CHAPTER 23
Ginny of course wanted chapter, verse and hymn number. I gave her as much of the day as I could remember, even Dennis’ plaintive little complaint about feeling alone.

Ginny grunted.

“We’ll have to see if anyone’s looking for a bloke, Annie. Oh, apart from you, of course”

We were having our evening meal, a salad that actually contained raspberries, with fresh fruit and Greek yoghurt for afters. I had stabilised with my weight, or rather stalled at losing more, at around 14 stone. Ginny had explained how my body needed, in her words, to catch its breath before getting back on track.

“It’s a normal reaction. Your body s trying to decide whether you really are moving into a famine state, so it’s hanging on to some lard just in case. It will settle down in a bit, and we’ll get some more off you”

That had been at the start of the meal, when she had been listing the food groups she was trying to top up. All the way through, though, was an interrogation about where I stood. I bit the bullet.

“Gilbey girl, right. This is how I see it. None of you bastards is going to leave me alone, so I have to do something that will meet with your corporate approval, aye?”

Ginny looked really suspicious at that. “Why do I suspect you are about to try and stitch me up, Price?”

“Look, yes, it must be fucking obvious I fancy Den like mad, because you have all passed comment on it. Even Steph was asking. Even he….even Den seems to suspect something, but he thinks I am gay, ‘not into lasses’, and fuck knows what he would say if the truth were out, aye? He is just so fucking gorgeous, and he is a nice bloke with it!”

I paused for a breath, and Ginny just sat open-mouthed.

“Bugger me, girl, you really have hit the old reality mainline, haven’t you? What the hell has brought all this out?”

“Ginny, love, a lot of things. Partly it’s Sal’s doing. She has a way of, you know, asking a question that you can’t answer without asking yourself twenty more. Then it is Steph. It works for her, she has the family about her, everything is like the bloody Waltons but it’s not sickly. They just get on with having a full life, and that bloke of hers is smitten big style. I want that, really do, and I’m sane enough to realise I won’t get it, but can still dream, and hope.

“Look, Sal is very clear. There are all sorts of ways I can go, it doesn’t have to be the old nip and tuck business. Sally has an endocrinologist lined up for me, see what we can do short of slicing away”

Ginny was nodding at that. “You really have so many risks there, but I think you have other stuff in mind, yeah?”

“Yeah. It was something Steph said, about work, and how she came out. It was all planned in the end, but it wouldn’t have happened without a cock-up”

I explained about how she had been caught canoodling. “Ginny, if we do this–“

“Glad you noticed the ‘we’, Annie. “ she grinned.

I grinned back, and took both of her hands across the table, and she pulled them back immediately. “We need a quorum, love”

She rang Kate, switching to the speaker on the phone, and then took my hands again as her lover joined our planning.

“Kate, love, she wants to go public”

The voice was tinny, but clear. “First do no harm…”

“Fucking right, love, that’s what I am telling her. It’s not like that, though. She realises it is going to come out, just wants to control how it does. She was talking to Steph…”

“About being caught snogging? Yes, I know that story. Does she actually---sorry, Annie, do you actually have a plan, a timetable?”

“Not at the moment, which is why I am talking to my friends. I want this, I have always wanted this, but I hid it behind a daydream of instant perfection. That doesn’t happen in the real world, so I need to find a way to make it work as best it can. Are you with me?”

“Fuck yeah!”

“Of course we are, my love”

I drew a breath, a deep one. “The more people who guess, who find out by accident as Eric did, the less control I will have. This is damage limitation, in a way. I haven’t got a team in the same way Steph has, I haven’t got the ranks to close around me. I need a few specific people to be on side, and they are the inspectors and the other custody sergeants.”

Ginny raised an eyebrow. “Dennis?”

I nodded, forgetting Kate couldn’t see. “Yes. He is part of the picture, he has to know, and for good or bad he is sort of getting into our circle. He has to know”

Kate’s voice crackled a little. “You do realise he may well never look at you in that way?”

“Oh, fuck, aye, I know that. He does or he doesn’t, and in the end life goes on”

Kate actually laughed out loud. “Bloody hell, she is hitting reality big time! Annie, I need to go back to work, and you need to talk to my darling about coming out. Just understand, we love you, whatever happens”

The line clicked, and I looked at Ginny. “Well?”

She looked bleak. ”Yes, Annie, I know what she wants me to tell you. Not nice, not nice at all, but never mind….”

She visibly hauled herself together. “There is a bloody obvious bit of baggage about being gay, and that is being in a small minority. There is the standard bollocks about one in ten, but it isn’t that simple. You have the girls who are in denial, and you have the ones who take the piss, and you have the ones who just don’t know, but when you are like me, you fall for someone and they turn out to be straight, or even worse, they are so far in the back of the closet they have to prove they are ‘normal’ by lashing out…”

She was breathing hard. “Both of us had a few collisions with convention before we found each other, love. Both of us lost friends”

I was shocked to realise she was crying, and in a moment of–what, feminine intuition?---I realised what she meant by ‘lost’ and gripped her hands tight across the table, past the yoghurt and the fruit, the plates and the glasses.

“Fuck, Annie, we get the shit, but you get so much more, you people! No fucking more, OK?”

Melanie, off the bridge, under the wheels, I knew what she was crying against, and I would learn who she was crying for.

“Ginny…love…talk?”

She sat still, once more making a visible effort towards control and calm.

“Not much to say, really. We all have that little window of risk where we see The One, as I said, and they turn out to be someone completely different. Both Kate and I have lost friends, in all senses. There are those who disassociated themselves from us as soon as they realised we were really, truly what we said we were, those who stuck by us for a while before the pressure to conform got to them and they ran away, and….it’s lonely, Annie, but you know that already. There are girls like us, oh and boys too, who just fold when the loneliness and the hatred get too much, or they pick the wrong person to love, or whatever….”

She looked up through her tears. “Some of our friends haven’t managed to stay the course, Annie, that’s all I want to say, and when I look at you I shit myself. You are falling for some fucker who knows you as a man, who thinks of you as a man. If he finds himself attracted to you he may start to overcompensate, and that usually means a world of pain. If you rush ahead with this, you could end up as someone else under a train at East Croydon. Please, please, please be careful.”

She sniffed back another tear. “Anyway, being practical. I’ve been looking at your arse”

I laughed. “Surely I’m not that much of a girl yet!”

“Na, and I’m married. It’s just that you still have moobs, and a fat backside. When you see your blood doc, ask them if any hormones will get better results if we leave you the man boobs and the wobbly bum. They are supposed to redistribute the fat which you still have in abundance, and if some is already where you need it, result.”

Ginny was back in control, but I had to ask. She frowned, two lines coming out between her eyes.

“Suicides, Annie, two so far”

“So far?”

“Yeah, we still haven’t stopped yours”