Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 9

Someone somewhere was playing a flute in that slippery seductive wail that I think of as Japanese. I waited an aeon for the first groan of my hangover to emerge before realising that I didn’t have one. That was a new experience, and rather a pleasant one. Brendan Behan could never understand teetotallers, he said. Imagine waking up in the morning and realising that was the best you would feel all day. I stretched out in my bag and heard a soft grunt. I had forgotten Kelly.

“White no suawwwwWWWger” she yawned and handed me a rather worn nylon mug.

“Morning to you too. What makes you think I have a stove?”

“Well, the teabags, the bread, the bacon to go in it, but most of all the large gas can and the stove next to it that I climbed over last night. Get brewing, I need a wee”

Off she went, and I got all domestic on the stove’s ass. Now, I am sure it has been observed before, but why does everything and everyone in America go around with a donkey for getting things on? Never mind; the simple act of brewing was helping me sort out my memories of the evening and my deeper reactions to what I still felt as profoundly harrowing events. I hadn’t drunk anywhere near enough to worry about ambush memories, but the situation I was now in left me deeply confused.

For starters, I, the me who was still legally and sort of physically a 34 year old man, had just spent the night in a tent cuddled up to a fourteen year old girl, presumably with her parents’ full knowledge. I was a law enforcement officer, which would make it look even worse. How did I feel about that?

Safe. Warm. Loved, even, if such a word could be used so soon, but that was the word that came to me. I had a moment of mental clarity and realised that that was the defining feature of the Woodruffs: they cared about others. It was nothing spectacular, apart from my own case that is, but all through the previous day there had been no points scoring or rancour, no catty remarks, no obvious criticism of others. The closest they had come was the cheeky musician’s joke Bill had made to Jan, but nothing worse. They just seemed to have acceptance without apathy. Had I walked into the Waltons via the Twilight Zone?

They had something that I needed to find.

Now, breathe, Steph, and get the tea sorted.

My tent has a door each side, so Kelly could get in and out without disturbing the tea making, and as she slid back in she said that we really needed a shower before facing civilisation. We drank the tea in silence till I saw Kelly looking at me through the steam.

“What?”

“You know, you really are striking. Your eyes are amazing, and I love the freckles, but we could really, really do something to show you off.”
“I don’t want to be shown off, I just want to be left alone to be me”

“You’ve already been shown off. Who was it last night stood up in the beer tent swapping licks with Jimmy Kerr? You don’t think people are going to forget that, do you?”

“Kelly, why are you all being so nice to me? You don’t know me from Adam”

“Eve”

“Whatever. Why?”

“Dad’s parents are weirdoes, all that hippy stuff, and a lot of it rubbed off on him, Mum says. Her parents are Quakers, though she doesn’t do that. I’ve been to some meetings, but it doesn’t speak to me. Mum and Dad talk to me a lot, it’s odd when people at school say they argue all the time with their oldies. Look, I’m fourteen, that’s all, so I don’t get what it is with them, but Dad keeps telling me that nothing is more important than people. I can do what I like–no, really–but it must always be with the question ‘will this hurt anyone?’”

Bollocks, I thought. It’s like Shangri La meets the Stepford Wives. Nobody can be that grounded, there must be a crack somewhere. I just hoped I wouldn’t be the one to open it up.

We finished our tea and made our way over to the Great Pavilion. Geoff’s bike was gone, and Jan was busy in the kitchen area of the tent. She came across and pulled me into a cheek-kissing hug.

“Shower, girls, then breakfast. Steph, sorry if I am being a bit forward…but is that your only dress? What are you, 14?”

“14 to 16, depending on label. Why do you ask?”

“Kelly, heel! Fetch!”

The girl grinned and ran into the tent. Thirty seconds later she was back with five or six hangers, and an even broader grin.

“Well? Get showered and you can see if something fits you. This morning will be a shopping morning, and do NOT look like that! I am talking about picking up some food for the weekend and some basics for you. You are NOT spending the weekend in a badly-fitted sports bra, for starters.”

She paused, looked down, then looked me straight in the eyes as she continued in a much softer tone.

“Listen, pet, we think we know what you are starting out on here. We are not trying to interfere, but what was said last night stands. This family is your comfort zone, your safe retreat, for as long as you need and want it. We’ve seen bad things and we don’t like them, stating the bloody obvious, and we do our best to keep others from them. One day you may be able to understand why, but not just now. Shower, both of you, before you get into my clothes!”

Kelly and I walked over to the shower blocks, passing through the race course loose boxes and as we did so. I looked to my right and just inside a stable door, on a clean pile of straw, was a pair of shocking pink knickers. We both started to giggle, Kelly wrapping both arms against my right and burying her face in my shoulder as she snorted.

“Someone got lucky last night” I said

“Losing THOSE knickers was lucky in itself!”

We wailed with laughter. It was one of those moments I had seen with teenage girls, where they keep bursting into hoots of laughter amidst whispered and fractured conversation, clinging onto each other as if they will fall down walking solo. My split mind was doing the looking-in bit again, but apart from one nagging question it seemed that “me” approved of all this.

The question was “How long can this go on?”

Showers. They have come a long way at festivals, but this one was doubly-blessed. Not only did the race course already have facilities, and good ones, for its jockeys, the organisers had enlisted the services of a particular mobile service who specialise in such things. No free advertising here, but they are well-made, clean and provided with lashings of really hot water. They come with queues, but we seemed to be up early enough to beat the bad ones, and I was not surprised to find myself in the queue for the female shower block.

I don’t know how well I can explain this, but almost with every minute that passed I was more and more able to be me. With Kelly hanging off my arm, we were just two girls waiting to get wet, and that was the least of it. Whenever I look in a mirror I see two overlaid images.

One is the Steph that I know and feel is me. She is a tall and slender girl, wiry rather than willowy. Not bad legs, if a little on the hard-edged side, but they please me. Broad but not excessively so shoulders and well-muscled arms, framing a soft bosom which is now about at a B-cup. Wavy auburn hair framing a face with sharp cheek bones, dusted in freckles and centred on a small but decidedly crooked nose. Unplucked light brows over what I do, in my vanity consider my best feature, those green/brown eyes I mentioned.

As I looked into the shower cubicle’s mirror I saw all that. Perky nipples too; I thought of Geoff and they perked some more, and I demonstrated to myself that when redheads blush, it is indeed a whole-body experience.

The overlay was still there, though. Steve was behind the façade in the tendons standing out on my hands and in the small scars on my torso. I ran my fingers down my sides, feeling the little bumps where ribs had been reset after being rucked out with the ball, or after some of my more Polynesian tackles. The eyes were the same, but there was hardness behind them. I watched as my jaw set slightly in thought and could still see the psycho flanker capable of really spoiling the day for a half back.

Most obviously, of course, was the maggot at the top of my legs. I had another attack of the giggles, thinking of the old joke epitaph for a virgin postmistress: “Returned unopened, Lord”

I imagined my testicles going back, “Not wanted on voyage. Shop-soiled but unused” and started to cry again.

I got under the shower and let the water wash away my sweat with my tears. This wasn’t the racking, painful sobs of last night, but a quiet weeping that was for so many things. My lost youth, wasted in pretence and play-acting. The friends I had found, that I could have already had if I had had more courage, and earlier, just to be me. The close calls I had had from alcohol and a wish to destroy myself rather than live as an alien. So much more…but I also wept with joy that I did indeed know who I was.

It was more, or less, than that. I had known what was wrong since that stay in the male surgical ward at the age of 12, old men with incontinence and dementia voiding their bladders on the floor in the middle of the night and calling out from old fears and current confusion.

A nurse had taken me to her heart and had brought me her son’s books once she learnt my taste for SF, and one of the titles suddenly clicked: Arthur C Clarke’s “Childhood’s End”.

No, this was not just knowing who I was but finally realising I was now free of Steve, that although I had picked up on a few sideways glances I wasn’t being seen as a bloke-in-a-dress but as “that skinny ginger bit who played the fiddle with Jimmy Kerr”

That, finally, was why I was weeping. I had open doors ahead of me. I had always had them, at least since my parents had gone, but it was the door behind me that was important. I could finally close it, lock it and throw away the key. I stood, head bowed, as the water ran down over my head and body, washing away sweat and tears, pain and a lifetime of shit.

“Sorry, boys” I said to my dangly bits.

“Returned unopened”.

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I should emphasise here that all the descriptions of performances by real artists are just that: events I have been present at. They may not have been at the same festival, but for dramatic purposes they are enclosed in a single event. All descriptions of such performances are simply my own reactions to wonderful music, as filtered through the eyes of Steph.

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