CHAPTER 3
It isn’t like that at all, you know. I wasn’t lusting after Stewie, or indeed any man. I like women for that particular area of my life, though I must admit I hadn’t actually spent any time in indulging that taste.

That little voice had whispered in my ear for as long as I could remember, and while I was very definitely aroused by thoughts of girls, the thought of doing things with what I carried around in my trousers was actively nauseating. I didn’t like it on me, I certainly didn’t like one on somebody else.

So what did that make me? Confused, for a start. I wasn’t gay, or was I? Was there a word for me? Fancies women, loves a man, doesn’t want to shag him, doesn’t want to shag the women he fancies….if I was on any “rainbow arc” of sexuality someone must have poked a stick in and stirred up the colours.

I had fought the voice all my life, or at least once I started to grow properly. I had been scorned out of dolls by my father, a miner in Seghill till they closed it. As a kid I had played rugby on their pitch, which was an odd one. The posts were made of telegraph poles, all creosote and splinters, and the pitch sloped from one side to the other, and from both ends to the middle. Depending on which touch line you were running, it was either baked clay or bog.

I played at many clubs in Northumberland, but Dad wanted me to get out of what was fast becoming a dead village. As the pits closed, and the shipbuilding stopped, and the steel mills shut down, there was nothing left to work for. I wasn’t academically gifted, except with words, and words don’t pay bills. So, I did what so many young lads from areas like mine have always done and joined up. It was meant to be the army, but a conversation with a mate of my dad in a pub changed that.

At 17 I was already a big lad, playing lock in the senior teams, and easily passing for older whenever I wanted a pint. His stories of foreign service and shipboard life caught my imagination, and I decided that I had found a way to close down Little Voice. The more masculine I could live, the less, I hoped, that my insanity could trouble me.

That is what I thought of it. I look back now and realise how wrong I was, but back in the seventies in working class Northumberland those thoughts were not ones to let loose in the wider world. This was the time of punk rock and skinheads, organised football violence and mass unemployment. I was well over six foot tall, broad, strong as an ox; which is actually rather an apt phrase, considering what an ox really is.

After all, I couldn’t be a girl. All I could be was an ox, large, strong, castrated, and far from feminine. That was what crystallised my assumption of insanity on my part: surely, if the God of my parents and my chapel had wanted me to be female, or even one of those who I had read about in the News of the World and the Mirror, I would’ve been more female in my appearance and not so downright butch?

It felt odd using that word, with its associations in my mind with homosexuality, but I couldn’t think of anything more fitting. So, I worked at it, I did as many male things as I could to try and still Little Voice, but she was still there. I held back from fornication, though, not just because Chapel God said so, but because it would have involved those parts that made me want to scream.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to score, if I had wanted to. This was the seventies, when AIDS and other problems were yet to explode onto the global consciousness, and the sixties were still fresh. I was big, and hard, and blond and, in my butch way, quite a looker. But Little Voice, Melanie, was still there.

I had a little motorbike, to suit my lack of income at 120 miles to the gallon, a Honda CG125, on which I would ride out to beautiful places to try and clear my head. I covered Elsdon and its gibbet, the Roman Wall, Lindisfarne and with my rock boots in the bag the top of Simonside and Crag Lough. Soloing the Great Chimney on Simonside with views out over Rothbury to the Cheviots, and out to the North Sea, as an attempt to silence the voice, just left me ecstatic at the place and the movement, but still hating my genitals.

And so I joined the Corps.

I was suited to it, I must admit. My rugby and climbing had left me fit and able to contain fear without freezing. Each level of pain the instructors added helped me with Little Voice, and the more men I saw naked and showering the more I had confirmed that I just did not find men’s bodies interesting beyond comparisons of strength. I remembered my father, a keen sprinter, watching a particularly powerful American sprinter and saying “I fancy his body, but I’d want it in white”

The one thing that did knock me completely sideways was meeting Stewart McDuff. To this day I do not know what exactly it was with him, but I was smitten. The closest thing I have ever been able to come up with is a girl’s “crush” on another girl. I didn’t want to fuck him; I certainly did not want him to fuck me. I just wanted to be near him, and keep him safe, not to kiss or cuddle, just to be beside him. I had to be really careful; the Corps doesn’t take too kindly to shirtlifters, and if I couldn’t describe what I was, how could they?

LV kept whispering, I kept reading. I particularly remember Jan Morris’ book, and she really connected with me. A soldier, a reporter on the Everest success, and underneath it all, a girl. Even though I was fighting all the way, her situation called to me and my dreams were filled with little moments in a dress, being swirled around a dance hall by some faceless presence.. I could never sort that one out. I definitely did not fancy blokes, what was I?

I met Emma in Pennycomequick, not the most salubrious area of Plymouth but fun in its own way. She was a biker girl, and when I first saw her she was in jeans and a ratty leather jacket, playing pool. The next time, I was on a pass and she had come in from a funeral, and was in what passed for formal wear, all black, which included the mini skirt and the four inch stiletto court shoes in black suede that brought her height up to around six feet, nine tenths of which seemed to be leg.

THAT was something I noticed. I have always been a leg and bum …man, thing, person, and she did have the most amazing legs. She was doing a marine engineering course, and yes, she did fancy a drink, and I had my first moment ever of waking up and feeling a warm body beside me and wondering “who the hell?”

She was looking at me when I woke, great brown doe-eyes behind a tumbling mane of dark curls. She leant forward and kissed the tip of my nose.

“You are very, very odd. I’ve never had sex quite like that...it was very nice, but not what normally happens.”

I had no experience whatsoever of “what normally happens”, but you don’t tell your new and presumably sexual partner such things. I just wished I could remember exactly what DID happen.

“No, most blokes seem to just want to get my knickers off, push my head down for a gobble and then it’s legs in the air and bang away till they come, and not too much thought for me. It’s all about their cock. You hardly let me near yours, you spent more time on me”

I was starting to remember bits as she spoke, the feel of her nipple in my mouth, the touch and taste of her….”I’m sorry it wasn’t too good for you”

“You taking the piss? Five times I came last night, five! I’m going to have to catch the bus for the next couple of days, lover, you’ve left me too raw to ride. You can come round any time!”

She started to giggle at her own pun, and I remember thinking that at least I was no longer a virgin, and I realised that those bits were on their own system and were responding to the memories. Emma noticed, and grinned.

“Too sore for any more of that, my lover, but I’ll treat myself to breakfast!”

She ducked down under the covers, and her warm mouth went to work. I closed my eyes and fondled her thick mass of hair as she efficiently brought me to a climax, and all the time Little Voice was talking me through it and I was imagining her mouth on my breasts and tongue licking….

That was how I got my “jollies”, then, imagining myself as just another woman. I could almost forget I had my unwanted bits when she treated me like that, but realised that if was going to perform conventionally it would appear I needed some liquid fuel first. She came back up, smiling and licking her lips.

“Mmm, protein shake for breakfast, tells a girl she is appreciated”

I pulled her naked body up and into mine, delighting in her length and her softness, and the way her eyes sparkled behind the hair. LV kept whispering about what-ifs and then dropped a big one: what would Stewie say?

I knew that one, and it would be a demand for all the gory and sweaty details, but that was the complication. The more I lay wrapped in the warmth of this woman, the more I realised that I did love him, ardently, ferociously, but that I wanted nothing to do with him other than to hold him and be held. With Emma, I wanted her body twice over, to ravish again with my hands and tongue, but also in the same sense my father wanted the body of an American sprinter. Lust and envy combined in me.

I did fancy her body, but could I have it in blonde?