Sex and Other Changes by David Nobbs Page A

cool Spanish tiles and elegant rugs, not these coffee-stained, winesplashed, asthma-inducing housing estates for carpet mites.
    â€˜Nick, I hate you,’ she said later as she lifted his odious photograph of the management team at the Cornucopia, all teeth and trousers, to dust round it.
    She dusted round their wedding photograph. If they had known what was in store …! She dusted round the photographs of Em and Gray at various stages in their little lives. Her eyes filled with tears. This was intolerable. It was becoming a habit.
    She picked up the wedding photograph again and stared at it and knew that all her efforts to hate Nick had failed.
    She loved him, damn it. She admired him. She’d have described him as a wimp, if the word hadn’t had connotations of strength that he didn’t possess, and now here he was showing courage and determination and imagination. She knew better than anyone how much of all those things a sex change took.
    She had always tried to be fair and just, and she realised now just how unfair she had been to Nick in blaming him for his monstrous self-absorption. That was simply the nature of consciousness. Hadn’t she been exactly the same, planning her every move, unaware of the great journey he was making in his head?
    She felt sick with nerves at the thought of him at the clinic. Oh, Nick, if we could only start the day again and I could say nice things at the station. Supposing he’s killed in a train crash.
    Don’t even think like that, Alison.
    She went to the kitchen, made herself an instant coffee, put a quarter of a spoonful of honey in it though normally she didn’t sweeten it.
    Bernie drifted in, in his braces and frayed shirt, and coughed shyly. It was the little cough he used before he asked a favour.
    â€˜Of course you can, Dad,’ she said.
    â€˜I haven’t said owt yet,’ he said. He hung on to his Yorkshire dialect in this foreign place.
    â€˜Whatever you want you can have, Dad,’ she said. ‘You’re my dad.’
    He frowned. He didn’t like her making it as easy as that.
    â€˜Seeing you’re here today,’ he began, and the thought struck him for the first time. ‘Why are you here today?’
    â€˜The works are being fumigated. Legionnaires’ disease.’
    â€˜Oh. We had that in a chimney in Wath-on-Dearne. Archie Millington’s dad who wasn’t really his dad died of it.’ He coughed again. ‘Seeing as you’re here, I thought … it wasMarge’s idea like … I thought …’ cos Tommy Pilbeam and one or two others play doms in t’Coach on a Thursday dinnertime, and seeing as you’re here, Marge thought … she’s a saint, that woman … “I don’t like you stuck here with me all day,” she said. “It’s not right.” Just for an hour like.’
    â€˜Of course I don’t mind,’ she said, answering the question he hadn’t quite dared to ask – was she really so difficult to approach? ‘Be as long as you like, but you aren’t going like that.’
    â€˜Aren’t I?’
    â€˜Look at yourself, Dad. You look like a scruffy old man. Smarten yourself up. Imagine there’s a young barmaid there.’
    â€˜There
is
a young barmaid there.’
    Suddenly he looked about two inches taller and when he went to say goodbye he was that smart, you could have thought he was going to a wedding, not just for a few hands of fives and threes, which he’d taught the locals who had never played it, and a couple of pints of mild and bitter, which was a very popular drink in Throdnall.
    She kissed him and he looked very surprised and said, ‘What’s up wi’ you?’
    She waved goodbye as if he was going to the North Pole, and then she sat with her mum for an hour or so. The granny flat was foetid with heat and old age, but it was strangely peaceful. Marge hadn’t the energy to resent