The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2851 by Angharad Copyright© 2015 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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Simon was very attentive in bed so perhaps absence does make the heart grow fonder, more likely abstinence makes the libido grow stronger, not that there was much wrong with his in the first place. I suppose because we hadn’t actually been intimate for a week or so I got sore again, but not before he’d satisfied both of us. The only problem then is having to get up and clean myself up or bask in the afterglow—in a puddle of... Quite, so I get up wash, sometimes put some antiseptic cream on and often clean knickers by which time he’s fast asleep.

Getting back into bed I lay there for a while just gazing at him in the light of the full moon—I still can’t believe I’m his wife, nor how much I love him. I’m not sure what I’d do if I lost him. I lay there just thinking about how it all happened, Stella knocking me off my bike and taking me home. Her discovery that I wasn’t quite what she thought I was—whatever that was. I’ll have to ask her sometime, not sure if she thought I was a boy or a girl, until I undid the bandage I had hiding my boobs—goodness haven’t they grown especially with breast feeding.

It didn’t faze her and she helped me develop my image there and then. What was so crazy was Simon coming home and fancying me. Effectively, I’d not even started my transition then, so was somewhat inexperienced in dealing with men—not that I’m that experienced now. If anything my attitude towards them was one of fear or despisal because of how much I’d suffered at their hands and also because the system included me as one despite my protests from childhood onwards.

I drifted into a reverie of elements of my early years when I’d known I was really a girl not a boy. I wanted dolls and tea sets not footballs and cars or worse, guns. I still can’t bear those things, cars I have got to enjoy, especially the one I have now.

Dressing up in playschool was my delight, I was always the princess—they even called my parents about it—as I sat in a long dress making picnics for dollies and teddies. I loved it, though I did have one fight with another girl about some toy or other, can’t quite remember now. Dad did everything he could to discourage me, including hitting me, humiliating me, and being generally aggressive towards me whenever I displayed any sort of unmasculine behaviour—which was often.

Then came the school nativity play and I got promoted from shepherd to BVM, how’s that for a career move? It all happened because Mollie Theobald fell ill and I knew all the lines, so I got to wear the blue dress and the headscarf. After that my acting career was limited to always being picked on to read the girl’s parts when we read plays in English in the classroom. The boys thought it was a hoot and a way to humiliate me—it did most of the time, but looking back Mr Whitehead, was always very complimentary of my reading.

I can still hear him delivering a put down to Stavros, a slimy toad of a kid who thought he was a Greek god—yeah, the god of sewage. “Mr Stavros, perhaps you’d prefer to read the part of Viola yourself if you don’t think Watts rendition is good enough? Personally, I find his rendition very good.” Yeah a boy playing a girl who’s pretending to be a boy. Or should that be a girl pretending to be a boy who’s playing a girl pretending to be a boy—no wonder I was so good at it, I’d been doing it for years.

Next, after many of Murray’s attempts to encourage me to leave, he made me play Lady Macbeth in the biggest attempt to get rid of me, making me attend the school in a dress to learn some of the subtleties of walking and talking like a female and to get used to the clothing. He went ballistic when I turned up in Siân’s old uniform, wearing almost as much mascara as Danielle does and painted nails. I’d been growing my hair for a couple of years and that drove him nuts but there was nothing in the school regulations that said I couldn’t. He’d already marked me out as different I was just agreeing with him. It also drove my dad to distraction but my mother simply told me if I wore it like a girl I had to care for it like one—music to my ears. I even got a hairdryer from her for a birthday present.

She knew more about me than she let on, encouraging me to cook and clean and sew. She taught me how to hang curtains, even how to make or alter them and about matching them to other things in the room like carpets and furnishings. So she must either have recognised what I was or assumed I was so strange I’d be on my own all my life and would need to furnish my own home. Either way it’s come in handy and I’m trying to pass it on to my daughters though none of them seem that interested in becoming domesticated. Well they have fads of it, when they pester me to do some sewing and then it isn’t mentioned for weeks unless they have a class in school and have got stuck or behind.

Julie is quite good at it, sewing that is, she does most of her own repairs including the salon overalls and so on, whereas Phoebe isn’t one bit interested. Her attitude is that she can always bring whatever to me and I’ll fix it, which probably applies to Trish and Livvie as well, Meems is a bit uncoordinated but soldiers on and Hannah has the idea but doesn’t particularly enjoy it. I do when I have time.

I had a flashback to my mother showing me how to turn the collar on a shirt—we don’t do such things now in these times of relative affluence—my dad was perturbed that I was seated at the sewing machine with my mother teaching me. I mean, even in those days we were rich enough to buy another shirt so she must have been teaching me sewing skills right under the nose of my father; skills far above any I should have needed to do running repairs at university besides I always wore tee shirts and scarves, so collars were somewhat irrelevant. But if her intention had been to show me half a dozen things in sewing that I’d need to remove, turn and replace the collar, that I could use for other things, she not only fooled Dad but me as well.

Even he approved of my being made to make repairs to his clothes and shorten his trousers on a couple of occasions. He saw it as punishment I now realise it was my needlework training right in front of him and so cleverly done he approved of it. Mum, you were a genius.

As I drifted off to sleep with these memories, I’m sure I heard her voice saying, “PhD huh, took you long enough to spot the obvious, didn’t it?”