The Mermaids Singing

FROM 3" DISK LABELLED: BACKUP. 007; FILE LOVE. 018

It’s laughable. They pick a man who can’t even tell whether I’ve carried out a particular punishment or not and they employ him to help them catch me. They could at least have shown me the respect of employing someone who has some reputation, an opponent worthy of my skills, not some idiot who has never encountered someone of my calibre.

Instead, they insult me. Dr Tony Hill is supposed to be producing a profile of me, based on his analysis of my killings. When this account is published, years hence, after my death in my bed from natural causes, historians will be able to compare his profile with the reality and laugh at the gross inaccuracies of his pseudo-science.

He will never come close to the truth. For the record, I set down that truth.

I was born in the Yorkshire port of Seaford, one of the busiest fishing and commercial docks in the country. My father was a merchant seaman, the first officer on oil tankers. He went all over the world, then he would come home to us. But my mother was as bad a wife as she was a mother. I can see now that the house was always in chaos, the meals irregular and unappetizing. The only thing she was good at, the only thing they could share, was the drinking. If there was an Olympic pairs event for pissheads, they’d have walked off with the gold.

When I was seven, my father stopped coming home. Of course, my mother blamed me for not being a good enough son. She said I’d driven him away. She told me I was the man of the house now. But I could never live up to her expectations. She always wanted more from me than I was capable of, and ruled me by blame rather than praise. I spent more time locked in the cupboard than most people’s coats do.

Without my father’s pay cheque, she was thrown on the resources of the welfare system, which was barely enough to live on, never mind get drunk on. When the building society repossessed the house, we went to live with relatives in Bradfield for a while, but she couldn’t handle their disapproval, so we moved back to Seaford, when she turned to the town’s other boom industry, prostitution. I grew accustomed to the procession of disgusting, drunken sailors traipsing through the succession of grubby flats and bedsits where we lived. We were always behind with the rent, usually doing a moonlight flit just before the bailiffs got really heavy.

I grew to hate the ugly, grunting copulation that I was a constant witness to, and stayed out of the house as much as I possibly could, often sleeping rough down by the docks. I used to pick on kids that were younger than me to get their money off them so I could afford to eat. I moved schools almost as often as we moved house, so I never did too well there, in spite of the fact that I knew I could run rings round most of the other kids, who were just stupid.

As soon as I was 16, I left Seaford. It wasn’t a wrench; it wasn’t as if I’d ever managed to make many friends, what with moving all the time. I’d seen enough of men to know that I didn’t want to grow up like them, and I felt different inside. I thought if I moved back to a big city like Bradfield I’d find it easier to work out what I wanted. One of my mother’s cousins got me a job at the electronics firm where he worked.

About that time, I discovered that dressing in women’s clothes made me feel good about myself. I got my own bedsit so I could do it whenever I wanted to, and that calmed me down a lot. I started studying computer science at evening classes, and eventually got some proper qualifications. About that time, my mother got left a house in Seaford in her brother’s will.

I got the chance of a job back in Seaford, working in computer systems for the local private phone company. I didn’t really want to go back there, but the job was too good to turn down. I never went near my mother. I don’t think she even knew I was there.

One of the few good things about Seaford is that it’s handy for the ferry to Holland. I used to go there every other weekend, because in Amsterdam I could go out dressed as a woman and nobody batted an eyelid. Over there, I met a lot of transsexuals as well as transvestites, and the more I talked to them, the more I realized that I was just like them. I was a woman trapped in a man’s body. That explained why I’d never had much sexual interest in girls. And although I found men attractive, I knew I wasn’t a poof. They disgust me, with their pretence at normal relationships when everybody knows that it’s only men and women that can fit together properly.

I went to see the doctors at Jimmy’s in Leeds, where they do all the sex-change operations in the north, and they turned me down. Their psychologists were as stupid and blinkered as all the rest of their brotherhood. But I managed to find a private doctor in London who prescribed the hormone treatment I needed. Of course, I couldn’t go on working while this was going on, but I spoke to the boss and he said he’d give me a good reference for another job when I’d had the operation and I was a woman.

I had to go abroad for the operation, and it was all much more expensive than I expected. I went to my mother and asked her if she’d mortgage the house to lend me the money and she just laughed at me.

So I did what I’d learned from her. I sold myself on the docks. It’s amazing how much money sailors will pay for a travesti. They get out of their heads with excitement at the thought of someone who has breasts and a cock. I wasn’t like the other hookers either; I didn’t blow it all on drink or drugs or a pimp. I stashed it all away till I could afford the operation.

When I came to Seaford, not even my own mother recognized me at first. I’d only been back a few days when she took that tragic accidental overdose of drink and pills. Nobody was surprised. Yes, Doctor, you can add her to the list.

With my qualifications, experience and reference, I had no trouble getting a job as a senior systems analyst with the phone company in Bradfield. The money I made from the sale of the house in Seaford bought me my home in Bradfield, and I started the task of finding a worthy man to share my life.

And Dr Tony Hill presumes to understand me, without knowing any of this? Well, in a very short time, I’ll share it all with him. Such a shame he won’t have the chance to write it down for himself.