Alphabet (32 page)

‘Sorry,' he says, glancing over his shoulder then turning back to finish the packing as he speaks. ‘I want to make sure everything is ready for the morning. I'm off out! So you'll have some peace and quiet, then.' He zips up the bag, stows it next to the bed, crouches down, unzips it again. ‘I've been in this hospital for nine months and most of that time I've been the only one. Mind you,' he adds, standing up and turning to face Simon again, ‘I've had a lot of visitors.' He is smiling broadly and oblivious, to begin with, of the gape of his bathrobe, which reveals, worn beneath, a floral nightdress in pale blue, cream and black with lacy trim, and beneath that, the oddest thing of all, a plump, smooth suggestion of actual breasts.

‘What the fuck?' Simon forgets to whisper and finds tears of pain in his eyes.

‘Oh, hell,' says Vic, covering up, then holding the dressing gown tightly closed. ‘Look, that wasn't on purpose. It's purely for my own benefit . . . I just thought, on the last night . . . Well – it doesn't matter, really, does it?' he says, sitting on his bed. ‘If it's a problem for you, I'm sorry.'

Simon studies Vic, as if mesmerised. He sees that there's a delicate sheen of some kind of cream or oil applied to his face and neck, but also, a faint dark shadow around the jaw. The calves that poke out of the bottom of the bathrobe are, he realises, hairless. When Vic sits, Simon notices, he sits shoulders down, with his ankles crossed and his hands in his lap.

‘I can tell you now,' Vic says. ‘It really doesn't matter: I'm in the process of gender reassignment. A sex change. I'm becoming Charlotte.' He reaches for a couple of pots of pills that are next to his bed, shakes them. ‘Hormones,' he says. ‘You have to do two years of it, before they'll consider you for surgery. Then the waiting list, unless you can go private. Which is why I did what I did, which is beside the point now . . . I was well on the way when they got me, and what did they do? They put me in dispersal with about a hundred of the worst-looking men I've ever seen, and pulled the plug on my prescriptions! Even though the offence was related to what I'm going through, it took me two months to convince them all this was real and they had to do something about it. I got my medication back and my solicitor got me out of there and in here as a stop-gap. We've been fighting ever since for me to go in a woman's prison but everything is just so incredibly slow . . . All I can say at the end of nine months is I've made a start on it, and it'll be easier for the next person. Meanwhile this –' Vic gestures at their shared surroundings ‘– is the best they came up with. They did warn me to be discreet. I'm sorry,' he repeats, ‘if I've shocked you.'

Simon is still staring. There's something about Victor, sitting there fifteen feet away, the soft skin, the big bones, sturdy feet, the disproportionate beginnings of breasts – he is so utterly half and half. A person stranded, in their own body, between one thing and the next . . . It's a story you could tell, Simon thinks if you had someone to tell it to, but meanwhile he can't think what to say and Vic reaches again to the bedside shelf, tugs a tissue from a pastel-patterned cube sitting there. He hides his face in his hands, starts to cry.

‘Oh,' he says, ‘I could have done without this.' The crying makes his voice higher, but at the same time he uncrosses his legs and the whole of his posture regresses, subtly, to something not male as such, but certainly less womanly. Just desperate. It's like a group, but there's only the two of them.

‘Look,' Simon whispers, ‘you're out. You've made it.' Vic rubs his face with his hands, takes in a huge, shuddering breath.

‘Yes,' he says.‘ Good night, then, Simon.' He stands up, removes and folds his bathrobe, exposing the entirety of the nightdress, then opens his bed and climbs in.

‘Brian!' he shouts. ‘Lights off, please!'

A couple of minutes later the main lights are cut, and with them the annoying buzzing sound that pervades the place all day. The shapes of everything in the room are still visible, though, and it seems to Simon that he lies awake most of the night, amazed, sipping water from his mug and listening to Victor's breathing shift and change.

In the morning Simon is woken by the doctor, who doesn't look down his throat at all, but talks about getting him back in circulation and decides to halve the dose of pain relief: ‘Let's see what happens, eh?' Pretty obvious, Simon thinks, but perhaps there's something I'm missing here?

Vic's bed is empty. While he spoons in the strawberry-flavoured soupy stuff he gets to eat, Simon hears him, splashing about in the bathroom across the corridor, then chatting to Brian and an officer in the lobby. He is expecting some kind of show when Vic comes in to collect his bag, but nothing could have prepared him for what actually walks into the room: Vic is wearing tightly belted black jeans and a paisley blouse, his hair is up in a knot at the back, a few carefully arranged wisps hanging down at the sides. He has applied a pearlised lipstick, and is suddenly possessed of smooth, even-looking facial skin with just the faintest bit of blush applied on the cheekbones, the suggestion of some shadowing beneath them. The face is all there; the rest, not quite. But if you didn't know?

Vic smiles, extends his hand. It's soft and warm, the nails filed and varnished to match his lips. Simon takes it.

‘Good luck, Vic.'

‘Charlotte,' Vic says.

‘Charlotte, then.' Even on the face, things do look a bit dodgier from close up. The make-up's an inch thick.

‘Don't let them grind you down.' Victor-becoming-Charlotte kisses his own hand, blows it in Simon's direction then picks up his bag and walks out. From the bed, Simon hears the unlocking of the hospital wing door, an officer saying, ‘Fuck me!' and the sound of Vic's heels on the linoleum dwindling into nothing.

After all that, his throat hurts. He squirts it liberally with the antibiotic and anaesthetic spray they gave him at the proper hospital. At noon, the pain has got beyond what he can bear. He reaches up and presses the buzzer. Waits. Has to do it three times before Brian comes.

40

Joanne, one of the probation officers from Welfare, sits in a bucket chair next to his bed. She is stick-thin, with limp brown hair cut short. But her manner is very animated and she makes good use of her hands as she speaks. Well, she explains, opening one hand, the fingers spread in his direction, well, where he is going to once he's discharged from the hospital is, basically, an entire wing of men under rule 43 . . . Both hands are now involved in a complicated dance. Sex offenders? Yes, she tells him. Sex offenders, along with a few men with bad debts, or vendettas against them: inmates who, one way or another, need protection from others in the general prison population. Given what happened, he is now deemed to be in that category . . . The hands flutter to rest in her lap and she watches him carefully as she suggests: ‘Why not give it a try, before you get upset about it? Putting a lot of people together like this means they can have their own facilities, and a better regime than if there were just a few of them dotted around . . .'

He'll think about that later. He'll get Alan to sort it out. Meanwhile: ‘Has anyone got my course materials?' he says as loudly as he can, then fumbles with the lid of his throat spray. It's run out.

Well, Joanne tells him, hand to heart, his course materials
were
lost for a while but now a new set have definitely been issued. Somehow the change of address didn't get through and then, when it did, he had to be assigned to a new regional centre, but the pack has now been sent out, definitely.

‘First- or second-class post?'

Well, actually, she doesn't know about that. It might be another three or four days before they arrive, then they have to go through the system, so Monday, perhaps. He will be able to have computer time and access to a member of Education staff. Someone will write a note of explanation to his tutor if necessary, he mustn't worry about that . . .

‘I should have done the introductory exercise and sent my first essay in by now!' he tells her.

Fine: as she said, it will be done. Joanne's hands rest again in her lap. At this point, her main concern, she says, is his health. Prisons are not good places to be sick. She thinks a dietician ought to be brought in.

Simon shakes his head. ‘Course materials, please,' he whisper-shouts at her, leaning back in the pillows. Though later, when he goes to the bathroom for a shave, he can see what she means. There's not much of him left.

The ward is quiet without Vic. It's a matter of passing time. Simon borrows something by J. G. Ballard from the library trolley and he has Brian's newspaper every day. Monday does come, eventually, but there are no course materials. It is when Simon reaches for his notebook to start drafting a complaint that he realises with an almost physical shock that someone else has been there. Someone has written him a message on the inside of the back cover:
If you want to write
, it says,
I'll answer
.
Nothing heavy
,
mind you
.
Friends
.
Charlotte Adams
.

It can only have happened while he slept. First thing in the morning, Vic must have come quietly over and picked up the book. Quite a liberty, but at the same time, the idea of it, the picture of himself on his back with his mouth open, Vic still wearing that nightie of his perhaps, or else dressed in the paisley blouse, brings a smile to his lips.

The address, care of a Mrs Adams, is in Brighton. Simon can remember Brighton, from a trip there with the Burnside kids. He remembers a bright, busy place, shops, hordes of people, light on the water, the crashing of waves and the squealing of gulls. He and a couple of other kids spent hours on the amusement pier, and then traipsed up the beaches, climbing breakwaters and daring each other to run along them. They tried to cut back by road, got distracted; the minibus had to be held back and everyone else got to have a fish and chip supper while they waited. He liked Brighton.

But basically, he's not interested. Why on earth would he write to someone way out there on some kind of a limb who isn't actually a woman? It could be catching, for all he knows . . . Besides, personal letters are a thing of the past, so far as he's concerned. He completes his complaint about the course materials, tears out the page, shuts the notebook and tries to read.

It's not easy. Vivienne, Tasmin, the women, he finds himself thinking, all that effort, the excitement of studying their words and sometimes feeling he knew something about them or seeing them in his head: it all came to nothing, except for the vaguest sense, again only occasional, of being, as they say, ‘in touch'. Not quite nothing: he remembers Tasmin sobbing down the phone at him, a real person risen out of the page and refusing to go away, and of course then he must remember Amanda too, it all goes back to there, to her very similar refusal to be ignored. Perfectly reasonable: but will he ever really know how to deal with it? Writing letters can be dangerous, can lead to places you'd never choose.

On the other hand, he's been asked, person to person, by someone he already knows, to write. OK: it's a weird person, but all the same there's a knowing and there's an asking. He, or she, has read what's on his skin. Watched him eat a yoghurt with a plastic teaspoon . . . Before, that would have been a disadvantage, but now there seems to be a kind of promise there: something that keeps bringing him back, between his brief incursions into a story in which men fly aeroplanes around an empty swimming pool, back to the idea that he might just do it, he might just write to Victor-becoming-Charlotte. He could at least see how it feels.

I hope things are going well for you now that you don't have the penal system to contend with on top of everything else. I would be interested to hear more about what it is you are going through.

The words come easily. It's somehow simpler than before. The confusion he feels over the name, Charlotte, will disappear with practice; the matter of he or she only arises in his own head.

I must admit that what you told me was pretty mind-blowing. Then you left, and now, I am still here, sitting up in this bed in a place you are probably trying to forget, and I am curious about you. At Wentham, where I was last year, we did a lot of group therapy. I sometimes thought they wanted to take me to bits and make a new person out of them, and I hated it, even though I knew there was a lot wrong with me, but here you are, doing the same sort of thing, on purpose! I suppose you must be absolutely sure, or else you wouldn't be doing it. As for me, I'm trying to eat my way out of here so I can get some exercise. My course materials are supposed to come soon, I'll be a happier camper then. I'm keeping this short as you must be very busy. Please don't feel obliged to reply.

Aware of the instructions he was given: nothing
heavy
, he decides against a P.S. to the effect that Brian is missing Charlotte. Missing, even someone else's missing that might or might not be his by association, is definitely
heavy
. Of course, it's true that the room does seem empty, without the larger-than-life, double-named, floral nightie-wearing, bell-pushing person whom it tried, and failed, to contain. Someone who asked for the impossible and now seems well on the way to getting it.

‘Did you know?' Simon asks, gesturing with a sideways nod of his head at the far side of the room. For a moment it seems as if Vic has left behind him not only a message, but an afterimage of himself sitting in his pale-blue dressing gown on the empty bed.

‘Know what?' Brian counters, deadpan, and clearly Simon's requests – for notepaper, stamps, pens and the like – just don't hit the spot.

The course materials finally arrive in a large cardboard box which contains, amidst a sea of styrofoam worms, a fistful of pamphlets and information sheets, a plastic wallet full of A4-sized paper with carbons attached, two ring binders, three normal-sized text books, two cassette tapes and another, larger book, called
Starting to Study
.