla. Tayla’s voice was pleasant enough – at least tenor not baritone – the voice of a young man with an amiable disposition who saw no need to bark, control or intimidate, but still an octave lower than a girl’s would be. The She Devil said of course she did not mind, and Tayla slipped a helmet on to her pretty head which effectively removed her from the outside world. Odd that, to look at, Tyler had seemed so Bronze God like and awesomely handsome, and now Tayla was merely pretty.
But the hands that put the helmet on were strong and competent. The helmet curved down round Tayla’s Adam’s apple – which Tyler had decided when she was still a he to keep intact – making it more pronounced and wobbling when she spoke. The MMOG she was playing, according to its box, was Slaves of Blood and Savagery and in smaller font below: See girls struggle! See the blood flow!! Have a laugh!!! Tyler’s choice, not Tayla’s?
The She Devil decided she could not call him Tayla any more. He was Tyler and that was that. Testosterone would always win the battle over oestrogen, male progeniture over mitochondrial succession. Play about with the genitals as you might, change the hormones to suit a new society – the old Adam would always rise again.
The She Devil sank down upon the white sofa – these days thought was enough to exhaust her – and contemplated past and future.
With Valerie Valeria’s departure, it seemed to the She Devil, a kind of miasma was clearing from her eyes. Valerie had managed to convince her she was old and worn out, fit to die, and the sooner the better. But she could see herself clearly now. She was worth something. She had achieved something. She had spent her early years struggling to make things fair between pretty women and plain women, but it hadn’t worked, so she’d turned her attention to the prosaic – equality of pay and opportunity – and lo! the IGP was born! That was good. Valerie, seeking to stand on the She Devil’s shoulders, fiddling about with body and soul, had sought justice by turning men into women, only to be thwarted by greed and her own base desires. Which was not good. The She Devil wished she wasn’t so old.
