Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 38

We now had two events thundering down the track towards us. One was PBP, and the other was our anniversary.

That is how we thought of the festival; Geoff was also, only half-jokingly, referring to it as my birth day, with the gap between the words emphasised. We planned a mass family descent on the event, with extra silliness, but first we had to get through the French Ride.

My worry was still my passport. I was fully immersed in my new life now, and despite my suggestion to Geoff I could not only not face going in drag, but I now felt that I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Without my lost baggage, I was naturally becoming more and more feminine in my appearance, but I was also developing kinetic reflexes, body memories, based on my altered shape. I had breasts, they stuck out, I worked around them. So did Geoff, of course, but once more that is a private matter. How I sat, how slept, even how I drove wearing a seatbelt, all was adjusted to fit.

Not just that, but how I moved when with Geoff .would have had to change. I had slipped into a habit with him, where I would come up behind him when he was looking at something and rest my cheek against his, hugging him from behind, and he would do much the same to me. Two men, doing that on a cross-Channel ferry full of lorry drivers and tightly-zipped Daily Hate readers didn’t bear thinking about. I decided to have a word with call-me-Vanessa and see what, if any, my options were. She was straight to the point.

“You know, I had almost forgotten what you are, you pass yourself off that well”

“Vanessa, there is no ‘passing myself off” here, I am merely being myself. If I were to drag myself up as a bloke, THAT would be passing myself off as something I have never been, but I know we can never agree on that one. No, my worry is that even in men’s clothes I would look wrong. Look at my choices: go as me, and have some snotty Immigration Officer get shirty because it says “M” in my passport, or go as Steve and get pulled aside as an imposter.”

“You do realise that if I make a phone call to Portsmouth you will simply end up with the entire station turning out to stare at the freak?”

“If I can walk into a rugby dinner in heels and long frock I think I can put up with that. I’ll be looking at getting the five o’clock boat back, so it will be ten thirty or later before we come through. I will also be with Geoff, and I can face an awful lot more with him than I ever could alone.”

“You seem awfully fond of this chap. Does it cause him problems with his family, him being gay?”

I could now go into a long account of a conversation I have had far too many times, and am sure I will continue to have for decades to come, but you already know it by heart. How is it possible, after all the years, the reams of paper, the “diversity awareness courses”, that such a senior manager is still unable to separate such concepts as gender, sex, sexuality and love? I touched my locket to remind me that some people were so much more aware, and I was lucky enough to live with one. In the end, c-m-V agreed to make the calls and drop a few subtle hints to those rostered on the car lanes that night. The drawbacks I could see included the likelihood that once they realised I was a colleague they would feel free to ask questions far more personal than they would of other passengers, and not feel they were being too personal. What deep joy.

We booked the tickets on Brittany Ferries’ sailing to Ouistreham, just north of Caen in Normandy, which would allow us a pretty direct route to St Quentin en Yvelines, near Paris, the start of the ride. The plan was an exercise in Woodruff planning: Geoff and I would drive to the start from Caen where we had booked a room. I would then leapfrog Geoff from feeding station to station to Fougá¨res, where the rest of the clan would await us with an erect Edifice. As much sleep as we could fit in would be grabbed, in both directions, thus avoiding the potentially noisy dormitories provided by the organisers. Once we had passed through on the way back, the trio would head off to St Quentin for the finish. It isn’t like the Tour de France, where support vehicles share the road with the bikes; I would be driving a separate, approved route and only seeing him at the “ravitaillement” controls..

The days counted down, and then we were driving in a two vehicle convoy down the A3 to Portsmouth, to join the shambolic queue that stretches from the roundabout near the Admiral Drake pub to the allocation lanes for the ferry. As the event starts in the late evening, at eight o’clock in Geoff’s case, we took the night ferry for an early morning drive to the start, and then into our room for as much sleep through the day as we could manage. Sometimes, shift work has its advantages, one in this case being that I am used to sleeping at very odd times of day and night.

We eventually boarded in a chaotic mass, the ticket clerk merely glancing at my passport, and sent Kelly on a search and occupy mission. There are horseshoe-shaped banks of sofas set around tables, and three people can sleep under said table. Take mats, bags and ear plugs and the night passes much more quickly. We followed the unguided missile laden with the necessaries and found her facing down a group of boys who couldn’t see why there was no room for them as well. I could smell the testosterone in the air, perhaps because I have become more sensitive to it since I began resorting to Geoff for my own supply. Teen wolves sent packing, we made our beds and sent an adult scouting party up to the bar as, at quarter to eleven, twenty seven and a half thousand tons of ferry began to back out of Portsmouth harbour.

There was quite a queue, allsorts of folk looking for a sleeping draught before whatever long drive lay ahead of them. There were also a couple of musician types setting up, a guitarist and a man with a small set of keyboards. As the people ahead of us thinned and the press increased behind, they started to play. I noticed Bill’s head nodding to the rhythm of a cover of “All Right Now” by Free. Not bad, nice crisp riffing, with electronic percussion from the keyboards. Might be worth staying for a bit. Just as the pints and wine were served, the guitarist launched into the solo.

No. Stop it right now!

He quite simply was making no attempt to play anything coherent. It was a stream of random wails and trills that were not even in the same bloody KEY! You have to imagine an aging man with an open shirt, showing some chest hair, a frizzy mullet of a haircut, a moustache and, of course, a medallion. The only saving grace was that he was not wearing leather trousers, but he was gurning and writhing in true cock-rock poses as his, er, solo was cranked out, to be followed by his workmanlike take on the riff as the song ran its course.

Have you ever watched a truly poor musician, blissfully unaware of their lack of ability, and felt embarrassed for them? So embarrassed you find yourself blushing? That was me. Bill had the drinks, and just as we turned to leave the bar they started to disembowel some Hendrix. Bill winced.

“Dear gods, I think if we get any more drinks we send the other two for them before my ears resign their commission. They get paid for that?”

We arrived back at the seats just as it occurred to me that we had just witnessed the ferry’s main engines at full power. Clearly, Paul Kossoff and Jimi Hendrix were interred below decks, and as the performance upstairs triggered their rapid spinning, so the ship was driven forward. As the first strains of “Hey Jude” drifted down the stairs, I knew I was right.

The night passed fitfully, and towards the end I stood out on deck as we passed through the vast Bay of the Seine and the Invasion Coast of Normandy lay ahead. Soon, we were queuing for the French passport controls, my first real test. The PAF * man was a classic of his type, with a soup-strainer moustache under a surprisingly small nose. He riffled through the passports and paused at mine. Shit.

 « Vous est anglaise depuis quand?  »

 « Naissance, et c’est galloise  »

 « Et ben, hein ? Comme mon frá¨re, qui est maintenant normande….  »

He sighed, then grinned.

 « J’ai perdu un frá¨re, mais j’ai gagné une sÅ“ur qui me plaá®t vachement bien.  »

He handed back my passport, and smiled with genuine warmth.

 «C’est ton copain?  »

 « Il est mon homme bien aimé  »

 « T’as eu de la chance, mam’selle. Et bon courage, t’en auras besoin  »

Another melting smile, and he waved us on. I could see Geoff, a bit of a monoglot, struggling with the conversation.

“I’ll tell you later, cariad, but for now just be grateful that he was a very, very nice man.”

We stopped to hug the trio so long as they set off for Fougá¨res, and then fought the queue of traffic out of the port. The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, apart from those little moments that come when you realise that even though the other driver is on the wrong side of the road it is actually the right side, and we were soon pulling up at a Campanile hotel with a room for us that held all sorts of things that could be ignored, all centred round a great, big, real BED. We set the alarm for four o’clock. We would get up, eat as much as possible (in Geoff’s case, that was), go back to bed with a bottle of wine and be friendly. The following evening I would be alone.

I hoped our PAF man had been an omen for the future, and silently wished him and his new sister the best of all things. I already had that, dribbling into my pillow.

*PAF: French air and frontier police---immigration control