CHAPTER 7
I wasn’t really up to anything for a while. I lived off my bounty for a bit, drank too much for a bit longer, and then moved into the obvious line of work for a big hard lad, door work at one of the pubs I had been using. There had been a spot of nastiness, I helped somebody to leave the pub by offering them a choice between staying in the warm or remaining attached to the testicles I was taking out into the rain, and for some reason they all left together.

The landlord knew the boss of one of the local doorman suppliers, and after he had overstated my abilities I was in. These days, doormen–bouncers---are supposed to be licensed and trained and sweet and cuddly, but back then, and in Luton, where I had stupidly ended up, it was no big thing. You stood at the door and filtered the prospective clientele, and if necessary returned those already inside to the wider world. Shoes were not casual and jackets were worn, jeans being absolutely infra dig. As for leather motorcycle jackets…well, there was the thing, we even ended up doing front of stage work at biker rallies, and in an odd twist, the trade stands at a cycle show, where I felt really, really unthreatened by the evil lentil-eating hordes and absolutely out of place.

I had started wearing knickers by then, under my male clothing. Little Voice was making promises to me, promises I needed her to keep, needed her to be able to keep, that she could end my dreams, the empty eyes, the sensible shoes, the sleeve of a shirt sticking out of freshly turned earth.

I had no idea whatsoever what to do. Military life is prescriptive, filled with routine. You know that you are in an hierarchy, you know when reveille, “OCOS”, and lights out come, and you are told where to go and, with a certain level of ambiguity, what to do. I had walked away from that, and I was also having to deal with the lesser-spotted civvy on a daily basis.

The biggest problem was my previous job. There is a squaddy term, a “Walt”, short for Walter Mitty, which is someone who fancies themselves an armchair warrior. Some take it to extremes, marching on Remembrance Day wearing a beret and shop-bought medals, as if they had earned them. I kept meeting Walts; they either wanted to tell me how wonderful we had been in the war, or how they had just failed in the all-arms commando course and if their horoscope had just been a bit better….

Oh, bugger off.

I was growing my hair as well, very non-bootneck, and I had even committed the ultimate sacrilege and shaved my upper lip. Ye gods, what would Stewie say?

Stupid question. I had walled myself off from that. He had a little girl, and the chance of a normal life, and I loved him enough to vanish and leave him the best of everything to get the Corps off his back.

I still kept a few quiet contacts, Nobby being one, and I knew he had stepped out of the khaki and into mufti, running taxis in Banbury after his dad died. I didn’t speak to mine any more; each time I picked up a phone I heard that joke and saw them all.

I was really, really starting to feel that men were a burden on the world, and my own membership of that group was just a little bit confusing.

You never, ever return kit. If you do, the QM might not replace it. If something doesn’t fit, you find a mate to swap with rather than returning what you have. When I came out, but not like that, I made damned sure I kept as much as I could, which is why I found myself on more than one drunken night sitting cross-legged in my room in Bury Park with my bayonet in hand, trying to decide whether to slice the fucking thing off right there.

I was hearing two voices at once. LV was talking about making Melanie real, and my own mind was reminding me about “rape first”

What a surprise, they were in agreement. Then again, I assume it was LV who won the argument on the trivial bass of my bleeding to death in some corner of the red light district.

The girls knew me, and whenever I walked back from the town centre I would be greeted by a chorus of “Are you lookin’? Oh, it’s just you , was it a good night?”

A couple of times I would need to have a word with a customer, or a pimp, and I remember sitting on a wall with a girl and sharing a kebab because I had one, and she didn’t, and trade was slow, and she told me that I had given her problems: how the hell was she supposed to shag someone who was a friend?

I realised I was nowhere near being the only one unable to have a normal life. She associated sex with business, not with anything tender or loving. I couldn’t associate the sex I was able to find with anything relevant at all to my life. I will tell no lies, I had quite a bit, especially from some of the more refreshed girls when I was out on the piss; my bits were still hard-wired to my body and back-brain, and when some willing lass did what she did they would respond as programmed, but I still resented them.

Nobby wrote to me a couple of years after I had jumped ship, and I nearly broke again. Stewie’s wife had never given up her much closer relationship, the one with the Rothman’s king size, and one night when she had forgotten she had taken her best friend to bed with her, the resulting fire took her, the house, the one next door, and Lee.

I really, really wanted to call in, or at the very least go to the funeral, but two things stopped me. One was that I felt the need to get off his back, let him live a normal life without me mooning over him. The other was simpler.

I couldn’t face seeing another dead child.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

Luton’s library is near the Arndale Centre, a concrete monstrosity of shops next to a tower block of an hotel and just round the corner from a couple of the clubs I worked at.. I spent ages in there during my daylight free time, reading everything I could get my hands on that might help me get my head around what I was. I would walk down New Bedford Road and spend a couple of hours at the books, then go into the Arndale and fill my bergen up with food. After walking back and loading the fridge, like as not I would be back with the books.

I got to be well-known there, and after lending a hand a couple of times with some of the more fragrant gentlemen of the road who used it as a doss, I started to be fed cups of tea and coffee by the staff. There was an older librarian there, Sarah, a long, long slim brunette with bobbed hair. She always wore a fitted, calf-length skirt or dress, with heels, and though she was in her fifties at the very least she had the most delightful arse, and she bloody knew it. I would often catch her when she felt she just had to re-shelve some books near me, and she would either stretch right up so that her breasts strained her top, or bend over straight legged so that her skirt stretched as tightly around her bum as she could make it.

No visible knicker line.

She caught me staring one day, as she must have done before, but this led to eye contact, and she simply smiled and licked her lips.

It turned out she was 62, which was amazing given her looks, and she never wore knickers, having hit the menopause years before. She had absolutely no pretensions whatsoever about love and romance, though she did like a nice meal out and appreciated it when I bought her flowers. No, what she wanted was to be fucked hard and in exactly the right way, which usually meant me on my back while she ground herself on top of me, on my face and then on my cock, sitting bolt upright and grunting like a piglet as she came. She liked what she called her girly sloppy seconds, too, and while I lay back, soaked in sweat, she would turn 69 and start to feed on me, soaked in her own flavours, until I responded and she got her reward, as she called it. She was old enough to know what she wanted and how exactly to get it, and still young enough to be able to find it and enjoy it, and for the first time since Emma LV was telling me that this was good, and I could pretend that it was Melanie receiving her attentions and responding to Sarah’s teasing as a woman would, with tongue and hands and lips.

It was the afterglow, the little death, that was the real delight, though, that simplicity of being wrapped up naked by another naked woman, no need to be anywhere, no need to rush off.

Yes, that’s right. Another woman. My long months of reading and thinking had crystallised all those whispers from Little Voice into the realisation of what was stopping me from really engaging with the world and the people round me, instead of just spectating.

It’s a sick joke, isn’t it? How many women do you know who are 6’4’’, eighteen stone and with size 11 feet? But then again, even though it was clearly just the sex on her part, I got very fond of Sarah. Despite the fact that she was absolutely fixated on something I would rather not have, I managed to feel feminine. I kept that thought very much to myself, though.

Her funeral was a small affair, just me, a couple of family members I didn’t speak to, and three of her colleagues, who said all the “right” things to me and hugged me, and left me to my thoughts and internal dialogue.

Sarah had been a regular user of the gym up at Stopsley, running there three times a week and spending an hour on the machines before running back, and several times I had arrived at her flat just as she did, all sweaty and so randy I didn’t even have time to undress before I was on my back and she was on my front.

And then, one day, she finished a session on some weights machine or other, sat down on a bench for a drink, and died. Just died, as if the switch had been thrown. That was it for me, I had no ties in Luton and so I headed out one day in my old Ford Escort and finished up in Crawley. I have absolutely no idea why Crawley, apart from the fact that Mehmet, the boss of my agency, had a few contacts down there, but I finished up living in Pound Hill. It was 2001, a new century at last after the false alarm of 2000, and I managed to get a proper job in town, working in the County Mall as a supervisor for the security teams.

You know, they make me laugh, those boys. Some of them are older, ex-squaddies and calm in what they do. Some are very young, and nervous as all hell, some are Walts who fancy themselves as some sort of special policeman, and have to be reined in. I caught one of them trying to stop somebody coming in because they were wearing motorcycle leathers….

It was a long and hard business trying to explain that the shops actually wanted customers to enter, and not be excluded, and that included the shop near the park exit that sold motorcycle leathers.

Pillock.

Yes, a new century, a new town in both senses, and Little Voice and I started to talk to my doctor.

*OCOS: another term for reveille,or your morning wake up call, and an instructon to young men as to where to put their hands: off cocks,on socks.