The Chrysalis

by Catherine Deveney

  I accompanied Raymond to all his appointments with Professor Mitchell. He had just begun his course of female hormones and was about to commence what was called his Real Life Experience: living as a woman for a year before surgery. It was a pre-requisite that was insisted upon before any operation could take place.

  I knew all about the physical process of surgery: the removal of the testes; the construction of a vagina using skin from the penis and scrotum. You must realise, Professor Mitchell said, - ‘realissse’ as it came out with his whistling‘s’ - that the removal of the erectile tissue and the testes is irreversssible. He spoke with a profound sense of calm that tended to eliminate panic, but my heart sank at the word ‘irreversible’. Raymond had beamed.

  “How many regret surgery?” I asked and Raymond glared at me.

  “A tiny percentage,” Professor Mitchell answered patiently.

  But then there came a time, not long before Raymond’s surgery was scheduled, when I wanted to see the Professor alone. I rang his secretary to ask if he would see me, and heard a muffled exchange at the other end of the line. A brief meeting was agreed for a week later.

  “Please sit down, Marianne,” said Professor Mitchell courteously, waiting until I was seated before taking his own place behind his desk. Given his job, it always amused me how conservative he looked, this little, grey-haired man with his light-coloured, machine washable trousers that rose at the ankles to reveal beige, diamond-patterned socks. He was not a man you could imagine discussing sex with when you first met him. Yet he never looked fazed by any conversation that took place in his consulting room. He would simply nod encouragingly no matter what was said, listening intently, waiting calmly for you to continue, so that you felt by the end of the appointment that you were the most normal person in the world, that your particular problem was nothing he had not heard before. Sometimes, I felt the most terrible urge to tell him about Patrice Moreau, just to see if finally he was shocked. I did not, of course. Survival depended on nobody knowing about Patrice.

  “How can I help?” he asked.

  “I wanted to talk to you about what will happen after Raymond’s surgery.”

  “Of course,” he said, nodding. “Though you must understand, Marianne, that there are limits to what I can discuss about Raymond without his permission.”

  “I know.”

  It was not the physical process that I needed to know about now. I did not want further information about the ways to reduce infection, the outside possibility of rectal damage, or the supreme importance of daily vaginal dilation with a stent to keep the newly formed opening from closing over. What I really wanted to know about was what would happen to our relationship.

  “Will he still love me?” I finally managed to blurt out.

  “Does he love you now?”

  I was taken aback by the question, wrongly interpreting it as a challenge, Professor Mitchell’s way of casting doubt on what I thought Raymond felt for me.

  “Yes. Yes he loves me,” I said, a little stiffly.

  Professor Mitchell nodded.

  He looked at me almost expectantly, like he was waiting for me to grasp some truth.

  “What is Raymond’s favourite colour, Marianne?”

  I shrugged. “Black… purple… perhaps….”

  “Black and purple will still be his favourite colours after surgery.”

  Professor Mitchell’s head tilted and he looked at me keenly.

  “You understand what I am saying, Marianne? His eyes held that combination of professional detachment and personal compassion that made him so effective at what he did.

  “I will not be operating on Raymond’s brain, switching on one emotion and turning off another. You ssss…ee?”

  The word whistled into the silence between us.

  “I will be operating on his body.”

  I looked at him hopefully and I suspect he understood what was in my mind because I sensed his slight unease then, a rush to clarify.

  “But that is not to say that certain things will not change,” he continued.

  “What things?”

  “You know, Marianne, that sexual identity and gender are different?”

  I nodded.

  “Post-surgery, Raymond’s gender will have changed. He will be female. But what his sexual orientation will be… that is not certain.”

  “It will be different to now?”

  “What would you say Raymond’s sexual orientation is now? Does he prefer men or women?”

  I knew it was not a question he knew the answer to. It was not a trap but a genuine query. There was no point in lying though it pained me to answer truthfully.

  “I think he is bisexual.”

  Professor Mitchell looked at me without judgment and yet something about his stare made me qualify that.

  “Though his preference,” I stuttered, “would almost certainly be for men.”

  “So how would you describe your sex life?”

  “Sporadic.”

  It was an overestimate that my pride insisted on. ‘Rare’ would have been more accurate.

  Professor Mitchell did not react in any way. His tie was closed right to the neck and his beige jumper sat neatly in a little fold over his stomach. He looked so conservative that I found it hard to imagine him spending his life operating on genitalia, discussing sex, and then going home to peel off his diamond-patterned socks for a grey-haired wife in a Marks and Spencer dress. But other people’s sex lives are always a surprise.

  “After surgery,” said Professor Mitchell, “patients sometimes find that their sexual orientation has changed.”

  “In what way?”

  “Some who have previously been attracted to women, continue to be attracted to women and live their lives as lesbians. But some find themselves more attracted to men after their transition. Another group again find themselves almost asexual.”

  In a way, that was my best hope. No potential rival to pull Raymond away from me.

  “How many?” I said. “How many are in each of these groups?”

  Professor Mitchell picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk and put on a pair of glasses to read.

  “This a recent study,” he said. “In a study of 3000 transwomen.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “It is a reasonable study.” He looked over the top of the glasses at me and then resumed. “In a study of 3000 transwomen, 23% described themselves after surgery as heterosexual, 31% as bisexual and 29% as lesbian. 7% described themselves as asexual.”

  “How many…” I said hesitantly, “how many will stay with the partner they were with before transition?” It was by far the more important question.

  “It is hard to be specific with all these figures, Marianne. They vary.” He took his glasses off and placed them, legs spread, on the desk.

  “Roughly.”

  “Eleven per cent.”

  Just over one in ten. The odds were not good.

  “I understand that this is as traumatic a time for you as for Raymond,” Professor Mitchell continued. “Let us get down to basics. What is it that you are worried about, Marianne? What are your biggest fears…sssss?”

  His voice was soothing, and I did not need much coaxing, but it was hard to put into words. I thought for a moment. Raymond and I were drawn together by so many things; inadequacy, hurt, rejection, insecurity, as well as love. And secrets. We were protection for each other’s secrets. Particularly Moreau. But if Raymond gained new confidence in who he was, then what need was there for me?

  “What do you fear, Marianne?” Professor Mitchell repeated gently.

  “That Raymond will be reborn and I will die.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Do you?”

  “You fear abandonment. It is a very common human fear.”

  I smiled weakly. There… I was normal.

  “Where do you think your abandonment fears stem from, Marianne?”

  I froze in my seat.

  “Your c
hildhood was quite normal?”

  “Relatively.”

  I lied.

  The memory flooded through me. A worn blue babygro wrapped in crushed, yellowing tissue, presented tentatively to me when I was 14 by what I came to understand was actually my adopted mother. I always wondered why it was blue, not pink. Strangely, it was that little detail that made me feel most rejected. Not the fact that I was enough of an inconvenience to be left, wrapped in a towel, on the doorstep of the council social work department. It was that I mattered so little that anything had been good enough to dress me in. Or perhaps that there had been another baby before me who had had clothes bought for them, who was being kept, while I was discarded. Isn’t it a foolishly trivial emotion to bother about colour in the face of something far more significant? Even I can see that. It’s especially ironic when you consider the significance that gender was later to assume in my life. But emotions are not logical.

  Professor Mitchell did not push.

  “You can tell me anything you want, Marianne.”

  I shook my head.

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I had fought to stamp that memory out all my life. I wasn’t about to dredge it up willingly. It was not who I was. I had done well for myself. I owned designer suits. Real pearls. I didn’t wear rubbish; I wore expensive to show I was worth something. And Raymond. I had Raymond. I had done well.

  “There are two things to remember, Marianne.”

  “Yes?”

  “Firstly, abandonment is not inevitable. And secondly it is ssss…survivable. Almost everything is ssss…survivable. The fear is almost always worse than the reality. Remember that, Marianne. Please. Remember that.”

  Raymond’s face was swollen like a boxer’s, his top lip thick and raised almost to his nose on one side. One eye was half-shut and blood trickled slowly from his nose, splashing every so often in thick, red splodges that were instantly lost in the autumnal coloured swirls of the silk dress he wore. The top of his nose was encrusted with the dark red of congealed blood that had been smeared, then dried, and the bruise on his left cheekbone was a livid purple under the pearlised glimmer of bronzer. I had never seen Raymond ugly but this was the closest I ever got: his whole face was blown out monstrously. Yet somehow, the ease with which his face had been changed only served to underline his delicacy. I screamed instantly when I opened the door, a cocktail of pain and anger rising in me because I could not bear to see him hurt. I hated whoever had laid a finger on him.

  “No, no, no!” I punched the wall, beside myself with rage. “Bastards!”

  The sense of pain that anyone could harm Raymond felt primal. He stood impassively on the step, trails of blood leaving caterpillar tracks of red slime on his face. The shock had left him speechless and I could see that he had lost more than mere blood.

  I put out a hand to touch him, but he shrank back before I made contact, and my hand hovered uncertainly, wanting to stroke and reassure him, but knowing I could not touch the bloated cushion of his face without causing him great pain.

  “Come inside,” I said and he moved past me obediently and sat down on the bottom step of the stairway in the hall. I knelt down in front of him, resting on my heels, and took his hands gently in mine.

  “What happened?”

  “A group of teenagers. I… some of them from the school, I think, I…” he stopped.

  “Tell me.”

  “I was in a bar with…with Sebastian. I saw one of them stare. I could tell he was trying to place me and then he realised who I was.”

  Raymond was no longer working at the school by this time. He had left in a ghastly whirl of publicity that had immediately involved a tabloid newspaper and a clutch of photographers who, for four days, had taken up almost permanent residence outside our home. They were a degenerate-looking little gaggle of unkempt wasters – a mixture of the unshaven and the badly shaven - who spent an inordinate amount of time handing round a hip flask. They would have been better served finding themselves a decent job. Occasionally they were joined by a reporter, a brittle-looking blonde woman with bags under her eyes like a bloodhound, who came to our door several times, rattling the letterbox in a way that frankly I considered an incitement to violence. Then a note fell onto the carpet assuring us she wanted to do a “sympathetic” piece and offering money for our story. Raymond was tempted just to get rid of them all, but I told him not to be ridiculous: he might just as well cosy up to a rattlesnake.

  The piece that eventually appeared juxtaposed a photograph of Raymond’s school with a picture of him trying to sneak out of the back of the house – and therefore looking furtive – accompanied by the uninspired headline, “Please Miss!”

  “These people have no imagination,” I had said to Raymond, who sat slumped in a chair, watching me with dead eyes. He had a similar look tonight, as if another little piece of himself had gone.

  “How many?” I asked.

  Raymond shrugged.

  “Six, seven. Not all of them hit me. Some were just…there.”

  “Cowards. Against two of you?”

  Raymond leant back slightly against the stair and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Sebastian,” I said. “What about Sebastian?”

  “What about him?”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He flashed me a look that seemed full of something shockingly akin to dislike.

  “Go on, Marianne.”

  “Go on what?”

  “Say, I told you so.”

  I was silent.

  Raymond glanced briefly at me as he stood up painfully.

  “Sebastian ran.”

  He turned and leant against the banister, wincing, then hauled himself slowly upstairs.

  “Shall I…?”

  But before I could finish, he shook his head.

  “I am fine. Thank you.”

  Between the two of us, I had always felt like I was the strong one, the half of the partnership that was in charge. There was something about Raymond that always gave in a

  little too easily. The part that was prone to say, oh well… It often worried me that people might think he did not have much backbone. But in that period of being a ‘trial woman’ he developed a strength I did not recognise and could only admire. He would not back down.

  “You have developed balls only to get them cut off,” I said.

  He was not amused.

  He got up as normal the day after the attack, though it was a Sunday and we did not need to be anywhere other than home. I tried not to watch him too obviously as he gingerly put some light makeup on over the bruises. His left eyes was bloodshot and his face was swollen, his top lip blown out to twice its normal size on the right hand side. It gave him a peculiar, lopsided look. He selected a soft, bottle green jersey dress from the closet, a colour that normally gave a beautiful greeny tinge to his grey eyes.

  I touched his back gently as he stood in front of the mirror.

  “Nice,” I said.

  He said nothing but smiled faintly at our joint reflection in the glass, and brought my hand round to cover it with his on his left shoulder. I thought that smile was resolute.

  I was wrong.

  It was the around the fifth month of his real life trial that I found him on the floor, bleeding with cuts on his wrists. I think the year-long wait for surgery simply felt interminable at that stage and he grew weary. In many ways, I would say that he was happier than he had ever been in those five months, more at peace, and yet the practicalities were so difficult: his inability to make a living and his subsequent financial reliance on me; the certain knowledge that nothing other than his gender identity would be solved by his forthcoming operation.

  He was frightened and weak when I found him but he begged me to simply bind up his wrists and tell nobody. To seek medical help would delay the surgery even longer while psychiatrists investigated his mental health. With some misgivings, I did as he wished. I tried to und
erstand, to suppress my anger with him. Why was I never enough?

  I remember that when I found him, he was lying on the dark blue carpet in the bedroom, rather than on top of the white bedding. It really hit home, that morbid little bit of etiquette. He might have been willing to put me through the trauma of finding his corpse, but at least he did not wish me to endure the inconvenience of having to get the blood stains out of the sheets.

  “Shhh. Shhh. Shhh, Marianne.”

  Zac’s voice is soothing me, his fingers stroking mine.

  Where am I? Dark furniture and white bedding, pink edged roses. I can still feel the gloopy stickiness of blood on my fingers.

  “It’s all right, Marianne. Shh.”

  “Is there blood? Is there blood on the bedding?”

  “No, no, everything is fine.”

  “On the ceiling then? Is the blood staining the ceiling? Look up!”

  “No Marianne. There is no blood, I promise. You must have been dreaming but it is all right now. I am here. Everything is fine.”

  Zac smiles at me, his face beginning to come into focus.

  “My goodness Marianne, what lurid dreams you must have been having,” he says softly, stroking my hair. “How loudly you were shouting!”

  “Was I?”

  “Never mind. Shall I take you through again to the sitting room and we will wait for Rae and Jasmine to come? They will be here soon.”

  Wait for Raymond. Yes. Let’s wait for Raymond. I have, after all, spent a lifetime waiting for Raymond.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Zac

  It was a relief to Zac that he was not asked outright. Rae simply took him to the wardrobe and asked him what he would like to wear. There was an assumption made that he had neither to explain nor falsely dispute. No doubt Marianne had spoken to him, Zac thought. His fingers trembled as he took out a plain, black beaded dress. Rae put his hand briefly over Zac’s to still the tremble, to say, without speaking, that he understood.

  “Good,” he said, removing his hand.