CHAPTER 23
And so it went, day by day and night by night. Em’s parents, Barbara and Peter, started coming round to the house, at first to make sure their daughter wasn’t in some vice den, which she was, in a way, and their initial take on our cuddling was a little off.

Emily hadn’t introduced me properly to them before things went bad, so they had no experiences of me as a fully (ha!) fledged boy. I knew what they were seeing, now, some wild lesbian romp, and despite my urge to suggest they go fuck themselves I made myself cling to the fact that they were family, and vitally important ones.

It was something I was slowly coming to terms with, in the way that two warring countries do at a ceasefire. People who knew, KNEW. They knew that I wasn’t a girl, they knew my history, but they saw a girl. That caused their thought processes to stumble, and many times I had to sit quietly as somebody tried to recover. People who didn’t know just treated me as a girl. I was getting past the stage of wanting to whip it out and wave it at them, but the need to scream was never far away.

There was also the problem of numbers of people. I had met lots of new friends over the past two years, but most of them only for the time it took for them to come. The boys….some of them were there for ages, some of them only for a few days, but all of them blurred into one amorphous bully figure. I had, indeed, met a lot of people but they were ciphers in my life, I had never had the need, nor the desire, to get all sociable with them, and certainly not the opportunity.

Now, though, I had waves of strangers washing over me, and each had their own needs, their own lives away from me, lives I needed to respect and consider. There was a huge temptation to act the spoiled brat, to shout and demand as my just reward for being the Victim, but Em and Nana kept an eye on me, and every so often I got a quiet word, and a reminder that I was at the edge of my life, not the end of it.

So, instead of dismissing the concerns of Em’s parents and carrying on, I did what I could to cultivate them, and after a while they thawed. Peter even got past his initial dreadful habit of staring at my tits when he spoke to me, so it went both ways.

I was running, now, slowly building up my stamina and strength, and adjusting to the different way my legs and chest moved. As I have said, I grew into my body, it didn’t appear fully-formed one morning, so I was familiar with how it moved, but hadn’t run for three years. I almost had to learn from scratch, and it was so absorbing I nearly missed the news.

The digging had finished, fourteen bodies recovered, fourteen murdered kids brought back to our world. The police were now demolishing the houses, just as they would do years later when Fred and Rose West’s abominations came to light. That case left me with flashbacks and nightmares for months.

Fourteen post-mortem examinations, fourteen attempts at identification, fourteen charges of murder against Elsie, and Raynor, , and Charlie, but not Don, no, and not Alf, not him, because he had succeeded in cutting his wrists on remand, after one too many ‘accidents’ on stairs and with hot drinks spilled in his lap.

We would have the post-mortems, then the trial, and finally a full inquiry into how the Council had left those bastards to do just what they liked for so long, and to so many. I looked forward to seeing new shits come out of the woodwork, new faces to see locked up, and when it was all over I wanted to go and find Don’s grave, and Alf’s, and dance on them, because it was my turn now.

The days led to weeks, and the weeks to months, and as the result of the post-mortems came out from the coroner’s office, Dave called around.

“Brian, Steve, we have a problem. I had a suspicion, when we broke this open, and it looks like I’m right”

He laid out a wad of newspaper cuttings, all from local papers, no nationals. Almost all of them told the same story, just with different characters, where rent boys or junkies had been found dead in dingy rooms, needles in their arms, death in their veins. Manchester, Carlisle, Lancaster, Liverpool, even London.

“Brian, I’m running this one past the Telegraph and the Guardian, because they have their own little sources, but I would lay odds on that almost every one of these lads has been somewhere we know and love”

Brian was sober. “Yeah…we knew they had friends. You think, a go at Stevie?”

“Or Karen, or you, or Ada, or anyone connected to you. I think it’s time to pull a few horns in, the kids in particular. They may know where Iain is, and they certainly know where Emily is.”

Kieran was shocked when I rang him.

“They would kill a kid like our Iain?”

“They killed fourteen that we know of, these in the papers were probably them as well, and I am certain they planned on doing me in the end, so, yes, they would kill another one. Look, you know we aren’t trying to take Iain away from you…”

“Aye, I know that. You have a generous soul, Steve Jones”

“Well, we can see if Netherhall can take him, and then we’ll have Tom with us, and lodge him here at night, if that’s OK”

“It will have to be. I want my son safe”

Oh, Iain, how lucky you have been. Brian went for him with Tom that evening, as the news spoke of blunt instrument trauma to the back of the skulls, consistent in size and shape with blows from a ball-peen hammer, and saw marks to long bones, and as the weeks went by there would be fourteen verdicts of ‘unlawful killing’

Who were they? What had they suffered, before being taken into the cellar, and Alf, or Don, or perhaps even the hellbitch, had taken the hammer to the back of their heads until they stopped moving, and then the knife, and the axe, and the hacksaw to their limbs? If I danced on two graves, I would be certain to pay my respects properly to my dead brothers.

School continued as a celebration of freedom, and my status as a nine-days’-wonder faded to that of a classmate, and I was happier than I had been since that race day. Iain was there, Em was beside me (and Tom was definitely beside Miss Stephenson), and Mr Robson had changed from “I’ll give you some track time” to “Come on, Jones, you can and will do better!”

With Karen’s help and advice, I had finally found just the right sports bra, and I was beginning to stretch myself again. I would never be top flight, not in the way I had once promised, but I could challenge myself, and soon I was recovering that zone, that drifting state of consciousness that comes with distance running. I was coming home at last.

It was the Telegraph that broke the story that Dave had been working on, and I wondered idly how much he had made from me, directly and indirectly, and didn’t give a shit. He hadn’t just done his job, he had pushed himself beyond that for my sake, and as he said, it was ‘us’.

Six of the dead men had been found to have links with social services in the Carlisle area. Four of them had been at the Approved School where I had been sold to screws and inmates alike, and two of them had actually been with Cunningham. The paper carried it as a front page story, with a long article inside rehashing my own case, and an editorial thundering away in true Torygraph style demanding that Questions be Asked, and in the end they were, in the House of Commons, where Harold was asked what the hell was rotten in Cumberland, or Cumbria as it now was. That was when the Inquiry stopped being a local government thing and became a full-scale select committee-style thing

It looked like their attempt to tie up loose ends and close down witnesses had backfired, and yet again I owed Dave.

“Don’t worry, kiddo, that’s the second new car you’ve bought me!”

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There were, of course, other things going on all this time, not least my medical treatment, and my psychotherapy. Despite my vow about doctors and knives, there were still a few things that had to be tidied away surgically, and I am not going into detail there. I have said what was done to me, and the rest is exactly what should be expected as a result. Book closed.

The therapist, though, was different. I threw an ashtray at the head of the first one when she started talking about ‘embracing my femininity’ and told her she could stick that up her arse and fuck off, which seemed to answer her question, and after she fucked off I got a new one.

Valerie had obviously heard of my earlier reaction, and decided on a much softer approach. We spoke in my room.

“Stevie, how do you feel about your body?”

“I hate and detest it, but I have to live in it, so tough on me”

“Why do you hate it? Is it unhealthy?”

“No, but it’s wrong”

“Why?”

“Well, look at it. What do you see?”

“What do you see when you look in the mirror?”

I thought for a second. “You want an objective answer?”

“As best you can. Come and stand at the mirror and tell me what you see, starting from the feet. As objective as you can, try and step outside yourself”

I did what I could. “Black Oxford shoes, small feet, and jeans, Wranglers, loose-fitting. A checked shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow”

“And the person? What do you see?”

“Honestly? My mother, younger than I remember her. Pretty, wavy hair, in a ponytail, reddish blonde…some freckles. Pretty face, nice body; if it were on someone else I would fancy it”

She laughed. “But on you?”

“All wrong”

“Why?”

“Because I am not a girl and never have been and never will be”

“Why will you never be a girl?”

“Because I am not one. You could put my brain into a dog, and I wouldn’t be a dog, I’d be me in a dog’s body”

“You think a girl is like a dog?”

“No, I just think a girl is different to a bloke”

She flicked through some papers. “There is a feminist viewpoint, backed up by some research in America by a Dr Money, that human gender is a learned construct, that is that being a boy or a girl is something you learn. What do you think about that?”

“I think it’s utter bollocks. You know you’re a boy even before you see your willy”

“What if you were adjusted before then, a sex change operation?”

I thought about it for a while. “No, I still think…Mitchell. Was that what that fucker was trying to do to me? He was always calling me his ‘subject’ or ‘project’…well, Valerie, they did their best to ‘teach me’ my ‘gender’, and they gave me tits and dressed me up and raped me, but I can assure you that all I learned was hate. The only reasons that I still look like this are because one, I won’t let anyone with a knife at me to do anything but the most essential repairs, which are now over, and two, because the only things they can do to make me almost like a man would just make me worse. Does that answer your question?”

She grinned. “Absolutely, Stevie. I always thought Money talks out of his arse anyway. I think we shall get on fine now!”

And we did, and she was great.