Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 25

This chapter may be said no longer to have any content at all....

We had continued to talk properly after our mutual fright, and I noticed that where Geoff had always seemed the strong and unfazeable sort he was now offering me evidence of vulnerability and doubt, and I took that as the proof that I had finally broken through to the inner man.

I do not mean doubt about us; that seemed to be impossible. For my part, there were no doubts. This was my man; all I had had were fears, and that is a very different thing. If anyone had told me ten or twelve months ago that I would have been just about living, and sleeping, with anyone, I would have laughed. If they had said it would be with a man, I would have been intrigued, I suppose. Back then I didn’t know what I was, apart from being a woman, of course.

We had a new openness, and even more simple affection and comfort just from each other’s presence. Of course, I can only speak for my own feelings, but trust me, I felt the same love coming from my dear man. I was just worried that the problems he was having might push him over the edg….perhaps I should change the metaphor.

It was heading towards Christmas now, and I needed to find just the right way to draw out and punish Geoff’s little friend at work. I resolved to have a chat with Naomi and Albert.

Time for a little background, I think. We won’t go through the shimmery lap-dissolve-fade-whatever, just straight to the meat. My father died of cancer when I was 16, my mother of much the same in 2008. In between there were a lot of changes.

My father had risen rather rapidly as an engineer with our local water board, and while I was quite young had already become rather high-up in their infrastructure maintenance (leak fixing) wing. We moved to Surrey when he was head hunted by Thames Water, and a year later he was dying slowly in front of me. My problems with bullying were made worse, of course, by being Welsh in such a quintessentially English area, and once he had gone I begged Mam to go home.

Unfortunately for my hopes, she wouldn’t. The long and dreadful business of losing the most important man in our lives had left us both rather sullen and withdrawn, and she claimed that her own business interests meant staying where we were. After all, I wanted a good education/prospects/comfortable life, didn’t I?

I begged off, and finally managed to persuade her to let me go back to Pembroke and stay with my Dad’s brother, Uncle Alun and his wife my Aunty Lizzie. A-levels, then off to University in England, and the rest you know.

I couldn’t face living with Mam as such an obvious failure, so returned home, and, well, my life continued to go even further downhill as a drunk took out both Alun and Lizzie. They weren’t even in a car, but walking not far from the dock wall by the Flying Boat pub when someone who had refreshed themselves excessively on the Rosslare ferry went looking for another drink. He found the pub, but decided to park a little in front of it. The bull bars on the front of his 4x4…

No, that’s all you need to know there. I moved once more to Surrey in 2002, on a “swap” transfer at my own cost that I am still astonished the Department granted, and then life got shitty again. My mother was diagnosed with a tumour in her left kidney, and by the time they found it, metastasis had set in. Liver, the other kidney, then a few other places. For the second time, I watched a parent die, eaten from inside by their own body.

It was six years after my move that she finally went. I had moved around two countries looking for a home, finally come back to my mother, and she was gone. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had started seeing Sally a year or so before, I would most probably have finished the job I had tried to do quickly years before, and was now doing slowly with alcohol. Once my mother was no longer there to force me to moderate my more obvious drinking at home, I would have been lost.

Mam had set up a rather nice little business based on her passion for photography, a little camera shop in Horley, which was sold on just before she died. She simply had to find a buyer with the same love of light and colour, rather than someone who just wanted stock and a shop.
She had got into video work quite early, and for a Welsh “housewife” she showed a fine instinct for technology and its possibilities. What really changed her life, and her bank balance, was the meeting of minds she had with Albert and Naomi. To give them their full titles, Detective Inspector N. and Detective Sergeant A. Woods (retired) of the Metropolitan Police.

Half the local businesses seemed to have taken on A and N Security as their CCTV and patrol provider, and it was Mam who supplied the cameras and other kit. It was all rather lucrative, and that is how I ended up living in a detached house in a Surrey village rather than a dire bed-sit in Crawley or Brighton.

You will see now why I decided to confide in Naomi about Geoff’s stalker. If anyone could find a way either to find him, or to draw him out, it would be her. As she had a particularly devious mind, I also thought she might be able to find an appropriately devious way to fulfil my promise to myself, and hurt him. Very, very badly. But legally. And there was another bonus ball in play.

A&N had the contract for Geoff’s office. We started to plan.

There was no question of putting a camera into the gents’ toilets. If that had been discovered, the lawsuits, especially from people “in the business” as the employees obviously were, would have been awe-inspiring. Instead, under the guise of a series of night supervision visits, and a carefully-dropped proposal to the Office Manager about catching stationery thieves, one or two rather small cameras were sited around Geoff’s desk, as well as the third-floor notice board where the majority of the abusive posters had appeared, and the nearest photocopier. Discs of the resulting images were filed neatly away by Naomi and Albert until we got the word that another poster had appeared. That’s when the hard work started. Working back from the time the poster was first seen, we checked our recordings for the moment when the item appeared.

Naomi had set up the link (“I learned an awful lot from your mother, you know…”) so that instead of hours and hours of video we had a slightly smaller quantity of stop-motion images, which she fed through a variable-speed reader and….there it was. Clumsy, as we should have suspected from such a small mind, but it had still been effective in rattling my dear man. We watched him make a number of copies of an A4 sheet of paper, place one on Geoff’s desk, another on the notice board and then move off camera carrying the rest. I was rising to a slow boil as I watched.

I may not have wanted my own balls, but by god I wanted his.

A and N presented the disc’s selected images to the Manager, and gave him The Talk about harassment, hate crimes, how dreadful if the victim were to sue, but we are sure you have adequate liability insurance, being —oh–an insurance company. A name was forthcoming, and the plan was underway. I visited a chemist…

Christmas was nearly upon us, and it would be spent in Oxford with the rest of the family. I very nearly wrote “our” there, because that is how it felt now, but presumption usually comes before huge disappointment. We had all agreed to limit our gift purchases to smaller values while still making them really personal, as there is always a temptation with new friends to overspend. First, though, would be the Christmas Dinner at Geoff’s office. And before we took that on, I confronted him.

You know those discussions? The ones where you tell someone something and refuse to let them speak until you are done and they have apologised? It was one of them. In short, I told him that I knew it was still going on, that he would never hide such things from me again, that I loved him, and that it was going to be sorted. And he was going to let me sort it.

“How do you plan to do that?” he asked. I told him.

When he had stopped laughing, he apologised in a very nice way.

The Lavender Excess would get another airing for that one, and I had spent some time with the girls practising getting my face Just So. I could see how it worked, and I did like the result (and so did Geoff, it seems) but it was all so much of a faff. I was no Vicky Pendleton, racing at the Olympics while looking ever so carefully prepared; I was just a girl who did things that made her sweat a lot. That night, though, I had to be ultra-feminine.

We had worked out that although he had heard of me, and had some idea of my situation, he had met neither me nor Jan. We arranged for an unattached good friend of Geoff’s (ours! ) to squire myself to the dance, while Jan went as me. I am sure you can work that one out, but for us it was all a bit confusing, having to keep remembering that I was her and she was me and I was this and he was that and…we got there in the end. Naomi helped with the make up this time, conjuring up just a little five o’clock shadow for Jan. It was very disturbing to see a woman who was now one of my very closest friends looking like an almost passable drag queen, but it would be worth it.

The night of the dinner-dance came along, and Iain, the friend, came to pick me up while Jan and her beard rode in with Geoff. Naomi had gone to town on the make up, not only with the stubble but also with very thick foundation and, crowning glory, blue eye shadow. I mean royal blue, and thickly outlined lips. By the time Iain and I arrived, Geoff and Jan were the centre of attention, as we had intended. I spotted our target and a little after the meal drifted over as he grabbed a drink. He had been in a circle of differently-groomed younger men, laughing loudly and making gestures towards Jan, who was frightening me just by the way she walked.

“What’s the joke?” I did my best to purr, arching my back just a little to lift the girls into view. As he was only about 5’8”and I was in heels, this was a bit unfair to him.

“Oh, d’ya not see the ladyboy over there with Woodpuff the shirtlifter?”

This lad really had been blessed by the muse of poetry. With such a chat up line, I relaxed. I had almost (almost) been feeling guilty about what I hoped to do to him, but that vanished in a little cloud of Brut 33. Or was it Old Spice? Don’t ask me, I stopped shaving as soon as I could. Except for…and of course…
Back on track, Steph.

“I came in with Iain, but he’s being really boring tonight. You seem like more fun”

“Oh….” He perked up, ”D’ya wanna drink?”

“White wine….why not get a bottle?”

And so it went, onto our second bottle, and he started to get a little flushed. When he went to the gents’ I gave Jan the nod. She trotted off to the ladies’, and thank everything available she dropped that walk; I have seen more feminine Marine Commandos. In uniform. In a few minutes my suitor had returned, and was knocking back the wine I handed him, when Jan re-entered the hall.

Gone were the stubble and foundation, gone was the John Wayne stride. She was back to her usual elegant, ladylike self. Lover boy looked astonished. There was a rumble from his stomach.

“What the fuck (urp) happened to the ladyboy?”

“Oh, she’s no ladyboy. She’s Geoff’s sister in law” I gave him The Smile, with as cold a pair of eyes as I could manage. I leaned in a little bit and said, still Smiling

“I’m the ladyboy. And your wine is actually picolax”

He nearly made it out of the hall before his bowels let go. It was extremely messy. Thank god we had already eaten.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

For those of you devoid of taste and sensitivity, the following link is to a blog describing the effects of “agent picolax”
Not for the faint-hearted and definitely in extremely bad taste. But funny.
http://www.madcaow.com/blog/random/agent-picolax/