CHAPTER 32
I got changed out of the clothes I had worn for all of an hour, and pulled on my lycra. As I was sorting out the bikes from the shed, I had a sudden thought.

“Eric, butt, how are you going to get your instruments home?”

“OK if I leave them here for a while?”

“You want me to share my place with a banjo?”

He just grinned and led me out of my street and onto the road to Turner’s Hill. It felt good to be out, good to be rolling, and even with the previous day’s excesses I could feel how my fitness was coming back. I had thrown some bananas and other munchies into the saddle bag, along with a flask of coffee, and I shared some of the food with him as we paused at the crossroads at the top of the first Hill. I stopped four times on Ditchling, but there was no goaping for the first time in years. That’s ‘get off and push’, ‘use the 24” gear’, all the usual jokes. The coffee was for the top, on a Summer day with the views stretching the width of a county, and then once more the gentle ride downhill to Brighton. I gave the two others a call from the top

“Mwmfh?”

“Morning!”

“What the fuck has got you up so early, and got you so disgustingly cheerful?”

I have arranged a weekend away with a man whose smile I have only just understood might be for me. “Eric’s got us out of bed and onto the bikes. We can haz ice creams onna pier!”

“What the fuck?”

“Top of Ditchling at the moment, going for ice creams and a swim. Bring money!”

“Oh, I’ll bring Kate, it’s the same thing. By the pier?”

“Yup! See you in a few”

The smell at the entrance to Brighton Pier is always the same, where two ranks of pretty dire fast-food stalls fill the air with smells that are somehow radically different from what they sell. The worst is from the doughnuts, which are, well, even in my worst days of fat and excess and self-hate, I still couldn’t face them. I took Eric upwind.

The girls arrived with an industrial quantity of locks and we decamped to a proper ice-cream seller before locking everything up and setting out along the pier. The deck is wooden, with gaps between the boards, but the owners have been thoughtful enough to provide a smoother walkway, clearly designed to allow girls in silly shoes to totter along to the attractions. Being Brighton, a lot of those girls aren’t, strictly speaking, actually girls. Ginny was completely focused.

“Grabby machines. Want grabby machines”

Kate sighed. “You are how old, exactly? I’ll get the change…”

Eric disappeared immediately into the bowels of a jet fighter simulator thing, while Ginny concentrated, tongue tip visible, on steering a set of claws that dropped to try and pick up some oddly-made cuddly toy or other. One pound forty later, and she had two. I was impressed. Kate sighed again, not as theatrically as before.

“It’s the competition, love, she is just so cut-throat about it. She can’t be beaten. Ever. Now, did you try on any of the stuff we left you? Ah, you did then, you blush far too easily”

“Not as badly as Steph!”

“Mmmm yeah, it went all the way down her tits and…no, Kate, do not go there! Stop changing the subject…let me guess, the blue dress with the white collar trim? Thought so. You are coming along, girl. I don’t mean silly things like clothes, I mean you are smiling again.”

She paused, just for an instant. “ Dreams going away? Ah”

She laid an arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. “Was it a bad one?”

“Kate, they are all bad. That one was a real… piece of work, though, I think it was the roast that set it off. It’s the smell…”

I tailed off, and she squeezed me. “Good job you had Eric with you then. Love, you are shaking, leave these two and get some air, OK? Ginny, we’re just getting some fresher stuff, OK?”

“Mmmhmm”

Kate took me out to the rail and we stood in the sun for a minute, watching the gulls turn on the wind.

“You are really confused there, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t got a bloody clue, Kate, not one. I was thinking about what Steph said, how you get a sudden clearing in your sight and bang, you know exactly who you are and what you want. I feel a bit like that”

“You want Eric…”

“Oh fuck aye, but look at me. It’s not like Steph, she was already, you know, and then he never knew her before. Eric’s known me ever since I came over to England, man and fucking boy almost, and that’s the problem, aye? I can see how Geoff does it, no previous sort of images, but me? I’m already an image, that fat bloke with the beard”

“But you have already shaved your legs, you changed your clothes for him. Why don’t you let him have a chance to say what he thinks, rather than assume?”

I locked my eyes on a gull sitting on the water. “I have so much shit already, Kate. Rejection would be just a bit too much. We are going to see Sally together, which is immense of him, and, well, shit, we seem to have sort of agreed a weekend away with the Woodruffs. Music festival, aye? If I put all this on him before then, it will be a totally crap weekend, aye?”

“I am not Sally. You see her in a couple of days, yeah? Talk to her then. Now, we better get the other two rounded up before they spend all our money. Does he really want to go swimming?”

“Oh yes…he is barking”

Kate turned me round and pulled me into a fierce hug. “We all are, Annie my love, we are all mad, but we are nice about it”

She pulled away from me for an instant, and smiled. “Just don’t let my beloved near any crossbows.”

In the end, we didn’t go swimming, as the rising wind carried just enough of an edge to chill us, and after lunch/tea, taken in that limbo of time mid-afternoon, we said goodbye to the girls and caught the train. There was space for once, and we sat in the double seat and joked our way up to Three Bridges. I caught myself at one point, with a hand on his thigh as I laughed, but he said nothing and I tried to carry on as if nothing had happened, till I got up to leave him and the train. Another of his one-armed hugs as I unfastened the bikes, and a whispered “It’s not a problem, Annie”

I stood on the platform staring till the train was almost out of sight. It was a problem, a very big problem, and one I didn’t have a clue how to address.

Work the next day was a bit of a tightrope, with Den smiling at me a lot and an occasional appearance from Kirsty, who seemed to be doing her level best to let everyone know she had a claim on him without making it official enough to cause him grief.. My mental state made me grateful that we had a really quiet shift, but that in itself gave the others time and opportunity to grill me about my performance. After one too many questions about one-legged flute-playing, I made the announcement.

“Look, some of you were there, I saw you trying to hide your batons while you were dancing, aye?”

Kirsty called out “Some of us hid the baton after the dancing, Sarge!”

“Naughty naughty, Ruth! There is a film of the event, I will have a copy soon, and I promise I will play it for you in the retiring room when I get it. That OK with everyone? Right, bugger off and fetch me back some work!”

No dreams that night. Not much sleep either, and I was up before the alarm getting ready for the doctor. I was just pouring the tea when Eric knocked at the door, his tourer locked outside.

“Time for a cuppa before the Inquisition? Nice nighty, by the way.”

Ah well, he had seen me in a dress, so no issues there. I grabbed another mug for him and poured.

“Thought you were meeting me there?”

“Couldn’t get off last night, so I rode down early, before the roads got too shitty. Can’t afford peak time train tickets, I need both my kidneys for the beer”

“Well, it’s the same shit for breakfast, butt, fruit and bran”

“Ah, so you like regular visitors, then!”

“Johnson, that was bad even for you. Here, be useful and cut the grapefruit”

We munched our way through the meal, and he put away several glasses of orange juice as well as the tea.

“It’s warming up out there, so we better fill the bidons”

“Eric, it’s only half a mile away”

“Yebbut, we might get lost on the way back, perhaps stuck in the countryside or something”

“Is this some plan to keep my fitness levels up”

He grinned. “Guilty!”

Once dressed, I led him out on the short ride to the medical centre, where Doctor Newman was supposedly ready to give me my results. Of course, the appointments dragged on, and we were half an hour late before we were finally in front of my bloods man. He looked at Eric, giving him a thorough going over, before asking him,

“And you are?”

“Her friend, here to give moral support, and I made sure I showered all my Gayness off before we came in”

The face cracked a little. “Well, given what…she is here for, it was a thought that crossed my mind. Now, results….what I have looked for first of all were signs of any unusual proteins, things that can indicate potential cancers in particular. Dr McDuff tells me…Ms Price, do you feel able to discuss this in front of your friend?”

“Absolutely, Doctor”

“Well, Sally tells me you have been on a rather extended alcohol binge. That can lead to a large variety of illnesses, some of which are cancers. I won’t go into great detail, but it can seriously damage liver functions as well. Tell me, before you decided to kill yourself like this, how healthy were you?”

Eric chipped in. “She’d just give you some bollocks, doc, so let me. An extremely fit long distance cycle tourist who went fully loaded through the Alps and other mountains because she liked the views. She could’ve been a decent triathlete, but she thinks running is unnatural”

I sniffed. “Well, it is. Why walk when you can ride?”

The doctor continued. “Fitness, OK, but I am after details on health. From what Sally says I should probably discount intravenous drug use.”

He continued on to question me about family health, smoking, sleep patterns and PTSD, building up a rather frighteningly detailed picture of my life, and then he finally came to the crunchy bits.

“Diabetes is one obvious risk for you, but I am pleased to tell you that it isn’t there, and from all the tests we have run there is no sign of liver malfunction. Doctor Khan has kindly supplied me with urine samples, and once again the only unusual feature is that you aren’t having any obvious kidney problems from your overenthusiastic boozing. Have you cut back, by the way? There was very little to be found in your samples”

“Yes, my friends sort of took charge”

“Good, good. Right, the other news. You are not exactly bursting with the fruits of the womb, don’t get any wild dreams up about magically turning female. On the other hand, your testosterone levels are below average. I should qualify that. Fifty percent of everything is below average, that’s how averages work, so we set a range across the mean figure that we call ‘normal’. You are normal, but towards the bottom of that range. That is actually better news than it already seems, as if approval comes for you to proceed with HRT, which from Sally’s notes is something you are exploring with her, we need less of certain compounds pushed into your body. Less risk to your liver, for starters.

“That, really, sums it up. Healthy, organ functions within tolerance, no unusual nasties lurking around your arteries. All I can say is that I hope you and Sally can sort out your future in a way that makes you happy. If you go down that route, I will be here to do the necessary. Any questions?”

We had none, and after handshakes we were off down the street to the nearby house that held Sally’s office. Once again we were left a bit longer than our appointment said, made worse by the delay at Doc Newman’s, and I sent Eric off to pick up three coffees from the nearby bakery cum café.

“Three?”

“If she’s ready, then three. If not, we can find it a good home”

He returned just as Sal opened her door and with a broad smile invited me in.

“Company, I see! I’d like to talk to you alone first, if Eric can wait outside for a bit. You OK with that? “

We both nodded, and I took two of the coffees in with me as I settled into the usual armchair. Sally took a sip of hers, and sighed happily.

“You shagged him yet?”