View from a Bridge

The old tune was on constant repeat in my head as I walked, slowly, across the bridge, carrying a heavy knapsack. The view was particularly stunning this bright early summer day. Following the lines of the song, though, I couldn’t take any more.

My troubles had begun after I turned eleven. Up until then, I had been fairly normal, for a weedy kid. I started to have the thoughts that led me to where I am today. I had been looking at my older sister in her pretty dresses and started dreaming about what it would be like to be a girl. Over some months, the dreams became my desire.

It didn’t take much to create the right shape, seeing how skinny and short I was already. I borrowed my sister’s clothes, as well as some from my mother. I stole my mother’s stock of birth-control pills, seeing that she had been forced to have an operation not long after the birth of my baby brother.

By the time I hit fifteen, my shape was more girlish, my voice hadn’t broken, and I was happy. My parents weren’t and took me to various specialists to see what was wrong with me. I kept telling them that, as far as I was concerned, it was all right. The doctors prescribed tablets to boost my ‘maleness’ which I quietly spat out and flushed down the toilet.

At sixteen I left school and home on the same day, staying with friends for two years and working in a bar, buying girls clothes, and saving my spare money for my desired operation. One November day, a guy came into the bar and started talking to me as I dispensed drinks. He was a big lad, probably a year or two older than me, and he seemed to have the hots for me.

A few nights later he waited until I was finished, and we had a snogging session in the alley behind the bar. I had never done this kind of thing before, having been constantly told, by my parents, that homosexuality was a sin. I found that I enjoyed it, and that I was truly pretending that I was a real girl, and he was a real man, so it was all right. This became a regular event, and it took me all my wiles to stop him finding out what was in my panties. Over the next few weeks, we moved on to the stage where he would fondle my small, but real, breasts and I would give him a blowjob, the alley being a very private place, in the winter cold.

Finally, in the week before Christmas, came the night I had dreaded. He had me pressed against the wall, his mouth firmly clamped on mine and then he felt my crotch to find something he didn’t expect. The last thing I heard before my world exploded into pain was his guttural cursing.

I came back into the land of the living with the sound of an engine roaring and the clanging of metal. I was lying in a pile of rubbish, in the big rubbish bin. I worked hard to stand as the sound of the engine got closer, with the sound of bins being emptied. I managed to stand as the engine got very close. It was a struggle to stay upright as I seemed to have lost the use of my left arm. The look on that driver’s face was etched into my brain as I finally got upright enough to peer over the edge of the bin. That’s when I gave him a wave and blacked out again.

My next awakening was in a hospital bed, pipes feeding me, and other pipes taking away excess fluids. Over the next few days, I discovered that I had been badly beaten, almost to death. They nurses were very good, even calling me dear, or my femme name that had been on the fake ID I had in my purse.

I wouldn’t tell the police who had done the damage. Not only would he beat me again, but I suspected that, this time, he would make sure of finishing the job. My guy was, I knew, in a particularly nasty gang and he would do anything to stop the news getting out that he had been making out with another guy, no matter how girly she looked.

I was released from the hospital after two weeks, having to lie and tell them there was somewhere I could go to be looked after. While I had been there, I made a New Year resolution to just end it all. Why bother staying alive with the chance that my attacker would see me again. It wasn’t possible to go back to my job in the bar, not with an arm still in plaster. I begged and sucked cocks, for a couple of months, until I had enough money to get the items I needed.

I collected up all my money, left the room I was sharing, packing what little clothing I had in a knapsack. and walked into the open countryside to follow through with my resolution. I set up home in an abandoned barn and worked on my plan, cutting off the plaster cast so that I could use my arm.

Three weeks later I was ready for my final stroll in sunshine. There was a suspension bridge not far away that beckoned me to try and learn to fly. It was long and high but there was a problem for me. It had been fitted with an anti-jumper barrier; a tough, clear, Perspex curved wall that was impossible to climb and designed so no-one could get over or through it.

One thing I was good at while I was in school, was chemistry. I quietly foraged for the things I needed to make my wall-buster, a serious explosive, detonated by a shotgun cartridge that would be fired by a pin set on a piece of metal. The metal was bent back and held by an electro-magnet powered by a couple of flashlight batteries. I had tested it several times without the cartridge, and it all worked nicely. The magnet was controlled by an old door closer.

The explosive was a variation on one that I had read about that was popular with kids in the fifties. Then, it was possible to make a serious bang with a mixture of weed killer, fertiliser, and sugar. The explosion in Beirut was living proof of its power. That style of fertiliser wasn’t available, any longer, but the basic ingredients were, and so was some other chemicals that I had decided would improve the size of the bang. I would make up the mixture and add some diesel to mould it into a cone, then cover the cone in old tinfoil.

I had thought about the shrapnel I could use. Old nuts and bolts would be far too heavy for me to carry, my left arm was getting stronger, but not so strong that I could carry a heavy bag across to the middle of the bridge. I cast pyramid shapes in a mould I had made from a toy pyramid shape, probably one that had been in a ‘Russian Doll’ style of toy, with a tiny one, fitted into others until there was one big one, that held them all. They were just hard toffee, easy to cook up on a wood fire. These were packed, in a thick layer, on the face of the explosive.

You may ask why I didn’t think of any other way to end it all. I really can’t tell you why, except that it was the song that gave me the idea. I mean, there hasn’t been a song that goes ‘Onrushing Train, I’m preparing to jump.’ Jumping off a bridge seemed less painful, somehow. Once you leapt, there was no way to stop the result. I had heard that water, from that height, was almost as hard as concrete.

On my final day I put my barrier-beater in a bigger knapsack bag I had found on a tip, dressed in my best outfit, and left the rest in an opshop bin as I passed by. I had put all my paperwork safely in pockets so they could identify me when they fished me out of the water and set out towards the centre of the bridge. It was a long, but lovely walk, the clear barrier on one side and a safety barrier on the other, saving me from being run over by the occasional passing cars.

As I walked my mind cleared of all my fears, today I would complete the resolution. I wouldn’t have to fear seeing my attacker. I would end my days as the girl I had hoped I could be. I wondered how my parents would take it. They may offer a prayer in my honour, but I doubted it. I was sorry that I hadn’t had the courage to say goodbye to my brother and sister, what I planned to do was taking all the courage I could muster. The only niggle was that my bomb wouldn’t be enough to punch a hole big enough for me to dive through. That had been the only thing I couldn’t test.

I was nearly at the centre of the bridge when there was a screeching of tyres and a lot of honking and shouting. A car had pulled up next to the safety barrier and, as the door opened, I saw my attacker jump out. He vaulted the safety barrier and ran towards me. I was rooted to the spot in fear and disappointment. My resolution to end it on my own terms would never be fulfilled. He would spoil my whole plan. When he got to me, he just swung a punch to the side of my head and I went down, into a black hole of nothingness.

Next time I woke I was back in hospital with a nurse on one side and a police officer on the other. The nurse wouldn’t allow the policeman to say a thing until she had checked me out for concussion. That’s when I found that I had various places with stitches.

When the policeman was able to say something, his first comment was, “That was the same man that beat you up before, wasn’t it?”

I just nodded, thinking that it would be third time unlucky when he got to me again.

“He won’t bother you again, you know. All I want to know is what you had in your bag, in detail.”

I had nothing left to lose so I described the bomb I had made, and the reason I had made it. I told him that I was going to stick it to the barrier with super-glue and detonate it with the door remote. He recorded it all and then thanked me for my honesty. He then left. I didn’t see him for a couple of days and was starting to get about on my own before he came back, along with another chap who looked like a detective.

They took me to a vacant room where we sat. The detective put a lap-top computer on the table and opened it up. He asked me what I remembered, and I could only tell him that it was a lovely day, I was heading for my final dive and had been knocked out.

He set the computer so I could see the screen. It was a view of the central part of the bridge, no doubt part of the traffic management system. I could see me off to one side, strolling along the walkway as if I didn’t have a care in the world. I saw the car swing across two lanes to pull up. I saw my future murderer get out and run towards me, hitting me in the side of the head. I fell down and rolled onto my front, with my head very close to the safety barrier.

“That’s what saved your life,” the detective said. The guy picked up my bag and rushed back to his car, opening the boot by remote. He threw my bag in the back and that’s when the car, him, and some of the safety barrier, disappeared in a blast. The camera shook violently, and the picture went black.

“Whatever you had there, it was certainly enough to do what you intended. I think that there wouldn’t have been enough left of you to dive off the bridge if you hadn’t been far enough away. We built a similar device as you described and tested it on a piece of the barrier at our laboratory. That material is supposed to withstand bullets and even RPG’s. Your device blew a hole in it big enough for two of you jump through, hand in hand.”

“Are you going to charge me with anything?”

“No, young lady. What we’re going to do is offer you a job in a small section, inventing devices for us. What you had there was brilliant, and it made us realise that our safety barrier wasn’t safe enough. Every inch of those barriers we have are now being coated with a clear chemical that won’t allow super-glue to adhere. We’ll give you somewhere to live and give you extra training. I’m sure a brain like yours will be an asset.”

“What about him?”

“That’s where it gets interesting. We’ve put out the story that he was carrying explosives in the boot, going to a shed where he was going to help make a terrorist device. His gang has been talking about violent insurrection for a while. We had a good look at his rooms and found lots of interesting information. One bit that we are grateful for is that we found traces of DNA that matched three female bodies that have been found in the rubbish tip. I think that his first attempt to get rid of you would have been the fourth. If you hadn’t frightened that driver half to death you would have been compacted yourself.”

When the stitches had been removed, hiding the furrows caused by bits of metal from the car, I was collected from the hospital and taken to where I now live, as a woman, working for an anti-terrorism unit devising all sorts of deadly devices from household and other chemicals, and figuring out ways to detect them. I have access to databases from around the world, following developments from chemical and explosives businesses.

My room overlooks the river that I had planned to dive into. The scene is lovely in the evening light as I look out on the view, downstream, with the bridge in the distance. I was glad that I had been foiled in my plan. I had even contacted my sister, now living with her boyfriend, and considered as much of a black sheep as I was.

At the unit Christmas party, a cute guy from the next laboratory had caught me under the mistletoe and given me a kiss. I managed to catch him there a few times as the night wore on.

That New Year, I made another resolution that was a total opposite of the one that brought me here. I resolved that, this year, I would organise my operation, in my vacation, and that the cute guy, and myself, would turn the next mistletoe meeting into something we could share, for the future. That was one resolution I would ensure that I kept.

Marianne Gregory © 2024