Beneath the Blonde (24 page)

Inside and outside Gaelene was now Greg, the person she’d always known she was, the person she’d always wanted to be, the person who had endured painful operations, worked like a dog to afford them—and when work wasn’t enough, had begged, borrowed and sometimes stolen to make up the shortfall. The man who had hitched seven or eight times a year across the Channel to the Netherlands or as far as the States because he could not receive the treatment he needed in Britain—not fast enough, not sure enough and not willingly enough. Greg had pleaded
and cried and suffered and laughed and eventually been so very relieved to be allowed to become the man he knew himself to be.

At twenty-one he had also met Siobhan Forrester, the flatmate who was to become his singer, his lover and his muse—Siobhan, who never for a moment doubted that Greg was a man and that she was in love with a man. Siobhan, who would do anything for Greg, who was prepared to allow the other members of the band believe she was the difficult one and cancel arrangements and even miss their first ever real gig if it meant Greg could get to his next appointment, his next round of drugs, his next surgery in New York or Rio or Utrecht. Siobhan who, once the band had achieved some success and there was more money to spare, bundled him off the plane and into waiting taxis to get him to their naturopath who would help him to stabilize his system against the foreign chemicals and drugs that he needed to maintain his new status, his real self. Siobhan, who screamed at him if ever he woke too sleepy to remember to take any of the many pills he took daily disguised as “too much good life” combating vitamins. Siobhan, who injected him with testosterone. Siobhan, who had known and aided and been prepared to take any amount of shit, throw any number of tantrums to protect Greg.

By the time he was twenty-six, Greg Marsden was “all man” and drop-dead gorgeous.

And though they were best friends, Alex never knew and Steve never knew and while Dan had a few suspicions, he’d never quite worked out what it was he was suspicious about. Siobhan knew and Greg knew and Pat and Dennis knew and eventually, with time and distance and the conditioning of unconditional love, they also accepted. Accepted that their daughter was now their son who, for the sake of his sanity and his career and the band, was now their nephew.

And now Saz knew. And, of course, Shona knew too.

Shona and Gaelene were sitting in the shed at Shona’s mum’s place. The shed had once been a coalshed, back when Shona’s mum’s house still had an open fire, but the advent of the seventies had seen the allure of glowing coals and sparkling embers replaced with the sober cleanliness and efficiency of three storage heater units. They dried out the air and gave Shona’s mum headaches, but at least they weren’t the same sort of headaches as the ones that came when she was trying to get herself off to work. Hurrying her own routine and at the same time clearing out the fireplace on a damp winter morning so she could dry Shona’s grey school socks before the little girl left for school, Vegemite sandwiches and little packet of Sunmaid raisins crammed into the yellow plastic lunchbox beside a drink bottle and two gingernut biscuits that were guaranteed to be soft and stale by morning break. The shed, then, had become “The Clubhouse” for Shona and Gaelene. They both had bedrooms they could have played in, but the shed was much more exciting. The shed meant they actually had a Club. They had covered the dirt floor with the old lino from when Gaelene’s mum had got cork tiles for her kitchen floor and they’d hung up an old candlewick bedspread in front of the open space where once there’d been a door but now there were two rusting hinges—the bedspread didn’t stop much wind but it kept the rain out in winter and stopped Shona’s mum being able to see in from the kitchen window when she was doing the dishes. There were three old packing
chests turned upside down. One was a table covered in a lace tablecloth that had been too tired even to give to the school gala and the other two were stools, draped in Shona’s old knitted cardigans to stop the jagged edges of the chests catching too often on their bare little girl legs. On the shelf on the back wall where a home-dwelling father would have kept his tools were the toys Shona was slowly outgrowing. Her first baby doll, perversely named Johnny, wearing a dirty yellow top and her father’s handkerchief for a nappy, his eyelashes cut short in a game of hairdressers; a dusty silver and red velvet musical box from her aunty in Wellington and a walking-talking doll called Elizabeth who had long since refused to do either.

The girls were practising kissing, each one taking it in turns to hold the other in her arms, pressing their lips against each other in the way they’d seen the older kids do on Friday nights when they waited, hands in back pockets cool, outside the pictures. Their lips firmly shut, eyes screwed tight closed, they twisted their faces against each other, trying to work out where to put their noses and how to breathe with their mouths shut and their nostrils half blocked by the flesh of the others’ cheek.

When they kissed, Gaelene felt nothing. Other than Shona’s lips, she felt nothing. It was just practice, a rehearsal for being grown up. Practice for when she had a girlfriend of her own. Gaelene was only seven. She still thought she was going to grow up and become a man, the horrible truth hadn’t yet dawned on her that the process of becoming unwoman was one she would have to push and force and fight for all alone.

When Shona kissed Gaelene she knew she’d found The One. Even at seven she knew she’d found The One. Sitting on her packing case, she sat back and asked Gaelene to wait for her, “Will you marry me when we’re bigger?”

Gaelene looked at her, half a finger stuck in the mock
cream doughnut she had just picked up, trying to pick up the lump of oozing jam and get it into her mouth without spilling any on her yellow daisy Bermuda shorts. “Why?”

Shona’s reasoning was simple. “Because you’re my best friend. That way you’ll always be my best friend.”

She knew her mum and dad hadn’t been best friends, she knew her mum said that was the only way to keep a marriage—with a seven-year-old’s logic she figured the reverse must be true, if you keep a marriage going by marrying your best friend, then the way to keep a friendship was to make your best friend marry you.

She tried again, “Marry me?”

Gaelene gave it little thought, it was Monday afternoon, she wanted to eat her doughnut and she wanted to wait until Shona’s mum came home from work and gave them five cents each to go and buy lollies and then she wanted to go home and watch the Partridge Family. She didn’t want to talk about what might happen when she grew up. She also knew that if she didn’t just agree, Shona would go on and on about it. Keep going until she got what she wanted anyway. She swallowed the cream and jam, swirling the two textures on her tongue before letting them slide down her throat, “Yeah, ok. If you want. Is John coming to stay in the holidays?”

Shona smiled, she had her answer. “Nah, my aunty’s coming to get me and we’re all going down to Ruby’s place. You can come too if you want.”

“Grouse!”

Gaelene loved Ruby, loved the relaxed atmosphere at Ruby’s place, loved the way the kids ran and played and the grown-ups sang late into the night and no one shouted at the kids to shut up all the time.

Shona knew she had Gaelene interested and added her coda, “But only if you promise.”

“What?”

“Promise you’ll marry me.”

“I just said I would.”

“Swear?”

Gaelene sighed, “Cross my heart and hope to die.” She crossed her heart, taking care not to touch her pale pink seersucker blouse with her sticky fingers. This careful promise was still not enough for Shona.

“Make a pact?”

“I just swore!”

“Make a pact anyway.”

“What sort of a pact?”

Shona’s eyes lit up, “A blood pact. Like John and Mani Pomare did last year.”

“Nah, we’ll get in trouble. John got a really big hiding when Ruby told his mum he’d cut himself.”

“They were dumb. They shouldn’t have done it with a big knife.”

“Or where everybody could see.”

“Yeah. So we’ll do it somewhere else. We can do it on our arms, up here, not our hands. Then they won’t see. Go on, or are you chicken?”

Gaelene wasn’t chicken, she just didn’t really care, but she followed Shona back into the house and held the chair as Shona stood on it to get at the top shelf in the bathroom cabinet where her Dad had left his shaving things behind when he left in such a hurry all those rainy nights ago. She carefully unscrewed the razor, her little fingers turning the bottom of it until the top opened and revealed the vicious two-sided blade, a few of her father’s whiskers still clinging to the dirty edge. They stood in the bathroom and Shona held the blade and made a tiny nick in both of their upper arms, just above the bend of the elbow, squeezing the surrounding skin up to force a drop of blood from each of them, then they rubbed their bloodied spots together while Shona made Gaelene repeat after her, “I promise—”

“I promise—”

“To be true—”

“To be true—”

“To wait forever—”

“To wait forever … Shona, I have to go to the loo …”

“Hold on! I’m nearly finished! To wait forever, until I marry you.”

“To wait forever until I marry you. Now can I pee?”

Shona shook her head, “In a minute. You lick my blood and I’ll lick yours and then we kiss and then it’s a real real pact.”

Gaelene, bladder close to bursting from two bottles of Fanta on the way home, spare hand clamped between her legs, quickly licked the small smeared drop of congealing blood off Shona’s arm and held hers out to be licked, she then kissed Shona on the lips and pushed her out of the bathroom, pulling her shorts and pants down as she did so.

Ten minutes later Shona’s mum got home and they went down to the dairy with their five cents and bought mixed lollies, glow hearts and aniseed balls for Gaelene, red and black gumdrops for Shona.

The girls didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. Didn’t know that the world thought it was strange for two little girls to be so close. Didn’t know that Shona’s mum talked to her friend Pam about it, was secretly relieved when Gaelene moved away, hoped that now Shona would make more friends, get to know other children her own age, broaden her horizons.

But Shona didn’t, of course. She was saving herself for Gaelene. Shona is not gay. Shona has no sexuality. She has never been interested in women. Or in men. She loves Gaelene. Only Gaelene. Always did. Always will.

But Shona didn’t like it when Gaelene broke her promise.

Saz’s head was reeling. Greg’s story had left her in a state of shock. He grinned at her, slow and rueful, “You think it’s weird, right?”

Confusing concepts around the shock of reality and fiction, political correctness, prurient curiosity and gender dilemmas hit her smack in the face. Saz, schooled in years of left-wing politics, knew she wasn’t supposed to think it was weird. Knew in the core of her aware soul she wasn’t supposed to think it was weird. “No. Of course not. No, I don’t. I just … it’s just … I …”

Greg was a man. But he wasn’t. Greg had been born a girl and, until he was sixteen, had lived as a girl. But he was a man. Now.

Greg nodded at Saz and stirred himself from the deck-chair on the balcony where he’d been sitting as he told his story. “Sure you do. It’s ok, Saz. It is a bit of a shock. You’re allowed to be surprised. Siobhan was surprised and she still loves me.”

Siobhan loved him. And she had slept with Siobhan. Had sex with Siobhan. Just a night ago. Twenty-four hours ago. Siobhan was a heterosexual woman who loved a man who had been a woman. Was brought up as a woman, conditioned as a woman. Must somewhere in there, somewhere inside, still think like a woman. Or not. Saz tuned back into the room and realized Greg was still explaining. “I mean, when I told Siobhan I thought I’d lose her. We hadn’t quite got around to the sex part and obviously, she had to know.
Actually, she says it was something of a relief. Because I hadn’t shagged her senseless within the first week we met, she reckons she was worried that maybe I didn’t fancy her and she knew she really fancied me. So she was almost relieved when she found out that really I did. Fancy her. A fuck of a lot.” Greg laughed. “Which eventually lead to a lot of fucking. Once it was all done. The operations, I mean. And quite a lot before it was done, I suppose. Well, you’re gay, I guess you’d know, right?”

Saz smiled noncommittally. “Yeah, right.”

What did she know? Siobhan had sex with a man who’d been a woman. But Siobhan was straight. More or less. Less probably. Greg had been a woman but now he was a man and he was living with a woman. Had just got married to a woman. Greg was a straight man married to a straight woman. So were they both really dykes? Saz’s lust leapt at the passing thought and then a combined dose of guilt and political correctness crashed down on the fanciful notion. Of course they weren’t, couldn’t be, Greg was a man. And Saz knew that Siobhan loved Greg as a straight woman loves a straight man. And shouldn’t Saz just accept that? She knew some male to female transsexuals, two distantly, one as a friend. She’d done the reading, watched the documentaries, seen the movies. And, as a woman, it made sense to her. Boys who wanted to be girls made perfect sense to her. Saz loved being a girl. Had never wanted to be anything else. She’d never understood the concept of penis envy. Thought it showed just how really weird Freud was. But Greg had wanted it. Wanted it all, the whole man thing. Greg had willingly undergone painful and—Saz winced as she thought about this, her own scars itching in sympathy—permanently scarring surgery to physically become the embodiment of the man he believed he really was. Greg had been through a voluntary mastectomy. A voluntary hysterectomy. Had paid thousands of pounds to make himself. Had worked himself
into the ground to earn that money and then spent it all on creating himself.

Greg got up from his chair and rubbed his red, tired eyes, stretched his arms above his head. Saz looked up at him. Noticed the scar on his arm, the one she’d been told and believed was from a motorbike accident. Understood that he had taken part of his body to make it new. Her questions were swimming. She wanted to ask about his body, how it worked, how it felt. Instead she quieted her prurient curiosity and asked about the legalities. “I don’t understand. How do you get to be married? I mean legally?”