CHAPTER 22
I was staring at a water jug. The bastard was empty, and someone had superglued my lips together with rancid cheese.

The pain hit me from a distance, right after I noticed the smell. It was there, the sharpness of something hot pushed where it shouldn’t fucking be, but it was as if I was watching it from another room. And I had a headache.

“Annie, how you feeling?”

“Erghh…Er-ick….shit, like shit”

I was trying to get the words out, but the cheese was stopping my tongue working, and I was trying very hard not to be sick. “Water….”

“Doc says you can’t, love. Hang on…”

I was starting to focus on things, and he came round to me and held up my head, slipping what was obviously an ice cube into my mouth. There was a strong taste of lemon.

“S’lemon…”

“Yeah, I got some juice and made up a dilute mix, they froze it for me, thought it might be better than simple water, for when you wake up, like, I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”

“No…where’s your hand?”

And he took mine, and that was the first time I woke whole.

They kept me in four days before I was shipped back to the hotel, and I was packed up like a stuffed chicken, things rammed up inside me that I wished weren’t there, which made me rather unhappy, but that particular gripe was very heavily tempered by the realisation that I now had somewhere in which to insert unwanted items, which meant---no, my first thoughts were not about sex, but were of pure relief. I was awake, I was well, and it was gone.

They unpacked me eventually, which was NOT fun, and then Doctor Syllables asked the question.

“Want to take a look?”

He had a small hand-mirror, which he held out to me as the nurses helped me move the bedclothes, and---

And he had a handkerchief for my tears.

“Annie, this is my bonus payment, the one I cannot put into the bank. But then it is also one the government cannot ask for tax money on. It is nice to be paid lots of money for my work, but it is also nice when there come smiles”

I laughed, carefully. “Land of smiles, aye?”

“Yes, but always nice to have them travel in both directions. Now, we shall deliver you to your hotel, and I have a very large bundle of detailed instructions for the care and feeding of new genitalia to give you. There will be some needs to visit here before you are ready to leave, and then there will be unpleasant necessities for a period of time. I will provide you with the items you will need to use”

And so it went. I stayed dry and clean, and Eric pampered me, as the clinic followed their rather superb aftercare routine, and I realised that the good doctor was exactly what it said on the tin: I really believe that he got a buzz from seeing people completed, from healing them himself. It didn’t interfere in any way with his making a decent living out of us, but I sensed no avarice. He was a man who had found his rightful place in the world and made the most of it.

In the end, it was two weeks after I was released that we left Bangkok, and I had more tears in my eyes as we bade farewell to the nurses, and to the hotel staff, who were beyond praise. We avoided the taxi, despite my sort of incapacity, and took the elevated train to the main railway station, and one of the hotel porters insisted on coming with us to carry my bags, Eric went to tip him, and he refused, with a little bow.

“You come stay again, yes?

And he was gone. I looked at my beloved, and he just smiled, and I loved him then, and blessed his foresight in being so naughty.

It felt odd dressing, with…absence where something had sat for so long, but I was far from complaining. Summer dress, knickers that fitted properly, a silly hat, and the rest of my life walking beside me pushing a trolley with our cases. I couldn’t help it; I whipped off the said headgear and pulled him into a snog.

Eventually, I let him breathe, and in answer to his unasked question, simply grinned and said “Because!”

Eric had booked us onto the train down to a place called Butterworth, and it was almost like stepping back into an earlier world. At some point I would have to find out exactly how much he had spent on this, but I had already made one resolution: as far as I was concerned, THIS was my honeymoon, our honeymoon. If we went anywhere apart from a weekend in Bognor after our wedding, it would be kicking and screaming on my part.

We rattled down through hilly jungles, rice paddies, limestone cuttings, all the little touches of tropical romance that hadn’t been properly served in the noisy bustle of Bangkok, until we were at the passport control and I was finally crossing a border as myself. It turned out to be no big deal, and I rather got the impression that the Malaysian immigration staff had seen it all before, certainly with people like me.

Another station, and Eric looked at me with a teasing smile.

“I know the answer, but I will ask anyway: a taxi ride over a bridge, or a ferry?”

I thought for a while: romantic crossing by water, 4,000 per cent humidity, temperature in the high thirties, cool breeze over the deck…

“You know me so well, love”

“Of course I do, otherwise I wouldn’t be marrying you, yeah?”

So it was a ferry ride…and a hotel at what we ended up calling Frog Beach, and then sand, and sun, and my first proper outing in the smallest bikini I could get away with, allowing for local mores, and day trips to turtle temples, and snake temples, and giant reclining Buddha temples, and---time spent forcing, as gently as possible, plastic things into somewhere very, very new. I will gloss over that part.

More than anything, it was being able to relax and be nothing more than a couple on holiday. So many times I had little flashbacks to that first time out at our festival, or trotting over to Den and Kirsty’s in a skirt, out in the open, feeling as if I had a target painted on my back or a sign round my neck reading ‘abomination’. Now, it was just me, me and my lover. It was clear that the hotel staff noticed our smiles, for there were little touches from them, such as flowers at our table, or in our room, and once more it was a wrench when we finally had to take our leave.

Another ferry, another train, this time to a station that looked like an antique mosque, next to some stupidly tall pair of buildings, and more airport chaos, more cramped seating, another flight into the darkness and the soulless bustle of Dubai.

I really missed our hotels, the green heat of the countryside and its red soil, the little thorny touch-sensitive leaves and even the red ants that walked in procession over the footpaths at night. The concrete high rises did little to hide the warmth of the people in both countries, and that was thrown into sharp relief by the avarice that dripped from the gold palm trees in Dubai airport. I looked around, shopped out, as we had a coffee and watched the dawn arrive outside.

“Eric, love, darling, please, go and hijack the plane for me! I want to go home, or go back, but not stay here any longer, aye?”

He just smiled and pointed to the screens.

“And we have a gate, love”

“Thank fuck for that”

Sometimes, life can be a bitch, and the daylight flight across Europe proved that. I really, really wanted the window seat, to look out and wonder at all sorts of wonder-worthy stuff, and I had to spend so much time in the bloody toilet it made sense for me to take the aisle seat. The only upside was that it gave me the excuse to lean into him as often as I wanted, at least when my new plumbing wasn’t making demands. It still got boring, in the end, and we finished up cuddled together as best we could until the seat belt sign went on and we started the run in.

The landing was so hard that two overhead lockers burst open, and then we were finally freed. The engines wound down, the doors were cracked, and we started the shuffle towards the front of the plane and the rest of our lives.

“Come forward together if you are family. What is the relationship?”

“Engaged, I marry her in four months”

“Her. Ah. Do you have a letter…thank you. Good idea to get this changed as soon as you can, confuses the Agency otherwise. Next!”

And of course Steph was there, not on duty but waiting for us at the exit, and as flashes went off in my face I saw the Woods, and the girls, and---not much else.

The tears were too thick and too fast, but they were not tears of sadness.

I was finally home.