Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
I went up to her and got straight to the point: ‘What are you using for bait?’ I say ‘her’ but you never know round here. We live a mile inland from one of the last unspoiled stretches of Adriatic coast, part of which was stolen several decades ago by highly trained nudists. The nudists, who seem to be mostly men, attract several fringe groups, such as trans women (men who identify as women). One of the best-known was christened Cesare but is now a peroxide blonde called Cesarea. ‘She’ is taller than anyone else in the village apart from me and has enormous hands.
Besides, it is not exactly every day you come across a real woman fishing, is it? But there ‘she’ sat on a fold-up stool in front of her rod, which was perched on a nice little tripod, the sign of a serious fisherperson, as the Guardian calls them. She looked about 50 and was dressed in black slacks and T-shirt, with dark hair tied up in a bun and puce-pink lipstick.
‘Coreani,’ she replied in a very husky voice. Ah yes, the Korean hardworm. What everyone uses, including us. No, she had not caught anything either. She had strong wrists, I noticed, and a big neck.
It was about 9 a.m. and I was in the port of Ravenna where it joins the sea with the two youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, ten, and Giovanni-Maria, 13. As the boys continued casting their imported Korean worm into the Adriatic, using a lead weight and no float, my mind drifted back once again to that night in Soho, back before the millennium, when I ended up in bed with a trans woman who I was convinced was a woman. I had not set out with such a goal in mind when I went to Madame Jojo’s nightclub in Brewer Street. ‘Metto la mano sul fuoco’ as they say in Italy (‘I hold my hand over the fire’). As ever, my aim, if possible, was very simply to cross swords with a suitable woman.
In the interests of full disclosure, I confess that there is a photo doing the rounds on Facebook that someone has unearthed of me wearing eyeliner as a Cambridge student and looking extremely effeminate. Beneath it I have posted: ‘Good job I never became prime minister.’
This might lead people to think mistakenly that I am at the very least tendentiously, if not actually, gay. But Bowie and Jagger wore it all the time, didn’t they? And so, for a while, did I – but only because a friend’s posh girlfriend from SW1 had convinced me it was a brilliant way to pull women.
It is not exactly every
day you come across a
real woman fishing, is it?
That night in Madame Jojo’s, pulling a woman, not a man, was most definitely my intention. And obviously, as a staff journalist on the Telegraph at the time, I was not wearing eyeliner.
To be fair to me, I was not asking for trouble. Not especially. But by the time I arrived I was pretty plastered and perhaps I should have been suspicious about the rapacious way in which what I thought was a rather attractive woman forced herself into my arms on the dance floor. As far as I could tell, in the half-light, she had slim wrists and waist and smallish feet and no visible Adam’s apple. She even had breasts. When we began to lose ourselves in what was in those days called ‘necking’ or ‘French kissing’, I could not help but notice that her tongue had a sort of sandpapery texture. But what of it?
We ended up back at my place in the Balls Pond Road on the outskirts of Islington. It was only when we were in my bed that the truth emerged: she had a penis.
That night in Madame Jojo’s, pulling a woman, not a man, was most definitely my intention
Well, of course, I leapt straight out of the bed and down the stairs and on to the sofa where I spent the night. I thought: ‘It’s OK, you’re not gay, you only found “her” sexually attractive because you thought that “she” was a woman.’
Not until the other day did it occur to me that I was the victim of a sex crime, when I read about a trans woman in Stockton-on-Tees who ended up in the sack with a man and was convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault. ‘She’ had not disclosed her transgender status and so the man – the jury decided – could not have given his informed consent. Interessante, no?
A gigantic black and red Chinese cargo ship surged ominously past us, pulled out to sea by an orange tug. ‘Only 190 metres long,’ said Giuseppe. ‘The Titanic was 269.’
Giovanni-Maria, who was mostly in charge of the rod, caught a large blue crab, a hugely destructive invasive foreign species, not from China but America, which you are supposed to kill on sight. But he left it to scuttle about on the concrete wharf. He also caught a small sea bream and a red mullet which he threw back.
‘Arrivederci, signora,’ I said as we passed the fisherperson next to us on our way back to the Land Rover Defender. But I didn’t wish her ‘good luck’, as you don’t, do you?
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