CHAPTER 7
September came, and the new school year was there in wait for me. I was actually impatient, because despite my most careful inspection, the drugs Maman had secured for me did not appear to be doing anything at all. What had worked, or was at least beginning to, was the careful attention she had paid to those few hairs that were starting to appear on my face.

Tweezers are painful, but I had not yet started to properly grow a beard, and I had always seen shaving as some sort of admission to masculinity. Having facial hair was one stigma of my unwanted male body; shaving it off would have been an act of acceptance. A few wisps of hair; many women of a certain age had more than that, and Mme Blanchard had a large mole on her face from which sprang three very long hairs.

The changing of my name had gone without incident, and Maman’s gentleman friend had turned out to know the Head of the new school, and words had been shared about me.

School. Not really, a college, a place for real study and not for incarceration of the unwilling. Surely there would be better, wiser people there? I stood by the bus stop on a warm morning that first day, and I was in that Summer dress we had bought together on what felt like the last day of a life, the first of another. Underwear…sandals that showed my toes, and toes that bore fresh, bright splashes of coloured varnish. A little more colour around my eyes, and the weight of books in the satchel I bore across my body, the strap angled carefully to avoid constricting my ‘breast’. I was wearing a skirt because it allowed me to cover up that little oddity down there, as I had tried all those contortions we had read of, and it just hurt too much to endure for a whole day. I was in my own little world of delight, when a small voice spoke from behind me.

“Hello, are you going to the Jean Monnet?”

I turned to see a tiny girl, clearly no child from the shape of her chest but no taller than the middle of my own.

“Yes, we have only just moved here, so this will be my first day. I call myself Sophie”

I thought of how the English say that, that their name is a particular thing, and then realised that it wasn’t just myself that called me by that name, but my family, and soon everybody that would come to know me. The girl smiled, good teeth in an olive face surrounded by shining black hair that fell below her shoulders.

“Héloise. With an ‘H’. I have seen you around, with---your brother? The policeman?”

“Yes, Roland. He is with the PAF now”

She nodded. “He works with my Papa. Do you have a boyfriend yet?”

Oh dear. Then again, what better compliment could she pay me? She saw me as a girl, clearly, and that was all I needed, all I had ever wanted since childhood, and there it was, handed to me on a late Summer morning at a provincial bus stop. I decided that even if I ended up hating this girl, I loved her at that precise moment. I still felt myself blush, however.

“Er, no, not yet. I didn’t really like the boys at my old place, they were too rough”

And vicious, and violent, and hatefilled. She was smiling, though, unlike them, who had only ever sneered.

“Plenty of time, then, for you to begin here. This is the time when boys become men, rather than children”

I laughed. “Maman says that men are children for the whole of their lives”

She laughed in return. “Yes, they are, but they can still be fun children!”

Her voice dropped. “And do things that children should not be allowed to, no?”

I had obviously never been included in the conversations that the boys of Caen would have, about girls, and women, and what the boys liked to do, or hoped to. The sole connection I had with them in those subjects was the regular and specific accusations I would receive; that I performed fellatio, or liked to be sodomised. Now, as the heat of the day slowly rose, I had a tiny, tiny girl including me in the same conversation, but from a differing viewpoint, and the realisation arose that I had never existed before now, that I had been a cipher. I had passed through the world as a ghost, as an archetype and necessary entity. Bullies need a victim, and that was me. They had never actually cared about who I was, merely what they assumed me to be. Now, finally, I was visible. I was seen, as myself. I called myself Sophie, and now so did she, and the Sophie I had always seen in myself was visible to all who had eyes.

Héloise dropped her voice even lower. “Is it true what they are saying? About…the doctor, and about your mother, and your mother and the doctor?”

She had a laugh that was full of joy, and I heard it properly the first time that day, as my second blush answered her question without the need for words.

“Shit, girl, you are like a traffic signal, and just in time for the bus, too”

The doors wheezed, and we were aboard, and of course it was necessary to take seats together as she called out to older friends and exchanged pieces of news and gossip. I was introduced around the swelling crowd, and one black girl, whose name I was given as Fatima, had an attack of giggling that she had to explain through the succeeding attack of hiccups.

“Always the same with Elle, she picks the tallest for her friends, and she looks even more like Thumbelina”

Once more, I found myself as a confidante, as she leant across the aisle of the bus and continued in a near-whisper.

“It is the same with boys, always the ones who are closer to two metres than to one and a half. I think she believes the old myth”

Stupidly, naively, I had to ask which old myth she meant. That brought a howl of laughter from the other girls, which brought home to me that we were all girls just then, no boys included in our circle. A blonde, Margot, a true Normande, had to explain.

“It is the correlation, Sophie. The bigger the feet, yes?”

I was still puzzled, and it showed, and---Elle?---sighed. “Tall boys have bigger feet, obviously”

I nodded. “Yes, of course”

“And the bigger the feet…the bigger the piece!”

The last four words were all but shouted by all the other girls as one, and to even more laughter I felt my face burning yet again. I was visible, I was being seen, at last, and what more proof did I need than to be included in a conversation about penis size? Fatima was still plotting, though.

“Elle, do not think that we haven’t seen you looking at Matthieu Gilet. What size feet does he have?”

Margot looked to left and right before whispering “I don’t know, but at least she is already at the right height for him!”

And so it went, as the bus carried us into Ouistreham, and the humour continued in an almost constant flow of vulgarity, and none of them seemed to realise that all I wanted to do, with my size 41 feet, was not just sever the connection, but sever the whole thing.

We disembarked outside the college, where a stream of other pupils was entering, and I was told when and where to meet the rest of the girls for the first break. Elle led me to the Head’s office, where I had to present my documents and receive the necessary information in return. The receptionist was almost a clone of Mme, Dr, Chinon. I handed over my identity card and she asked “Certificates?”

“They are to be sent by post”

By post, and in the name of a boy who no longer existed. She sighed and shook her head at my inefficiency. “Monsieur Montcalm wished to speak to you on arrival. Come this way”

She knocked once and then went straight in, without waiting for any response. I assumed that as she had been sitting like a vulture at her desk since the start of the day, she would know that he was alone. He turned out to be a big man, tending to fleshiness in the face, and without thinking I tried to see how big his feet were. Desist, Sophie. My pet vulture just said my full name and walked out, the door shutting behind her. He gestured to a chair, and I sat as elegantly as I could, placing my satchel on my lap. He stared at me for a minute or more of silence.

“So, you are this certain Serge Laplace I have been expecting”

Years later, I would read an English joke that said that virginity is a balloon: all it takes is one prick. That was how I felt just then, the one prick in question sitting across from me as my confidence vanished in scraps. Then he smiled.

“No, you are not what I expected. You are perhaps too tall, and your hands and your feet are a little on the large side, but no, you are no Serge. Welcome to our establishment, Mademoiselle. May I ask what is making you grin so?”

As soon as he had mentioned the size of my feet, the conversation on the bus had sprung to mind, and in my relief at his sudden switch in attitude, I was near collapse. I tried to explain, as politely as I could, but it was not a subject that was amenable to such subtlety. He just nodded.

“Sophie, you will find this a new place, a new life in ways other than the one which for you is most obvious. However, it is necessary that you remember that we are here to educate young men and women, and they remain exactly that throughout their time in our hands. We are what I think of as a starting school, and certainly not a finishing one. Here is your initial timetable, and a plan of the college. We have no compulsory programme of sports, so there will be no need for you to disrobe at any time. I will just ask that your condition remain a matter of privacy between the two of us”

He stood, to show me the door, and as he did so he made one last remark.

“Young men and women, Mademoiselle, remain just that, and their parents are ever the same. Good fortune smile on you, Sophie Laplace”