EDITOR’S NOTE

The following tale is based on documents recovered from Woodfield Cottage prior to its sale in March 2012. The story appears on these pages by kind permission of Mr John Pennington.

The right of Mrs Pennington to be identified as the sole author of this work is no longer disputed. In spite of their unconventional style, graphologists are satisfied that the earlier manuscripts were produced by the same hand as the others. Mrs Pennington’s reasons for creating this needless confusion are likely to remain a mystery until her whereabouts become known.

Readers should be aware that the basic premise of this story may offend their sensibilities. I also feel obliged to draw their attention to the strong language Mrs Pennington occasionally employs.

Richard Furness
Hinton Membris, Northamptonshire
October 2012

You remember that quote from Sherlock Holmes, the one that goes something along the lines of when you’ve eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

Of course you don’t. You’ve never heard of him.

This is going to be difficult. There are so many references you just won’t get.

Maybe I should dress it up as fiction. I mean, what are the chances that any sane person will believe it? Sometimes I struggle to believe it myself.

Okay, we’ll play it that way. Pretend it’s just a story. A yarn I made up to pass the time.

Even if it isn’t.

Even if it really, really isn’t.

What finally persuaded me to open my eyes was the unmistakeable sound of a steam locomotive’s whistle.

I already knew that I hadn’t made it home last night. The bed was too wide and comfortable to be my own, and had proper sheets and blankets instead of a duvet. Obviously I’d checked into a B & B, one that was located not too far from a preserved railway line.

Funny that they ran trains before dawn — and on a Sunday as well.

[B & B stands for ‘Bed and Breakfast’, which should be self-explanatory. Picture something between a boarding house and a small hotel. I’ll try and keep these interruptions to a minimum.]

My brain made a valiant effort to piece together the events of the previous day. I’d set off from Sunderland [the town you know as Bishopwearmouth] intent on a wholesome ramble across the Northumberland fells. I caught the local train to Hexham and strolled up to the bus station on Priestpopple. It was a warm, bright June morning with a gentle westerly breeze, perfect conditions for walking. But the summer cold I’d been nursing had begun to stream. Although a cooked breakfast in the Wetherspoons at the back of the market place eased the worst of the symptoms, by now my enthusiasm for the great outdoors had waned. Soon I was on my way to Carlisle, ready to indulge in less physically demanding pursuits.

[Wetherspoons: a nationwide chain of public houses that serve reasonably priced food throughout the day.]

I remembered picking up a second-hand copy of Clive Barker’s ‘Imajica’ from a charity shop on Lowther Street. I remembered going into HMV and wondering who they imagined would be willing to part with  £60 for a single season of ‘The West Wing’. I remembered the test match being on in one pub, and Sky’s rolling news channel in another. I remembered going outside for a cigarette, where a complete stranger had attempted to engage me in a conversation about the leadership of the Labour Party. I remembered ordering a large Laphroaig and becoming involved in an argument over whether it was pronounced ‘La-phro-ig’ or ‘Luh-phreeg’.

[A charity shop is…no, if I go on like this it’ll be unreadable.]

I remembered getting maudlin as the alcohol took its toll. I remembered thinking ‘to hell with it’ and buying a ticket to Euston so I could pay Susan a surprise visit. I remembered lurching towards the buffet in search of a few cans of Strongbow to keep me company on the journey.

I didn’t remember anything else.

Well, I mused as I lay there in the darkness, you’ve excelled yourself this time, Col. Thirty-four years old, assistant Head of Year in a large secondary school, supposed to be a role model for the youngsters in your charge, and one dose of man ‘flu has you getting so shit-faced you haven’t the faintest idea which part of the country you’ve woken up in.

A good day’s work. Now I needed to figure out how those assignments I promised 9E2 would be marked and returned to them on Monday were going to get done.

At least my cold seemed to have cleared up. And I didn’t have a hangover, which was another pleasant surprise.

Then my tongue chanced upon something altogether less agreeable. The only dental surgery I’d ever needed was the occasional filling. Yet I could feel three gaps in my top teeth; the widest was on the right side of my jaw, where I was missing the lateral incisor, the canine and both premolars.

I froze. My brain was unable to issue any instructions to my central nervous system because it didn’t know how to process the sensory data it was receiving. If my heart hadn’t been capable of beating independently it would have stopped there and then.

But that wasn’t all. The sockets were fully healed. Not one of them felt raw, or even the slightest bit tender. The extractions had been carried out weeks, if not months ago.

Cold beads of moisture formed on my forehead. The evidence pointed towards only one conclusion. Somehow I had lost a significant portion of my life.

Maybe the London train had crashed. If I’d suffered a head injury, that might account for my amnesia.

I moved cautious fingers to my cheeks, my temples, the top of my skull.

No bandages, bruises, bumps or bald patches.

I wiggled my toes. I drew up my knees and moved them from side to side. Everything below the waist was in order too.

Everything?

Although I could feel the pressure building up in my bladder, it wasn’t having the usual effect on my dick. In fact it wasn’t having any effect at all.

I slid my right hand under the covers. When it encountered the silky smooth skin below my navel I frowned. When it met only a few sparse wisps of pubic hair I narrowed my eyes. When it confronted nothing between the tops of my thighs that remotely resembled a penis and a pair of testicles my mouth opened so wide it could have swallowed up a Panzer division.

The full extent of my injuries was now revealed. They had resulted in my emasculation.

My complete and utter emasculation.

I began shaking. Intimations of a future my worst nightmares had failed to produce flashed through my mind. I would reach the end of my days without having fathered a child. I’d had full sex with my last woman. Bizarrely, what disturbed me most of all was that I would never again be able to use a urinal in a public lavatory.

It took me several minutes, but in the end I managed to push these thoughts aside. I had other concerns. I still didn’t have a clue as to how much time had elapsed since my ill-fated visit to Carlisle. For all I knew, when I looked in the mirror I’d see a middle-aged man staring back at me.

A middle-aged man whose first duty might well be to mourn beside his mother’s grave…

Suddenly the idea of walking around with nothing hanging from my crotch, upsetting as it was, seemed of secondary importance.

I raised my head from the pillow. I could bask in ignorance no longer. Whatever the consequences of my drunken behaviour turned out to be, I had to face them.

The light had improved a little, enough for me to notice as I sat up that two sizeable mounds of flesh were swelling from my chest.

[Even today I find it impossible to convey the sense of shock that tore through my entire being. No matter how florid my imagery, no matter how carefully my sentences are constructed, no matter what techniques I use to increase the dramatic impact of my prose, the description I set down will be inadequate. If by its absence I give you the impression that I took all this relatively calmly, I can assure you that I did not.]

I had grown breasts.

Not only had my genitals been amputated, I’d developed a pair of pair of tits into the bargain.

Now I was furious.

Who had made the decision to pump me full of female hormones? What medical purpose did that serve? And who had given their permission for this treatment to be administered?

Or were these questions redundant?

There’s a saying where I grew up. When you’re very familiar with something, you know it ‘like the back of your hand’.

Well I was looking at the back of my hand — and I didn’t recognise it at all. For one thing, it was sprinkled with dark freckles.

The same applied to my fingers, which were also slimmer and shorter than I remembered.

I was prepared to accept that hormones might have altered the texture of my skin. I felt reasonably sure that they couldn’t reduce the length of your bones.

I reached for my crotch, found exactly what I’d expected. No cosmetic surgeon had sculpted that orifice. It was as natural as the one I was breathing through.

When you’ve eliminated the impossible…

This wasn’t my body.

How I’d come to be wearing it was a mystery.

But this wasn’t my body.

At least it wasn’t the body I was accustomed to. It was certainly mine now.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t the prospect of having to spend an unspecified period of time as a woman that bothered me so much as the growing realisation that everything I’d believed about the universe and humanity’s place in it had been turned on its head.

Let me stress that I didn’t actually believe in anything. I made choices and held opinions based on informed guesswork. I was confident that the sun would rise every morning because I couldn’t conceive of a force powerful enough to stop the earth spinning on its axis. I put my trust in Newton’s laws of motion whenever I crossed a road. I examined the available evidence and concluded that a man named Adolf Hitler was responsible for the deaths of millions of people during World War Two.

[How did Hitler accomplish this? You don’t want to know.]

But I didn’t believe any of those things. There was always a chance — though in each of these cases it was a ridiculously small one — that I might be proved wrong.

As for the entity I regarded as ‘me’, recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology suggested that it was probably an emergent phenomenon arising from my brain’s highly evolved ability to predict the future — which it does best by extrapolating the past. My ‘self’ I considered to be an accidental by-product of the memories my brain had stored. This seemed considerably more plausible than the concept of a soul, immortal or otherwise.

What I’d discovered in the short time since I woke was forcing me to think again.

For the brain inside my head had access to the unique patterns of neural signals that made up Colin Armstrong’s memories. Assuming that transplant technology wasn’t quite at that stage yet, I had no option but to concede that something else had put them there. Whether I called it my essence, my spirit, my disembodied consciousness or indeed my soul was beside the point; whatever had transmigrated from Colin’s body to this one, it had brought his memories with it.

I quickly abandoned this futile speculation. What use was metaphysical enlightenment when I didn’t know my own name?

All at once I was overcome by despair. The task in front of me was too big. I could adjust to being female, but the thought of meeting other people, of trying to pass myself off as this woman and of what might happen if I got it wrong, made me feel sick.

Why had fate placed this burden on my shoulders? What evil had I done, that it saw fit to punish me in this way?

It took a few minutes to fight down the panic that had threatened to engulf me. I succeeded because the one thing I was determined to rescue from this situation was my self-respect. I wouldn’t go under. Shoppers might laugh and point. Children might hurl abuse. Friends and family might turn their heads from me. I’d tell them all to eat their own shit.

Better all round if it didn’t come to that.

I needed to look at the big picture. As a Geography graduate, I was trained to take a systematic approach to problems and devise integrated solutions to them. I had to work on the assumption that my condition was permanent, that I’d inhabit this body for the rest of my life. The strategy that would benefit me most in the long run was surely to bully myself into thinking like a woman from the outset.

It wasn’t going to be easy. I couldn’t wave a magic wand and develop an immediate interest in shoes. Then again, the gentler sex encompassed a spectrum every bit as wide as its male counterpart. As long as I stayed within certain boundaries I’d be okay.

The grey of pre-dawn leaking through the curtains drawn across the window on the far side of the room at last gave me an opportunity to observe my surroundings. The bed was situated in the corner, facing the door. Beside this, taking up most of the opposite wall, stood a unit consisting of two wardrobes separated by a dressing table. The only other item of furniture was the armchair a few feet to my left.

Then I noticed the boxes scattered randomly across the floor, as well as the piles of books, ornaments, crockery and kitchen utensils. There was also a large rubbish sack, full to bursting with waste paper.

My mood soared. Here was the break that just might enable me to pull this off!

She was unpacking, and she was doing it alone. Not only would I be this dwelling’s sole occupant, but it appeared that I didn’t have any close friends or relatives living nearby. I felt as though I’d just been granted my dearest wish.

Now I could think more clearly. My first target was to acquire a name. On the armchair rested a shoulder bag; it was too far away for me to reach so I pushed back the covers, averting my eyes from my naked flesh in case its contours, folds and hollows proved too fascinating a distraction. My feet made contact with the deep-pile carpet, and I braced myself to take my very first steps as a woman.

They were ungainly ones. My breasts bounced cumbrously as I stood, swayed heavily with every movement I made. It was unsettling to know that they weren’t some temporary inconvenience, but a feature of my physique that would eventually become as central to my sense of self as my male genitals had been. Perhaps more so, considering that they were much too large for me to get away with not wearing a bra.

Which was another treat to look forward to.

As luck would have it, the bag lay open and from the top peeped a little black address book. Although its previous owner had entered her personal details in neat capital letters, I still had to hold the page close to my eyes in order to read them.

“Annalisa May Pennington,” I said out loud, the book falling to the floor as I jumped back in astonishment at the sound of my new voice — and the plummy, BBC newsreader accent in which I’d spoken.

Annalisa…

How did she shorten that?

It didn’t matter. It was my name now. I was free do as I pleased with it.

Anna?

No. Lisa.

Lisa Pennington. That’s who I’d be. Lisa Pennington.

I crouched to lift the book from the carpet. I wanted to know my date of birth before I came face to face with my reflection.

When I saw it, I gasped.

July 17th 1975.

The same as it had always been.

That wasn’t a coincidence. It couldn’t be.

What the hell was going on here?

I’d have a go at solving that riddle later. First I had someone to meet.

I turned towards the wardrobe unit. The girl staring back at me from the dressing-table mirror allowed her mouth to fall open even as I felt mine do likewise.

We both took a single step forward.

“Hello, Lisa Pennington,” we said to one another.

The bathroom had a curiously old-fashioned feel to it. The WC was flushed by means of a long metal chain, the cistern so high I’d have to stand on the lid if I ever had to repair it. Hot water was supplied by the immersion heater in the airing cupboard. The taps feeding both the washbasin and the tub were of brass, and sorely in need of polishing. Annoyingly, there was no shower.

I scrubbed my hands and face, irritated that it would be half an hour or more before the water would be warm enough for me to run a bath. The stubble in my armpits reminded me that changing sex hadn’t consigned the drudgery of shaving to the past; like remembering to sit down when I urinated — and what a close call that had been! — it was one more addition to the ever-lengthening list of adjustments I’d have to make.

Two entries stood out from the rest. The first had been suggested by the box of sanitary towels on the shelf to the right of the bowl, the second by the tumbler in which a dental plate was soaking.

Yes, I was in for a fun time as the luscious Lisa.

The phrase was no exaggeration. Her tits were on the heavy side, and her upper arms were a little too plump and freckled for my liking, but in most other respects she was a very tasty bit of stuff. She had a trim waist, wide hips, strong thighs, rounded knees and smooth, perfectly shaped calves. Her face was appealing rather than pretty, but her complexion was unblemished, only the laughter lines at the corners of her intelligent hazel eyes and the first signs of creases around her delicate lips betraying the fact that she wouldn’t see thirty again.

Not that fancying my new body cheered me up. On the contrary, if Colin Armstrong might have been tempted to make a move on her then so would the majority of other men. I had a rough idea of how to take the wind out of a guy’s sails — God knows it had been done to me often enough — but unless I could think of ways to avoid unwanted attention in the first place I was going to be in demand.

I brushed my teeth, then did my best to put a centre parting in my unruly dark brown hair. It was one of Lisa’s less attractive features; she’d had the top cut into short layers, but left the sides and back long enough to brush her shoulders, giving the impression of a job half complete. I wondered if I shouldn’t just have the lot taken off. As Colin I’d worn my hair unfashionably long since I was in my teens and began my love affair with metal bands. This might be the ideal time to change all that, and by doing so break decisively with my past.

[‘Metal’ refers to a style of music performed with electrically amplified guitars, and characterised by a relentless drum beat, strident chords and piercing vocals, all played at a tremendously high volume. Originally known as ‘heavy metal’, it ultimately fragmented into sub-genres too numerous to record here.]

“I reckon you’d look fine,” I said to the girl in the mirror above the basin, a remark with which she evidently concurred. “But before we make any rash decisions let’s find out a bit more about where we are.”

Wearing the plain blue robe I’d taken from its hook on the bedroom door, I padded along a corridor whose plain eggshell walls cried out for prints of abstract or surrealist art. It widened into a hallway from which one door gave onto a living room and another led to a kitchen, the latter as poorly appointed as the bathroom.

I didn’t linger in either. Yet another mirror held me captive as I struggled to accept that the young woman looking back from the glass was really me, that her shrewd but alluring eyes were my own.

Who was she? What had brought her here? Why was she living alone?

And if she had a soul, where was it now? Was she at this very moment in Colin Armstrong’s flat, asking herself the same questions?

Would she try to find me? She certainly knew where to look. If she did, would I have the strength of character to handle that meeting?

The hall ended at the entrance to a porch, which looked out over a small front garden and a low wooden fence to an unmetalled lane that wound between fields of waving corn on its way to the foot of a broad valley. Perhaps a mile from here, to the west if the early morning shadows were anything to go by, I could see a cluster of rooftops dominated by a tall spire. A short distance to the south of this settlement, amid lines of railway wagons, stood a series of long sheds from which smoke curled and drifted.

I rubbed my chin, perplexed. The whole scene looked as if it would have been more at home in the 1950s. The fields were bordered with high hedgerows, and seemed much too small for modern farming machinery to function efficiently. Many of them contained blossoming trees.

On the doormat lay a white envelope. I had to peer at the name and address on the front; the letters were written in ink, and formed into a cursive script that made them jump about like mischievous scallywags just when I was on the point of identifying each one.

No doubt there was a pair of reading glasses somewhere. But I couldn’t be bothered to look for them.

I persevered, deciphered the handwriting — and instantly wished I hadn’t.

Mrs J Pennington
Woodfield Cottage
Ashby Lane
Hinton Membris
Northamptonshire

Mrs J Pennington.

Mrs.

I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but the fact remained that I’d been thrust into the body of a married woman.

I had a husband, with all the complications that implied.

The next two observations I was to make, when taken in conjunction, literally ended my world.

The first was the Oxford postmark, dated June 9th 2010, just four days ago according to my subjective calendar.

The second was the postage stamp itself. It was the right colour, it had perforated edges and the monarch’s profile faced left, as it should.

But the face, though aloof, distinguished and thoroughly regal, was indisputably, earth-shatteringly, male.

“It’s Northamptonshire, Lisa,” I said to myself, “but not as we know it.”

Then I broke into laughter. It was the only thing I could do.