The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1350 by Angharad Copyright © 2011 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

Simon was up at six, he had a meeting at half past seven–don’t these people sleep? I did him a light breakfast, and went to shower, rousing the children after I’d finished.

They tend to help each other showering or bathing, except Billie because she still has an outie, so the others, Trish included look like normal girls. I let Billie shower in my bathroom while the girls messed about in the other one.

“Everything alright?” I asked her.

“As much as it’s going to be.”

“What’s the problem?”

“All of you have proper girl bits ’cept Julie an’ me, an’ she’s gettin’ done next year, an’ she’s got tits.”

“Well you’re taking hormones now that’s more than she was able to do at your age.”

“They’re not doin’ very much are they?”

“You’ve only been taking them for a couple of weeks, give them a chance.”

“They’re only weak ones anyway–I heard Dr Rose say so.”

“They are low dosage. Now let me explain something to you–high dosage doesn’t necessarily mean anything but increased risk when applied to hormones. If you were whacking down ten times as much all it would do is make you feel sick or increase the risk of thrombosis or cancer. It isn’t so much the strength as the time when you start to take it–and that also means you can’t take it too early because it would do horrible things to you like stunting your growth or damaging other parts of you. You’re the right age now to start having some changes happen to your body. You’re already taking something to stop it becoming more masculine so the effects of the hormones will become clear in a few months.”

“Will I have tits then?”

“The start of them–remember, Billie, that they don’t grow overnight it’s quite complex what happens inside them, it isn’t just fat collecting, they grow lactation cells as well.”

“What does that mean?”

“Milk cells–theoretically, you could breastfeed eventually.”

She smiled, “Like you do with Catherine?”

“In theory, yes–whether you’ll get the chance is another matter–I’ve just been very fortunate.”

“Trish will grow them faster than me, won’t she?”

“I sincerely hope not, if she does she’ll look deformed having breasts at seven or eight.”

“But she’s got the pills too.”

“She has very low dosage ones, because we’re trying to maintain her body with the same sort of amount of hormones she'd have if she were a natural girl–the same as you, actually–we’re doing it the same as if you were a natural girl, because the blockers stop you producing male hormones. So you have the correct amount of hormones for a ten year old girl–effectively starting on puberty.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means the hormones are preparing to turn your body into that of a young woman–obviously in a biological female it would be a bit different–periods would start, dependent upon weight and breasts start to grow, hips start to widen and so on. So by the time you’re ready to go for surgery, assuming it’s what you want to do, you’ll have a very female shaped body and will pass as a female very easily. Probably better than I do.”

“Awww, Mummy, you are female–you just can’t have children–anybody who says you’re not is a liar.”

“I am officially now, and you will be one day soon as well.”

“I can’t wait to cut this off,” she pulled at her penis.

“A word of advice–accept it as part of you and love it–it’s got a very important role later on–that’s what becomes your vagina and labia–if you do a Trish and damage it now, you’ll regret it later.”

“What d’ya mean–regret it later?”

“It could mean that you don’t have enough skin for them to create an innie for you.”

“Trish has got one.”

“Trish’s is very small which is okay now, but when she gets to seventeen or eighteen, she’ll need at least one more operation to make it bigger. You having surgery at eighteen, hopefully wouldn’t need to have further operations.”

“I just feel such a fraud, Mummy being a girl with a dick.”

“I think I prefer the term, outie to dick. Dick is something a boy would say.”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Right finish showering and I’ll see you downstairs.”

“Okay, Mummy.”

“And remember who you are happens in your mind, it doesn’t necessarily involve your body at all–that only happens when you want others to share what you feel, and that usually happens a bit later than ten or eleven. But we all think of you as a girl because that’s what you are, isn’t it?”

She hugged me, “Yes, Mummy, and thank you.”

“For what, sweetheart.”

“For being my mummy.” She started to sniff and I hugged her tightly.

“Thank you for being my daughter.”

She laughed at this and I left her to finish her ablutions, while I tried to maintain some sort of order at the breakfast table.

We all piled into the Porsche, Danny went with Tom, who had time to drop him off on his way to the university, Jenny stayed behind looking after the little ones. The traffic was as sluggish as ever and at one point I thought we were going to be late.

We were late–but it wasn’t our fault. At the big junction, with traffic lights and built in congestion, we were just coming up to our turn to go through the junction when, a white van who’d been trying to squeeze past me to turn right, forced his way past me as I moved forward. This happened at exactly the same time as a BMW came through the red light to our right.

We moved forward a short distance, the van came through and a moment later the BMW smashed into the side of it–all of it on the junction, blocking the road in two directions. I managed to get across the junction and pulled in, Trish did her emergency call on her mobile while I locked the car and ran back to see if I could help. I had a bad feeling about the man in the van–I think he was very badly injured if not dead.

I was right, there were several people trying to assist, but the poor chap in the van took the impact right on his cab burying him in a pile of twisted metal.

Someone was trying to pull the driver’s door open–it was stove in and part of what was trapping him. He was groaning and when I looked there was quite a lot of blood about.

I managed to get in through the passenger door which had come open and saw that his leg was haemorrhaging from a gash on it. I picked up his overalls which lay by the side of him and began ripping them into strips, someone saw what I was doing and while I manoeuvred myself so I could reach the wound, the other helper took over our impromptu bandage manufacture. He passed me a wodge of material which I pressed onto the wound and then handed me strips of cloth with which I tried to improvise a pressure bandage.

What I didn’t expect when I touched him was the flow of energy which went from me into him and I almost smelt burning from his wound, as if it was cauterising it. Once I’d got the bandage tight, the bleeding eased off enormously. I could now check his airway.

I clambered beside him, he’d passed out and was kissing the steering wheel while being pressed forwards and sideways by the smashed door and the car the other side of it.

I lifted his head a little because he was making a snoring noise, which to me indicated a blocked airway, he was also going blue at the lips. I sat there, wedged against the door holding his head, and feeling the energy pulsing into him.

I glanced down at the occupant of the BMW and saw to my horror it was a woman, who was being attended to by two men. She seemed to glance up at me, and despite the blood and bruising on her face, she laughed at me–“I can see it, Cathy–you’ve blown your cover–I can see it,” she called through her missing windscreen; and I realised to my horror it was Laura Lawrence.

The emergency services arrived and it was the same fire chief as before, this time a woman fire-fighter took my place, and I was able to get out of the van. The driver was still alive when I left.

I stood and watched them release the driver of the BMW and saw she was covered in a blanket, up over her face. I felt no urging of the energy to touch her and my feeling were very mixed.

I finished my journey, taking the girls to school and apologising to the headmistress in person–she was fine about it suggesting that I did the right thing in trying to save a fellow human’s life.

I described what happened to her and began shaking. She took me to her office and sat me down while sending for some strong tea. In describing what had happened, I realised that Laura Lawrence had deliberately run the red light to hit my car so I’d have to heal my children or even myself.

Instead, she hit the van and saw me helping the driver–whether she saw the blue light or not, I can’t say. She seemed to think she had–but at a price that most of us would consider too high.

When I spoke with the police later and complained about them releasing her on bail, they apparently couldn’t hold her–a newspaper paid for her bail–they had posted a condition that she keep away from my family, my house and place of work, and me.

If she hadn’t died, she could have been arrested for contempt of court or breach of bail conditions, not to mention dangerous driving or even attempted murder/ manslaughter. I learned later, the van driver was alive when he got to hospital but died later from internal bleeding.

Two lives lost for a bit of printed tittle–tattle, what a waste–doubly so, because they didn’t get a story after all.