CHAPTER 1
The mynah was doing the toilet again.

Perched on the overflow pipe, repeating the sounds that filled the space around it, this one endlessly flushed the toilet. The silly thing was that such an oddity was now just another fact of daily life, along with the ants and the mossies. Somehow my arm had got out from under the net, and they had feasted on my elbow in my sleep. Not nice, and very red.

I thought back, in my twelve year old mind, to my arrival here that first night, two in the morning of a March day in 68. For most of a day we had lumbered through the skies in a Britannia turbo-prop, passing over wonderful sights such as the edge of the Himalayas and the great cities of India, all of which I had missed as I was spending what seemed like the entire flight on my knees in the toilet revisiting whatever I had tried to eat until all that seemed to be left was bile. Mam had put both of us into little boy suits, proper jackets with matching shorts, so that we felt sort of grown up. I hated mine. My brother and I, .two years apart, were dressed as much alike as possible, and she found it so easy. Instead of going into the shops and buying one set of Ladybird7-8 year old clothes, and one of 9-10, she just got two sets of the junior size. I was that short. Every time I looked at the label on my little-big-man jacket, I was reminded how pathetic I was. My father joked, ‘milk-bottle shoulders’ being the latest, and I don’t think he meant the pain he caused, but it still cut me deeply.

Iain was the one, he was the footballer even at eight, I was the reader, the music addict, the odd boy that couldn’t throw.

I crawled out from under the netting and did my teeth in the single bathroom that I had, for once, managed to get to first. Into the khaki shorts and short-sleeved white shirt, the black socks and brown sandals that made up my school uniform, and down the stairs. It was Friday, Dad was already at work, and Mam had a Tupperware box of jam sandwiches and a bottle of squash ready for me. They fitted into my little briefcase along with the folded plastic mac and cap for the rain that would no doubt come before I was home.

My brother banged down the stairs just as the amah arrived to start the day’s housework, and as he grabbed his own bag I hugged Mam and we were off down the little slope to the school bus stop, my shirt already starting to stick to my back. Please God, no cricket today. I never managed to stay in for long, and fielding was a nightmare. I could never throw, neither straight nor long, and the idea of trying to catch what was basically a hard lump of leather-covered wood did not exactly appeal.

Sally and Julie were at the bus stop already, wearing green summer skirts. It struck me that day that life wasn’t far; there they were in light, floaty clothing that let what passed for cool air get to them, and I was tied into a pair of thick shorts and a shirt. They got to play netball indoors, I had to stand around on the padang under the equatorial sun until the games master had had enough of it himself, and that never seemed to happen.

Sally had her hair ted back with a really pretty ribbon that had a tiny plush parrot on it, and I realised n an odd moment of simultaneous thought that not only could I never wear such a thing, as a boy, but that I hadn’t the necessary hair. What I did have was Brylcreemed back into what my Dad called a ‘wave’, certainly nothing like the length I would need for my own parrot to perch on.

I started to giggle, and Julie looked oddly at me.

“What’s funny?”

“It’s Sally’s parrot. We have a mynah that does the toilet flush, and I just wondered what her parrot would do"

“You’re weird, Stephen”

At that, she turned away from me, just as the old white Vauxhall-badged bus drew up, and we were off to Bourne School. Off the bus, and the long, long walk up the endless steps to the main yard and morning assembly. Each morning I would try to count the number of steps, and each day it would be different as someone spoke near me or otherwise distracted me. The distraction usually consisted of slamming my face into one of the steps by tripping or directly pushing me. Yes, that was my normal day, from start to finish. At some point we would have some sort of organised physical activity, such as the cricket I hated, or the daily game of British Bulldog that was just about compulsory on the padang at late morning break, and that would give the likes of Keith Maxwell and the rest the opportunity to get even more physical with me.

I was the weird boy, the one with the large bull’s eye indelibly painted on my back, and probably my face as well, as they seemed to aim for both. Maxwell had come up with a new trick in the past few weeks, pressing a drawing pin into the sole of his sandal and scuffing his foot on the ground until the friction had heated the metal, at which point he would press the bottom of his foot against my bare leg. Little things, minor things, but they built up.

I had no idea why I didn’t fit, why it was always me they picked on, I just assumed they found the smallest boys the easiest to pick on. That is something I look back on, now, and I am astonished at the way I accepted physical violence, persecution, as being the natural order. I was still puzzled, though, as Paul Betson was smaller even than me, and they left him alone.

I settled into my little corner when break came around, hoping to avoid the padang’s violence, and opened my new copy of Podkayne of Mars, one of the fringe benefits of a father who, while not the most literate man in the world, loved SF. Heinlein was breaking new ground here, writing as a teenaged girl, and it was really drawing me in, so much so that the slap round the head nearly made me scream.

It was Burnside, the Maths teacher.

“What are you doing skulking here, Jones? Healthy boys do healthy things! Are you unhealthy? Answer me! Or get off your fundament and descend to where normality awaits you”

He took my ear in one hand, twisting it nastily, and stuffed my paperback into my little case, dragging me along as I tried to fasten it, before pushing me down the stairs to the playing field where yet another game of Bulldog was just starting. He pushed me sprawling on the grass, and as he walked away I heard him mutter “fucking pansy”, neither of which word meaning anything to me at the time. That would change, of course, as would my ability to recognise that the smell which always seeped from the old sadist was that of gin. So, yet again a break could have spent in a shady corner immersed in a young girl’s entry into adulthood was spent having my face pushed into dry and coarse grass, and yet again I would have to explain to my mother why the ahma had to wash my shirt after only one day’s wear.

The next day I went with my mother to help with the shopping at the NAAFI, and my life changed.

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She also had an appointment to get her hair done, which in those days was a matter of perms, smells, and huge hair driers, which meant sitting for over an hour with a bottle of coke and whatever I could find to read. I was saving the Heinlein, for odd moments in bed with a torch, or on the bus home, and so I descended on the bound volumes of newspapers that were sent out for the Forces. A week’s worth of newspapers bound in a hard-backed folder, with all the cartoons I could ever want. I settled down with the Mirror, and started working my way through a week’s worth of ‘The Perishers’. That was the moment I found out what I was.

There was a running series of articles all that week, all about someone called April Ashley. That was the moment that Heinlein’s story became even more personal for me.