CHAPTER 14
I put those thoughts behind me as we moved on once more. It hadn’t been so very long since I had clambered out of that window and over the barbs topping the boundary wall, and my head was still spinning with the changes that had ensued.

For good or bad, but obviously the former in my view, Lorraine and Ken had both accepted me as what I felt I had always been, despite the physical reality. There was no way they could ever have been in doubt about that, considering how much of my body they had seen. Seen and healed, in Lorraine’s case.

Other people took me at face value, but I knew that couldn’t last. The sparse pubic hair Lorraine had removed was only a harbinger of what I knew must follow, as puberty couldn’t be that far in my future, and what would happen then?

My genitals gave me a twinge just then, the prickles of the slowly returning hair in question digging into the soft and delicate folds of those bits that felt more wrong with each day I woke. I had followed Lorraine’s instructions as it first showed, applying some of what she called ‘Blue’. I squirmed on my seat just then, shifting things just enough to ease the discomfort, and she gave me a sharp look.

“You OK, Deb? Nothing tearing?”

“Fine, Loz. Just thinking about things”

“Penny for them?”

“What?”

“Penny for your thoughts, love. What are you worrying about?”

I didn’t cry, by a major effort of will, but it was a near thing.

“What happens later? With me?”

“Oh! That bit about having to leave again? Thought we’d got that one sorted: you stay as long as you feel is right. End of”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing. I’m not stupid”

“We know that, love”

“What happens in a year or two when I start getting bigger? Hairy and that?”

She looked out of the window for a while, before turning back to me, looking a little worried.

“I’ve done some thinking of my own on that one, love. Done a bit of reading, as well. I have some ideas, but I don’t want to discuss them right now. You’re still escaping, aren’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Still wondering when they are going to catch up. Doesn’t matter who ‘They’ are, you’re worried. Am I right, love?”

She was, and we both knew it, so I left my reply to a nod, and she squirmed her arm across my shoulders for a hug.

“Not happening, love. Never. I have ideas, me, and I’ll tell you what they are when I think I’ve got everything sorted, but you don’t go back”

We both sat in silence for a while as Ken drove, his own silence heavy on all of us, until he spoke his first words for what felt like a week.

“You wondering where we’re off to today, duck?”

Subject changed. “Yeah! You’re driving south, so no more hills”

Lorraine laughed out loud, her own mood clearly broken.

“Not hardly, love! Some bloody big ones ahead! We are heading south, you’re right there, but there’s a climb ahead, be bloody wet and miserable, or at least it always has been every time we’ve gone that way, but there’s a pub we know that does food and has an open fire. Then it’s downhill again, and a place called Lockerbie. Bit of crap driving around the Big City coming up, and then trust me, you will see plenty of hills!”

Ken was right about the city driving, which I quickly grew to detest, as the old van wasn’t that lively even without the trailer, but eventually we broke out into more open country, and that was when Lorraine’s predictions came into their own. The horizon got lumpier, the green farmland and housing estates thinned out, and the road started to undulate.

After several hours on the road, Ken pulled into a petrol station to top up.

“Gets wild a bit further on. Safe, not sorry, duck”

“There’s no petrol? No towns?”

Lorraine laughed with real relish.

“It’s not that, Deb! It is just that every single time we have gone this way, it has pissed down, and standing beside the van in horizontal bloody rain while it drinks fuel is not my idea of fun. Put a coat on, a hat, whatever, your legs till end up soaked through, and then you don’t really dry out sitting on these seats. No; top up here, get over the hills, and then we don’t get frostbite”

I kept an eye on the horizon, and as the lumpy bits grew, I realised how many of them were blurred at the top, rising up into fog, or mist. Or rain. Not that much later, and the wipers were dancing over the windscreen as we ground uphill in a world suddenly grey, dark green and beige, the first word that came to my mind to describe the colour of the lank, flattened and very wet long grasses that seemed to fill each field and cover the lower slopes of whichever cloud-shrouded lump we were currently passing. The ground seemed remarkably flat for a while, as Ken indicated right, pulling off the road with a sigh.

“Red Moss, duck. Middle of sweet FA, it is, but it is here, and it is open, and they should have a fire and a cuppa. Hot chocolate?”

The walk to the Inn’s narrow door wasn’t long, but I learned through bitter experience how true Lorraine’s warning had been. When I say ‘bitter’, I mean it as ‘bitterly cold’. My legs felt as if they were turning blue, and I almost wished I was in trousers, just for once. Into the Inn, across to the bar to confirm our order, and yes, there was an open fire roaring away, almost drowning out the sound of the traffic outside swishing through the standing water.

Hot chocolate, and a couple of slices of cheese on toast, and a bag of crisps to follow. Ken finished his meal with a sigh, looked into the fire for a while, then nodded to Lorraine.

“Soonest over, soonest down, duck”

A twisting road led us upwards through heavy rain and skies so dark it felt like late evening, but at last, somewhere near a place called Beattock, we started to descend. The rain eased, and to my astonishment ceased entirely after a few miles. The land flattened out once more, as if it had forgotten how to be hilly, and the road signs were announcing ‘England’ and ‘Carlisle’ as well as ‘Lockerbie’.

There was nothing special there. We set up in yet another weekday market after stopping at an industrial unit where we picked up a load of T-shirts and woolly hats with Scottish flags on, which puzzled me.

“Ken?”

“Yes, midduck?”

“Why are we buying all the Scottish stuff? Aren’t we heading for England again?”

“Yup, but we’re doing another two pitches around here. Annan’s first, but then we’ll spend a day at Gretna. This stuff is for the tourists and the bolshies. The English all come up on trips to Gretna, and they want souvenirs of Bonny Scotland, and I really can’t be arsed with tartan shit. The bolshies are a bit different”

“What bolshies?”

“Ah, it’s borderlands shit, duck. Nobody shouts louder about being English, or ‘Scoatish’, or whatever, than some idiots who only just qualify. So you’ll see loads of tourists, plus some lads, and it is always men, buying this stuff”

He paused for a couple of seconds, then offered me a much gentler smile.

“You’ve cheered up a bit, then, Deb”

“What do you mean?”

“Ah, girl, I was a bit worried, up there in the clag and rain. Left it to Loz to talk you through it, cause she’s good at that, and I was busy with the weather, but think on what you’ve been saying. It’s all ‘us’ and ‘we’ now. Come here…”

How could it be that so many men, almost every single one I had met, could be so consumed with their status, their manliness, and yet this one, this real man, could offer such gentleness and love? Hold those tears, Debbie. Hug him back.

My thoughts were tangled in knots, but I knew, fully and clearly, that I never wanted to let these people go.

Ken was, of course, absolutely right, his commercial sensitivities honed by so many years of working his circuit. So much of the ‘Scoatish’ stuff went in Lockerbie that we (wonderful word) bought another load from the warehouse, before setting off to Annan, a much shorter drive, where we parked up overnight in a locked yard owned by yet another of our contacts. The market the next day went much as the Lockerbie one had, and I was struck by how low and flat it all felt around me. The buildings never seemed to rise to more than two storeys, and were either in a local dark-red stone or a depressing grey render. I was glad when we set out for Gretna, after a second night parked in the industrial estate yard.

Another very short drive, the sun shining now, and while the land was tabletop in its flatness, I could see a couple of very big hills in the distance, one behind us as we drove, the other to our right, across a very wide and muddy estuary. Lorraine was pointing out places and other sights as we drove.

“Big hill behind us is Criffel, love. Really nice town by it called Dumfries, but not really our sort of opportunities there. Hills over the Solway are the edge of the Lake District. We have some plots along the coast out that way, but we stay well away in Summer. Far too many tourists there. Anyway, we want to get back over East. Away from this side of the country be safer for you, love. Ken?”

“Yes?”

“Which road are we taking Sunday evening?”

“Sightseeing, Loz?”

“Aye, love. Park up in the usual place that night, I think”

“Wilco! Ah, Deb?”

“Yeah?”

“Other side of the water there is a place called Bowness. That’s where Hadrian’s Wall ends. Or begins, depending on your point of view”

“Where’s the other end?”

“You’ve already been there, duck. That big tunnel we went through near the Hairy Stotty”

Once again, that name brought a snigger from Lorraine, so I turned to her, eyebrows raised.

“What’s the joke”

“Ah, love, you’re a bit young for that one”

No I wasn’t.

“If it’s about sex, there’s not that much I don’t bloody know about it, is there?”

Her face fell, then her head, before she looked up again, with a smile as soft as Ken’s had been.

“Point well made, love. Look, it’s something men call a woman’s bits sometime, ‘hairy pie’. Some men like to, well, sort of eat it, and that’s why they call that do ‘Hairy Stotty’, if you see what I mean”

“Oh. Didn’t know that. I know men like putting their willies into other people’s mouths, but I didn’t know about that bit”

Once again, her face clenched, and she looked away out of the side window. Ken did his best to break the mood.

“That place at the end of the Wall has a really clever name, duck”

“Oh? What is it?”

“Er… Wallsend”

Follow his lead, girl.

“So that must mean that Bowness is the start of the Wall!”

“Perhaps, but that’s an English name, so we don’t know what the Romans thought, and…”

The conversation turned silly again, but Lorraine spent a long time staring away from me before finally brightening as we approached Gretna, which I will admit I found a little depressing.

We set up the stall in a parking area, with minimal tarpaulin cover in case, as Lorraine revealed, we were told to ‘Foxtrot Oscar’, and a succession of coach parties wafted through, all seeming to be nailed, glued or stapled to a rigid timetable. Years later, I saw a film about a package tour called something like “If this is Tuesday, we must be in Belgium”, but the scheduling here was more along the lines of “If it is eleven thirty-three, this must be Gretna”

There were other types of customer, though, including several skinny men with sunburnt faces and raw knuckles, who Lorraine explained were climbers heading for the Highlands. There were a few family groups as well, in private cars rather than coaches, and we sold out of children’s sizes just before the predicted visit of some sort of officialdom.

That was the first experience I had of something that was to become far too familiar. We did no harm, we left no litter, and from the way the stock had disappeared we clearly satisfied a demand, but we weren’t Approved. Neither Ken nor Lorraine made any sort of argument until the man with the badge and hat asked his final question.

“Why is this child not in school?”

Lorraine snapped, just then, rounding on him with a snarl.

“Why do you think she’s got no fucking hair? She’s in recovery, that’s why, and what is more is that it is none of your fucking business. Is it your business? Or are you going to start fucking minding what is?”

“Don’t you swear at me, diddycoy!”

“Oh, just go fuck yourself. I doubt anyone else will want to. We loaded, love?”

Ken nodded, and I was helped into the van, rather unnecessarily in my view, but I could see hoe the theatrics were helpful. The trailer was already hitched, so after checking the lashings, we pulled off onto the road for England.

Once we were underway, I took Lorraine’s hand in mine.

“He going to remember us for next time we come here?”

She grinned, surprisingly chirpy.

“Oh, it’s only temporary staff there, and he’s going to sit up all night remembering how he hurt the feelings of a poor little cancer girl”

Three seconds later:

“And checking the size of his cock!”

We crossed the River Esk laughing.