CHAPTER 61
Some day I would have to ask how far Kate and Sal went back, but for now it was enough to gather my man from his interview and confirm where I stood.

I walked off through town to our arranged rendezvous, and it was only after I was nearly there that I realised how easily I was handling it all, walking in a skirt through Crawley. I came back to reality quickly enough.

“Annie?”

It was Nev, fully tooled up for his beat duties, a middle-aged PCSO at his shoulder.

“Tom, want to grab three coffees while we have a natter? Ta.”

He waited while the support officer wandered off, then turned back to me.

“I can see you now, Sarge. Makes sense, now, but you do know the whole nick is talking”

I was about to answer, but he was smiling too brightly to trust. He continued.

“You shocked me, you know, but here you are, happy as a pig in shit, and how could anyone object? Getting any crap at work?”

“At the moment, no. Nev, be honest, how many threats have been made?”

“On your behalf or against you? Well, not many arseholes there, but then you know damned well Sergeant Armstrong has…told a few fortunes. Seriously, Sarge, you look, I dunno, sort of, shit, sorted. Look, we had that chat, yeah? You look good. You have allies that scare the shit out of the station, yeah…yeah, we all know the poison dwarf is shagging him, but who gives a fuck? They work well together!”

I looked at him, trying to work out which way he really leant.

“Annie, for that is who I see before me, we have a shit job, we meet shit people, but we work with gold. I am so glad to see you here, smiling. Where’s the bloke?”

“Having a job interview at the hospital. I’m on my way to see how it went”

He looked suddenly shy. “Could I meet him?”

Oh, Nev. One of the diamonds of the station, he wanted to be sure I was happy and safe.

“Nev, as soon as you have your boy back I will take you to my bloke”

The PCSO was on his way back, and Nev told him about heading over to the hospital.

“Yeah, but are we OK doing that?”

“Sarge says yeah…and here she is. Tom, Sergeant Price. Sarge, my new shadow, Tom Jenkins”

Tom looked abashed. “Sorry, Sergeant Price, didn’t realise. Still sort of finding out who is who, like”

“No problem, Tom, as you can see I am off duty, aye? Just nice to have a natter as I walk, and you never know what might turn up”

We ambled along in that gait parodied as ‘proceeding’, where the free leg is left to swing forward and the body seems to flow towards its destination, the walk that policemen learn the world over. Tom was full of the delights of his new job, and to my relief he stopped Nev digging any deeper. I was almost keeping control of my emergence, but it is in the nature of a policeman to dig, to query, to ask questions, and Nev was all copper.

Eric was waiting outside as we arrived, sipping from a cardboard cup. H looked at the three of us, and said “Snap! I’ll come clean, copper, it’s a fair cop guv!”

I stepped forward and quite deliberately kissed his cheek. Get used to it, Nev, get used to it. It’s the pattern of my life now, the life I intend to live.

“How’d it go, love?”

“Really well. They are working through the references again, having their usual private chat, and then it’ll be yea or nay.”

“How long?”

“A week, they say, then they’ll be sending the letters out”

“You feeling confident?”

He gave a little frown. “I don’t know. I’m a bit out of practice at these things, but I think I did well. Watch and wait, all we can do now”

“Indeed. I’m being rude, love. This is Nev, one of my older colleagues, though still quite spry, and Tom, his shadow. Boys, this is Eric, my other half”

Handshakes all round, and then we left the boys to continue their stroll as Eric took my hand for the return home.

“They seem OK with you, love”

“Nev’s a good bloke, and Tom is shiny new, so they aren’t really a fair sample. The rest of the station, well, we shall see, aye?”

“How did the quack go? And Sally?”

I thought for a while, and he picked up on my silence. “Problems?”

I nodded, and he offered me the alternative of a chat at home or a walk through the park, so as the sun was out I elected for the flowers and the conkers. I took my time getting to the point, but it had to be said.

“Eric, I have a few things I hadn’t told people, and Doc Khan sort of dug them out, aye?”

“Yeah?”

“Look, I sort of had a false start at all this a while ago. No easy way to tell it, but I decided to do something like I am now, but without telling anyone. You know, like that fantasy of mine, where it all changes magically, and nobody has any problems with it, aye? Well, I got some stuff off the net, and I took it for some time, and then things changed.”

He was watching my face as we walked. “In what way? I can’t see you as anything but girl, now, even my memories of Adam are overlaid with ‘Ah! That’s why he acted like that!’, so if you are saying you had doubts about your identity I will find that hard to believe”

“No, love, I think we have that one sorted. It was more a confidence thing. It was Melanie, when she was killed. I sort of lost it then, lost hope. She’d done what I was looking to do, come out, gone for it, and bam, she ends up in the middle lane of the M23”

He stopped walking, and put his hands on my hips, facing me. “So you just gave up, on everything”

“More or less, aye”

“So what’s different now?!

I had to smile at that, as it was a question with so many answers, all of which were the same.

“People. Support, aye? Ginny, Sally, all the others. You, mostly. Ginny dug me out, but you turned the key.”

I paused for a second. “Look, I know you have problems with my body. You make all sorts of allowances, which amaze me, but you still worry that at the end of the day I am a bloke with tits, which are the only good things to come out of my little experiments in self-medication using pills and booze. I have my own problems with it, but you just carry on treating me the way I have dreamt of, and that astonishes me”

I put a finger to his lips. “Shush. You made it very plain when we started out, how awkward you found it, and it wasn’t till I got dressed up that you could relax. If it was easy for you, it would be meaningless, but it isn’t easy, so it is as great a gift as I could hope for, aye?”

“Annie, love, I can’t help the way my body is hooked up. I react the way I do, it’s a bloke thing. Well, a straight bloke thing, at least. It took me a while to work it out, so I am sorry for the delay, yeah?”

I kissed him, as it seemed the right and proper thing. “Well, here we are, then, past all that. We have a number of things we have to do, before we get to the removal of awkwardness-–don’t wince, I never wanted it, and neither do you, and that isn’t what I meant. There are a lot of things bubbling away in my head, aye, and one of the biggest is the realisation of what a mistake I made back then”

“What, the self-medication shit?”

“Not exactly, love, the stopping. I should have found someone like Sally, talked it through, done it properly, rather than waste two years or so. Anyway, we have two things to do today. The first is a simple one, surprisingly. I change my name. Then we go to the bank and do the complicated one, which is to get them to accept it. After that, we do a bit of house hunting, because I am not taking out a joint mortgage with you in a bloke’s name, aye?”

“Love, was that an invitation to move in together?”

“Oh, he can be so coy at times! We already did that bit, love, it’s now put up or shut up time. After all that…after all that, we do two things. The first is to parcel up my old clothes and see who can get best use out of them. This is it, Eric, this is goodbye Adam, permanently.. Then, the hardest bit How the hell do we explain this to young Darren?”