CHAPTER 44
Dinner was a lighter meal than Jan usually did, as we would be dancing, and we fully intended to snack later. I was settling into my new role, and when the ‘something nice’ from Eric turned up, it was a pair of leather sandals. Kelly smiled in a truly predatory way. If Sandra had been a hawk, she was a leopard waiting to drop. The smile widened, and all she said was “toenails”

Jan was nodding. “Good idea. Annie, we have to make sure there are as many little signals going out as we can. Signals that say what you are. Men imagine that when they play at dressing up it is all high heels and corsets and heavy make up, but it isn’t. Little clues….look, it’s how you move, key touches like a small piece of jewellery, pretty toes, that sort of thing”

“So tits and a dress aren’t enough, aye?”

Eric laughed. “They are a bloody good start, girl!”

Steph was nodding. “Geoff, remember Sarah’s friend, Alice?”

“Oh yes. Annie, she transitioned rather late in life, but Sarah tells the story of how she just sat knitting one day, and it was all there, pure essence of housewife, even without any changes in clothing.”

I asked the obvious question. “Who is Sarah?”

Geoff answered. “Wife of one of hairy’s colleagues. Steph used to play rugby against her cousin when she was at school, and she played with Tony, Sar’s husband, for the Customs regional team”

Steph was nodding. “Yes, and Alice got wed to Sarah’s uncle, so it all goes round in circles. Look, the point is to let people read what they expect to read, not beat them to death with it. Ah, there goes Kelly.”

It was a truly odd experience to be sat at a table eating a cold buffet-style salad meal on a delightful August evening as a young girl lay on her stomach under the table painting my toenails, as she snacked from the plate on the ground next to her. Eric looked across at Geoff.

“Has anyone ever told you your family are seriously weird, mate?”

“Sometimes before they meet the wife, but they always pass comments like that after they have met her. I don’t care, they are my kind of weird”

Jan called out “Bill, his medication is wearing off!”

Bill nodded. “I‘ll fetch the restraints and the cattle prod”

He wandered off into the tent as I chuckled, and came back with a selection of fruits.

“No cattle prods, but there are some bananananananas. Where do you want them?”

A voice came from by my feet. “Peeled and in my hand, please, Daddy dearest”

It tickled, and we had to hang around a bit till it dried, but that didn’t take long, and I found myself adorned with burgundy. Steph flashed her toes at me. “Snap! It was my bottle, so I hope you like it. Sandals on and grab the bottles and stuff!”

I looked across at my man. “Just a thought, Eric, but how did you know my size?”

“Looked in your cycle shoes, of course”

“Yeah, but why would you do that, unless…hang on, how many of you were in on this little make-over?”

Every hand went up. Eric actually looked embarrassed. “You know how confused I get. I just thought, perhaps a bit selfish, sort of, but if I sort of saw you as you really are, type of thing, well, I could stop being such an arsehole about things”

“Eric Johnson, you have never, ever been an arsehole about anything except your favoured instrument. You give me so much strength, without you and Ginny, well, you know, slow suicide they call it. That is where I was until you and her did something about it”

“Yeah, love, but she did something about it, I came in halfway through”

“Ginny beat and cajoled me, and I spent ages trying to work out how to tell her to piss off and leave me to it. You gave me a reason to listen to her, so don’t you talk about being an arsehole, aye?”

“Yeah, but I have been hiding everything. I mean, all this dressing up shit. No, I don’t mean like that, I just mean I should be able to relate to you as you are”

“Eric, my love, look at me. I left my marriage because I couldn’t…you know. It just didn’t work. I sort of loved Maria, but I am not built that way. Neither are you, so…patience, and we will get there. I am holding you to your promise, not to walk or run away”

Something leapt out at me, and I replayed the last exchanges. Oh. I stood up and walked over to him. “Stand up, Eric”

He did, and I kissed him, full on the mouth, and he twitched, and then kissed me back, and it was, it was, I could feel the stubble, and he held me and….

I was stood there afterwards, nothing but his eyes visible, and Steph whispered in my ear. “Handbag’s for lipstick and stuff, means when you need to you can repair the damage I expect you will be repeating”

I looked at Eric, and in as cocky a voice as I could manage, though still trembling, I said “There, wasn’t so hard, aye?”

He pulled me closer, and whispered into my other ear. “No, that was all I had hoped for. This is where we start….”

I whispered back. “Well, you did use that word”

“Yup”

And that was his declaration. No avowal of deathless passion, just the ‘L’ word slipped into a conversation. I couldn’t imagine a better way of saying it.

Jan was singing as she bundled the bottles and other stuff into a rucksack, and we set off for the dance.

Now, as I have said, I have never been a dancer, especially not of the sort of measure practised in ceilidhs, but as a musician I have that ability to hear the phrases in the music, feel when a movement should start. As a non-dancer I had another advantage: I didn’t have a built-in bloke mode for dancing, so being led round by Eric was no problem.

No. It wasn’t just no problem, it was delightful. Every part of me had screamed to throw off the costume I was forced to wear from birth, the alien anatomy I hated, and now….now I was being handed and swung, held and steered, and all through it was in his eyes, and his smile was in mine.

We ended up in one set with a couple of our camp site neighbours, and Mrs Neighbour smiled as she asked me why I hadn’t worn such a pretty dress before tonight, and I explained how much inconvenience a small tent gave to girls in skirts. Thank you, Stephanie, for that advice.

And we danced, and I danced with Geoff, who was amazingly graceful, and with Bill, who always seemed to be smiling, but never with Mark, who seemed welded to his girl. I even had a turn or two with Jimmy, and the more I saw of him the more I realised why Steph loved him. He was so much a cliché, the old man with a fag forever in the corner of his mouth, or behind his ear, though now he had given up, but that image lived on. The flat cap, the old tweed jacket, it was so much him that it was a shock to see the real man, the musician, the grandfather, leaking round the edges in the same way as I was seen to do.

No, Jimmy was someone who fitted neatly into the little Woodruff world of that phrase Big Bill was forever using, being excellent to one another, and deep down I saw the same passion Kelly had, that need and love of music that had kept her single rather than lose her meat and drink. Weird people, but as Geoff said, my kind of weird.

It was done, the dance was over, and I had sneaked more than a couple of kisses, and we gathered our stuff and set out for the first of the two acts we wanted to see, Show of Hands, Steve Knightley and the aptly-named Phil Beer. I had no idea what they would be like, but my new and weird family rated them.

An empty stage, with two men, one long-haired with sharp features, the other bearded and chubby. Fiddle and guitar, I saw, and then they started, and while Beer’s playing wasn’t up to the standard of Jimmy, or Steph, he was bloody good. The guitarist, though…

It was his voice. The words were amazingly well-crafted, and when he did something about “Country Life”, which he introduced as being too political for the Beeb, I was shivering. It was a song about rural decay, unemployment, holiday homes, drug addiction, it was every shitty little ‘cottage’ in Llareggub I had ever gone into hard, it was every overdose death found in a derelict barn I had attended, it was Cefneithin and Crosshands, Pyl and Tredegar. I was crying by the end, and it wasn’t their only song that did that to me. Eric sat next to me, feeding me tissues passed to him by Jan, and holding me.

They finished on a song about an Irish farmer going to the races, and I staggered out into the darkness for a pee, Steph by my side.

“Annie….there are only proper toilet blocks down here….stick with me, you will be fine.”

And I was. The more time I spent out, the more natural it seemed, and the cubicle helped. I mean, I always sat at home, so no big one. The ease of everything did cause me a small moment of upset, as I realised that come Tuesday the genie, as had been hinted, would have to go back in the bottle. Enough worry for now; leave it to the day. We rejoined our men for what everyone was raving about, a man called Richard Thompson.

If there can be a good way, he made me want to slit my wrists. This was a man of deep, dark passions, and amazing cynicism that somehow showed a love for humanity that lighter souls could never do. The songs blurred one into the other, songs about alcohol and loss, about loneliness and the sight of hope setting off on the last train away from you, and yet the hope lingered, made stronger by his apparent dismissal of it. By the time I was led out into the fresh air by Eric, I was stunned.

“Steph, any of you nutters….you listen to that for FUN?”

Bill answered. “No, Annie, for his sheer genius. Now, after that, anyone fancy pie and mash?”

Eric looked sharper. “And beer?”

There was a family chorus of “Yeah!” and Bill gathered our cash as the rest of us headed to the beer tent, where a session was just finishing. The barman looked closely at me.

“Weren’t you a bloke yesterday?”

Eric slipped his arm round my waist and grinned back. “No, but she is a serious cyclist. I would have noticed if she were a bloke”

“Oh, sorry, Miss. Just, you know, pints and well…”

He made a vague gesture towards my chest. I smiled, and just offered up a comment about jiggling and sports bras, followed by his embarrassed declaration of ‘too much information’

We took the beers back to our group, as Eric informed me I was a bitch and a tease, and I was feeling absolutely on top of everything. Pie, mashed tatws, beer, the man I knew I loved holding me, could it be better?