Sex and Other Changes Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Nobbs

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1 Two Different Uses for Trees

  2 A Damper

  3 A Revelation in a Popular Store

  4 Unlucky Molluscs

  5 The Dog-Leg Ninth

  6 Thank You for Your Support

  7 The Die is Cast

  8 Her Indoors

  9 Kiss and Make-Up

  10 The Manageress

  11 Broken Nuts

  12 The Heavy Mob

  13 Close Encounters of the Throdnall Kind

  14 Alison Makes Her Move

  15 Bon Appetit

  16 A Taste of Fame

  17 Friends and Enemies

  18 The Last Supper

  19 Visiting Time

  20 Lost Innocence

  21 On Her Own

  22 A Memorable Moussaka

  23 A Bluffer’s World

  24 A Strange Game of Scrabble

  25 The Man From the Farm Shop

  26 The Long Silence

  27 Eric

  28 Dropping Off

  29 A Hungarian Masterpiece

  30 A Man About Town

  31 Los Altiplanos

  32 Reflections on the Validity of the Turner Prize

  33 Up the Wooden Stairs to Bedfordshire

  Copyright

  About the Book

  From the bestselling author of Going Gently and the hugely successful autobiography I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today.

  Every time someone changes sex, there’s one less freak in the world.

  Meet the Divots. They seem a happily married couple, in their cosy suburban home in a cosy suburban town. Then, one day, everything begins to change. Nick drops his bombshell. He wants to become Nicola. Alison is extremely upset, naturally. But she has more reason than most to be upset, because she has a secret too. She wants to become Alan. Nick has pulled the rug from under her. However, she’s always been the supportive type and she’ll wait her turn.

  Will Nick become Nicola? Can Alison become Alan? Can both partners in a marriage change sex and save their marriage? What effect will this have on their children, the sexy Emma and the hi-tech loner Graham? There are dramatic changes in store for them too – and for Alison’s father, Bernie.

  In the spirit of David Nobbs’ acclaimed novel Going Gently, Sex and Other Changes is a funny, touching and compassionate study of what being a man and a woman really means.

  About the Author

  David Nobbs was born in Kent. After university, he entered the army, then tried his hand at journalism and advertising before becoming a writer. A distinguished novelist and comedy writer, he lives near Harrogate with his wife Susan.

  Also by David Nobbs

  FICTION

  The Itinerant Lodger

  A Piece of the Sky is Missing

  Ostrich Country

  The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

  The Return of Reginald Perrin

  The Better World of Reginald Perrin

  Second From Last in the Sack Race

  A Bit of a Do

  Pratt of the Argus

  Fair Do’s

  The Cucumber Man

  The Legacy of Reginald Perrin

  Going Gently

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  I Didn’t Get Where I Am Today

  DAVID NOBBS

  Sex and Other Changes

  For Susan

  Acknowledgements

  I cannot emphasise too strongly that this book is an entertainment and not a documentary. However, I have tried to get the facts about sex changes right, and in this connection I am greatly indebted to Dr D.H. Montgomery, MB ChB (Otago) FRANZCPsych FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist, who worked for many years at the Gender Identity Clinic of Charing Cross Hospital. Any errors are due to my misinterpretation and not to his misinformation. (I must point out that my psychiatrist and my Gender Identity Clinic are totally fictional.)

  I am also grateful to Roz Kaveney, who read the manuscript from the point of view of a transsexual and made several suggestions which I found very helpful.

  I must also thank Geoffrey Lean and the Independent on Sunday for giving me permission to quote the article on sex changes among whelks which he wrote as Environment Correspondent of the paper in 1998.

  I also owe a great debt to my agents, Jonathan Clowes and Ann Evans, and to my publisher and editor, Susan Sandon, for their trenchant but extremely constructive criticisms of my first draft.

  1 Two Different Uses for Trees

  People were shocked when it all happened. Afterwards, though, they claimed that they hadn’t been surprised. That is so very Throdnall. The town’s main products are railway carriages and hindsight.

  ‘I always thought there was something not quite right about that marriage,’ commented an osteopath’s wife in the Warwick Bar of the Cornucopia Hotel in Brindley Street.

  Where does the story of Nick and Alison Divot begin? In the womb, Alison would say, but we won’t go back that far. Too much speculation and not enough action.

  In childhood, then? Certainly Alison felt that her childhood was deeply significant. Her mum had told her, so many times, oh so many times till she was sick of it, how, when she was two, at tea, at Granny Huddersfield’s, she had said, ‘Why haven’t I got a willy like the other boys?’ How everyone had laughed. ‘I wish I was a boy’ became fourth in her top twenty childhood sayings, behind, ‘Mummy, I’m bored’, ‘My tummy hurts’ and ‘Are we nearly there?’

  Marge had never seen anything particularly significant in that remark at Granny Huddersfield’s. She wouldn’t have told the story if she had. Even Alison didn’t realise its full significance. ‘I wish I was a boy.’ Well, a child has many wishes, a child has many heartaches and disappointments and learns to live with them, and Alison never said, ‘I’m going to be a boy when I grow up.’

  They weren’t well off. Her father, Bernie, was a guard on the railways, and they lived on the wrong side of the tracks in the South Yorkshire town of Thurmarsh. Marge ‘did’ for a couple of families on the posher side of the town. She cycled to work.

  They had two daughters. Alison was the elder by two years, and ruled Jen with a rod of iron. Alison was brighter than Jen. Jen was prettier than Alison. All the motives for civil war were there.

  Jen was blonde, gorgeous, delicate, fluffy, self-righteous and devious, with the attention span of a hyper-active newt. Alison was dark, intense, passionate, tough, rough, gruff, hot-tempered, straightforward and an utter tomboy. Her greatest pleasure in life was hitting Jen. When her mother rebuked her, she retorted indignantly, ‘But, Mum, that’s what sisters are for.’

  Alison believed herself to be utterly charmless. Tall, gawky, awkward, she was all of these, but no, she was not charmless. She loved the theatre, appeared in all the school plays. Her charm was in the passion in her eyes as she brought other people to life. Of course she was often cast in the male parts, to her mother’s fury. ‘Why couldn’t Andrea Houseman have played Richard the Third? She’s got a hump already.’ Her charm was in the toss of her head as she climbed the scratty trees that lined the River Rundle. Her charm was in her honesty.

  How lucky that her mother didn’t ‘do’ for the Divots, in genteel, middle-class Upcot Avenue. How could Nick have fallen for his charlady’s daughter?

  Nick was an only child. His father, like Alison’s, was in transport, but his transport was the stuff of Bernie’s dreams. Daniel Divot was a purser on the cruise ships. Barbara Divot hated the sea. Nick was a mother’s boy.

  Nick and Alison saw each other once, actually, when they were both aged ei
ght. It was a lovely summer’s day. An artist had dotted the sky with just the right number of puffy white clouds. There was no breeze at all in the Divot garden, and just a faint zephyr up on the top of the sycamore that Alison had climbed. She had trespassed into the garden of the house next to the Divots. Nobody in Thurmarsh was better than Alison Kettlewell at climbing trees. She stood right at the top, like an overgrown stork, holding on with one hand. She was Queen Boadicea. She scanned the horizon for enemy troops. Nothing. The only person she could see was a thin, sandy-haired child in the next door garden, who was doing something very earnest and very boring with a book. She gave a great cheery holler and saw the child jump.

  Nick was just about to press an oak leaf into a notebook when the holler startled him. He looked up and saw Alison. His eyes widened in amazement. He waved. To his horror she waved back so vigorously that she almost fell, clutched the top branch, and swung on it so violently that it seemed it must break. He was terrified that she would fall and he would have to do something. She wasn’t frightened at all. Gradually, she regained her equilibrium, but not before he had broken out in a fine sweat.

  A homing pigeon, en route from Hyde Park to Featherstone, flew past Alison. She reached as if to grab it, and gave a bloodcurdling yell. Startled, it shat itself. A white stream descended into the Divot garden and fell plop all over the cover of Nick’s notebook, on which he had written, in a careful childish hand, blissfully unaware of his spelling mistake, ‘Thurmarsh and Evnirons – Summer 1964’.

  The pigeon flew on, unaware of the tenuous initial link it had provided for the unusual love story of Nick and Alison.

  Nick spent much of his childhood reading. His mother thought that he was literary, but he read because he preferred other people’s lives to his own. His favourite book was Tess of the D’Urbevilles. He was drawn to its miseries like a gambler to the tables. He read it eleven times. His mother disapproved; she wanted him to read different books, she found his obsession unhealthy, so he had to read it in secret, which added to its appeal.

  ‘Nick,’ she said one day, ‘I hope you aren’t reading Tess again.’

  ‘Of course I’m not,’ he lied.

  ‘You should find a real girl to be friends with.’

  He looked at her in astonishment. How could somebody as experienced as a grown-up get something as wrong as that?

  He had the sense not to tell her that he didn’t keep reading the book because he loved Tess, that he read it because he was Tess.

  He always used his father’s postcards as bookmarks. ‘I was so sad you weren’t beside me as we steamed into the heart of Venice. Your trip to Filey sounded fun.’

  It’s hardly surprising that he was a late developer. One speech day, when he was sixteen … ‘I’ll be with you in spirit, old son. I’ll think of you as I hunt out a little trinket for your mother in the souks’ … as he was walking towards the hall with his embarrassingly overdressed mother, they overheard a boy say, ‘Nick’s so retarded he thinks Wanking is a town in China.’ He met his mother’s eye and blushed. ‘I always was bad at geography,’ he said. He had no idea whether she’d understood. He had no idea about anything, really.

  Three weeks later, in the last week of term, he met Alison properly.

  A fine summer’s evening in Thurmarsh. In the cricket pavilion there was a meeting of the Thurmarsh Grammar School Bisexual Humanist Society, to debate the rather ambitious proposition ‘Is unselfishness impossible?’

  Nick’s friend Prentice, a thickset, plump youth with a round face, had urged him to join. As they’d approached the pavilion for the first time, Nick had said, ‘What am I doing here? Why are you bringing me here?’

  ‘I want you to speak,’ said Prentice. ‘I want you to take part. I want to draw you out of yourself.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m your friend. Incidentally, it’s about time you called me by my Christian name.’

  ‘What is your Christian name?’

  ‘Prentice.’

  ‘Well, it’ll be just the same as calling you by your surname.’

  ‘It won’t. I’ll know. Will you do it, Nick?’

  ‘All right then … Prentice.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There were usually fewer than twenty people at these meetings. Nick had hated the first one, which had been on the subject ‘Can tests on animals be justified?’ He had been frightened that he would dare to speak. He had been trying to force himself to speak. He had only just failed – several times. It had been terrifying.

  Gradually, however, through ‘Should smoking be banned?’, ‘Does Socialism kill initiative?’, ‘Is philosophy a waste of time?’ and ‘Is marriage before sex too risky?’ he had bravely come to terms with the fact that he would never dare to speak, and there was no need for him to dare to speak, and he had begun to enjoy sitting there anonymously in the pavilion with its faint unthreatening aroma of the stale sweat of generations of jockstraps.

  Sometimes he would allow himself to dream that he was at the girls’ school, that after the debate he would wander off with Prentice and they would … well, he could never bring himself to use the actual words even to himself. He had to be so careful, he thought, not to reveal any hint of this to Prentice, or he might lose the only friend he had.

  On this occasion, however, Nick didn’t have time to dream. He was entirely taken up with Alison. She spoke fluently, confidently, loudly, as if to a vast crowd that only she could see. She insisted that unselfishess was possible. True, she hadn’t met any of it in her life, and none of it among her friends, but she gave examples of her own unselfishness as proof of the absurdity of the proposition.

  Her speech did not go down well. Later speakers offered other motives for her apparently unselfish actions. Nick didn’t care. It wasn’t what she said that impressed him. It was how she said it. It was what she was.

  He felt that she was speaking directly to him. He recognised that her confidence was bluster. He realised that her conceit was grown out of self-disgust. He knew that she was as lonely as he was, that she was as awkward with herself as he was with himself, that they were soul-mates. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even sexual attraction. It was compatibility at first sight.

  After she had spoken, he began to plan what he would say to her after the meeting: ‘You were magnificent’, ‘You can inspire me to total unselfishness’, ‘I thought you were marvellous about the shortcomings of the rest of the world’, ‘I do totally agree about the awfulness of humanity’, ‘Your cynicism is excessive. I will prove it by being as unselfish as you’, ‘Would you like a milk shake?’, ‘Where have you been all my life?’, ‘Where have I been all your life?’, ‘Would you like to come and see my pressed ferns?’, ‘Have you read Tess of the D’Urbevilles?’, ‘My dad could get us on a Mediterranean cruise if you’re interested’, ‘I don’t suppose you’d fancy coming to my friend’s father’s camp site near Filey?’ All were tried, weighed up, placed in a constantly varying order of possibility.

  And then the meeting was over, and she strode out contemptuously, and he had to struggle past Prentice’s thick legs and by the time he got out she was already striding away across the outfield of the cricket ground. A low sun made her shadow immensely thin and long.

  Nick ran after her but, even though no match was in progress, he couldn’t bring himself to walk on the outfield. He scurried round the boundary.

  ‘Hey!’ he cried.

  She stopped and turned. At that time she was at least three inches taller than he was. He felt over-awed. All his opening gambits, so carefully rated from one to twelve, flew away. He could think of nothing to say. He approached her slowly. She stood there, mercilessly. In the nets, a ball thudded into a batsman’s box. Behind them some wag had arranged the scoreboard to read ‘Home Team 1176 for 2. Last man 617.’

  His mouth was dry. His tongue was sticking to the side of his cheek. He found it almost impossible to speak at all.

  He only spoke three words, and
it’s ironic to realise, with the hindsight for which Throdnall is so famous, that his statement, so apparently simple, was actually something in which he had no confidence, something which he didn’t believe to be entirely true even then.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Nick.’

  2 A Damper

  Nick’s mother was a snob. ‘You’d think he was Captain of the Queen Mary, not a piddling purser on a crummy cruise line,’ was the comment of her chiropodist. She wasn’t liked in the shops. She thought that shopkeepers feared her. ‘They see me coming,’ she said proudly, ‘and they cringe.’ They did see her coming, but they didn’t cringe. The greengrocer gave her the oranges that had been on the shelves too long and would soon go bad.

  She was not the ideal mother for a boy who had the natural inclination to be a mother’s boy.

  Nick loved his father’s postcards. ‘You would have adored the Malacca Straits, old son.’ His father seemed like a hell of a fellow, on deck, seeing the world. In Thurmarsh, on leave, he seemed smaller, less real. His shore leave always came in termtime. ‘Holidays are synonymous with our peak periods, my boy.’

  One day, just after his father had gone back to the ship, Nick asked his mother, ‘Do you think Dad likes me?’

  ‘Of course he does,’ she said. ‘He loves you.’

  ‘Then why does he never invite me on the ship? Surely he could wangle a cruise?’

  ‘He doesn’t want you to see his other life,’ hissed his mother through gritted teeth. She raised her hand to her neck in horror at what she had said. Her neck went red. She swept out of the room, slamming the door.

  Everything in Nick’s life propelled him towards Alison.

  It would have been impossible to have invited his mother to Garibaldi Terrace, or to have taken Bernie and Marge to Upcot Avenue. Nick and Alison’s relationship grew in secret, and secrecy is heady stuff.

  During their last year at school they went to several films and several concerts together. He preferred the films, she preferred the concerts. Sometimes they went to pubs. She liked pubs, he didn’t. Eventually he did get to meet Bernie and Marge. Occasionally they went to the pub with Bernie, and even more occasionally with Bernie and Marge. Nick liked that. He felt more comfortable in the pub then. He felt he had his camouflage on. He dealt with the class divide by mocking it. ‘Got your cloth cap, Bernie?’, ‘Ferrets locked up, Bernie?’ Alison held her breath, but Nick had realised that Bernie found every joke funny as long as he featured in it, and the routine made Nick begin to feel, for the first time, that one distant day he might become a man of the world.