The Hermaphrodite's Curse

PART TWO - CAMBRIDGE

- 1 -

"So..." Gabe said, unable to sit there in awkward silence any longer, "A transgender symbol, eh? What does that mean?"

After almost an hour and a half of feeling uncomfortable in the back of the cab with the fearsome stare of the purple haired punk eyeing him up from across the seat, Gabe was feeling pretty nervous. He had accepted that Saphy was probably as much in the dark as him about what had happened at the Gallery and about the guys that had chased them. That did not, however, make him any more comfortable in her company. Many times he felt on the verge of saying something only to have his ideas shot down by her withering look of contempt before he even had the chance to articulate them.

The huge urban sprawl of Greater London had been left long behind, to be replaced by the pleasant green fields of the English countryside. Driving into Cambridge put Gabe in a completely different place to the London he knew, a much smaller town with a much slower pace. People rode by the historic university buildings on bicycles and drove punts and rowing boats along the river.

Amongst these historic, academic scenes it was hard to imagine that they had recently been running for their lives and getting mixed up in a murder back in the city. Gabe began to relax and decided to raise some of the questions that had been on his mind for over an hour. Saphy, too, seemed to no longer be glaring at him quite so accusingly, as if she too had had a lot to think about on the way.

"What?" she replied, seemingly jogged by his question out of some deep thought, "What does it mean? You're asking what the symbolism of the shape is or what's the significance of it being drawn here? Because I can tell you the first, but I sure as hell don't have the faintest fucking clue about the other."

"No," Gabe confessed, "I meant what does that mean -- 'transgender'. It's not a word that I've ever heard before."

"Really?" Saphy scoffed, genuinely surprised, "You've never heard of transsexuals? You really are clueless aren't you? To think that you had me all scared back there, stalking me!"

"So, what is a transgender or transsexual or whatever?" Gabe replied, a little frustrated.

"Somebody that's both genders, part man, part woman, in some way or another," said Saphy, picking her words carefully to clarify just what she felt about the subject, "They could be anything from crossdressers who just dress in clothing that isn't appropriate to their own gender, although girls seem to get away with this without such a stigma, to people with gender dysphoria who feel they are born into the wrong gendered body, some of which have been surgically altered to more closely resemble their real gender, if not completely surgically reassigned. Some are even born intersex, hermaphrodites with the genetic qualities of both sexes."

Gabe's heart skipped a beat at the sound of the word "hermaphrodite", something he had never heard mentioned by anyone but the book Love's Children and the visions in his dreams. He had never imagined that such people, part man, part woman, could ever exist in reality. It almost felt like fate, an idea and image that he had hardly thought about in years suddenly coming back in his dreams and then in reality too. However, Gabe was a pretty private person and wasn't about to open up about all this rush of feelings to a near total stranger, especially one he was still slightly scared of.

"You seem to know an awful lot about this," he said warily, instead, "You're not a..er..transsexual or something yourself, are you?"

"Screw you!" she responded aggressively, "That's just what people like you think, isn't it? That if you show any interest or understanding, then you're just one of 'them'! You know, I am actually capable of compassion and empathy toward other people. You should try it sometime."

"OK, OK, sorry," Gabe decided it was probably best not to bring up the thought of her tone right now not seeming all that compassionate, instead he decided to change the tack of the conversation, "So, what about that thing you said before, about the symbolism of the design here, the circle and the cross and the arrow. What can you tell me about that?"

"It's a combination of the biological signs for male and female," Saphy replied, still slightly sullen, "My tattoo, as we've already established, is the female sign (see, if I was transgender, then my tattoo would have been just the same as the blood symbol). The male sign is a circle with an arrow coming from the top left."

"That seems pretty simple," Gabe said, glad to find, apart from her snarky aside, that Saphy had found a topic that would engage her in a more civil fashion.

"It's not," she said, seeming determined to contradict whatever he said, "People think that symbols are easy, like a code or an alphabet; this symbol means this, that one means that. But it's not true, the same shape of lines and circles can mean so many different things."

"How do you mean?"

"Imagine if my tattoo had this picture on it," she took a pen from where she saw it in Gabe's open laptop bag and drew a symbol on her arm, a hooked cross shape. Gabe recognised it instantly as the Nazi symbol, a swastika, "If that was my tattoo, you'd also have made some pretty quick judgements about what that tattoo said about me and my personality."

"That you're some mad, evil bitch," he responded, raising the hint of a smile on Saphy's lips for the first time.

"Exactly, but if you went back a couple of thousand years, then this same shape crops up frequently in Greek art and architecture, it's a sun symbol. Even today, it's still used as a symbol of harmony and balance in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. It actually guards against the kind of evil it has come to represent here in Europe. Of course, even knowing what it means to Buddhists, I could never bring myself to have that on my body," she spat on her arm and rubbed the ink off, "To us it will always now be a symbol of hate. But, others are not so set in stone."

Gabe was beginning to see that, like the symbols she was talking about, Saphy was a much more complicated prospect than she had first seemed. He had been quick to make judgements about her just like he had been quick to see the hooked swastika cross as a sign of evil. He was just starting to see that beneath that prickly persona was somebody who had picked up all kind of esoteric knowledge that could prove much more useful in unravelling the mystery that they were caught up in than any idea of his.

"So, your female sign doesn't just mean female?" he said.

"Exactly," Saphy agreed and Gabe let out an almost audible sigh to have found something that she finally agreed with, "It's actually the astrological symbol for the planet Venus and is a reference in itself to the goddess. Because Venus is the goddess of beauty and love, her object is the mirror. So, really the symbol originally represented a mirror. That's the glass surface," she pointed to the circle inked into her arm, "And that's the mirror's handle," she showed the cross, "So, I guess originally it was a symbol of female vanity, but, like I said, these meanings change over time. When the naturalist Linnaeus wanted to use symbols to represent male and female biological specimens, he chose the astrological symbol of Venus for female and Mars for male. Mars is the circle with an arrow coming out of it, it represents the war god's spear and shield. Basically, 18th century scientists had a really reductive idea of gender roles, even when it came to looking at plants, so men were warriors and women beauties."

"So, women really are from Venus and men are from Mars?"

"Don't be a dick," she replied, this time, however, smiling a little rather than spitting her response back aggressively, "Actually, that mirror thing reminds me," she went on, "This isn't the first time this painting's been attacked. In 1914 it was slashed as part of a protest by suffragettes after the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst. They were trying hard to change the way women were perceived and I think they kind of objected to that image of lounging before a mirror, admiring our gorgeous reflections!"

"So, if it's a symbol of all those old fashioned ideas of women just needing to look good, being seen and not heard, why does it matter to you? Why have you got it permanently inked into your body?" Gabe felt he had to ask.

"Because, as I already told you, symbols' meanings can change," she responded, "These days feminists like to use it to show that we are proud of our womanhood. We don't want to be just like men, we are different and special and want to celebrate that. Those suffragettes did great things for their time, they allowed women to be who we are today, but that means we don't need to be like them any more. Yeah, we don't always want the image of being the vainer sex, but, come on, we're obviously the more attractive. So, maybe I don't mind being a little bit like Venus. There's nothing wrong with valuing beauty. And it is a beautiful painting, there's no denying that. I can't imagine ever wanting to damage such a lovely thing as like they did."

"So, if your tattoo is the symbol for women and beauty and Venus, then why is that not the one that was written in blood on the gallery wall?" Gabe was beginning to feel that Saphy was using the discussion more as a chance to air her opinions than really answer the questions they needed answering, "Why this transgender one instead, Venus and Mars together in one?"

"Honestly? I have absolutely no idea," Saphy confessed, directing her eyes to the ground, for once no longer staring right at Gabe, her strident, opinionated tones somewhat suppressed to sound, for almost the first time, as if the real her was coming out a little.

"Look," she went on, "You were right, what you said before about being in this together, and needing to understand what we're dealing with after what happened back in London. I don't like it at all, but you're right. I don't know any of the answers, but I'm taking you to the one person I know who might be able to help."

Seemingly on cue, at this point, the cab driver turned back to face them.

"Sorry to interrupt your little lecture, love," he said, "But we're here. Cambridge. Now, where is it I can leave you?"

"Pembroke College," Saphy's voice had resumed it's plummy, upper-class tone of command, making it clear that her moment of confiding in Gabe was long since over, however he was surprised to hear her then add, "I hate this place. Just a world of traditionalist, elitist, smug idiots."