Sex and Other Changes Read Online Free Page A

end you’ll quite like the idea of having a brother!
    Don’t be alarmed, Jen. Nothing’s going to happen in a hurry. I’m going to need to do an awful lot of research. I couldn’t possibly do it till Emma and Graham are a lot older. I rather doubt if I could do it while Mum’s alive. (She’s looking older suddenly, and thinner, which worries me, but you know what she’s like, she won’t go to the doctor, she says, ‘They’ve enough on their plate without worrying about me’, which is ridiculous.) So, please, Jen, you must promise not to mention a word of this in your letters to Mum and Dad.
    I’ve had a dreadful recurring dream, Jen, all my life as long as I can remember. I dream that I’m in the womb, assuming that I’m going to be born a boy. Sometimes I wake up at that point and am absolutely mortified when I remember I’m a woman. I reach down to say a friendly good morning to my prick, and there isn’t one! Other times the dream goes further and I am going through the process of being born – horrid, messy, what a shock – and everyone looks at me and screams, even Mum screams. That’s so terrible, Jen, I wake crawling with sweat. Sometimes it takes me hours to forget Mum’s screams.
    I know how proud you always were of your breasts. I’m ashamed of mine. I hate them. I think of them as aliens, sometimes I’ve felt I could chop them off with a kitchen knife, I’ve felt frightened to be in the house on my own for fear I’ll do myself a dreadful injury. I know that sounds mad, but my incarceration in a female body
has
been driving me mad.
    Somehow I don’t think I’ll ever feel as desperate as that again. The knowledge that there is an escape, that one day I can change, I can become me at last, is amazing.
    Now that I’m into confession mode I may as well tell you that all is not well with our marriage. Hardly surprising, really, under the circumstances. I mean on the surface we seem pretty happy, I suppose – I don’t think the kids suspect anything – but we haven’t made love since I got pregnant with Gray. Things tailed away quite a bit after Em, actually. I think Nick blames himself. Sometimes he goes to bed early and pretends to be asleep when I go up, sometimes he works late in his study, invents work, I think, or reads – he’s so much more of a reader than I am – and creeps up late so as not to wake me, and
I
pretend to be asleep. It’s a farce. I long to tell him that I don’t mind, that I don’t want sex with a man any more, that I hate the submissive gesture ofopening my legs, that it’s all right with me that we don’t have sex, but I can’t. Not till I pluck up the courage, one day, to tell him that I’m going to become a man. I can just imagine his face.
    How silly we were to spend so much of our youth fighting. Life’s difficult enough without putting obstacles between us. Jen, darling, I miss you so much, I no longer feel remotely jealous of your beauty. I’m so proud of you, I need you, please write back a proper letter, please let’s be close as we never really were, and have no secrets from each other ever again.
    I do hope you and Bruce are well, also of course Craig and Kelly.
    Your loving sister (but not for ever!)
    Alison
    Just as she was beginning to address the envelope – she found it difficult to think of Jen as Mrs J. Hackenburger – she heard the back door slam.
    She went through to the kitchen and gave Em a hug. Em at ten was going through a really sweet phase.
    â€˜Love you, Mum,’ said Em.
    Three innocent words. Two of them warmed her heart. The third stuck a dagger into it. Mum. It came as a shock after all she’d been writing.
    She made herself a cup of coffee while Em piled two scones with butter and Marmite.
    â€˜Your hand’s shaking, Mum.’
    â€˜It is, isn’t it? Did you