Summary
"People: The Doctor"
Dr. Krishnamurty is called to Joss Moody’s house, where he has been dead for a bit of time. Millie looks like she has been suffering. The doctor goes upstairs. The room has a strange quality because it is an ordinary room with a dead body in it—a body that had once been a man, a person. She gets out the death certificate and begins her procedure. Eventually she sees the bandages and begins to unwrap them. When she first sees the breasts they don’t make sense to her. it is only when she looks below the pajama bottoms that she knows the truth.
She gets her red pin out and crosses out “male” and writes “female” in large red letters. Downstairs she gives Mrs. Moody the death certificate. Mrs. Moody is stoic, composed.
"Cover Story"
Colman is thinking about his childhood and his experience with his father. Joss never hit him, ever. They would walk in the street and people would assume Colman was his biological son. It was hard being Joss’s son, though, because Colman was resolutely ordinary and talentless.
He is currently very angry, feeling as if he was “conned” by his parents and that what he once understood as his life is now totally different. He ruminates on how his life was far from conventional. The family toured all the time and he remembers wishing he had his friend Sammy’s regular, normal life. Sometimes he had thought his father was having affairs on their trips but once when he asked his mother about that (just to stir the pot) she gave him a weird smile and said Joss would never be unfaithful. These memories are the ones Colman has to excavate now, as everything is turned upside down. Colman went to his funeral despite what he knew.
As a child and young man Colman was in his own world. He pretended he didn’t care what his father thought of him but he did want him to be proud of him “as a man, as a black man. I fucking worshipped him” (49). A memory pops up of him going into his father’s trumpet case when he was six and stroking it to make it purr like his father did. His mother found him and told him to leave it alone.
He wonders how his parents pulled the whole thing off, deciding they must have fooled the adoption agency. It had been a fortunate thing at the time, the agency told them—a mixed-race child for this mixed-race couple. Now Colman wishes he could have had any other boring father. He then remembers moving to London from Glasgow when he was seven. He never felt Scottish or English.
He wonders what his father’s death certificate says. He feels like he has the right to search through whatever he wants, get whatever answers he needs. His father was nice to everyone. They were poor until he was ten or so; it seemed like his father was forever trying to get solid gigs.
All of his memories are kind of jumbled up. He recalls once when he and his mother were on a bus in Glasgow and a black man got on. Someone said something racist to him and his mother immediately became fired up and cursed him. The man looked at Colman and said something like, “No wonder,” and Millie took Colman off the bus. He felt his mother’s rage as they went home, and this made Colman really consider the color of his own skin for the first time.
He wonders why Joss didn’t tell him the truth. He’s not a boy; he’s over thirty. Yes, his father was never naked around him but many families are like that. It’s rarer to have a situation like Sammy’s, where he saw his father’s penis and was surprised how big it was. Millie and Joss always liked Sammy, which made Colman jealous and annoyed.
Things seem to be making more sense now. Joss never taught Colman to swim—where would he have changed? He feels like a complete idiot because of all the signs he now sees.
Before he was adopted he was William Dunsmore. If he had stayed William Dunsmore he’d have a completely different life—a different smile, walk, facial expressions. As a kid he used to think about this a lot, but he never really cared about his “real” parents. They gave him up and were not entitled to his concern.
Colman wonders why, if the jazz world was so “anything goes,” as his father said, his father had to hide himself. As for himself, Colman has never fancied boys. He is sure of this.
Colman would ask his father about where his parents came from and all Joss would say is that “you make up your own bloodline” (58). Any immigrant story could be his father’s, he would say, which infuriated Colman. He wanted to know the truth, but Joss never liked discussing his own family. Colman wonders if there is any information or photographs of Josephine Moore hiding anywhere. If he saw them, he could convince himself this wasn’t some strange Freudian nightmare. He sighs to himself that he was wrong about absolutely everything.
Colman becomes more upset, thinking about how “some people get all the luck” (61) but “My father had tits. My father didn’t have a dick. My father had tits. My father had a pussy. My father didn’t have any balls. How many people had fathers like mine?” (61). He decides he will track him down. He is no longer his father’s disciple; he’s gone to the other side.
He shudders remembering how the funeral director told him about his father. When Colman arrived at the funeral parlor the man told him haltingly what he had discovered, and Colman became angry because he assumed it was a cruel joke. However, he went to his father’s body and saw the truth. His father’s body was female, there were bandages there, and the image of “my father in a woman’s body. Like some pervert” (63) was unforgettable. He remembers thinking he would never feel normal again.
Yesterday Colman got drunk and was down and out. He went to his parents’ house, which disconcerted him with its palpable sense that “the whole house had died, not just my father” (65). He went through the post and his adoption papers and discovered a letter from his father addressed to him and to be opened after Joss’s death. Colman chose not to read it, and has still not read it, because he assumed it was full of excuses and reasons. He just wasn’t and isn’t interested.
That morning Colman saw a woman who looked like his mother and it upset him. He thinks of his parents passing looks and kissing each other. He cannot believe his father did not go through puberty, that every time he said he understood what Colman was going through he was actually lying. He is disgusted that his father had his period. He is also frustrated remembering his mother always told him that lying was the worst thing for a child to do—how ironic! He will never forgive them.
Joss had a fear of hospitals and doctors his whole life, which now makes sense to Colman. He was very sick and still wouldn’t see one. Colman was destroyed and begged him to go to one but Joss would not.
In the funeral parlor he’d looked so fake. Colman was “scared shitless” (70). He remembers calling his mother and saying terrible things to her. He ranted and raved and all she could say was she was sorry. He did go to the funeral but refused to sit next to her. For a moment when he regarded her soft, passive tears he considered it but bitterly decided against it. The only time Colman almost cried was when Millie prepared to leave; trying not to look at her almost broke him. Before he left the funeral, he looked once more at his father and saw that Joss looked like himself but dead and waxy—“Dead; but normal. Better” (72). This man and the woman down below seemed to be two different people.
"People: The Registrar"
The registrar, Mohammad Nassar Sharif, has seen it all, and he knows how important the death certificates are. He always remembers that the dead person was a real person. He knows how to read faces and can tell who they’re coming to register; children are obviously the worst. He is kind, elegant, and tidy. He makes sure everyone gets their moment. He has never in his career, though, seen “male” crossed out and “female” written in its place. The red pen seems unnecessarily garish and violent to him.
The woman who is here for the body is quiet and organized. She has all the correct documents and she has an air of fascination for him. He cannot quite understand the situation, for she is composed and does not seem shocked at all about the body’s…confusion. Though she quietly requests for “male” to be on the death certificate, he tells her sadly that he cannot lie on it. He does, however, write “Joss Moody” instead of Josephine Moore. At the end of this meeting Mohammad marvels at her silence and beauty and spirit. He feels as if he could sit here with her for a year or two. It is an intimate, unforgettable experience. She smiles and departs.
"House and Home"
Millie reads the letter and knows that there are things in it Colman must have told that awful journalist. She is very upset but tells herself he is his own man and is not in her control anymore. Outside it is cold, foggy, and ominous. The rain is intense and loud, everything seems dated.
She recalls how when she first married Joss, she became less close with her mother. She didn’t want her too near, and the older woman criticized Joss for not having a proper job. It was strange how when Joss was standing next to her mother that she became nervous. Yet, Joss showed her another side of her mother—a more interesting, compelling person. Her mother did believe that Joss needed to see a doctor when he got a cold, and would not leave him alone about it. Millie refused to let her get close, telling her Joss was a private person. Millie wonders what her mother would think of things now, if she would defend her, if she would have stood firm. She thinks she would have.
Millie packs up Colman’s things in what was his room. She feels as if he has died as well.
The sky is bloodless and pitiless as she walks to the butcher. The butcher wants to know what Joss died of. At the vegetable shop the kind woman makes Millie feel normal as she softly says, “There you are, Mrs. Moody” (90). The locksmith arrives and works on the door. Millie feels safe for the first time in many weeks. Torr no longer feels the same to her since the letters have come.
Inside she washes her face and barely recognizes herself—she is gaunt and solemn. That morning she’d found a note in Joss’s handwriting that said “Write EM” and she did not know who that was. Actually, she does not know a lot about Joss. She never really wanted to know anything about Josephine Moore; it was frightening to her, and maybe even to Joss, who spoke about her in the third person.
Millie finds herself wondering about Josephine Moore—if she had friends, what did she like, what did she play with. Millie doesn’t want to think about her but she cannot help it.
If Colman and Sophie come she will say only one thing. She thinks of Sophie asking in the letter if she would have done anything differently in hindsight. Hindsight—that word is a lie. Millie was living her life, not a lie.
Returning to her bedroom, always wondering if she will see Joss, it strikes her how repetitive grief is: stupid hope, remembering, carpet pulled from under your feet. Millie dreams of the two of them wearing each other’s clothes. Joss begins to shrink and Millie is terrified and becomes a little girl. Millie shrieks that she is killing herself.
The last three days of Joss’s life keep playing before her eyes. He cannot speak, he is heavy in the bed. He will not go to the hospital and struggles for three days. She does not sleep either and they are in a new kind of time. His eyes are closed but he knows she is there. She walks to the border with him and he is light as he crosses over.
Millie wonders to herself who is she, and if she dreamt her own life. She tells herself not to let go of the fact that she had a family and memories, and to never let them go. She looks at a photograph of Joss and simply can’t see the woman everyone else says they see. Maybe she’ll never see her.
Analysis
Millie isn’t the only person who is telling Joss’s story; we now have Colman as well as two of the outsiders trying to come to terms with Joss’s gender. Kay includes figures like the doctor and the registrar to show how the public also has a say in how a person is defined, though the truth of that definition is, of course, suspect. Critic Tracy Hargreaves sums up what is going on here: “[Joss’s] . . . upending of this evolutionary logic [humans having one sex] is what baffles the appointed upholders of the state, who are required to affirm sex as monolithically Male or Female . . . It is the stark intransigence of the State’s desire to thus regulate and control sex that Kay’s novel responds to, underlining the inadequacy of such attempted control but also the paucity of assumptions that prompt it.”
The doctor is the first to see that Joss is biologically female, and she uses the garish red pen to write in large letters “female” instead of “male” on the death certificate. For his part, the registrar keeps “female” but agrees Millie’s request to keep “Joss Moody” rather than “Josephine Moore.” The doctor’s act in particular is described in the manner of a desecration, a violation, both an over-writing and an erasure; it is no wonder the registrar is uncomfortable even looking at it. As critic Kirsty Williams suggests, “their underlying desire to violate the concept of Joss (symbolized by the legitimation of his life in his Death Certificate) suggests that, because he has chosen to transcend his biological gender, his memory is worth less than an unambiguous corpse’s.” Ultimately, as Carole Jones writes and as we will see in later analyses, “Joss himself escapes their categories, effectively evading the discourses they attempt to enforce. He is a boundary, both inside and outside, proof of their failure to police the discursive gap he slips through.”
We also meet Colman, a deeply angry and confused young man who experiences an internal tumult when he discovers the truth about his father. He concludes that his whole life was a lie and cannot help looking back to every encounter with his father to probe whether or not there was some clue. This discovery compounds other issues for Colman, which is that his identity has always been a slippery thing. He is mixed-race, child of a black parent and a white one. He had a different name—William Dunsmore—for a few years until Millie and Joss changed it when they adopted him. He is ostensibly Scottish but does not feel like he really belongs anywhere. He is on the fringes of the economy, the child of famous and moderately prosperous parents but unable to make a decent living for himself.
Through his exploration of his memories we come to see how Colman has always defined his masculinity in traditional terms and in light of the masculinity he saw modeled in his father, so now that his father appears to be a woman, his identity is utterly destabilized. The breasts and the vagina literally do not make sense to him and he concludes that his father looks like a “pervert,” which, significantly, is the word Sophie hopes to use in her book to stir up prurient interest. He uses, Mandy Koolen writes, “aggressive transphobic and misogynist hypermasculinity” in his language—tits, dick, pussy, balls—in his “struggle to reconcile the materiality of his father’s body with his persistent memory of him as a man.”
