Adam by Frances Poet

Author:Frances Poet [Poet, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780019369
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Let There Be Light

GLASGOW ADAM. I wish I remembered what those words were called that are two opposite things. Saleem. The snake bite… cured me! I never have another period.

Puberty hits for the second time. Where the oestrogen softened and rounded me, the testosterone thickens and strengthens me. My body fat redistributes away from my hips and legs to my internal organs and abdomen. My body mass increases. My feet grow.

GLASGOW ADAM kicks off both shoes and steps into another pair and even another. Each time, growing in stature.

This is the opposite of the princess in the fairytale with the glass slipper that fits. For my happy ending, all the shoes need to stop fitting.

Looking at both feet and laughing, GLASGOW ADAM lifts them up to show the audience.

I have hobbit feet!

My voice deepens. Hair is growing all over my body and I love it. Thick black hairs claiming my flesh.

I wonder if Sauron has been in my brain with me. His big eye watching me.

Because it’s only now, now that I have ripped myself into manhood, that I receive notification that I have been granted asylum. I have proved myself a man. Now nurses will administer the testosterone without the pain and fever.

A surgeon will sculpt my chest without need for blood-soaked towel or ambulance. A team of doctors will take blood vessels from my arm, grafts from my legs and buttocks and shape me a fine manly cock.

I can exist in the world at last. Leave this room behind. This room in which I have lived for six hundred desperate days. I turn my back on it and step out into the watery Glasgow sun.

GLASGOW ADAM steps out of the flat and into the world. He is bathed in beautiful coloured light.

I am in Maryhill Burgh Hall looking up at stained-glass windows. A little plaque tells me they are called Adam’s Stained-Glass Panels. Of course! I own the whole world now.

The windows show men in their working clothes. It says that these pictures are unique because usually the workers would be depicted as angels but here they are allowed to be themselves. The light shines through these men onto my face with its black stubble. Their light casting my shadow. The same shadow I was born with in Egypt in 1992, though my body and name are different. It is an angel’s blessing from these working men for me – allowed to be my whole self at last.

A wall of leaflets behind me is also bathed in their light. One in particular from the Scottish Refugee Council inviting refugees and Scots to participate in an event called Here We Stay. A month ago, I wouldn’t have even seen it but today, I am newborn and I think. Why not?

I am backstage in the Citizen’s Theatre. There are splats of paint on the black floor and it smells musty and full of promise. In an hour I am supposed to stand up in front of an audience and tell them my story.

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