This is the website of Molly Cutpurse, the English transgendered novelist. Here you will find links to purchase her books from Amazon and her publishers as well as links to buy eBooks from PayLoadz's and Lulu's secure servers.
There is also a substantial amount of FREE peanuts here consisting of stories, artwork, sound-bites and videos.
For a better understanding of Molly's extraordinary novels, please click here.
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You are invited to read my blog. Please click here.
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Web page/videos of the Month
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2EV3w2QxII
and
http://es.youtube.com/watch?v=BOjeZnjKlp0&feature=related
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Short stories of the month
They are still, my people.
They are still, my people. Perfectly still, if one does not account for the occasional twitch of an eyelid or the sound of a rasping dryness which twitches indiscreetly around their dry lips.
They have a unwieldily detachment. As far away from their youth as one can imagine, these elderly, wheelchair-bound statues whose eyes dry off into the distance, many seeing no detail, but reduced to shadows and the few textures which remain to them.
They are not hungry anymore. They look forward to nothing. And the odours in the still air attest to it. These people, perhaps more than most, live just for the next few moments. Their perspective, if we could ever witness it, would be inexplicable to our earthbound mortal eyes and ears.
Yet, their legs bleed continuously, their weekly perms glow when the summer sunshine strikes them with an unfathomable blueness, their forehead's crease and they cry with anguish at the impossible and the unknowable. It is heart-breaking. And each day I dread going in to work for one reason; ugly news that another has died during the night. It is an impossible job.
The wheelchairs are kept spotlessly clean and oiled. As is their last place of residence. Lined up like some macabre race in the living rooms, they are left, always turned towards the sun. As if that is what they have to look forward to. Their clothes too are boiled spotlessly clean and parched, some to the extent of losing colour. But few visitors notice details like that. Mother is clean and silent, and therefore content. That is what they notice.
Death reduces us all, it has often been said. But when it catches up, and overcomes, as it will, our feeble and time-limited attempts to keep it at bay, address an expression of thanks to your God that you have friends and family around you; not dry and, to my eyes, still incomprehensible statues.
Grandmother
Despite the pretty decor, the flowers, the family photos, some still, some ever changing and rotated by an eframe, and all of them witness to past happy major family events, where the subjects perpetually beamed at the observer, the room where my grandmother was to spend the last months of her long and productive life had to be likened to a prison cell. One could not escape the similarity, no matter how hard one tried. There were no bars on the single window but the length and width and height of it gave it away. As did the lock on the door.
A faint odour of urine, like a strong brown colour, assailed me as I entered but it was so negligible that it was forgotten straight away. Nan did not know I was visiting and it would not have made the slightest difference to the situation if she had. She did not hear me knock on the standard thick fire door and did not notice my entrance either.
She was slouched on the corner of her single bed, her eyes closed, thin creased neck bent forward, her clothes clean if not pressed, her thin grey hair awry slightly, her treasured battered brown and cream handbag, clutched unconsciously in a fist. I called her title louder, noticing her hearing aid and both sets of false teeth on the bed side cabinet despite it being mid afternoon. I frowned at this. Nothing. Only when I was three feet away, did she visibly jump to become immediately annoyed. Which itself was soon replaced by confusion as she wiped the sleep from her eyes before focusing on her intruder.
She referred to me as nurse and, as I sat on a single hard-backed chair, I explained that I was her granddaughter, 'Little Bobby' I empathised until, there it was, at last, some semblance of the beautiful and no nonsense woman I had known in my young life. The woman who had been so particular about the condition of the backs of her chair legs and how they were not to be scuffed, the angel who fed me bacon and mashed potato every Saturday afternoon as my mother had offloaded me to give her some respite for one afternoon a week, the laughing and gorgeous woman whose presence in her old kitchen she undoubtedly dominated.
However, there was no domination now. Not in her last place of residence. At that moment, feeble in mind, tired, weary, battered and withdrawn, she looked at me disinterestedly through pale blue Alzheimer's eyes as that momentary flash of who she once was, disappeared back into the choppy sea of confused consciousness that was now her only world. I spoke again of the past, touched her hand as if to press home the memories I was trying to evoke but this ploy only worked for a limited number of seconds before she, every time, sank back into her confused mutterings about how little money she had and shockingly, mentioning what bastards and fuckers they were to do that to her. Even holding up her empty purse for me to see how wicked everyone was that they had stolen her money. If it had not been so tragic, it would have been amusing. No other emotion or reaction would have sufficed.
She referred to me as a nurse again and reached across to her bedside cabinet and retrieved a twin-headed razor from a white china mug adorned with a colourful print of flowers before gently proceeding to stroke it dryly across her chin. And I could hear the rasp of the stubble. This was a bizarre experience and in that long second, I became confused as to how the young and delicate flower of her species, as I had remembered her in the few monochromatic photographs which existed, taken long before I was thought of, could have changed into the shameless woman who now sat before me.
What sequence of events could have taken place which would culminate in this once proud individual, a woman who had once occupied a high position in the Ministry Of Defence, to unblushingly scrap a razor across her chin in front of, to her confused perception, a complete stranger? What power in all the world could have so altered her perception, her sense of dignity, her perspicacity, her...nobleness to this extent? What could have brought her to this?
The urine odour returned quite suddenly and I heard an unwelcome noise. A slight hiss. It was time for me to leave, to fetch a carer and then to examine my own life with the assistance of a cigarette and a few tears in the car park with the horror that, at that moment, I could well be looking at my own future, perhaps some forty years hence. Yes, at that moment, I would never undertake any cosmetic hair removing work in front of anyone and that includes my husband. Had granny once felt the same? In her young and smooth days? I touched her marbled hands again briefly and offered my good-byes. I did not kiss her and she only offered me a look devoid of feeling, as if my beloved grandmother had already departed, leaving just this animated shell. "Good-bye nurse", she mumbled. Two months later, my mother blasted me with the news that she had died.
Death of a loyal friend
I remember carrying her back from the kennels; it wasn't a whisker ago either. Maude was alive then, and Bobby, and Saul our tabby. How the poor feline hated her at first! I never thought I'd see the day when the two of them were to be found together, enjoying the heat of the fire, apparently watching television! The pup was a wee thing at first; a sprat of a creature, thin with nobbled bones sticking through her young and still taut fur. A dreadful sight and a wicked damnation on the farmer who let the puppy and her brothers and sisters get like that. Rot in hell may he.
When not annoying Saul though, as she grew, she felt sweet towards humans despite the treatment she had suffered at the hand of one of us. Maude used to bath her about once a month and we were convinced she loved our attention. But never a bark she uttered. Her way of convincing us that all was not as it should be was to growl softly and widen her delicate brown eyes. Her temperament was one of silence, one we could talk to, as if she understood. But now, with Maude long in her grave, Bobby, lost to us at sea and Saul, the only other animal she had tolerated in the house, long since, I suppose, turned into glue, my dearest companion had leukaemia.
She was fifty eight thousand and fifty three days old when we made our final trip to the People's Dispensary. A suitable dull, thunderous and emotionally dangerous day. Young Tom, my next door neighbour's boy helped me with her into the cab but then I told him he could go no further . A frivolous boy but that day he knew why and where we were going and an aura of sadness pervaded but we left him nevertheless. I saw him recede into the distance and felt a chill as I realised that that was a forerunner of what I would soon have to do.
The vet understood. He was a personal friend and knew this business well. Simon had given her her first round of shots and had especially cared for her when, in her seventh year she was pained with kidney stones. As I waited in the grey waiting room, her head on my lap, her eyes occasionally flicking up to see if I was looking at her, paying her my usual attention, I felt so much complex guilt it was impossible to decode or describe. I pulled so gently at her little terrier ears and felt blocked; in all ways. Close to tears, to distraction, to hell, I had not felt as much when Maude, my only sister, had been lowered into the ground in that mangy old casket.
I was called and she managed to walk in with me. Simon knew why we were here and he very gently lifted her onto the table. He did not speak but retreated into the shadows and we were left alone for the last time. I kissed her gently between her eyes and felt her warmth and in return, she offered a slow lick on my cheek and then laid her head back down between her paws, her eyes still occasionally flicking up at me.
Aware of Simon's time, I spoke a last few words and told her that I loved her and that I would always love her. There was an unspoken communication then between us and I think, however impossible it may seem, that she knew. She did not murmur as the needle entered but I held her right paw and stroked her soft head until, within seconds, her brown eyes closed quite peacefully. Then the last breath and life left her. I was bubbling and fixed with emotion but I did not cry. It was peace for her; no more awful pain. She was gone; my perfect playmate, chum and companion was dead.
I do not remember reaching home but when I did, I could smell her and my personal dam broke. Much later, after the storm had turned eastward, I gathered her toys, her lead, her basket, my many photographs and placed them in a box. This I stored in the attic and then I wrote my diary. It was a miserly entry; ruthless and mean and sadly did not reflect the love I felt or the emptiness and loneliness which was beginning to close, tighten and envelope me; Rose was put to sleep today. Alone again.
The love that has no name.
She sat, twisted; in an ancient rusty wheelchair that was probably as old as she; this woman in her late fiftes. The wheelchair alone betrayed her status, no high-tech aluminium here. Some wood, dirty dry spokes and worn grey paint. But it suited her, this suffer of Parkinson's disease.
She stared. At what, only her distraught husband knew. Her eyes, like her almost white hair were dry; not lifeless but dry in the sense that they understood nothing. She gazed across the large hall to the golden cross, her focus unchanging when anyone passed in front. She could have been seeing into the future or the past as far as I could tell.
She looked relaxed. Except for her hands and wrists, the former, which continually shook, and the latter that cruelly bent back on themselves. Her head hung to one side, her bottom lip glistened with transparent drawl. A white towel lay on her sunken chest.
We were in church. A Tuesday coffee morning but I'm guessing that she did not know that. He knew that. Her huge brute of a husband, in looks only of course. I'm guessing a one-time bouncer or a boxer. Almost certainly an ex convict. I look for spirituality in his face but see none. A face that, in its time, had almost certainly made the acquaintance of a multitude of Essex fists.
Nevertheless, where anger and panic once resided, now only tenderness existed. It was clear to all that his concern was only for her. Where had they met? How had she quietened his life? Made him fall so much in love with her? Where had that happened? Such un-opened history.
His suit was poorly made, his shirt un-ironed, a plain blue tie messy with a breakfast and he needed new shoes. He was a plain man now as well; something of the ego had diminished him. He neither smiled nor frowned but there was panic around his eyes. Panic probably even he was not aware of yet. Although about the same age as his wife (I could see their tokens of love around their ring fingers) he had no hair left and his spectacles were broken in three places. What was their history? Marriage in the Seventies? Thinner, hipper, trendier? How has time brought them to this?
His clothes were props now. Props brought at the many local charity shops, as was her simple floral patterned dress, obviously purchased for her as no woman in charge of her own mind under the age of sixty would have considered it. And no earrings or adornments of any kind. Not the sort of things he had an interest in.
Occasionally, he swung a huge arm out, grasped his cup and passed it under his bland and stale-looking red moustache and drank but, when he was not doing that, both his huge hairy hands were touching hers, trying so absolutely, but in vain to keep them still.
They pampered and pawed, stroked and caressed, knitted and uncrossed and all with unimaginable tenderness. Here truly was a man learning to be another man and with a woman lost to him. Here was a man who once whispered in his wife's ear, "Tienes mi corazon" - you have my heart. A phrase learnt when honeymooning in Latin America and never forgotten.
They remained like that, facing the alter, while I finished my own coffee and I wondered what the next ten years would be like for them, more him than her I will admit. For she had already left the marriage and the life cared for by social services. Although when a sunbeam illuminated her face, her jarring neck twitched gently upwards to meet it but I've a feeling it was an automatic response. Her fingers did not stop their eternal muscular chatter.
Who would he become after his darling wife left? How would he spend his time? Something told me there were no children. Something told me most of him would die too.
They exuded poverty on every level but they were a queen and a king as far as I could imagine. A half an hour later, about to get my bus, I strolled through the shopping precinct and came upon them once again, this time outside Boots.
He was on his knees, his face the subject of immense sadness and concentration as he held a straw to her mouth dipped into a can of inexpensive cola. They were silent and I wondered about their last conversation.
I pretended to window-shop but the more I watched, the more impotent I became. I was not the only voyageur; shoppers glanced too but the man was oblivious to all except her needs. I do not have a name for that type of love. But I have never received or given it.