I’m George B Shaw, that’s George Bradley Shaw not George Bernard Shaw. I reckon my mum must have had a weird sense of humour to have saddled me with that but she died when I was five and as far as I’m aware she never told anyone why she named me what she did. Anyway that’s me and I’m a welder and not too good with words.

I’ve been going out with Samantha Graham for just over twelve months. We met on a refresher course for welders that you have to do and pass in order to work for the gas board welding supply pipes. There’s big money in that at the moment because a new thirty-six inch supply network is being installed to distribute more gas round the entire country. Not that it’ll do me any good because the only gas we’ll ever get where I live comes in red cylinders: propane. In rural parts that’s how it is.

Most of the country is on lock down, but we’re still going to work to weld pipes, so at least I’m still on full wages and I get to see Sam every day. I liked Sam from the moment I met her. She’s different and special. She has a dry and wicked sense of humour and can just shrug off the shit heads she meets on the pipeline site, and God knows there always seem to be plenty of them on just about every kind of construction site you can imagine. Sam’s never made a secret of being trans, she doesn’t advertise it, but she doesn’t deny it either. The few blokes that believe she’s trans give her shit for it, but most don’t believe she’s trans because she’s too pretty and instead they get upset because she’s a woman and they don’t reckon women should be welders. It’s hard for them to accept, but she’s been the ‘top’ welder since the site opened. Every pipe weld is X-rayed and ultra-sounded all the way round. All dodgy bits of weld have to be ground out and redone, for free. You get paid by the completed weld, how long it takes you to complete it is your problem. Sam has never had to re-weld anything. I’m not far behind her, but she’s the best, so she’s at the top of the list that’s put up outside the site office every week of how many completed welds each welder has done. She’s the ‘top’ welder. It also means since she’s fast too, she’s the ‘top’ earner.

A further source of resentment is she is gorgeous but won’t flirt and she makes no secret of the fact that she’s not interested in anyone else because she goes out with me. She also openly despises married womanisers. Recently I’ve been thinking since things are pretty serious with us that it might be a good idea to propose some time soon. I can’t read Sam at all well and had been becoming anxious that she may be expecting me to propose and if I didn’t I’d be toast and I didn’t like the idea of that at all. When we can we take breaks and lunch together, and a week ago I’d decided to propose at the next opportunity. We were working on the same stretch of pipe yesterday, and when we went for tea in the afternoon she said, “With all this bloody lock down stuff life gets decidedly boring some times even if I do have plenty to do at home. How about you move in with me, Gee. I miss you.”

I lived with my folks and things had been getting a bit tense at home since lock down. I nodded my head and said, “I’d like that, Sam. Dad’s just his usual bloody, miserable self, but Mum can’t cope with him being under her feet all the time and takes it out on me. If anything came of it I could say I left for a cooling off period. The Government said that’s ok to do the other day.” I hesitated before admitting, “I have never been able to read you, Sam, and I don’t know what you want. I do know I want to marry you, so, Samantha Patricia Graham, will you marry me sometime when it becomes possible?”

“Hm! Samantha Patricia Shaw. Just trying it on for size, Gee, but it feels like it fits. Yes. I thought you’d never ask. I was beginning to wonder if me being trans was getting to you. No?”

“I never even thought about it. I was bothered in case you thought I was being presumptuous.”

“I see. How we going to do this? Move your clothes and stuff I mean without having to answer awkward questions if we get stopped?”

“Easy. I’ve already got a load of clothes at your place. When we go shopping we just collect a bit of my stuff from Mum’s each trip and put them at the back of my van with tools in front of them. Anyway they ain’t going to stop a van with ‘British Gas’ plastered all over the sides and back are they?”

“Highly unlikely. If this is what we’re going to do then we need to put it about that there are two of us using my workshop and we’re available for work. You never know, maybe we’d could quit on the pipeline. I wouldn’t be unhappy not having to associate with some of those idiots. The money’s nice, but I can live without it. What do you think?”

“The sooner the better. No fools, and far less contact, so less chance of catching it.”

“You do realise we’ll not be able to maintain the recommended two metres [six feet] separation in my bed don’t you?”

“Idiot.”

Well, I went home with Sam that evening after work and we started the process of becoming a co-habiting couple rather than just a couple. I’d always got on well with Mac Sam’s jet black Maine coon tom cat that she got as a kitten from the Maine coon rescue society. Mac is of colossal proportions, round four foot from nose to tail tip I’d say. He terrifies folk who don’t know him because they think he’s a puma or some such due to his size. Mac is as soft as cats come and lives for being petted, so he approaches everyone to let them make a fuss of him, which strangers always assume means he wants to eat them. Tiktok is another matter. Sam rents most of her farm out to neighbours for the grazing, but she keeps a flock of forty-odd geese and Tiktok is her gander. Tiktok loves Sam. She watched him hatch and he imprinted(1) on her so thinks of her as his mum. As a rule he is very aggressive to strangers, and when he starts making that unholy racket of his, which would wake the dead, his ladies all feel obliged to join in, and forty-odd geese can make a terrifying din. I’ve fed the geese often enough for Tiktok to cut me a bit of slack, but I won’t turn my back on him.

It was nine days ago when I moved in with Sam at Four Winds, Millersthwaite and things had been going well. I’d spent long weekends at Sam’s many a time and we’d been sleeping together for months, but living together is different. We were surprised at how much easier it was than we’d thought it would be. That Saturday we’d worked till one when we ran out of pipe so we went home for lunch and spent the afternoon in the vegetable plot. After dinner we spent the evening in the workshop. I welded the repair jobs that wanted finishing, and Sam worked on the David Brown 990 tractor she’d bought recently at auction. After supper we had an early night and enjoyed ourselves more than we had for a while, I suspect because we weren’t as tired as usual only having worked half a day on the pipeline. Sam awoke at three and went to make coffee. She was back in seconds without the coffee.

“There are two men in the yard. If I don’t stop them they’ll probably set the barn alight. Bigots. It happens from time to time. I’ll just put a nightie on and deal with them.”

I hadn’t realised she’d gone to the kitchen naked. Before I had time to say anything she’d threwn a nightie on and gone. I got up, fell over in a tangle of sheets and blankets and by the time I’d untangled my self and threwn some clothes on she was back. I wouldn’t say she was giggling but it was a near run thing. “What did you do?”

“I let Mac out and shut the back door to the barn as soon as they went in at the front. Mac followed them and I barred the front door too. They came to hurt us, but any second now they’ll learn what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander too. They are about to learn about hurt.”

The geese slept in the barn and were very light sleepers. It was half a minute before I heard Tiktok and his flock start up, shortly followed by one of the men screaming, “Jesus, there’s a fucking leopard in here! I told you messing with that fucking tranny was a bad idea.”

Then I heard the other shout, “The frigging door’s locked!” That must have been when Tiktok attacked because that’s when the screaming began.

“What you going to do, Sam?” I asked. “You can’t leave them locked in all night.”

“True, but I’ll let Tiktok and the girls have a bit of fun whilst I immobilise their car. Then they can walk home. The geese will only follow them to the big gate. I’ll keep out of sight, so they’ll never know what happened. Make that coffee will you, Gee?”

I’ll give Sam her due she surely does know how to provide a man with entertainment at night. By the light of the near enough full moon I watched the two reach the illusory safety of their car just ahead of the geese and then fail to start it. I wish I could have seen their faces when they realised they were going to have to face Tiktok again. It was all over far too quickly. The two screaming men were running down the drive with a flock of noisy, angry geese in hot pursuit, who as Sam had said they would gave up at the gate. However, Mac followed them as far as the road, but the terrified men, even knowing he was following them, could run no faster, and it was a disappointed Mac who joined the two of us in the sitting room expecting to be petted as we drank our coffee.

“This sort of thing happen often, Sam?” I asked.

“Not any more, no. It used to be ten, twelve times a year, but probably the word got around about the geese. You can’t reason with bigots, Gee. The locals are all fine, but the idiots come from the scumbag estates. No brains, no education, no job, no money, no future, so to make themselves feel better they target anyone who’s different, and folk don’t come any more different than me, do they? Clever, educated, I can get a job when I want one, but can earn enough from the workshop to live without one, I own a decent sized farm and to top it all I’m trans. Some of the flag crackers(2) on the estates hate me because I take care of myself and am reasonably pretty. No doubt the word is out from some of the men at work that we are getting married, so they’ll resent that too. I’ll drive their car to the nearest estate where if not gutted for spares it’ll be torched and connect an electric fence up to the door handles to turn on after we go to bed. Just forget it, Gee. Mac and Tiktok can deal with it.”

I didn’t sleep well. I don’t know which disturbed me more, the bigots coming round or Sam’s casual acceptance of them. I slept late and when I awoke I could hear Sam talking to someone in the sitting room. I went into the kitchen and poured a coffee out of the machine and went to see what was going on. Sam was talking to her sister’s kids using Skype and they were talking about how to monitor the passage of time. Julie was saying, “One Mississippi, two Mississippi was how my teacher told us to do it.”

“Miss Symonds, told us to go, One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus. How do you do it, Auntie Samantha?”

Sam laughed and said, “I’ve changed how I do it recently, Jessica. The world is a sad place at the moment, so I try to laugh at bad things. I now go, One Corona-virus, two Corona-virus.” Like I said Sam is different and special.

1 Imprinting, geese will imprint on the first suitable moving object they see within 13 to 16 hours after hatching, they will follow what they imprint on as if it were their mother.
2 Flag cracker, a pejorative term for an obese person, usually female. The implication is the person thus described is so heavy they crack the concrete paving flag stones on the pavement [sidewalk] as they walk.