PART TWO
SADIE/1930s EVENING GOWN

1

I think I’ve always felt a wee bit of an outsider. There’s the accent of course - I never did pick up a Scouse one. And my looks. Mum is Chinese, and I’d inherited just enough of her features to mark me out as being different - at least compared to the rest of the local kids I grew up with in Dundee. My dad was a drinker and a journalist - in that order. He’d come home off his head and mum would shut me away in my room, but I could still hear him hitting her. I was twelve the first time he hit me, and the following day, whilst he was away at work, my mum packed our suitcases and we left to come stay with her brother who lived here in Liverpool.

My mum’s a brilliant dressmaker and everything I’ve ever done clothes-wise I owe to her. She took odd jobs when we first moved down, making ends meet, but eventually saved up enough to open a wee alterations shop. I’d help her out there after school and she taught me her trade. At weekends I’d head into town, trawling the vintage and fabric shops for whatever I could find that caught my eye and I could afford. I’d take old dresses and offcuts of fabric back home and refashion them. Skirts became tops and old blouses became miniskirts. I cut up and pieced back together my school uniform and got sent to the headmaster for my skirt being too short, and for wearing too much make up. My looks and dress sense, which had got me bullied in Dundee, suddenly marked me out as being cool in Liverpool. I started getting asked out by boys just at the time that I was beginning to realise that I wasn’t interested in them. Other girls took offence when they caught their boyfriends looking at me. I was lucky that my best friends Ellie, and Patsy and Sam always stuck up for me.

When the end of year fancy dress ball came around it was me that thought of the ‘vintage’ theme. Ellie didn’t need much persuasion - she’d become my partner-in-crime when I went shopping at the weekends and last year we’d found her a gorgeous flapper dress that she’d worn to the ball. This year we decided we’d each wear something from a different decade. We drew straws to choose. I really wanted the 50s, as I already had some ideas for a big, full-skirted, corseted dress in a retro style that I wanted to make. But Patsy drew that. Ellie was to dress in a 30s style, and Sam the 40s. That left the 60s for me. I knew everyone would expect some ‘flower-power’ but of course I had to be different. I found a silver fake leather mini dress in a second hand shop in town, and teamed that with some old knee length boots that I hadn’t worn for ages that I spray painted silver. I found some badges online embroidered with pictures of spaceships and sewed them on to the dress. I borrowed a water pistol that looked like a ray gun from our next door neighbour. And in a final act of rebellion before leaving school for good, I filled it with vodka.

The first time I met Lucy was at that ball. First impressions? I mean it wasn’t love at first sight or anything, but she was cute, definitely. That little bob haircut that she was wearing, and those gorgeous blue eyes of hers. And when we were dancing, she looked amazing in the flapper dress - the way the tassles swirled around her legs. We were dancing as a group - the five of us girls. And every so often I’d squirt a shot of vodka at one of the others, or one of them would pinch my ray gun and shoot one back at me. It wasn’t long before we were all quite tipsy. I’d gone to sit down to cool off for a while and Lucy had joined me.
“Give me a go then!” She’d grinned.
“What?”
“Your gun!”
“Oh!” I handed it across to her and opened my mouth for her to aim at. The stream of vodka was a direct hit on my tonsils, and I coughed and spluttered whilst Lucy giggled helplessly. When she laughed her eyes sparkled, and her nose would wrinkle up in a way that made her look really fanciable.
“So what are you going to do now you’ve left school?” She asked, once I’d stopped coughing.
“London. Fashion college. Then when I graduate I’ll go and work for a famous designer for a year or two - just to learn the ropes you know - before I set up my own studio in Paris. Or maybe Los Angeles. Or Milan. I haven’t decided yet.” I grinned.
“Ak, ok.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “It’s funny. I had you down as being more ambitious…” and she laughed.
“How about you?”
“Oh, I dunno. Still another year at school to make up my mind. I like Liverpool though. It’s home, I suppose. There are worse places.”
“Really?”
“Oh, I mean travel is great. I’d love to have time to see more of the world. But I cant imagine anywhere else being home. It kinda gets in the blood, you know…”
“I could get you a job as a model. When I’m rich and famous. You could model all my most glamorous gowns, be my muse - the face of the House of Sadie.” She giggled, and I continued. I liked making her laugh. I liked the way her eyes shone as she looked at me. “I could fly you out from Liverpool to exotic fashion shoots all over the world. The famous Lucinda! You know, that would work! Just one word! Lucinda! Like Madonna, or Rihanna.” And we both collapsed into giggles.

And then she went quiet, and just looked at me. And I looked back. And there was something in her expression. I wanted to kiss her, and I felt sure she wanted me to as well. And then she looked away.
“Fuck, Sadie. I don’t know about you, but I’m definitely a bit tipsy.” She looked up again.
“Yeah, me too.”
“I like you.”
“Yeah, I like you too.”
“But…”
I knew what was coming. She’s not into girls. Of course she isn’t. Why would she be? My stomach sank. I’d been making a fool of myself. Worse, Lucy would probably go and tell her cousin, and I’d have to fess up to all my friends. I sighed. Maybe I should have done that a long time ago. “It’s ok, I understand. You’re not into girls. That’s cool. No worries. OK?’
“No. I mean, yes. I mean…” she sighed. “Actually I am into girls. The thing is, though, I’m not one.” She looked up at me again.
I was confused. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not Ellie’s cousin, I’m her brother.”
“Nah. I’ve met him. He’s a scrawny wee metalhead who never washes his hair.”
“Thanks” she said sarcastically and then went quiet, and we must have sat there in silence for what felt like an age.
I didn’t know what to say. There were so many thoughts running through my head. “But…”
She interrupted. “I didn’t mean to fool anyone. At least, not in a nasty way. I didn’t have anything to wear to the ball, and me and Ellie used to play dress up when I was little, and I think she knew that I’ve been wearing her clothes in secret for ages and ages.” She looked like she was about to burst into tears.
“But you look so natural, I mean - the way you move, and walk, and…”
“We’ve been practising this week.” She sniffed, and wiped her nose, and a tear fell onto her hand. “And it’s been amazing. Just being able to to do it with Ellie helping me, out in the open without sneaking around, having to make sure I put everything back exactly the way it was like it’s some horrible guilty secret….I’ve loved every minute of it. I’ve never been so happy. And now I don’t want to go back to being a boy again.”

We sat there, oblivious of the party going on around us, for the rest of the night. It felt like an unburdening. For me anyhows - and I know when we talked about it months later it had felt the same for her too. For the first time in both our lives we were able to talk honestly and openly about how we felt.
“My mum’s got this old photo album, from China.” I told her. “She gets it out every so often - I think she wants to make sure that I know who everyone is in there. Anyway, there are some pictures in there of her grandad. He was an actor in the Beijing Opera back in the 20s, back in the time when the female roles were all played by men. There are loads of pictures of him all dressed up in these incredibly elaborate costumes and he was beautiful. I mean, really beautiful. Like, if he was at our school, he’d be the best looking girl there. I think it’s really cool.”

Eventually, the lights came up. Sam and Patsy came over to say goodnight, both with a boy in tow. Ellie and Tommy had long since made their excuses.
I took her hand. “Come on. I’ll walk you home.”
It was only ten minutes or so from the school to her house. She’d slipped off her heels and carried them in one hand whilst I took her other. Her little finger slipped into the gap between my index and middle fingers in a way that I’d never held hands with anyone else before. It was weird, and yet it felt so natural and comfortable.
The drizzle that had hung around most of that week had finally stopped, and it was a clear and balmy summer evening. Too soon we were outside her door. I felt like I could have carried on walking with her like that forever.
“You know what my mum used to say?”
She turned to face me and wrinkled her nose in that cute way that she does “Go on”
“God’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world.”
“Hmm.” She squeezed my hand tightly. “Thank you. And good luck in London. Give me a call when you’re ready for me to do the modelling, remember?” She smiled.
I kissed her gently on the cheek, and watched her into the house, before turning and making my own way home.

2

So Ellie’s already told you how I came to be still in Liverpool when I bumped into her in the student union a few months later. She listened in silence as I told her what had happened with Lucy at the school ball, without going into all the details about how much I’d fancied her. When I finished the story she sighed loudly.
“Ah, fuck. The poor thing. I meant to have a talk with him before I went travelling in the summer, I really did. I mean, I’ve been pretty sure he’s been wearing my things for a while. And the way he was when we spent a week with him dressing up before the ball - he just seemed, you know, so comfortable with it all. But I suppose I kept putting it off because I knew it would be a difficult conversation. I feel really bad now. Poor guy. Poor girl, I suppose I should say now.” She sighed again. “I’ll go home this weekend and talk to him. Her.”
“I was wondering…” I hesitated. “Maybe if Lucy wanted to go out again, we’ve got the Christmas party coming up at the Art School. Maybe you and Tommy might like to come too?”
She grinned “You two got along well, then?”
I blushed.

I knew exactly what I was going to wear to the party. Ever since Lucy had mentioned it when we first met, I’d been intrigued by the idea of copying Kate Bush’s hairstyle. I studied videos of her on YouTube. In one of them she was sat at a piano wearing a man’s dinner suit. Not a tailored fit like James Bond would wear, but loose and velvety, with a big floppy bow tie and a satin cummerbund - romantic and Pre-Raphaelite-ish. The guy in the hire shop couldn’t believe I wanted to take it - I don’t think it had been rented out since about 1973.

For the first time in my life I arrived at the party early. I was sharing a drink with some fellow art school students when my guests arrived. I noticed Ellie first, walking towards me hand in hand with her boyfriend Tommy. Lucy looked quite different to the last time I’d seen her. Her short bob had been replaced by a tall column of loose curls, piled into an up-do that must have taken an age to arrange. It had the effect of elongating her face - she was all cheekbones and alabaster skin, her blue eyes picked out in subtle shades of silver and grey, her lips soft and pale. She was wearing the 1930s style dress her sister had worn to the school ball. In contrast to the flapper dress I’d last seen her in, this one gave her curves - the luxurious pewter satin fabric flowing over her like water, the short train as it met the floor rippling with each step she took like the tide on the seashore.
“Hey”. She looked at me shyly, her hands clasped nervously.
“Hey” I replied.
We stood in silence for a few seconds, our eyes locked. Ellie broke the spell. “Come on Tommy.” She grinned. “Lets go and dance. These two look like they’ve got some catching up to do.”

“I love your…”
“I love your…”
We both started at the same time, then stopped and giggled. I let her continue.
“I love your hair! You remembered! What I said about Kate Bush!”
I nodded. “And I love yours too. It must have taken ages to do.”
“Yeah.”
“And that dress looks amazing on you too. You’ve got curves, girl!”
She giggled, and gave me a wee twirl. At the rear the shoulder straps criss-crossed over her otherwise bare skin down to the small of her back. It was that rare combination of elegant, but sexy as hell too.
“And you look so cool in that suit! No-one else would get away with it.”
“Twenty quid from the hire shop. And about twenty hours of practising how to crimp my hair…”
She giggled again.
“Come on, let’s go dance.”

“So how have you been? I mean, how has Lucy been? Has she been able to get out much?”
“Hmm. Not really. I mean, Ellie knows now. We had a long chat a few weeks ago and she’s been dead supportive since then. Offered me the run of her wardrobe at home - all the stuff she hasn’t taken to uni that is. But I haven’t said anything to mum yet - that’s going to be difficult.” She bit her lip. “How about you. How come you didn’t go to London?”
“Ach, I didn’t get the grades. I was totally scunnered at first, but then I got the offer from the art school. It’s cool here. I like it. And the course feels a wee bit - I dunno - it feels like I can be a bit wilder and more creative designing for film and theatre than I can for real life. It’s good. I’m really enjoying myself. And at least I’m not at home any more. I’ve got a flat with some other art school students in Gambier Terrace. It’s cool. It’s a total shithole, but it’s cool.” I paused for a moment. “When I knew I was going to be staying in Liverpool, I meant to look you up. But. I dunno. I got busy and stuff. And that night at the ball - it just seemed like it wasn’t real - the more time passed. I wasn’t even sure if Lucy would still be around, or if you’d decide just to stay, you know…”
“Thanks for not giving up on me. On Lucy.” She wrapped her arms around my neck and I placed mine on her hips, my fingers tracing the line of the ribbon on her back. And I kissed her. You know how it feels when you kiss someone for the first time and it just feels right? It was like that. Our lips just fitted into each other perfectly; there was none of that horrible clashing of teeth you get sometimes thats always, always a sign that you’re not compatible. I knew absolutely even then, that this was going to be something special.

We left the party as soon as we respectably could. We said our goodbyes to Ellie and Tommy, and almost ran the half mile or so back to my flat. In the hall, the front door still ajar behind us, we collapsed breathlessly into each others arms. I took her hand, and led her through into my room and we kissed again, our tongues intertwined, my hands exploring the contours of her body, burnishing the soft satin against her skin. I reached down and undid the bow in the small of her back and began to slide the straps from her shoulders but she pulled away suddenly.
“Wait”
“What is it? I’m sorry, don’t you want to…”
“No, I mean, it’s not that, its…” she paused for a moment, trying to find the right words. “It’s just. I mean…” she paused again. “Everything under my dress is fake. Fake boobs, stuck on with glue. My bits…held back between my legs with about half a roll of medical tape, so I look nice and flat, like a girl. But I’m not, am I?” She was staring at the ground in the space that had opened up between us.
“Oh, Luce! I know exactly what you are. That’s why I like you so much.”
She looked back up. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed, that’s all…”
“Oh, Lucy!” I pulled her to me and held her quietly. ‘That tape. Sounds really uncomfortable.”
“It is. Especially since you started kissing me, and rubbing me all over like that.” She giggled softly. “He’s been straining to get out all night. It’s a good job the tape’s as strong as it is.”
I smiled. “You want to use the bathroom and sort it out?”
She nodded.

She returned a few minutes later, biting her lip that way that she does when she’s nervous. She held her hands together in front of her but there was no disguising the bulge in the front of her dress.
“You must think I’m… I don’t know…”
“Don’t be silly. Come here!” I pulled her to me again, and pushed her arms up so they were around my neck, and we started to kiss again. I’d put some music on whilst she’d been out, and we swayed softly to the rhythm. I could feel her hardness against me, responding to our caress. I reached down and stroked it gently through the satin of her dress, and she moaned gently. I nibbled along her neck and throat, and down her shoulder, as she arched her back and pressed into me.
“Mmmm. That feels amazing!”
I smiled and leant forward, brushing my hair behind one ear as I whispered in hers. “Come here.” I took her by the hand and sat her on the edge of my bed, and then knelt in front of her. I slid the skirt of her dress up over her legs until I could see her penis peeking out from underneath the satin. It was slim and smoothly shaved and for some reason an image came to my mind of a fledgling emerging from the nest for the first time. I felt her tense. “It’s okay, just relax.” I took it in my hand, exploring over it’s surface with my fingertips before giving it an exploratory squeeze. She flinched.
“I’m sorry!”
“No. No. That’s nice! Carry on!”
Gripping her more firmly, I pulled her foreskin back and licked across her glans. She flinched again and moaned softly. I was more confident now, and took her in my mouth, washing around her circumference with my tongue whilst gripping her more firmly, and stroking steadily up and down.
She moaned again, more loudly this time. Her body was tense now, her nails digging into the skin of my other arm as I leant against her. I continued, slightly faster, until I felt her back arch and her torso rise from the bed. She cried out, spurting into my mouth in a series of spasms, strongly at first and then fading until at last her body relaxed and she slumped back into the mattress. I slid up until I was lying next to her, side to side, our noses touching, her breath still coming in pants.
“That was amazing. No-one’s ever done that to me before.”
I beamed. “I’ve never done it before either. You’re my first penis.”
She giggled. “Can I try with you now? I’ve never done it before either, but it doesn’t seem fair that I get all the fun.”

3

I awoke the next day to the aromas of buttered toast and coffee. Lucy was standing at the bottom of the bed carrying a tray. She’d already showered - her hair was wrapped in a towel, turban-style, and she was wearing my robe - a short kimono that usually hung on the back of my door. Her legs, thighs still pink from the hot water, stretched out below the hem of the robe. Her face, devoid of make up now but still all cheekbones and big, beautiful, come-to-bed, blue eyes, beamed at me.
I cranked open an eyelid. “Morning Baby”
“Morning?” She giggled “It’s barely still afternoon. It’s going to be dark again in half an hour.”
I groaned and pulled myself up, onto one elbow initially and then resting my back against the headboard. She placed the tray on my lap and climbed back into bed next to me, reaching over to kiss me on the cheek whilst stealing a slice of hot toast. “Thank you for last night. It was amazing. And this morning was pretty good as well.” She grinned. Then, pointing at a dress I’d been making that was hanging on the end of the curtain rail at the window she asked “Is that one of your designs?”
“Yeah. Want to try it? I think it will fit.”
She crammed the rest of the toast into her mouth, climbed back out of bed and lifted it down. Holding it in front of her she lifted the hem of the skirt out to it’s full extent. “It’s gorgeous. I love the decoration.”
“It’s for one of my projects. The brief was to draw numbers out of a hat and then design something inspired by the number we got. Mine was 5386. So I found a pattern for a party dress from 1953 - really flirty, with a big skirt and lots of petticoats, and then I googled things that happened in 1986. That was the year of Chernobyl and the Space Shuttle disaster, and it felt like an interesting contrast - the darkness of those events screen printed onto the silk of the dress. What do you think?”
She was still holding it against herself, admiring her reflection in the mirror. “It’s really cool!”
“It’s got a really tiny waist. You’d probably need a corset to get it to fasten. Want to try?”
She nodded.
I rolled out of bed and, rummaging in the big old chest of drawers that officially occupied a corner of my room but overflowed across much of the floor, pulled out a corset. I fastened it around Lucy’s waist and pulled the straps as tight as I could. Of course, we couldn’t leave the suspenders dangling loosely, so another rummage located some sheer stockings with a fine black seam down the back. Then petticoats, a mass of them, to fill out the skirt to its fullest volume. And finally the dress itself, carefully smoothed into place. Lucy squealed with delight and pirouetted in front of the mirror as I stood watching, naked but for a proud smile.
“There’s another one goes with it.” I said. “Same idea, but opposite hand. The dress is eighties style, in taffeta with big pouffy shoulders and a tight pencil skirt. And the idea is to decorate that with events from 1953 - the Queen’s coronation probably. Maybe using embroidery this time instead of screen printing. The dress is finished, but I haven’t started the decoration yet.”
“Oooh! Can I see?”
So I lifted that out from my wardrobe, and this time it was my turn to put it on, and we stood hand in hand in front of the mirror together. The dresses looked great, but the overall image was spoiled somewhat by the towel turban on Lucy’s head, and my Kate Bush hairstyle which, after a night in bed, was much more bush than Kate.
“Hmm.” Lucy’s hand went to her chin. “When you present these in a review, do you use real models or just mannequins?”
“Depends. If I can persuade someone to model for me, that always works best.”
“It would be dead cool to play some games with their hairstyles too. So on the eighties style dress you could go with a fifties hairstyle and vice-versa.”
“Oooh! That’s a good idea!”
“You got a brush and some hairspray?”
She sat me down and about half an hour layer I had a full on beehive piled high on my head, held in place with what must have been almost a full can of lacquer. It looked fantastic.
“Where did you learn to do that?”
“Oh, you know, my mum’s a hairdresser. When I was smaller, she didn’t like me coming home by myself after school if the house was empty. So I’d go around to her salon and wait for her to finish. I guess I picked up a few things.”
“Picked up a few things? It looks amazing!”
It was her turn now to beam with pride. “Yeah, I’d like to be a hairdresser when I finish school. It’s fun, playing around like this. I’d like to have my own salon one day, like my mum.”
“You should kit it all out in a fifties style. Those big old hairdryers that you used to sit under and stuff. And have all your staff wear fifties dresses. That would be dead cool. Make you stand out from all the competition.”

Lucy came to stay the following weekend, and again the weekend after that. She’d arrive on the Friday night and we’d meet in town at a restaurant where we’d talk about our weeks and get to know each other again before going back to my flat and spending most of the rest of the weekend together in bed. Often on a Saturday afternoon we’d go into town and tour the vintage shops. Lucy began to develop her own style (with a few pointers from me, I have to say) and we felt like the two coolest girls in the whole of Liverpool. About six months after we’d started going out, she left school, told her mum, and went full time as Lucy, enrolling on a hairdressing course at college. I remember one afternoon when we’d been at her house in Woolton. We were in her room and I was looking at all her heavy metal cds.
“How come I never hear you play any of this stuff?” I’d asked her.
“Oh, I dunno. It kind of feels like, like it’s not very feminine. For Lucy. To like that kind of thing.”
“Ach, bollocks. Who gives a shit about what anyone else thinks you should be! Why don’t you put something on and we can have a good old headbang?”
So she put some music on. It was Thin Lizzy ‘The Boys are Back in Town’ and I couldn’t help but smile at the irony of the two of us, a lesbian and a t-girl, dancing manically along to that song. We turned the volume right up to eleven and played our imaginary air guitars so hard until we both ended up collapsing on the floor, laughing helplessly. When we eventually quietened down she reached over to me and kissed me gently and just said “Thank you.”
And I was like “What for?”
And she said “Just for letting me be me, and not trying to make me into some kind of image of what you think I should be. I love you, you know.”
And I grinned and was like “Yeah, yeah, you’ve told me that like a thousand times.”
And she laughed, and hit me playfully over the head with a cushion from her bed, and we fell about, laughing helplessly again.

It was perfect. It was ridiculously, madly, stupidly, head-over heels perfect. It wasn’t just my relationship with Lucy - at the art school, my work also felt like I was inspired. I was acing my submissions. When I presented my work in reviews, students and tutors from other years and even other disciplines like painting and sculpture would come along to see what I’d done. Visiting tutors from the industry were asking me to get in touch when I was ready to start looking for a job after I graduated. For those two and a bit years I just couldn’t imagine how life could be any better. But then of course when things can’t get any better, they can only get worse. And I couldn’t have imagined how it was the things that were going so well that would bring everything else crashing down.