CHAPTER 32
I remembered that hospital, Mitchell’s den. He was long gone, crawled into some hole or other, but the smell of the place still brought the fear back.

I had sat with a dying man three-quarters of the way up a four hundred foot cliff, as the sun set, but I was still frightened here. I was on full alert for any familiar faces, and Tom caught my mood.

“This was where Mitchell worked, Tom”

“I know, Steve. I’m here, he isn’t.”

Nana and I were ushered to a side room, where a policeman waited, and I balked at the door, waiting for Tom. Once more he understood, and joined us there, to the copper’s obvious annoyance.

“I’m PC Noble. It’s just these two I want to have a talk with for now, we’ll get to you later”

“I’m the boy’s minder”

“Boy?”

He looked at me, and yet again I saw the penny drop.

“Oh, that Jones. Well, it’s OK, I’m here, so he’ll be all right.”

“Oh yes? I seem to remember one of your colleagues trying to shoot me and him, and one of your skippers doing worse.. I’ll just sit quietly by the door. Don’t mind me”

The copper blushed, but the point was brutally well made. He talked us through the day’s events, our run, the scramble up the chimney and my semi-abseil down, and in the end he was actually a nice man, unlike some of his colleagues. When I came to the setting up of belays, he was very, very precise.

“Did you move him at all, Steve?”

“No, his harness was still on him, I just crabbed some slings on and set some nuts. He was sort of sitting up where he had landed on a rock, that’s why I thought his back might’ve gone. He was only conscious a couple of times.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Well, he was asking about his mates the second time, and I told him all was well, that there were people coming, and gave him some teas”

“While he was conscious?”

“Nil by mouth if unconscious, that’s what I was told”

“Good lad. You said the second time?”

“Yeah, he woke up for a second when I first got there”

“What did he say?”

I blushed. “Angel…”

He nodded. “I can see why. There’s always a worry in cases like this that somebody does something wrong, something they think will help but actually makes things worse. You seem to have done not only all the right things, but some remarkably brave ones as well. After what you went through with that cunt Allison…sorry, Ada.”

He looked across at Tom, who was sweeping the area steadily with his gaze.

“Bad apples, Mr Skinner. Truly rotten, and gone, and that’s how we want it. Pity Allison didn’t go the way of Carstairs. Pity they got rid of the rope. You look after this lad. He deserves better, and it looks like he’s getting it”

He shook hands with all three of us and went on to debrief the rest of the rescue team. Brian arrived an hour later, and took us back to the house for the night. He was smiling as he drove.

“Steve, my dear soon-to-be-son, how would you like some money of your own? Real money?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I was thinking of giving Dave a ring. This is the sort of story that the Sunday rags will pay top dollar for. Famous boy rescues man from cliff, while beautiful girlfriend and gorgeous stepmother pine and fret in fear for his life. Couple of shots of the girls in bikinis, you on some bit of rock looking all adventurous, that sort of thing”

“They’d pay for that?”

“Oh yes, and then there’s syndication rights abroad. Karen did it years ago, ‘I was just a meek librarian is twinset and glasses till I met football star etc’. They had pictures of her in a bikini, and in a cardy and glasses!”

“She doesn’t need…oh, I see.”

He rang Dave once we were home, and he was excited about the prospects of yet another sale from me, this time targeting the Express. Aidan would be along for the photos in a couple of days, he said, and once more I was spinning along as events went out of my control. I wasn’t worried, though. This was my chance to get a little of my own money. I had been paid, of course, for the little bit I gave out for the papers at the trial, but nothing big as Dave was holding out for a book contract, which would earn me a lot of money if it took off.

It was self respect. Nana looked after me, and with Brian and Karen I was short of nothing. They were stupidly well off, so could more than afford it, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to be responsible for my own life, to have some of the freedom that I had never had and the little bit of adulthood that comes from paying one’s own way.

Tom drove us back the next day in the Rover, and Em went all soppy when we got in. I ran Brian’s proposal past them, and Karen looked at Em.

“Have we got bikinis, pet?”

“Oh, I think we have bikinis, Kaz”

Two minutes later they were demonstrating that they did, indeed, have bikinis, and the wherewithal to fill them extremely nicely. Sally took one look, sniffed, and disappeared, only to return looking almost as nice. There was something in her smile, though…

“Steve…some day you will want to go swimming again. We’re not trying to get you to be a girl, or anything stupid like that, but your old Speedos are not exactly, well, decent. We went shopping, and….”

She was holding out a dark blue bikini. That was a moment that left me with no idea at all as to how I should react. This was purely girl clothing, but then I had a girl’s body. I didn’t want to dress as a girl, for I was a man, but I had to wear bras and knickers because the latter fitted and the first was essential. I loved to swim, but Sally was right, I couldn’t exactly walk down the beach with my top bare.

Such a small thing, and I don’t mean the costume. Such a huge step.

I drew a deep breath, took it and changed. Tom grinned at me as I came out.

“It’s the right thing to do, Steve, get on and live your life and give two fingers to opinion. Want me to drive you all out to the beach? You’ll need two cars”

In the end, Nana dug out the half-timbered relic and we piled in with towels and windbreak, stove and picnic, and headed on down the Dale and up the coast to Braystones, a little further away from the nuclear power station, and while the girls were in sarongs or sundresses I had my shorts and a T-shirt on over my new costume. Nana has never been a real fan of thermos flasks, and insists on taking her battered primus stove on trips, as then tea can be made properly. Back then, there were still many cafes that sold boiling water for people like her. They would turn up with empty thermos, loose tea or bags, and a little pot of milk, and for a few pennies the café owner would let them brew properly rather than drink something that had sat all day.

We did the usual British thing and set up a little wall of stick and canvas wind breaks to mark our little patch of beach, and then Nana got to work with paraffin, pricker, pump and priming paste, as Tom grabbed Sally and ran with her into the waves, her screams echoing the cries of the gulls. I noticed, though that just before he grabbed her he scanned the full length of the beach. Even when he switched off, he didn’t, really.

There were families set up along the sand, little groups of girls of all ages in the least amount of material they could get away with, young lads in similar groups orbiting the girls, older couples in deck chairs with rolled up trouser legs and sleeves, the men definitely not watching the teenaged girls.

Kaz and Em walked up to the ice cream van with me, and got the predictable “What can I get thee ladies?”

It wasn’t worth arguing, as it was a more than natural error, and of course it was followed by the flicker of recognition when Emily called me by name, and the ice cream man smiled.

“Tha’re that lad that was in the news this morning”

I started to close down, as I tended to do once my notoriety was brought up, and the man noticed, and held up a hand. “Na, LAD, I don’t mean that nastiness, though I’d pull the bloody lever mesel, I meant what tha did yestere’en. That was right brave of thee. Is that thy nana down on the beach with thee?”

“Aye, and Tom, who helped carry the rescue kit up”

“Well, let me shake thy hand, lad, and the ice creams are on the house. I mean, on the van, ah, tha knaas what I mean! “

He shook my hand with genuine warmth, through the window of the van,

Once more I was learning that once I broke away from the evil I had lived in, the vast majority of folk were simply people, fellow human beings, with the ability to share that humanity. To all intents and purposes, to outside eyes I was just another bikini-clad teenage girl. He had made a point of stressing the ‘lad’ bit, though, once he knew, and it was simple gestures like his which were the real balm that was healing me. I could almost live with myself, now, and I was learning, slowly, to live with others.