CHAPTER 7
She looked at me with more than a little sympathy evident in her face.

“Be truthful, then, and tell me what you actually want to do”

I thought for a few seconds. “I suppose I want to be me at some point, rather than, well…”

I waved a hand vaguely over my face and body, and Rachel nodded. I felt I had to try and explain more of the whole shitty mess.

“Look, Rach, just look, yeah? How could I ever, ever hope to pass myself off as a woman, physically? The worst thing about all of this is the futility of it: I can’t ever be who I want to be, no matter what I do, how I get treated, ever, yeah? So we have a problem. I mean, I have a problem. What I want, what is killing me, is the fact that it is the original impossible fucking dream. The only thing that keeps me going, in truth, is work. If I had nothing to prod me along, like, then, oh, I don’t know”

“What I know, Carter, is that you need to do something, whatever you can, rather than carrying on like this. Cause one day you won’t carry on”

She must have caught something in my face, because hers twitched

“Rob, no. Tell me that isn’t what you are thinking”

I pushed my face into an approximation of a teasing smile, but it felt unreal even from behind.

“Rachel, if you knew what I knew, well, go and have a poke on the internet, aye? There’s a lot of bullshit on there, but the real sites, they can be scary. But take a few points to heart first, please. I’m a spastic, like”

“Cerebral palsy sufferer” she shot back as if by reflex.

“Kid, I am a lot older than you, and when and where I grew up it was ‘spacker’, cause ‘spastic’ was the polite term. But look: can you think of anything worse than being aware, intelligent, fucking normal, and having to live in a body you’re not wired to? That’s sort of where I am. None of this works right for me, it grows wrong, it grows fucking HAIR all over. I can’t love properly, can I, because I can’t even live right”

I could feel myself getting angry, and that wasn’t fair. I tried to rein myself in, but the pain was still there, and suddenly I realised that Rachel was crying.

“Look, kid, I am sorry, really sorry, but it’s getting to the point where I have to do something before I blow up, or break down. All I want is a chance to die as myself”

That was a revelation, even to me, and a sudden mad plan shouted for my attention. Change my name, so the buggers would have to bury me under the right one, and then sort out the mess once and for all. I pulled together another fake smile, and waited till she had mopped her eyes. Lying was easy, I had had five and a half decades of practice.

“No, that’s not what is going through my mind, Rach. I still have to outlive MAC, right?”

“Right…”

I wondered if I might be able to sort a contract out on him. Rachel and I cleared up our crap and I walked with her to the station, seeing her off on her way to Croydon and a weekend off that probably involved some serious vodka-fuelled exchanges of intimate bodily fluids with whichever piece of meat she was currently allowing into her. We never got to see any of them, just heard the blow-by-blow histories second-hand, from one of her so-called girlfriends. Marion was not someone I would ever have wished to share a secret with, not if I wished it to remain in the state I left it.

That was when my plan crystallised, though calling it a plan was hardly fair. A hazily linked set of intentions was a better description. Stage one: see how the quack came along.
Stage two: prepare a statutory declaration, or deed poll, or whatever the fuck they were called.
Stage three: start recording all this somehow, diary or something, so that they would understand, whoever ‘they’ might turn out to be.
Stage four: research. There must be a simple way, something that wouldn’t leave me either going painfully, or not going at all.

And then stage five would come when I could arrange things as best as I could for Mam and Siobhan.

Stage four would be the crucial one. I hated the body I lived in, but the thought of ending up still in it, still alive, just…damaged, that thought was pretty terrifying, for such an outcome would take any choice away from me forever.

Those were my brakes, then: two women, and the need to do it right the first time. I rode home, perversely feeling happier than I had for some time. I had a plan of sorts.

There was a thick brown envelope waiting on the doormat with my name and address handwritten on the front, and a stamp rather than a franking. Despite the personal touches, the words ‘Private and Confidential were stamped on the top left corner in red. When I opened it, after changing into a long skirt, there was a compliments slip with the square NHS logo on its front and the title ‘New Thoughts’, clipped to a bundle of papers obviously printed from the internet.

The compliment slip was sweet, signed ‘Lynn’ and addressing me as ‘Robert’

“I have enclosed the attached bundle to let you see the sort of information available on the internet. I hope it will be helpful. There is unfortunately a very long waiting list for our services, so the more flexible you can be with appointments, the sooner we can arrange your help”

Typically, the place had a bugger of a hill on the way there. I went to look it up on the mapping website, and remembered how I had fucked up the laptop the night before. And I was out of booze.

It was a very, very long evening, which I finally filled by dragging out the Airfix model of HMS Victory I had started so many months ago in an attempt to find something other than alcohol to fill my time outside of work, and to my surprise I looked up a little later to find out I had actually disposed of three hours, gone in a cocoon of sound from ‘In Search of Space’ on loop repeat. The excitement nearly stopped my heart, but I had finally got the hull together, all guns in place. I took the brushes to the kitchen to clean them, and as I stood at the sink rinsing the thinners off them I started to cry.

This was my life. A single man, in a house full of empty bottles, who never wanted to be a man in the first place. Evenings full of junk food and alcohol, or building plastic fucking model ships while waiting for exhaustion to finally turn my mind off.

Stage five. It needed to be arranged soon.

I was awake at five the next morning, and in a mad flurry where Behan’s words about teetotallers mixed with shock at how nice the day was, I decided to have another run out to Barnes. If I e-mailed…

Shit. Perhaps, if I timed it right, I could pick up a cheap computer of some kind from the supermarket. I needed my stories, needed something to let me feel I was myself. I texted a few people, ‘on way to Barnes bird reserve if interested’ and on a daft impulse I included Larinda in the list.

Half an hour later, I got back “How get thr?” from her, and nothing from anyone else apart from Karen, who simply sent “Camping in Somerset”

I sent Larinda some simple directions, and loaded the Galaxy up and hopped the train to Clapham Junction and then the urban one to Barnes. She was only five minutes behind me, and I was impressed. Her arse was a lot narrower than I had assumed, but the dimples were still there when she smiled.

“This is one of those places I always wanted to see!”

“Why not just come and do it, then?”

“Na, always wanted to have someone to show me the birds and the bees, yeah?”

I had to laugh at that. “Birds only, pet”

She grinned. “Well, for today at least. Nice legs! You shave them?”

“Er, yeah. It’s traditional, like. You get a massage, they don’t like them all hairy and that”

“Yebbut, not being funny, you don’t look like a racer to me”

“What do I look like?”

“In those shorts? Overstuffed, yeah. But…edible”

“For a natter, you said!”

“Well, a girl can dream!”

This one does. In technicolour.

“What do you know about birds and all?”

“A bit, but never really had a chance to learn about them properly. Was always working, getting money for his latest Barry job”

“His what?”

“Where are you from?”

“Boldon”

“What, Lancashire?”

“No, Boldon, with a ‘D’, near Jarrow. Tyneside”

“Oh, now wonder you talk funny. Barries are cars that have been barried up, you know; look, you know when you see some little Corsa, or Saxo, or some other dinky toy, and the driver’s got all sorts of crap stuck onto it? Spoilers, extra lights, an exhaust pipe the size of the Dartford Tunnel, yeah? That’s a Barry! There’s even a website where they take the piss out of them”

“That’s what he was into?”

“Yeah, subscription to Max Power mag, all that rubbish. Spent all our spare on crap from the car shops, and even more getting proper mechanics to put right what he’d stuck on wrong, yeah? Wanker”

She paused, and then grinned again. “Well, I assume he was a wanker, cause none of it came my way for ages. Not unless he was getting it from one of the spotty little cows that used to hang around the cruises. Oh hell, you don’t know what that means, either!”

“I am completely uninterested in cars, pet.”

“You sure you aren’t trying to get into my knickers? A cruise is where lots of sad men, mostly, drive tarted-up shit cars round and round till the Bill get bored or they break down. Are we going in or what?”

I had a guest pass, which saved us some money, and I handed her one of my spare sets of binoculars. That was when she changed. All of a sudden, I had someone more reminiscent of James than a borderline nympho, and her questions were sharp and to the point, just as her obvious delight in the place lit up the air around her and I gave myself a mental pat on the back for asking her along.

She had been right, as it turned out, and we could indeed talk. The conversation came back time and again to the birds and insects around us, but we covered so much ground I was astonished. I heard all about her ex, and her dreams of e better life without his dead weight holding her down, of Open University and advancement, while she heard almost all about me, even about Siobhan.

Almost all. At the end of our visit, as she went off to get her car, she looked me in the eye and smiled, taking both my hands.in hers.

“Rob Carter, I was right. You are a nice guy, and anyone would be lucky to snare you. And I do love a bit of meat on a bloke, yeah? Just…what is it you are keeping back? Look, not prying, yeah, I don’t think you’ve got an ounce of nastiness in your body, just, well, I can listen, and even if you are gay, I don’t give a monkey’s, right?”

“Honest, I’m not gay”

She smiled, and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“Whatever. Bothered? Laters!”

And she was off, and I was still lying. Fifty-odd years of practice.