CHAPTER 30
That was living, as Nana would say. How to sum up what I consider now as my first true holiday? I could list the climbs we did, or the peaks we crossed, or the silliness in boats on Derwentwater, or…it would be just that, a list, and while each of the items there brings me a memory, a smile, it remains a series of names and dates for anyone else.

Tessa and I spent a great deal of time talking, as the boys had hoped, and one day I got more of an insight into her nature, and by proxy that of my old passion April, than I anticipated. What struck me was the utter certainty she brought to the chats, the conviction. I thought back to Valerie’s question, and asked the same one, and to my total lack of surprise got the same answer: as soon as she knew there was a difference.

“That’s the point, Steve, they ask the wrong question, every time: when did you start feeling like a girl? I never did, I just always felt like me, and as soon as I realised that other girls were different…look, we used to go down to the beach, down at Studland, and little children never used to have costumes, just run around as nature intended, and I could see that some kids were like me and others had front bottoms as well as back ones, and as I got older I asked My mum why. They’re girls, she said, you’re a boy.

“Look, I’m sure there are lots like me, and they will all say the same things, but this is me, it’s who I am. I’ve been through the letters to Santa bit, I did all the ‘please God can I wake up tomorrow’ prayers, I’ve read the Jorgensen and Ashley stories over and over again, and nothing whatsoever changes. I tried….”

She was getting upset at that point, and I took her hand, me, a seventeen year old boy comforting a thirty-odd year old, well, woman.

“There’s a film I saw, called ‘I want what I want’, and it just spoke to me because it was my life, except that it didn’t work like that for me, not quite”

In the film, as Tessa told it, a young ‘man’ just like her gets caught in a dress by her parents after falling asleep, and after all the usual recriminations and visits to shrinks she leaves home, changes clothes in a public toilet, and starts a new life, finding a job and a boyfriend.

“It’s not as simple as all that, of course, but it was just about what I did, except I didn’t get that far. I packed up the few clothes I had harvested over the years, and all the money I had, and went up to London and changed in the toilet on the train. I started to walk around the shops, around Carnaby Street, looking to see if they wanted a shop girl, and all I got was ‘piss off, son’. I was twenty, I’d done my best with the make up and everything, but I’m too dark, and there’s only so much I can do with the beard.

“I was up there for three days, in a cheap hotel, and my money just evaporated, and then it was gone, and I’m in a twenty year old man’s body, in a dress and kitten heels, and too much make-up, and it’s never going to be any different….

“It’s awkward, you know? After the first cut, when you haven’t got deep enough, yet there’s still plenty of blood, so the blade gets slippery, and you have to cut again...

“I’d found an alley, and got behind some bins, but I didn’t realise it was the back of a café, and the kitchen staff came out to dump some rubbish and one of them stepped in my blood and, well, that was that. Ambulance, more psychiatrists, strapped down in the bed so I couldn’t open the cut again. I had a vicar telling me suicide is a sin, and a copper telling me it’s a crime, and I’d had enough, and I just said ‘what are you going to do, fucking hang me?’ “

She was crying now, her forehead furrowed with remembered pain.

“It was shame, Stevie, shame that got me the most. Shame that I had let down my parents, shame that I hadn’t managed to get something as simple as death right. I’d had this fantasy, you see, I’d move into life as the woman I am, and it would all be so simple, and once I had the cash I could go back to the family as myself, as Karen says, ta dah! Instead, they’ve got this useless excuse for a son bleeding into some London gutter and ‘showing them up’. That was the thing, the embarrassment I caused them, at the golf club, or the whist drive.”

There was anger there now. “It was all condemnation, and how I shamed them, and visits to head doctors who talked about fetishistic homosexuality, and back then, Steve, that was something that held the threat of a prison sentence, and I had a real urge to do the job properly, find a locked room or something, and my parents made me burn all my clothes in front of them…and then there was Roger, who was a lawyer, so they all thought he was so, so straight and sensible, and he offered to take me in while I had another go at University, well, polytechnic in the end.”

Tessa grinned at the memory. “If they only knew! Two nights after I moved in, there’s Simon at the door. Now I knew him as a friend of Roger’s, but this time, as soon as I shut the door behind him, the two of them are snogging! I mean, where are you supposed to look? This was another country, back then. In theory I could have been hanged for a suicide attempt, and those two would certainly have gone to gaol, but this….it was so natural. And then…then Roger just introduces me as his cousin Tessa, and Simon kisses my hand and…”

Now it was full sobs, and it took a while, but she got the rest out.

“And that was the hardest part, you know, because suddenly I was me, I was Tessa in daily life, but every time I went out the door I had to be Tim. I got my degree, I did what I needed to do, and Roger took me on in his chambers. My parents were ecstatic, as their macho, mountaineering nephew had made a real man of me at last”

I couldn’t help it, looking at her in a fitted dress with a little bow at the back, her pink toenails poking out of her sandals, and I just started to laugh. She understood, and Nana found the two of us sat on the doorstep howling, and just handed us each a cuppa and left us alone.

I looked at Tessa. “You know, I never wanted any of this. This isn’t me, but it is me, and, well, I know that sounds stupid, but I just have to accept it. Couldn’t you just, you know, go on as best as you can as you are?”

“No. This goes, or I go. I used to think my suicide was due to stress, depression, all that nastiness n London, but it wasn’t. It was actually a perfectly calm decision. I can’t live a lie any more. It was Simon who showed me all the stories, of Christine, and April, and that’s what has kept me going. I’m not living just now, love, I’m working towards a life. That’s what I use to keep me alive, that at some point I can stop being a caterpillar.”

She chuckled. “That film I mentioned, they really took the easy way out in it, you know. They had the boy played by a woman, and a pretty one. Life isn’t like that, or at least mine isn’t”

Once again she was looking wistfully at me, and I knew all too well what she was seeing.

“Hey, we should get someone to work on that Heinlein brain transplant thing”

She looked puzzled. “Heinlein? Who’s that?”

Danes. Such poor, limited people.

So much of what Tessa said was the mirror of my life, but there was always that one glaring difference: she had been born, while I had been made. I had no belief in any god, none at all, and that was all she had to blame, but I had a man, very much mortal and very much guilty. All I had to do was find him.