Sex and Other Changes by David Nobbs Page A

out.’
    â€˜Out? Where will we go?’
    â€˜Well, the Collinsons’.’
    â€˜They’ll drop us when this comes out.’
    â€˜The golf club dinner.’
    â€˜Oh God. I can’t go to the golf club dinner.’
    â€˜I’ll support you to the hilt, Nicola, but I am not going to become a hermit. Real Life Test, not skulking in corners.’
    He bought an evening outfit.
    As they staggered back to the car with their purchases, Nick said, ‘Well at least that’s over.’
    â€˜Till the spring,’ said Alison.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Till the spring fashions come out. You’ll need light clothes. Fine cottons and silks for summer. And there’ll be new styles. New colours. Summer colours. And next winter these colours that you’ve just bought won’t be
the
colours any more. There’ll be new winter colours. Mauve’s tipped for a dramatic comeback.’
    â€˜My God,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if I can afford to become a woman.’
    â€˜And you always thought I was extravagant,’ said Alison.
    They got home just in time for his appointment with Karen. Karen was Alison’s hairdresser at ‘A Cut Above’ (Throdnall’s Premier Hair Stylists) and she’d agreed to come and do his hair at home, partly to save him embarrassment and partly for security reasons. (They didn’t want the story breaking before Em got her exclusive, which would give her CV such a boost when she applied to the Nationals.) Karen did a very good job, using Nick’s slight natural curls to create a soft, wavy look. He’d let his hair grow longer than he’d liked over the last weeks, at Alison’s suggestion, even though towards the end he’d begun to feel very uncomfortable and unmanagerial and positively un-Cornucopian. But he saw why now. Cut in a bob with a side parting, and falling over the face to one side, it softened his features enormously. It made him look quite feminine, it really did.
    He woke up feeling extremely excited, sexy even. To his horror, with an insensitivity that shocked him to the core, his prick had one of those semi-erections that even he got very occasionally,first thing in the morning. He gave it a little smack, and said, silently, ‘Get down, you insensitive fool. Oh well, I suppose I’d better forgive you. After all, your days are numbered, you sad little person.’
    Alison felt the movement as he smacked it and said, ‘What’s up?’ and he said, ‘I thought I’d been bitten.’ He wanted to take her in his arms, but then it might have led to a very rare bout of sexuality and to say that this would have been mistimed would be an understatement. Anyway, the shock of this thought shrivelled his rebuked organ back into its habitual insignificance.
    He lay there for a minute or two, more than somewhat shocked. He soon rationalised it, of course. He was feeling sexy because at last he was going to live as a woman, but since the only organs that he had that were capable of expressing sexuality were male, he was forced to express his feminine sexuality through a masculine mechanism. It wasn’t shocking at all. It was complex and absurd, but it was also a perfect affirmation of why he had to become a woman – to free himself from this complexity and absurdity.
    He dressed in his new jeans and a lemony blouse, and they went down to breakfast.
    â€˜My God,’ said Bernie.
    â€˜Yes, Dad, very helpful,’ said Alison.
    Gray took one look, said, ‘Is it any wonder I’m twisted?’ and took his coffee and toast back to his room.
    Em burst in, had a black coffee and a bun standing up, said, ‘Gotta split, ciao’ and didn’t even comment on how Nicola looked. Giorgio was arriving from Modena that day. She’d met him in Venice and had been into everything Italian ever since.
    Suddenly she’d bought lovely clothes that made her look