CHAPTER 10
My little Honda made short work of the ride up to the club, a sleeping bag strapped across the rear seat and a change of clothing in the throwovers along with some toiletries for the morning.

Being where I was, the bags also held some waterproofs.

I still remembered the scene where a biker at some rally or other had spent ages pulling spark plugs and other bits of his wheezing and misfiring bike, right up to the point when one of his ‘friends’ had pointed out that stuffing waterproof and windproof nylon overtrousers under his saddle also put said waterproof and windproof nylon overtrousers over the engine’s air intake.

In through the gate past another prospect who recognised me and waved me in, and my year got so much better, so quickly, as I spotted two people I loved deeply, entwined at the bar.

The shock came when Carl, prodded by Rosie, turned to face me, and I saw what those bastards had done to him. It wasn’t until he spoke that I could tell exactly how much he had been hurt.

His nose was smashed right into his face, folded in, it seemed, a clear line across the middle where the spade had caught him, and that voice, the sound that had filled so many of my yearning dreams, was gone. He croaked now, and I almost snarled in angry reaction, but the eyes were still there, and that smile, so I screwed everything down except my joy at seeing him again. Class, girl.

“Carl”

“Debbie”

Sod class. I flung myself on him and Rosie together, and couldn’t really work out which one I kissed first, but it didn’t matter at all. Once I had calmed down a little, and could look them each in the eye, I felt another arm fall over my shoulders.

Oily, naturally, his grin as wide as mine felt.

“You eaten, love? My old lady’s got a plate made up for you, if you want. Just pie and peas for now, take the edge off. Got a barbie later, and a pig on the spit. Drink?”

I gave my order, and the night went on exactly as expected. Short skirt and boots, bloody good DJ playing my sort of sounds rather than the shit the Smugglers offered, greasy food and beer after beer, I was home, and so was Carl. I even got to dance with Horse, although ‘dance’ wasn’t exactly what he did. Move, at least, but did I give a shit? Nobody there to worry about, the bass and the snarl of the lead guitars taking me away from the world and all of its shit.

I was alive.

By one in the morning, I was starting to lose my steadiness, getting more and more pissed but still intent on dancing everyone else to death, when I realised two things.

The first was that the crowd had thinned out considerably a couple of hours earlier, and the second was that it was building up again. I found a seat to slump into and catch my breath as well as another mouthful of bear, and spotted Oily, who I hadn’t seen for a while, talking to Horse at the end of the bar. He nodded to one of the prospects, who was holding a canvas sack that was clearly full. As Horse squeezed Oily’s shoulder, the younger man handed him something. It looked like a cut-off, and as Horse took it, I saw part of what was obviously a top rocker, a few letters visible: ‘APERS’.

As drunk as I was, I could still work out what was going on, and after one more look at Carl’s face, smiling past the wreckage of his nose as Rosie danced with him, I decided I simply did not want to know. Sam was gone, thanks to those bastards, and Carl had lost five years of his life. Fuck them.

It was almost my last conscious thought, but the last one I can clearly remember was an urgent need to have some more of the roast pig, and then it was morning, and I was in a bunk, fully dressed apart from my boots, and covered with my sleeping bag as the rain lashed against the window nearby.

Milky cereal for breakfast, and certainly not a fry-up, with gallons of tea through the day, until it was early evening and I felt sober enough to ride home. Hugs from all, and I took a chance to whisper in Oily’s ear.

“I saw. No worries. Fuckers deserved whatever it was you didn’t do to them”

He whispered back, his beard tickling my cheek.

“I know your class, girl. I know how things went wrong, but you will always be my sister, whatever happens”

One last squeeze, and I was off home, where I watched the mews obsessively for the next two days before finally catching the item about the dead bodies found in a burnt-out unregistered panel van in a remote area of woodland.

No sympathy. All I worried about was whether there would be any comeback on people I loved. I think I lost a little of my sympathy for humanity just then.

The next few years were nowhere near as exciting, thankfully. Horse passed away, to my astonishment turning out to be 71 years old, and the obvious replacement was ‘Pig’, the name now adopted by Carl as a sort of joke about his new voice, and I continued driving for Bert. Ruth pushed me into one change, which was using my savings to pick up the house next door to mine when the elderly woman who lived there moved into an old people’s home, the proceeds from the sale clearly necessary to pay for her care. I rented it out to students as separate rooms; for some reason, they didn’t seem to leave any damage or mess, and Ruth laughingly explained that it was a simple matter of not wanting to upset the Evil Biker Bitch that was their landlady. Apparently, I was getting a reputation in the area, and not just with the other bikers.

In the North, I was one of the regular Real Walkers, and occasionally pointed to as someone to ask for route advice.

At Harry’s, I was the local lorry driver who liked a beer every now and again.

At Ruth’s, I was the quiet one who sat by a window and read, some mate of the owner.

At any number of Bert’s customers, I was the driver you did NOT want to piss off, and certainly not one who would react in any nice way at all to a grope.

At the Smugglers, I was the woman who was most definitely not a dyke, but still OK.

At any number of rallies, I was most definitely one of the real ones.

At home, though, I was just lonely as hell. It wasn’t helped by the simple fact that I was stuck in limbo, still legally a man despite everything I had gone through with Mam, Carol and Mr Hemmings, The Eighties were utterly shit, as Marlene explained to me far more often than once, with a concerted attack by the government on the rights of most of her customers. I bit my tongue during those conversations, because as far as I could see, I had no rights whatsoever.

No life, either, in many ways. I got up, I went to work. I had weekends away in the hills, or in fields with other bikers. I saw friends, from both near and far, and watched their lives as they settled into their lives as couples, and felt to horribly left out. The only thing that really kept me going was the simple fact that at least I had a life of sorts, when measured in terms of employment, money, enough to eat and a roof over my head. That bitch Thatcher had done so much damage to the country, and the Miner’s Strike was hardly more than icing on the cake. I saw the evidence every day, as people slept in cardboard boxes in doorways or derelict buildings, begging for whatever could be spared by those with their noses just that little bit higher above the encroaching flood.

I suppose that was what started me off on my new hobby. I had taken to using a Ford Transit I had bought for winter camping, fitting a little stove inside, and I made time when I could to park up in some of the places the rough sleepers gathered, and offer them a warm drink. I couldn’t do much more against such a tide of shit from an uncaring government, so I did what I could, and people said thank you, and appeared to mean it.

It shook me at times, for I had been one of those poor sods, eating from bins, sleeping wherever I could manage, and it had been someone in a van who had rescued me.

The news continued to be shit, as a model was outed as being like me, and I could see all too clearly how the way she was treated would so easily be my own fate, so I kept my head down as best I could. I had my work, I had my weekends, and when the memories and the depression got too severe, I took my van and spent a couple of hours counting the blessings others lacked, and reminding myself of how lucky I really was.

Those, then, were the eighties. Shitty times, with even shittier music. Things changed sharply in the early nineties, when I picked up an abandoned copy of the Western Mail left at the next table in Marlene’s place to see the first of two stories that really upended my world.

The first was of the sort I had become heartily sick of, where some poor transsexual woman, like myself, was outed to the world for fun and sport. She was a chemist in Swansea, and the paper danced along the edge of claiming that the serious beating she had received was her own fault. I showed the article to Marlene, and she just nodded.

“That’s why I left it next to you, love. Got a few minutes for a chat?”

I nodded, and she sat down opposite me after grabbing a couple of mugs of tea and checking the other occupied tables and the next bar were OK.

“Check the date, love. Paper’s a week old. One of the other girls brought it in, and I thought you needed to see it. Hoped it might perk you up”

“Are you joking?”

“Everyone can see how stale you’re getting, girl. There’s more to the story, if you want”

“In what way?”

She rose and reached under the bar, returning with another copy of the paper.

“Page eight, Debbie”

The story was a lot shorter, simply detailing how a local chemist called Joseph Evans had been the victim of assault occasioning grievous bodily harm after answering his own front door. In Swansea.

“Darling, Marlene isn’t thick, and she doesn’t think it’s a conspiracy to attack pill-pushers in Abertawe. There are rumours about, and one of those rumours is that there are fucking coppers behind that first story getting into the paper. That girl, that Sarah Powell, she’s a tranny. Not like me, that is: one like you. Just another girl a bit fucked-up in the knicker area when she was born”

“You aren’t…”

“No, love. I am rather fond of my little meat and two veg, and so are my men. That one, she’s one of yours, and I am wondering why two of the Filth have their sticky fingerprints all over it. No, love. There’s more. A little twink tells me that there were leather boys involved in Mister Evans and his accident, and I don’t mean bears, I mean bikers”

She picked up the empty mugs and turned to go back to the bar.

“And Debbie?”

“Yeah?”

“Next time you see your friends, tell them that Marlene says thanks”