Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee (uplifting book club books TXT) 📕

the single armchair and put his feet upon a little stool. The wine bottle was to hand and he filled his glass. “Loss of income, Roderick. Straightened circumstances in bad financial times. The predatory crunch of bankers chewing on our bones. Lost everything. Fled with a man with a van. I remembered, you see, you’d told me this was a cheap area, as indeed it is.”

I stared at him. “And Vanessa?”

“Same thing. Home repossessed. They’d have had the lot, so she grabbed what she could and parked herself on me. The other room, you understand.”

“But…” stupidly I blurted, “…you two don’t get on.”

“No.” George smiled and sipped his refreshed wine. “Quite stimulating, silly old bitch. Too young for me, of course, or too old. Not sure which. I like the young girls to look at, sixteen, seventeen. And the ancient hags for a night out. Feel like a kept man, then. Not like you, dear lad. You at thirty-nine, going on ninety-nine. I’m old as a listed building by now, but inside young as a lamb. A teenagéd, that’s me, accent acute, angled left to right and upwards: Teenagéd.”

In the kitchen, Vanessa banged metal things, perhaps forks, on china plates. I pictured the cold meats and frosty green salads.

“Any take-away places hereabouts?” asked Uncle George, with an appealing youthful greed.

61

As I’ve mentioned, I had a guardian after my father’s sudden death. He was no relative. Someone appointed by a court, I imagine.

His subsequent horror and bemusement were spectacular. And next I was cast in a new mould very strange to me, and I had to visit an endless (it seemed) stream—no, a river—of people who’d ‘wanted to help me’.

I recall less my confusion and disbelief, which soon enough transmuted into a complete amazement, than the dreadful interviews I had to undergo.

In awful over-bright little rooms, or more awful darker ones, smells of damp or nail varnish-scented new paint, window-frames full of cloistered courtyards beyond. Everyone was determined to assist me.

At almost fourteen, I realised fairly swiftly what they were on about. And after that I learned to speak and then to listen, and so to seem to come to an enlightenment which, frankly, I never felt, and do not feel now. Not even now do I fully, I think, grasp what all the fuss was about.

Most of all I came to see that after each interview, all rather, in their intense ways, resembling the debriefing of a prisoner of war, (or, sometimes, his harsh interrogation), I felt much, much better. I myself was aware this was solely because said interview was finished. I was free for the rest of the day or, as things ‘improved’, the week, the month, the year. And my knowledge of the liberation to come made me tell them all how much better I felt. Although, wisely, I never expanded to explain it was the escapes from my ‘helpers’ that lightened my heart.

In that way, rather rapidly perhaps, given the situation, I progressed out of their remit.

At least, by then, I knew what was, and what was not. What I was—and was not.

Did I ever blame my parents? My sister? I think I never blamed them, and I know I don’t blame them now. Did they destroy my life? I doubt it. It was life itself that destroyed their lives. Smashing them like special whisky bottles in trains and planes, while I, little bastard, lived on.

62

I began my awareness, and began to grow up, (to the age of thirteen-going-on-fourteen), as a girl. Yes, the little girl to whom pink is allocated. In my case, I often wore it, too. Pink. I’ll assume it suited me, back then.

They had wanted daughters, and the first elder daughter was female. Isabel. Then I arrived. What should they do? They discussed it, I expect, or maybe they didn’t, how can I know? But it was decreed that their male boy baby was to be brought up, from the first, as a female.

So I was taught all the usual girl things then current, encouraged to play unroughly, given dolls, pretty clothes, advised on softness and sweetness, I must conclude. My hair was long and had bows, which I can just remember. My name was Rosalind.

Now, I must make this clear. I never saw either my mother or sister, let alone my father, unclothed. Not even in a one-piece bathing costume. And obviously, as a small child, my voice was not of any particular gender. I had, inevitably, a penis, but since the bathroom and lavatory, (of which there were several), were private places, with what was I supposed to compare my own equipment?

However, as I grew up, certain anomalies—it must go almost without saying—intruded. This though was after the tragic deaths of my mother and Isabel. Normally I would have gone to my mother, I suppose, when, at the age of ten, I saw the picture of a naked man in a grown-up book of Renaissance art. And recognised the vital piece. My father was at home at this time, and I went straight to him.

“Oh, Rosalind, dear,” he said, “sometimes girls and women have these too. And sometimes, of course, some men do not.”

To me this made immediate and unproblematic sense. I did not know anything, aside from the act of urination, for which the penis was constructed. By then I was, as well, here and there, noting the shape of the female bosom. I mentioned this. My father assured me they were, none of them, real. They did not grow. “Most ladies have them made, do you see, Rosalind? They are then attached, painlessly, to the body by a cosmetic process. The usual age for this is sixteen, but some girls prefer to acquire them before that date. Most foreign girls, I must say, seem to do that.” He gazed into space as he said this. Looking back I suspect he had, then, a very young foreign mistress. “But you’re far too young,