Fortnight of Fear Read online

  Behind her, through the picture window that was framed with cheese-plants and ivy, he could see the concrete promenade, the wide gray beach, the gray overhanging clouds, and the restless horizon of the North Sea.

  He came and sat down beside her. He touched her lips with his fingertip and she kissed it. His hand followed the warm heavy curve of her breast, and then he gently rolled her nipple between finger and thumb. She watched him, still smiling.

  “Do you think you could ever fall in love with somebody like me?” she asked him, in a whisper.

  “I don’t think there is anybody like you. Only you.”

  “So could you fall in love with me?”

  He dared to say it. “I think I already have.”

  She set her drink down on the glass and stainless steel table next to her, and knelt up on the sofa. She tugged down her pajama trousers so that she was naked. She pushed Gil on to his back, and climbed on top of him. “You like kissing me, don’t you?” she murmured. He didn’t answer, but lifted his head slightly, and saw her looking at him with that same disturbing smile.

  The house was always silent, except when they spoke, or when they played music. Anna liked Mozart symphonies, but she always played them in another room. The walls were white and bare, the carpets were gray. The inside of the house seemed to be a continuation of the bleak coastal scenery that Gil could see through the windows. Apart from the houseplants there were no ornaments. The few pictures on the walls were lean, spare drawings of naked men and women, faceless most of them. Gil had the feeling that the house didn’t actually belong to Anna, that it had been occupied by dozens of different people, none of whom had left their mark on it. It was a house of no individuality whatsoever. An anxious house, at the very end of a cul-de-sac that fronted the beach. The gray brick sidewalks were always swirled with gritty gray sand. The wind blew like a constant headache.

  They made love over and over again. They went for walks on the beach, the collars of their coats raised up against the stinging sand. They ate silent meals of cold meat and bread and cold white wine. They listened to Mozart in other rooms. On the third morning Gil woke up and saw that Anna was awake already, and watching him. He reached out and stroked her hair.

  “This is the day I have to go home,” he told her, his voice still thick from sleeping.

  She took hold of his hand and squeezed it. “Can’t you manage one more day? One more day and one more night?”

  “I have to go home. I promised Margaret. And I have to be back behind my desk on Monday morning.”

  She lowered her head so that he couldn’t see her face. “You know that – if you go – we will never be able to see each other any more.”

  Gil said nothing. It hurt too much to think that he might never sleep with Anna again in the whole of his life. He eased himself out from under the quilt, and walked through to the bathroom. He switched on the light over the basin and inspected himself. He looked tired. Well, anybody would be, after two days and three nights of orgiastic sex with a woman like Anna. But there was something else about his face which made him frown, a different look about it. He stared at himself for a long time but he couldn’t decide what it was. He filled the basin with hot water and squirted a handful of shaving-foam into his hand.

  It was only when he lifted his hand toward his face that he realized he didn’t need a shave.

  He hesitated, then he rinsed off the foam and emptied the basin. He must have shaved last night, before he went to bed, and forgotten about it. After all, they had drunk quite a lot of wine. He went to the toilet, and sat down, and urinated in quick fits and starts. It was only when he got up and wiped himself by passing a piece of toilet-paper between his legs that he realized what he had done. I never sit down to pee. I’m not a woman.

  Anna was standing in the bathroom doorway watching him. He laughed. “I must be getting old, sitting down to pee.”

  She came up to him and put her arms around his neck and kissed him. It was a long, complicated, yearning kiss. When he opened his eyes again she was staring at him very close up. “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Not yet, I couldn’t bear it. Give me one more day. Give me one more night.”

  “Anna … I can’t. I have a family; a job.”

  With the same directness she had exhibited in the bar of the Amstel Hotel, she came up to him and put her arms around him, kissing his neck and his shoulders. His reaction was immediate. “Don’t go,” she repeated, “I’ve been waiting so long for somebody like you … I can’t bear to lose you just yet. One more day, one more night. You can catch the evening flight on Monday and be back in England before nine.”

  He kissed her. He knew that he was going to give in.

  That day, they walked right down to the edge of the ocean. A dog with wet bedraggled fur circled around and around, yapping at them. The wind from the North Sea was relentless. When they returned to the house, Gil felt inexplicably exhausted. Anna undressed him and helped him up to the bedroom. “I think I’m feeling the strain,” he smiled at her. She leaned over and kissed him. He lay with his eyes open listening to Mozart playing in another room, and looking at the way the gray afternoon light crossed the ceiling and illuminated the pen-and-ink drawing of a man and a woman entwined together. The drawing was like a puzzle. It was impossible to tell where the man ended and where the woman began.

  He fell asleep. It started to rain, salty rain from the sea. He slept all afternoon and all evening, and the wind rose and the rain lashed furiously against the windows.

  He was still asleep at two o’clock in the morning, when the bedroom door opened and Anna came in, and softly slipped into bed beside him. “My darling,” Anna murmured, and touched the smoothness of his cheek.

  He dreamed that Anna was shaking him awake, and lifting his head so that he could sip a glass of water. He dreamed that she was caressing him and murmuring to him. He dreamed that he was trying to run across the beach, across the wide gray sands, but the sands turned to glue and clung around his ankles. He heard music, voices.

  He opened his eyes. It was twilight. The house was silent. He turned to look at his watch on the bedside table. It was 7:17 in the evening. His head felt congested, as if he had a hangover, and when he licked his lips they felt swollen and dry. He lay back for a long time staring at the ceiling, his arms by his sides. He must have been ill, or maybe he had drunk too much. He had never felt like this in his life before.

  It was only when he raised his hand to rub his eyes that he understood that something extraordinary had happened to him. His arm was obstructed by a huge soft growth on his chest. He felt a cold thrill of complete terror, and instantly yanked down the quilt. When he saw his naked body, he let out a high-pitched shout of fright.

  He had breasts. Two heavy, well-rounded breasts, with fully developed nipples. He grasped them in his hands and realized they weren’t tumorous growths, they weren’t cancers, they were actual female breasts, and very big breasts, too. Just like Anna’s.

  Trembling, he ran his right hand down his sides, and felt a narrow waist, a flat stomach, and then silky pubic hair. He knew what he was going to feel between his legs, but he held himself back for minute after minute, his eyes closed, not daring to believe that it had gone, that he had been emasculated. At last, however, he slipped his fingers down between his hairless thighs, and felt the moist lips of his vulva. He hesitated, swallowed, and then slipped one finger into his vagina.

  There was no question about it. His body was completely female, inside and out. In appearance at least, he was a woman.

  “None of this is real,” he told himself, but even his voice was feminine. He climbed slowly out of bed and his breasts swayed, just the way that Anna’s had swayed. He walked across the room and confronted the full-length mirror beside the dressing-table. There was a woman looking back at him, a beautiful naked woman, and the woman was him.

  “This isn’t real,” he repeated, cupping his breasts in his hands and staring intently at the face in the mirro
r. The eyes were his, the expression was his. He could see himself inside that face, his own personality, Gil Batchelor the bus salesman from Woking. But who else was going to be able to see what he saw? What was Brian Taylor going to see, if he tried to turn up for work? And, God Almighty, it seemed absurd, but what was Margaret going to say, if he came back home looking like this?

  Without a sound, he collapsed on to the floor, and lay with his face against the gray carpet, in total shock. He lay there until it grew dark, feeling chilled, but unwilling or unable to move. He wasn’t sure which and he wasn’t going to find out.

  At last, when the room was completely dark, the door opened, and a dim light fell across the floor. Gil heard a voice saying, “You’re awake. I’m sorry. I should have come in earlier.”

  Gil lifted his head. Unconsciously, he drew his long tangled hair out of his eyes, and looked up. A man was silhouetted in the doorway, a man wearing a business-suit and polished shoes.

  “Who are you?” he asked, hoarsely. “What the hell has happened to me?”

  The man said, “You’ve changed, that’s all.”

  “For Christ’s sake, look at me. What the hell is going on here? Did you do this with hormones, or what? I’m a man! I’m a man, for Christ’s sake!” Gil began to weep, and the tears slid down his cheeks and tasted salt on his lips.

  The man came forward and knelt down beside him and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t hormones. If I knew how it happened, believe me, I’d tell you. But all I know is, it happens. One man to the next. The man who was Anna before me – the man who took the body that used to be mine – he told me everything about it, just as I’m telling you – and just as you’ll tell the next man that you pick.”

  At that moment, the bedroom door swung a little wider, and the man’s face was illuminated by the light from the hallway. With a surge of paralyzing fright, Gil saw that the man was him. His own face, his own hair, his own smile. His own wristwatch, his own suit. And outside in the hallway, his own suitcase, already packed.

  “I don’t understand,” he whispered. He wiped the tears away from his face with his fingers.

  “I don’t think any of us ever will,” the man told him. “There seems to be some kind of pattern to it; some kind of reason why it happens; but there’s no way of finding out what it is.”

  “But you knew this was going to happen all along,” said Gil. “Right from the very beginning. You knew.”

  The man nodded. Gil should have been violent with rage. He should have seized the man by the throat and beaten his head against the wall. But the man was him, and for some inexplicable reason he was terrified of touching him.

  The man said, quietly, “I’m sorry for you. Please believe me. But I’m just as sorry for myself. I used to be a man like you. My name was David Chilton. I was thirty-two years old, and I used to lease executive aircraft. I had a family, a wife and two daughters, and a house in Darien, Connecticut.”

  He paused, and then he said, “Four months ago I came to Amsterdam and met Anna. One thing led to another, and she took me back here. She used to make me make love to her, night after night. Then one morning I woke up and I was Anna, and Anna was gone.”

  Gil said, “I can’t believe any of this. This is madness. I’m having a nightmare.”

  The man shook his head. “It’s true; and it’s been happening to one man after another, for years probably.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Anna took my passport and my luggage, and it seemed to me that there was only one place that she could go – he could go. Only one place where he could survive in my body and with my identity.”

  Gil stared at him. “You mean – your own home? He took your body and went to live in your own home?”

  The man nodded. His face was grim. Gil had never seen himself look so grim before.

  “I found Anna’s passport and Anna’s bank-books – don’t worry, I’ve left them all for you. I flew to New York and then rented a car and drove up to Connecticut. I parked outside my own house and watched myself mowing my own lawn, playing with my own daughters, kissing my own wife.”

  He lowered his head, and then he said, “I could have killed him, I guess. Me, I mean – or at least the person who looked like me. But what would that have achieved? I would have made a widow out of my own wife, and orphans out of my own children. I loved them too much for that. I love them still.”

  “You left them alone?” Gil whispered.

  “What else could I do? I flew back to Holland and here I am.”

  Gil said, “Couldn’t you have stayed like Anna? Why couldn’t you stay the way you were? Why did you have to take my body?”

  “Because I’m a man,” David Chilton told him. “Because I was brought up a man, and because I think like a man, and because it doesn’t matter how beautiful a woman you are, how rich a woman you are … well, you’re going to find out what it’s like, believe me. Not even the poorest most down-trodden guy in the whole wide world has to endure what women have to endure. Supposing every time that a woman came up to a man, she stared at his crotch instead of his face, even when they were supposed to be having a serious conversation? You don’t think that happens? You did it to me, when we met at the hotel. Eighty per cent of the time, your eyes were ogling my tits, and I know what you were thinking. Well, now it’s going to happen to you. And, believe me, after a couple of months, you’re going to go pick up some guy not because you want to live like a man again but because you want your revenge on all those jerkoffs who treat you like a sex object instead of a human being.”

  Gil knelt on the floor and said nothing. David Chilton checked Gil’s wristwatch – the one that Margaret had given him on their last anniversary – and said, “I’d better go. I’ve booked a flight at eleven.”

  “You’re not –” Gil began.

  David Chilton made a face. “What else can I do? Your wife’s expecting me home. A straight ordinary-looking man like me. Not a voluptuous brunette like you.”

  “You can’t do this,” Gil told him. “It’s theft!”

  “Theft? How can a man steal something which everybody in the whole world will agree is his?”

  “Then it’s murder, for God’s sake! You’ve effectively killed me!”

  “Murder?” David Chilton shook his head. “Come on, now, Anna, I really have to go.”

  “I’ll kill you,” Gil warned him.

  “I don’t think so,” said David Chilton. “Maybe you’ll think about it, the way that I thought about killing the guy who took my body. But there’s a diary in the living room, a diary kept by most of the men who have changed into Anna. Read it, before you think of doing anything drastic.”

  He reached out and touched Gil’s hair, almost regretfully. “You’ll survive. You have clothes, you have a car, you have money in the bank. You even have an investment portfolio. You’re not a poor woman. Fantasy women never are. If you want to stay as Anna, you can live quite comfortably for the rest of your life. Or … if you get tired of it, you know what to do.”

  Gil sat on the floor incapable of doing anything at all to prevent David Chilton from leaving. He was too traumatized; too drained of feeling. David Chilton went to the end of the hallway and picked up his suitcase. He turned and smiled at Gil one last time, and then blew him a kiss.

  “So long, honey. Be good.”

  Gil was still sitting staring at the carpet when the front door closed, and the body he had been born with walked out of his life.

  He slept for the rest of the night. He had no dreams that he could remember. When he woke up, he lay in bed for almost an hour, feeling his body with his hands. It was frightening but peculiarly erotic, to have the body of a woman, and yet to retain the mind of a man. Gil massaged his breasts, rolling his nipples between finger and thumb the way he had done with “Anna”. Then he reached down between his legs and gently stroked himself, exploring his sex with tension and curiosity.

  He wondered what i
t would be like to have a man actually inside him; a man on top of him, thrusting into him.

  He stopped himself from thinking that thought. For God’s sake, you’re not a queer.

  He showered and washed his hair. He found the length of his hair difficult to manage, especially when it was wet, and it took four attempts before he was able to wind a towel around it in a satisfactory turban. Yet Margaret always did it without even looking in the mirror. He decided that at the first opportunity he got, he would have it cut short.

  He went to the closet and inspected Anna’s wardrobe. He had liked her in her navy-blue skirt and white loose-knit sweater. He found the sweater folded neatly in one of the drawers. He struggled awkwardly into it, but realized when he looked at himself in the mirror that he was going to need a bra. He didn’t want to attract that much attention, not to begin with, anyway. He located a drawerful of bras, lacy and mysterious, and tried one on. His breasts kept dropping out of the cups before he could fasten it up at the back, but in the end he knelt down beside the bed and propped his breasts on the quilt. He stepped into one of Anna’s lacey little G-strings. He found it irritating, the way the elastic went right up between the cheeks of his bottom, but he supposed he would get used to it.

  Get used to it. The words stopped him like a cold bullet in the brain. He stared at himself in the mirror, that beautiful face, those eyes that were still his. He began to weep with rage. You’ve started to accept it already. You’ve started to cope. You’re fussing around in your bra and your panties and you’re worrying which skirt to wear and you’ve already forgotten that you’re not Anna, you’re Gil. You’re a husband. You’re a father. You’re a man, damn it!

  He began to hyperventilate, his anger rising up unstoppably like the scarlet line of alcohol rising up a thermometer. He picked up the dressing-stool, and heaved it at the mirror. The glass shattered explosively, all over the carpet. A thousand tiny Annas stared up at him in uncontrollable fury and frustration.