CHAPTER 68
There were a few places that could work, but we realised there was going to be a lot of legwork ahead. We made a long-list, then a short-list, both of places and of estate agents that seemed at least a little less reptilian than the norm.

We had ridden home after the coffee, cake and cut, so I was able to get out of my cleats before we started the walking.

“Eric, if there is no garage in the new place we are going to have to look at new sheds as well. We each have quite a stable”

He started to laugh. “This is how it starts to go cold, yeah? All the romance disappears and we start thinking of storage space and whose turn it is to check the spoke tension or grease the nipples”

He had a tissue ready for my snort. Dressed more normally, we had made the rounds, and there were a few places we put on our list. Location, garage or other storage opportunities, at least three bedrooms for what would most likely be a regular set of visitors, and a decent kitchen. One thing I did want was a conservatory, somewhere light to allow me to play my music and Eric to play his banjo.

Rewind. “Dressed more normally” now meant that I was in a dress or skirt, it meant that I was utterly myself. The nerves still leapt and bounced, but apart from little moments such as my delightful sales assistant, I was finally becoming relaxed about being myself in public. There is a complex web of associations and meanings there, and very few of them relate directly to how I was dressing then. It wasn’t the thrill of putting on a bra, but the fact that wearing one was more comfortable. The swish of a skirt wasn’t a sexual lift, merely a signal that I was accepted as a woman. It is hard to explain the difference, but I was not fixated on clothing, but on the elusive ‘ordinary’.

Ordinary women stood at their wardrobes in bra and knickers wondering what to wear. Ordinary women asked their partners if they looked OK. Ordinary women pulled on a pair of jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt to do the housework, they didn’t need to indulge in some Betty Page fantasy of stockings and odd undies.

That was the revelation, the delight, that as long as I ticked a few girly boxes I could, in the end, wear what I liked and still be seen as female. The hairstyle helped, as did a little bit of paint, but I rather think the main part was attitude, and the presence of Eric on my arm. More than that, though, was the acceptance I now felt for myself. I knew, I had always known, what I should have been, but the fear had sat in my mind and taunted me, that I would simply look ridiculous. In the end, as Ginny and the rest dragged me out, what emerged, it seemed, wasn’t just my inner girl but also my inner cat. I was looking at women, now, not just in jealousy, but in occasional smugness. I wasn’t as ugly, no longer as fat, as some of them. I had better legs than many of them. I had a better man than all of them.

We did our trot round the agents, and arranged a couple of viewings, and Eric and I visited the various financial places we were in to try and get some idea of what sort of mortgage we might manage. All so very ordinary.

That next month dawdled by, and Geoff did sterling work for us with his van, slowly clearing out Eric’s place and transferring furniture and packing crates to the storage place Eric had mentioned. This was real, not one of the various fantasies I had daydreamed, and it took a while for me to relax and stop waiting for the pop of the bursting bubble. I also spent a great deal of time, when not at work, pushing myself harder on the bike. I had promised my man that I would be able to get into nice stuff, and I wanted to please him in everything I could. I was realising with each day what a true sham my marriage had been, just another Dad-pleaser.

I rode out one Saturday to visit Darren, Steph being off that day, while Eric was off with Geoff doing some more transhumance. I fancied a bit of general girliness with someone who would understand, but it wasn’t to be. There were instead guests there already, a car and a couple of motorcycles parked in the drive, one of them seriously tasty. Now, it is odd, the merest smell of a roast dinner can set me on the road to a breakdown, and it should be the same with a motorbike, but they don’t, they still interest me. I just can’t ride them any more.

It was a lovely old thing, and I recognised the engine as soon as I saw it, but the HRD was in a wideline that had clearly been spread, so as to drop the centre of gravity. A long, polished aluminium tank sat in front of a Venom Thruxton style seat, complete with hump, and clip ons and rear-sets finished the styling beautifully.

In other words, it was an old one-litre British V-twin engine shoe-horned into a slightly newer British frame, racing style footrests and handlebars added, and the whole thing polished up to look like sex on wheels. It was a Norvin.

The other was something Japanese.

Steph was waiting at the door, grinning. “You still have the thing for motorbikes, then?”

“Aye, just can’t ride the things, too many ambush memories, aye?”

“If you want to see Darren, he’s over at Naomi’s playing computer games. Tea?”

“Bears and woods?”

“How goes the house hunting?”

We carried on down the hall to the kitchen, where she provided me with a decent-sized mug of the brown stuff

“Not too bad, a couple of possibles, in Horley and Hookwood”

“Got some visitors, Annie. A workmate, and some friends, one of whom is a colleague”

We made our way into the living room where I was presented with two of the biggest men I had ever met, men who made Den look normal. One of them was in leathers, so I assumed his was the Norvin.

“This is Dave, he works with me, and Tony, who works in Dover, but whom I used to play with.”

“What do you play?”

Steph laughed. “No, not music, rugby”

“Oh, sorry…I forgot you used to do all that”

I suddenly realised there was a third figure almost invisible between the sides of beef.

“Steph forgot you?”

She was a rather hard-faced blonde (down, kitty), also in leathers. She leant forward.

“Sarah, Sar”

There was a definite Welsh accent, but not valleys, more like Steph’s own. “Where you from, Sar?”

“Abergwaun. Just up the road from ginge there. Tony’s my hubby, our boy’s off playing games with the lad next door. Where you from?”

“Brynamman”

She grinned. “Met Tony here just up from there. Spent years working in Abertawe, so got around there a lot”

“If it was on a bike, I probably saw you. I was a bike copper round that way, aye?”

She laughed. “Oh god, it’s Uncle Arwel in a dress!”

That bloody hurt, and it must have showed in my face. Sarah stood just as I rose, and she was shorter than me but bloody skinny, with tits, and an arse, and I was there like a sack of lumpy porridge in lycra, not a dress, even, and looking like her bloody uncle.

She stood at once, and I felt like slapping her, but she had her hands up, placatingly.

“No, Annie, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s the way you talk, not the way you look, aye?”

How did she know my name? I didn’t remember Steph giving it, and then I remembered a comment about something in the water in West Wales, and realised that they must have been talking about me before I arrived. I looked closer at Sarah, but even though I still couldn’t see it, I knew.

“You are…you are like Steph, and me, aren’t you?”

She nodded. I started to cry, bloody hormones, bloody PTSD, bloody life. She hugged me, and there was no hardness in her, none of Steph’s rawboned athleticism.

“If you were a copper round Abertawe, you might well know my big sister. I’m Sarah Hall now, but I was Powell, she’s Elaine”

I blinked away the tears as Steph brought me a tissue and the two men buggered off to do something masculine. “Was she a dyke? Solid girl, into bikes, aye? Really pretty wife?”

“That’s ‘is’ not ‘was’, Annie, but yeah, Siá¢n is lovely. Sorry to get on your bad side, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, when you talk, you do it just like my old bugger of an uncle, and it sounds so wrong coming from a woman”

I nodded, to let her know I understood, and tried to drag together all my earlier delight in the ordinariness of my life, but it was hard. The tranquillity I was feeling had been, in the end, so fragile that a simple misunderstanding had floored it. I felt better, though, just slightly, that if anyone could understand what I felt it would be these two.

Steph put a hand on my shoulder.

“This is the time, Annie, when I thought it would make sense to have a proper girl to girl chat. Sally is wonderful, but she hasn’t been there, not like us. Dave is here to keep his mate happy, they can talk about bikes or whatever, and we can see what help we can give you as your life gets complicated.

“Oh, and I mugged Naomi. I have her chocolate biscuits!”