CHAPTER 36
It was cold enough to bring half s shout from my lips, and without any conscious thought my arms were already flailing around for something to hang onto. That brought my mind back, but I was arguing with myself, in panic looking for a handhold to keep my face above the water as my shoes and clothes dragged me down into the murk of the Ouse, and at the same time cursing my lack of forethought in not stepping off a bridge away from the bank, where my cowardice could be ignored and the water take me where I belonged.

I was also, instantly, sober.

My hands struck something, a branch of some bush growing from the steep grass of the bank and trailing its end in the winter-swollen river. My hands made their own decision, locking onto the smooth bark as it bent with my weight and the tug of the current. Let go, hands. Do something right for once in your bloody life and let me go from this one were the words from one half of my mind while the other part, the one that had always controlled my life, gibbered in terror in a corner.

Come on, I told them, come on hands, just do this one thing for me, and I knew that in a little while they would have no choice. As the cold tore into me their grip would fail, sure as death and taxes, and finally, finally… Would they find me in the river, or would my body make it all the way, past Goole, into the Humber, out towards Denmark… I had never been back, never gone to see those places, the men I had failed… Just a little longer and the choice would be taken away from my failings and seized by the river and the cold.

“Give me your hand!”

There was someone there, the glow of distant streetlights picking out a corona of hair, and it was a woman, but that voice was wrong.

“GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING HAND YOU SOD!”

And my hand did let go, my right one, but instead of dropping away, like a traitor it reached for hers and she seized it, her grip strong and true, just as my left hand finally obeyed my pleas. I rolled in the current, and for just an instant my face went under the water, but she wouldn’t let go. The good lord alone knew where she got her strength from, but no matter how I tried to stay limp and slip from her grasp she still managed to keep some sort of contact with the bank and slowly, slowly pulled me onto the edge of the grass. She gained a proper footing, and bit by bit I came out of the water, till she bent down to get her hands under me to ease her position. As her head came near mine, she recoiled.

“You are fucking pissed, you bastard! Why are you out by the river in poxy February if you can’t walk straight?”

I broke at that, finally, but not quite completely, and she started to stammer an apology.

“Look, if, right, if you were, you know, doing… fuck, so was I. There’s only so much crap anyone can take, and my life…”

I was only half-listening up until then, but her words brought me up short. Not only could I not even get my own death right but I had ended up spoiling some stranger’s own exit. Story of my bloody life in one wet pile of misery, and the wind was making it a painful one now. I couldn’t manage to keep my peace, and that word, one I so rarely used, was there unbidden.

“What fucking life? I just wish…I just wish I had the guts to do it properly. Bugger, I’m cold!”

She stood, a tall girl, and pulled me to my feet. “There’s lights in the boat club. Come on, you old bastard, I am freezing”

Dripping filthy water we stumbled to one of the rowing clubs on the river, the unlocked door opening on lights, young men and the smell of some sort of varnish. I caught her eye as we entered, and gave her the very slightest of head shakes, her response a slow blink of her eyes and a muttered “Later” before turning to the oarsmen.

“Need some help here, lads, poor old bugger fell in the river, and. Well, we’re both bloody freezing and…”

One of the young men ran out of the door with a shout of “I’ll give the ambulance a ring!” and two of the others brought blankets, musty from lying in the corner of the boathouse as another poured hot coffee from a Thermos. I hate coffee, but it was indeed hot, and my traitorous hands took it and my mouth worked with my throat, and there was no bloody dignity left as they stripped me of my outer clothes and swaddled me in grimy, prickly warmth. I was watching the girl as well, and she did have tits, that was a brassiere, but there was something very off about her. I almost started to laugh, as I realised where the strength of her grip came from. I had been pulled out of the river by a bloody female impersonator. Could I get any more shame into my life?

The ambulance crew were calm and efficient, and I was strapped to a sort of wheelchair thing, wrapped in cleaner blankets and a silvery space-age thing.

“What’s your name, mate?”

“Gerald. Gerald Barker”

He was so young, and I thought of Philip, dead in those woods for the sake of peeing in private.

“You got the boatyard, down by Acaster?”

“Aye. Dobbs and Barker”

“Thought you’d be better round water, Gerald. Your friend coming with us?”

He was looking uncertain, and I understood immediately, or so I thought. He’d surely want to be off home to get into proper clothes before he got found out. To my surprise, he simply climbed into the back of the ambulance with me. The two medics looked at each other, and without a word they both got into the cab, leaving us together in the back. My rescuer waited for the engine to start, then simply asked “Why, Gerald?”

I could at least try to be polite and pretend I hadn’t spotted what he was. “You wouldn’t understand, lass”

“Susie. Try me”

Susie. My little girl… I just had to ask. “And what was your name?

What a temper he had. ““Darren, but that’s not who I am, not who I was supposed to be, so if it causes you any problems I can get out here and you can piss off on your own, OK?”

All the pieces fell together with a bang, and I remembered all the stories in the papers, all the odd tales of people who were not who they were told they were born as, and it was she, not he and once more I saw old friends, and it was Bob and Harry this time, and poor Minnie Braithwaite on an empty platform at Thirsk station, and by god I knew not just what she was but why she had been there, and what is more understood.

I dropped my eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way”

Her voice was softer now. “Okay, Gerald. As I said, try me”

“Lass… look. See this lot? This is why. These gongs. It were last war, aye? I mean, we call it the last war, but it never were, there’s always another bit of bloody stupidity, but that last war, our war, it were bad”

“Where were you?”

“Europe. I didn’t get involved till the invasion, like. We were a recon—reconnaissance troop. Group of tanks go out front of main body, try and spot Jerry before he spots us. That were our job, and we went ashore two days after landing had started, so it were a bit easier for a while, but then it started, and it was weeks and weeks, lass, and each day a mate went, sometimes more, and you kids….sorry, but please God you never have to be somewhere like that.

“There were more than a few places where it was worse, and the bad thing was that we were the recon troop and so we had to be somewhere with a good view, and one of those was Goodwood and another were Carpiquet”

“Where’s that?”

“Airfield near Caen. Took a lot of lives to secure. Goodwood, though... It were summer, ripe corn, open ground, and Jerry dug in, and the start line were all traffic jams, and then… It’s a clang, and sometimes it’s on the net, the radio, aye? And sometimes it’s close enough to hear, and getting out is so hard, and they’re so quick to burn, the tanks, aye? And the poor bastards trapped in them, and they scream, and they scream, and then it’s charcoal with teeth, and that bloody smell, it never goes away from you, and then Harry couldn’t get the smell out of his boots, and—“

“Slowly, Gerald. Easy, aye? Harry?”

Harry. “We found a place, in Germany. Place called Belsen”

“Fuck”

“Harry… Harry had an accident with pistol on way home after”

I realised how close I was to breaking down in tears, and took a few breaths, but it wasn’t really any good.

“And…and we had a dinner today, a regimental thing, so I got the gongs out, and I sat with the young’uns, and I thought, why am I here, and not Bill, and Ted, and Harry, and Philip, and Wilf, and all the other poor bastards I put in a hole outside that fucking airfield, the boys I heard burning, and I knew it was because I was a coward, and I sat there while they sang my praises, and I thought of the real heroes and felt these on my jacket…and I felt so bloody worthless, aye? Then, I got in the water, and it was so bloody cold, and I was so scared, and that’s me, isn’t it? Too scared to get killed, too cowardly to sort it out”

She sat and simply stared at me, and the more I looked at her, the more I saw the man she had been, and my mind did the same split it had done in the water, and as I saw who she had been I also saw, fully and clearly, who she was, how she had never been allowed to live, and there was Bob smiling from behind her. Decent people, people who cared and loved, shut out from the rest of us because of some pathetic bigotry. Bob had still put his life on the line for all of us; she had come into the water for me. She waited until I looked away again, and then spat out one word.

“Bollocks!”

I looked back up at her, and she repeated it.

“Bollocks. You might not know what you did but if you hadn’t… fuck, I wouldn’t be here, would I? Dear old Adolf didn’t have a soft spot for perverts, did he?”

I have never been particularly religious, but you never really lose it. I still saw Bob in her, the strength was there, and the isolation, but it was the name that held me. It had to be a sign. She was probably around the same age as my little girl would have been, perhaps a few years younger. This was something I felt was meant to be.

“Lass…Susie…look, can we make a deal?”

“Eh?”

“Look, this might sound a bit daft…we used to do a thing called piling, stacking our rifles, aye? Trick is, it needs three, two fall over. Here’s my offer, aye? You and me, we lean on each other”

“You said two fall over”

“They do, but I have mates in Normandy. They’ve been there fifty years. More than enough for a bit of mutual support, aye?”

“What are you asking…offering, Gerald?”

I could feel her suspicion, and I wondered how other men had treated her.

“Ah bugger it, lass, I am far too old for that, so don’t worry. Just a simple thing: we agree to keep an eye on each other, stop us doing owt daft when the days are short and the ghosts are calling”

She stared at the back door of the ambulance for a while before turning back to me, brows furrowed.

“You offer that to me? A tranny, a pervert?”

I nodded. We were just turning into the hospital. “No, to the young lady who just saved my life. Now, what do you think the food will be like at this hospital? Just for the future, it’s white, two sugars, OK?”

I had work to do, now. The spare room would need clearing for a start, and then there was a passport application to complete.

I’ll call by soon, Wilf.