We both belonged to the everyday, that’s certain. Both of us – you came to the cafe in your car, and I on foot. How could we not meet? The cafe: that’s where we coalesced, briefly, from the dispersal of the afternoon. The cafe: for a moment, we were as real as anyone else; we gained by sitting alongside them, the real people. We were flesh – like them. We were alive – like them. But were we alive?
That’s where we met, the cafe, through your ex-girlfriend, who used to visit me at the house to drink tea in the garden. Your ex-? Could she be called that? A week, she had said, my tea-drinking companion, that’s all it lasted. And didn’t you have a week long affair, too, with that soap star? A week – why not longer? We spoke about it that day, do you remember? You said: ‘I couldn’t stand it. I felt trapped -‘ And then told me you wanted to sell your house and move away. ‘But I can’t – I’m ill, you know’. Ill – you were on the sick, you said.
Ill – or was it the day itself? Ill, or was it the eternal afternoon from which you materialised, and into which you disappeared? You rose late, you told me – never earlier than midday, and went to bed in the morning. ‘I’m always exhausted – it’s terrible’. You’d drive to the gay club on Friday nights and Saturday nights, and one night you took me, too, and while I danced inside, you spoke in the stairwell to gay men. On the way back, you said, ‘I’ve never known men like that. I’ve never been able to talk to men like that’. And who was I, a man, to you?
One day we walked out in the Ees with my handsome housemate, and he named for you the birds in the sky and the trees and plants. Later you said: I think in love with him. With him? I was shocked – you loved him, who was a man like me? Yes, that was how it was. Soon enough, it is true, you grew tired of him. But you could love men, too – very well.
When did it begin, our affair? It was your birthday – or was it mine? We went out shopping, didn’t we? You told me of your love for my friend, didn’t you? And then you said, ‘but I love someone else more’. Was it me? We talked in the cellar. The hours fell away. It was late, you called a taxi to take you home, but when it came, I sent it home. That morning, very early, we walked out in the dawn.
So what had begun? To what story did we belong? Not to yours’, that was true. It was to be secret, our relationship, you told me. Secret – but didn’t everyone know? You would visit me in the early hours, after your trips to the nightclub. In the day you were a lesbian and in the night you were a lesbian – but in the early hours, who were you? You’d just come out to your mum, to your brother and your sister, you said. You’d left your old friends behind, and your old life had fallen away, you said. It was as a lesbian you drove to the cafe; it was as a lesbian that you wanted to live.
My housemate showed you a medal with the number 1 on it he’d been given after attending AA for a year. I’m 1 year old, he said. And you said, I’m not even 1. Not even that. Birth was still ahead of you, wasn’t it? You had not been born, you thought; your life, your new life had not yet begun. You’d made the great step – you were a lesbian – but where had it taken you? Were you a lesbian yet?
‘Why aren’t you a woman?’, you demanded of me. Then, an idea: ‘Couldn’t you have the operation? Couldn’t you become a woman?’ Two women. Two women together: that was your plan, your alibi. You called up your friends and told them about me. He’s trans-gendered, you said of me. Trans-gendered: this meant I could be part of your new life.
And when I laughed? When I told you it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard? You left. You never came to the house again. Where did you go? Busy being born in another part of the city, no doubt. Busy at the brink of a new life, in another part of the city.
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