CHAPTER 33
That one smacked me down hard. It was clear that she knew exactly what the question would do, and I had to think hard as to what answer I should give.

“No. Not yet, and most probably never, ever”

She smiled. “But you want to?”

“I don’t know. Better to say I wish I was able to”

“Fair point. When did you stop crossdressing?”

“How did you know?”

“My questions, your answers”

“I….well, it was really when Mam went.”

“Lack of accessible clothing?”

I thought about that one. “Partly, but I didn’t really need her stuff by then. I had a small stash of my own. I kept them in a sort of cave in one of the quarries.”

“Where did you get them from?”

“All sorts of places. I never had the guts to go into a shop, aye? People would dump stuff in lay-bys and field entrances and that, mattresses and old fridges, and sometimes bags of stuff. Some of that was old clothes. And…well, I sew.”

“You made your own stuff? Same as you did for Tabby?”

“Yes”

“Did you ever get caught? Apart from that time with Jessica?”

“No. I was very, very careful, my dad had a temper, and Greg went, and…”

“And you hid? The beard?”

“Yes, the beard. I read the story, got a bit obsessed about stuff like that, saw the bit about the beard, and, well…”

“So you hid. Annie, I am going to ask you a question. It’s another of the sort of traditional ones, but I have to ask it. No internal dialogue before answer, OK? Just like those word association things, question-bang-answer”

“OK…”

“When did you decide to become a girl?”

“I am a girl. Always. Birth. What do you mean?”

“Ah, I didn’t expect much else as am answer, but it’s one of those questions I sort of have to ask. Occasionally I get people who have had magic revelations while watching Springer or Jeremy Kyle, but they normally get filtered out before they reach me. Now and again, though…”

She smiled again. “Shall we get Eric in, then?”

I popped the door open, and he joined us.

“Ah, the spawn of Satan, I believe. Eric, who is in the room with us?”

“Annie Price”

“Who is she?”

“A very old and dear friend, with a shitload of problems”

“Can you help with any of them?”

He looked at me for quite a while, then turned back to Sally. “I hope so. I think so. I think I have, in some ways”

“What do you see as her problems? Annie, this isn’t asking for a diagnosis, I just want you to see what others see”

He looked at me again. “ Life has screwed her up, her job has screwed her over. She mutters endlessly in her sleep, and then the nightmares come along…and I suspect the lack of proper sleep messes her up for the day, so it starts to pile up”

“You sleep with her?”

“A couple of times, when she has had a particularly bad night, when Ginny isn’t about”

“Any other comments?”

He thought again. “I am obviously not the trick cyclist here, but I suspect that life might go a lot easier if she didn’t have as many of the other problems. That sounds obvious, but what I mean is that we have had an awful lot of movement over the last few weeks and months. She has started coming out of her front door again, started riding again, lost most of the excess flab she had built up. More than that, though, she has told many of the people who matter exactly what the fuck is up with her, and that seems to have made the biggest difference”

“You don’t see her as odd? Losing a friend, that sort of thing?”

A long pause. “I did some reading, tried to put things into focus. There were several leitmotifs in the literature, one of which was about left and right handedness, another about badly fitting shoes, but the one that caught my attention was about double-exposure photos. You see someone you knew as one sex suddenly appear as the other, and the images conflict. I have a similar reaction, but in an opposite sense sort of way.

“Annie, you have always been weird. I don’t mean that nastily, I just mean that you never sort of fitted convention. All of your riding, apart from our social stuff, was solo. You never toured with a friend. The way you reacted to things was sort of off…that double exposure picture thing, it’s like I’m not seeing Adam under Annie, but like the other picture has been scrubbed and I can now see the real one clearly. Suddenly, you make sense. Sally, sorry if I am taking over here”

“Not at all, Eric. She needed an outside viewpoint.”

“Thanks, Sal. Annie, do you see what I mean? I think you are shitting yourself that we’ll all go ‘losing a friend’, but it isn’t like that, it’s finding out who our friend is. Got me?”

Sally leant forward a little. “What Eric is talking about, sticking to his photo analogy, is a sharpening of focus, not replacement of a picture”

I nodded. “So where does that leave me? You are the shrink, tell me what I am!”

Sally just laughed at that. “Oh, all of us know what you are, as soon as I spent five minutes with you I knew, and Eric has said it as eloquently as I could wish. What we need to do isn’t find out who you are, but decide who you wish to be.”

“That’s an easy one, but not a real hope. I just want to be myself, rid of some excess baggage–no, Eric, do not wince. I wasn’t talking about those. Well, I was, sort of, but what I really meant was my history. It is a big thing, PTSD, and I don’t think even the doctors, you, Sally, I don’t think you really appreciate what it means. The trouble is that I have that double load. It was that war book, Eric, that Canadian bloke, aye?”

“You know, I remember you talking a lot about that. I should have realised what you were saying”

“Yeah, yeah, butt, hindsight and all that. You are here now, and that is what matters to me. It is that image from the book, you know…”

“The wall? I remember you talking on and on about that”

How long had Eric been listening, really listening to me? Either I had been more obsessed than I remembered, or he actually paid attention. That begged a question…why?

“You remember that? I must have gone on a lot about it.”

“No, it was just such an image, the thought of an anti tank gun getting up close and personal on one man, brick by brick”

“Well, that is my life. Brick by brick. And it’s that personal aspect, as if the entire planet is aiming it all at me and me alone. That is the problem, I suppose, when you add two conditions like mine into one festering pile of shit.”

I took a few breaths. “Sal, you said you knew what I was, well, so do I, but I have had to live with that all my life, and it is corrosive. Eric, every single day my life shortens, because I haven’t got one now and the one I might have has just lost a day. Shit, mate, Sally, I know what I mean, I just can’t get the right words to it.”

Eric smiled. “You seem to be doing all right to me, kid”

Sally nodded. “That is a common concept among people with GID, and I don’t want either of you pretending you don’t know that term. You have both been researching like buggery, haven’t you? The concept that the longer you wait, the less you will have, until one day you just give up hope. Alcohol, drugs, self harm of varying degrees. That is what I try to prevent. Shit, I try my best, every time, and sometimes it works, and sometimes…sometimes I have to go and get outside a lot of my own alcohol.

“Annie, cutting to the chase, as I should do, we both know what you are. So does Eric, but I have boxes to tick and he just has to look after a friend. What is your preferred course of action? Stay hidden, or look to go through transition into what we all know is your true gender?”

That was the crunch question, the one had run from for so many years, the reason I had grown my beard, now almost zapped out of existence, and I knew it would only be after a lot of heart-searching that I could answer it.

So I simply said “I am hiding no longer. What is the next step?”

“Well, it is a matter of comparing what Doc Khan says about your general health, what Doc Newman says about your bloods, and stuff, and what Doc McDuff says about the fact that you are suitable for HRT.”

She drew in a few slow breaths as she flicked through Newman’s notes. “This is going to be a shitty time for you, Annie, I make no false promises. You have a lot of conflict ahead of you, and some of it may well be really unpleasant, but look at it this way: this isn’t the world shitting on you turd by turd, it’s you choosing to fight back. Your rules, in fact”

Eric was laughing. “You have some interesting metaphors, Sal!”

She was smiling happily. “Gets the message across, dunnit? So, Annie, we going for it then?”

“Fucking aye. Let’s do it”