Chapter 6: The Eyebrows Incident

My first E.

Venus in Nottingham. A club so cool it was practically dripping with it, not my natural habitat at all. Later I’d gravitate to the harder places, the ones where the music was relentless and the crowd didn’t care what they looked like, but that night Venus was perfect. By the end of it I was up on the bar. There must have been twenty of us up there, but I knew if anyone was going to climb first, it would be me. And then the DJ dropped We Are Family. I’d never been able to dance before. Stiff, awkward, self-conscious. Suddenly I was moving like I’d been born for it, jigging my arse off, free in a way I’d never known. On the way home we sang it into the night. It still sounds like an anthem to me now.

From then on the pattern set in. Clubs, drugs, dancing. And always the ache. The ache I’d carried since childhood, only now sharper, more insistent. Ecstasy stripped away the noise and left the truth behind: I didn’t just want to be near the women, I wanted to be them.

I used to slip into the girls’ toilets and stay there for hours. Nobody cared. Everyone was boxed off their heads. I’d lean against the wall, breathing in the femininity, the chatter, the perfume, the way they flicked their hair in the mirror. I didn’t want to kiss them. I just wanted to be with them, to stand in that space and soak it up. Occasionally someone would ask, “What are you doing in here?” but mostly I was left alone. It felt like permission. Like stepping into the world I’d always wanted.

The nights stretched forever. The Dance Factory, Diggs and Whoosh on the decks, the music carrying us into the early hours. And then the after-parties. Flats crammed with bodies, the air thick with sweat and smoke, music blasting until Saturday night. That was Pez’s domain, he’d be on the decks, playing until the last stragglers gave in.

But often I wouldn’t go. I’d peel away, head back on my own. High as a fucking kite, buzzing with it, and that was when Stevie came out.

I’d drag a cheap pine-framed mirror into the living room and set it on a chair. Hours vanished like minutes. I’d shave everything beforehand, knowing if I tried once the ecstasy kicked in I’d cut myself to ribbons. The feel of jeans rasping against freshly shaved legs was horrible, but it was worth it for the illusion. I worried sometimes that maybe I was some kind of fetishist, staring at myself like that. But it wasn’t lust, it was hunger. I was building her.

The red dress became my second skin. A bodycon knit, below the knee, clinging in the right places once I’d strapped myself in. With the corset I’d hacked together from a Head sports bag and the little cleavage I could coax out of the glandular breasts I’d had since my twenties, it almost worked. I’d tweak and adjust endlessly. Could my waist be thinner? My hair better? Makeup sharper? Hours disappeared into this drug-fueled frenzy of becoming. Sometimes, on LSD, the illusion was so strong I lost track of myself. Was I a man who’d built a woman, or a woman trapped in a man’s body? For brief moments I forgot which I had started as. And then the mirror would betray me. A flash of jawline, an Adam’s apple, some angle of the face, and it all collapsed. Each time it broke me a little more.

Pez came round one night after leaving the club early. He knocked on my door, and if he had looked through the letterbox, he would have seen everything, dresses hanging, traces of Stevie everywhere. But he didn’t. I ran over, slammed it shut, held it down with my hand.
“Just fucking let me in, you dickhead,” he shouted.
But I wouldn’t. When he came out to me, he still brought it up. And I told him, “If you’d looked through that letterbox, you’d have found me out. And you, of all people, must know how that feels.”

Through it all, university was slipping away. My grades dropped from straight As to B-minuses. Enough to scrape a 2:1, but the momentum I’d built was ebbing away. I didn’t understand then how much the drugs were robbing me of focus, of motivation, of ambition. I only saw it later, looking back.

After graduation I started my first job. That was when the eyebrow incident happened. Four in the morning, high as a kite and convinced I’d had a stroke of genius, I decided my eyebrows were ruining the look. By dawn, most of them were gone. And I had work in a few hours.

Panic. I plastered up my face, painted on bruises, muttered something about being mugged. Any normal human being would have made a joke about their mates shaving their eyebrows off for a laugh. Not me. I came up with some elaborate, ridiculous, concocted story. Nobody believed me. But nobody asked either. Which was worse.

The drugs stripped me down to seventy kilos. A twig of a man. One morning, after a night at Renaissance in Mansfield, I tripped over my boots while wearing a too-thin pencil skirt I’d fashioned from a pillowcase, and smashed my face into the bathroom sink. Twenty-eight stitches. Another blow to the fantasy.

The cycle kept grinding on: work, dress, club, crash. Over and over until the joy thinned out. The highs weren’t worth the cost anymore. The girl felt further away each night. And the voice in my head was louder than the music now.

You can’t live like this. Kill it off. Be a fucking man.

I looked in the mirror one morning and thought: Where is this going?

No answer. Just the same thought circling like a vulture: maybe it’s time to throw it all away. Again.