DANCING
One year ago. Our last breakfast together. We sat at the counter, in the sleek modern kitchen of his sleek modern house. Outside, a flat white sun hammered down, eye-scorchingly bright, and it felt all wrong. It was 9 a.m, thirty degrees in the shade. In January.
Australia.
...I tell people: “David took it well; he moved to Australia...” This whole country was wrong. Hot when it should be cold. Parched, no green anywhere, just shades of red. A bunch of loud, sporty white people clinging to a semi-verdant fringe; and a big, blank, red desert for the rest, inhabited only by invisible black people, rumoured to still be around there, somewhere. Probably getting drunk, according to the whites, if they ventured any opinion at all.
No wonder they got excited about that big rock in the middle. It was the only thing amounting to a view.
On a local scale: Adelaide. Main claim to fame: the first Australian city not founded by convicts. Oddly, this made it worse. It meant that Adelaide’s city fathers had chosen to come here.
Out of one impressively huge picture window, acre after acre of grid-squared, tin-roofed bungalows, rising to distant hills, where smoke wisped, and helicopters flitted; they had been fighting forest fires up there for a week now.
Out of another, the pocket Manhattan of Adelaide’s downtown business area, one square mile of not very commanding office blocks. It took twenty scorching minutes to walk there. In another twenty, you had seen everything, and wondered why you bothered.
It was three hundred miles from Adelaide to the next place of interest. And that was Melbourne.
Why had he abandoned me, and England, for this damned place, after twenty four years together?
Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? He never had to explain himself to our friends. Just tell them the facts. They would nod, and sigh, and agree with him. Feeling sorry. For him.
How had he put it? Bluntly. David always did have a streak of ruthlessness. This was what had made him a success.
“Look, it’s simple. I’m a Gay man. I don’t want a relationship with a woman. Not even…”
Not even a freak like me.
I “filled him with horror”, he told me, once, in a rare access of truthfulness.
Never mind that we had lived together, and loved one another, and shared the adventure of our lives together, down all the years since we met in 1980. Just two horny, wide-eyed working class kids away from home for the first time then, out of our depth but paddling frantically in the scary, sexy waters of the GaySoc freshers’ disco, Strugglers Rest bar, Sussex University.
Ironically, the first thing we ever spoke about, the reason I summoned the courage to self-consciously shuffle my way onto the dance floor, to meet the first cool gaze of his beautiful blue eyes, was the thing that later destroyed us. In our beginning was our end.
Remember. It was the 1980s. Curly perms were in. Big flappy trousers. Make up on boys. New Romantics. And he looked the spit of someone I’d seen on telly. A grim slice-of-life documentary that scared the bejesus out of me, and for the first time put a name to the lack at the centre of me. George & Julia it was called. A show about a rare, wonderful, sad thing. It was about a transsexual.
Weirdly, David was Julia’s doppelganger, down to the bubble perm and curves. Operating on a principal of sympathetic magic, I concluded that if he looked like a transsexual, he probably was one…
 …Magic, of course is a flawed belief system. And so it proved.
But not before he had taken the semi-rent boychick I’d been, the sexually experienced, emotionally crippled hustler I thought I was, and opened me up, seducing me with gifts of macaroni cheese, and other things I couldn’t cook, (which was pretty much everything). He fed me, made me laugh, and, eventually, made me love.
So for love, I spent the next quarter century burying my strangeness. I very nearly got away with it, too.
Until, one day, while he was away on business, I found myself on the Downs, belt in hand, testing tree branches for one that could take my weight.
Something had to change. It turned out to be me.
I tell people: “David took it well; he moved to Australia…”
It usually gets a laugh.
…So now it’s the last day of my first visit after my change. My flight leaves in a couple of hours.
David has a new boyfriend now, Desmond, a man apparently intent on keeping his cock, something for which David is clearly grateful. Desmond, out of deference to my feelings, is not here this morning.
It’s just the two of us. The radio is on. Leonard Cohen, “Dance Me To The End Of Love”.
David, never one for lyrics, catches only the waltzy beat.
“Let’s dance,” he says. “Now you’re a girl, it’s allowed.”
It used to be a joke between us. Back when I was trying, so hard, to be a boy, I never danced, not even when drunk, which was often.
He gathers me in his arms, and holds me close, and we stumble through a sort of waltz, on the polished wooden floor of his shiny, me-less home.
And I’m glad he holds me close, because I’m remembering all the other times he held me down the years. Not dancing, just holding me: watching old movies on the sofa on a wet Sunday afternoon; at the end of a shitty working day; next to me in our bed. His arms, around me.
I feel his male strength, the promise of security, that turned out to be a lie after all, and I bury my face in his shoulder, and stifle my sobs, as the music plays, and Leonard sings:
“Show me slowly what I only know the limits of,
Dance me to the end of love.”
Finally, after all these years.
We’re dancing.
Tanya Murray used to be a lot of things. These days she just is.
Photographer Steve Collins took the picture on the South Downs. His photos are online at momofoto. He is also part of digitaldoc, an organisation dedicated to "easing the pain of the digital lifestyle".
There are naturally times when I wonder whether Un-Made-Up is a good idea or not; whether it's worth it. Opening the email from Tanya and reading this story for the first time was really, really, really, really not one of those times.
4:20 PM - 3/12/2006 -
William's afterword.
I couldn't agree more. Don't stop. Ad.
Anonymous - 11:54 AM - 4/12/2006
Mmm
Oh all right.
Thanks for the comment, by the way. For some reason they're thin on the ground here. I don't know whether people feel these pieces are so complete they don't need comment or what, but given the numbers dropping by, I'd welcome comments and I'm sure the writers would.
I've thought about adding some sort of voting mechanism so people can register how much they liked the story, but I'm not so keen to start ranking contributors.
Any thoughts are welcome.
w
wshaw - 11:29 AM - 5/12/2006
Comments
It's harder to make a comment on a true piece of writing. It's like you're commenting on someone's life instead of something which is written as a piece of fiction. A piece of fiction is more distant from the author and therefore easier to critique.
Susannah - 7:08 PM - 6/12/2006
Posting
Speaking as the author of the above piece, I can second William's view: I would certainly appreciate feedback/observations from readers. Yes, it is a slice of my life - but I have chosen, by writing about it and posting it here, to make it public, and like any piece of non-fiction writing, it is amenable to criticism. Criticism of how something is said is (or should be) distinct from criticism of what is said, and I am sure I can only benefit as a writer from thoughtful and constructive feedback. In short: bring it on!
xx Tanya Murray
Anonymous - 7:27 AM - 7/12/2006
OK
I take Susannah's point; but I think that just makes it more of a challenge. The leverage non-fiction has over fiction is that you know the author claims this as true; this creates a totally different tension - and I think thrilling one - to the process of reading.
And I think that allows people the double option of weighing in about either the subject matter of the story or the way in which it's told... The last thing I want is for Un-Made-Up to turn into some gruesome writers' workshop, but to take the sort of bold step Tanya has done means that she's probably able to take blows on either count.
I don't want Un-Made-Up to become a confessional box either; in some ways the danger is that too many people will just write autobiography. But when a story like this appears, I think it breaks new ground. As a personal story it's incredibly tender and raw but there are a lot of stories that are that. What I like is that it's unexplored territory. I don't think I've read anybody discuss the emotional journey of gender change in such an illuminating way.
For my money, there are loads of things I like about this story... but what I like most of all I is that you'd start reading it assuming that it's a simple story of long-time lovers falling out. It plays on conceptions of gender - which is, after all, part of what this story is about.
As a minor point, I read an earlier draft which Tanya wanted to change and there's a section which is no longer at the end - about whether people listen to the meaning of a song's lyric or not, and how meaning that's so potent for one person can fly over another's head. I kind of miss that... Why did you drop it, Tanya?
Edited by wshaw on 7/12/2006 at 12:29 PM
- 9:24 AM - 7/12/2006
Also
... I initially misread Tanya's description of Adelaide as being full of "sporty white people clinging to a semi-verdant fridge" which I still maintain is much more accurate.
wshaw - 9:42 AM - 7/12/2006
Wait a minute...
So I wrote the story underneath Tanya's...
And I write lots of fiction but also occasional features articles, most of which are based on my own life and, technically, 'true'.
All I wanted to add to this discussion is that actually much of the fiction I write is much closer and rawer to me emotionally than most of the 'fact', including the two things I've written for unmadeup. Which of course *are* true but are also manipulated and manipulative. I feel somewhat distanced from them because I've made decisions about what to include and what to omit and what to emphasise. There are bits of what happened on those two train journeys which only I know!
So you'd be commenting on the version of it I'd chosen to present, rather than on me, at least in my case. Other people may write for unmadeup differently.
Meanwhile, when I write fiction, it is of course not about me, but there is often a kernel of an emotion somewhere in it which I realise afterwards has sprung from something which has happened to me. E.g. last year I experienced a sudden and particularly awful bereavement, and I've only just realised that a lot of the stories I wrote in the middle-distant aftermath were about loss and isolation. No surprise really but it wasn't wholly conscious.
Actually I feel a lot more protective of those fictional pieces and would take it a lot harder and more personally if they were badly received. (Depending on the nature of the criticism, of course.)
All I mean is that fiction can be very personal and non-fiction isn't necessarily and the deliniation is a lot more complex than I think most people give it credit for.
Humbly,
Kate
Kate - 8:07 PM - 7/12/2006
A line!
I wouldn't go along with that. All story-telling, fiction or non-fiction, is about chosing what you leave out. If you tell everything, you're making a list, not telling a story. I think both forms make you decide how close to the knuckle you are willing to go...
wshaw - 9:29 PM - 7/12/2006
Comments
I feel uncomfortable about comments in Unmade up. Don't ask me to explain why.
Gil - 4:25 PM - 14/12/2006
Tanya
First of all, thank you, Tanya, for introducing me to this site. I think what you have proved to me is that personal narrative non-fiction is so much deeper in the emotions it teases out of us - and the quality of the narrative that results. I was very moved by the sadness - both described and implicit - of this piece. Because it is short it has to cover a lot of context setting and so it has to overcondense some of the material (ie your dismissive comments on your earlier self). I would like to know so much more about how you arrived at where you are now. I hope this will be expanded into a book.
Jonathan - 4:50 PM - 21/12/2006
Thank you Jonathan
Tanya here again. Thank you for your kind comments. I agree there is a lot of compression in the piece - a function of William's 1,000 word limit!
As a rule, though, I always try to write as tight as possible, as I find it personally a useful discipline to try to condense the essence of a piece as much as possible, and, hopefully, by such condensation, make it stronger.
This piece is the first I've written to directly address my situation, and was a sort of experiment for me because of that.
I'm very conscious of the tradition of so-called 'transition narratives', the usually tabloidesque, ghost written (dull!) accounts of media friendly transsexuals. I am categorically not interested in writing that sort of thing.
If I could find a way to make the experiences I've had along the way worth someone else's attention, though, it is something I'd consider. This piece might be a one-off, or it might be the start of something. I need to think about it...
Thanks again for your interest.
Tanya
Anonymous - 9:58 AM - 26/12/2006
True footnote to a true story
Since the time described in Dancing, I've been attempting a mainly one sided effort to retain contact with David, to try and find a new way for us to still matter, a little, in each others' lives, somehow. I told him about this piece. His response to it was to tell me not to contact him again. Ever.
Tanya Murray - 9:47 PM - 31/12/2006
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A growing collection of narrative non-fiction miniatures
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MORE! Send me MORE! Un-MADE-Up eats stories. If you've enjoyed the work published here on Un-Made-Up, maybe you'd like to add to this collection. If you have a true story that you would like to submit to Un-Made-Up please send it to me. The stories don't have to have a punchline, they don't have to be dramatic, they don't have to be funny, they don't have to make a point, they don't even have to be autobiographical; they must be under 1,000 words long, they must tell a story of some sort - however small - and above all they must, of course, be true.
If you are an illustrator or photographer who would like to add your take to one of the stories, please get in touch with me, William Shaw..
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