Anyone watching would have been very confused. I must have changed about three times and was clearly becoming very agitated, and yet an observer might well have been completely nonplussed as to why.
Finally, I kept the stretch lace knickers on, and chose the longer and slightly baggier shorts in salmon pink, with the flowers. As I appraised the choice in the mirror, and turned to frown at the flowers on my buttocks, I decided it was the best choice, the underwear less constricting than the alternatives (I had remembered the pantycorselets were also an option) and the colour went quite nicely with the lilac top.

Yes, I did think that.

I had another tea.
Five o’clock came and went.
I had completely given up on Mr Gunn when I heard his heavy step on the stairs followed by his knock at 6 o’clock. I opened my door.

“Ah, Miss Tertullian, how are you doing my dear?”
He managed to sound slimy.
I managed to smile: “Fine, how are you?”
“Not bad, not bad. I was able to enquire about some work, as you asked.” His eyes had been scanning me, looking for I don’t know what, but I was glad I had hidden the bulge that was my masculinity. Finally his eyes met mine.
“Have you ever done cleaning work?”
“Ah, yes, that’s what I do now,” I answered.
“Perfect!” He seemed delighted. “One of my tenants has been looking for a maid: someone to clean and hoover and look after the kitchen.” He glanced around the room and looked suddenly doubtful.
“I can do that,” I said quickly, perhaps too quickly, “it’s a busman’s holiday being too neat here, you see,” I said slightly desperately, “and I don’t have a hoover.”
*“Oh, my dear, you should have said. I can lend you mine, and you’ll be able to clean up better here.” He smiled. I felt caught. “How about we do that now, and if I think you can handle it, then I can ask my tenant to interview you?”

“Arm twisted, or what?” I thought at the prospect of even more cleaning, and without pay – yet, what the hell, the room could use a cleaning. “Would it be full time or just a few hours?” I asked wondering how many hours I might be offered.
“Well, you were talking about weekend work…”
“Yes,” I said.
“So Saturday or Sundays, a few hours repairing the ravages of the week was what my tenant was thinking.”
“That sounds good,” I said. “I’ll get started here as soon as you can bring me the hoover.”
He blinked, realising he had also made work for himself. If he saw me as a girl, surely he wasn’t going to ask me to carry it up two flights of stairs? So off he went.

Quarter of an hour later he arrived, sweating and trying not to sound as out of breath as he was although it was, indeed, a good quality vacuum cleaner with some sturdy parts and was heavy.
“There you go,” he said, as if I had requested the machine.
I plugged it in and after fifteen minutes’ work of my own I had done a good job on the carpet after having moved the chairs and my side table to cover all quarters.
“You may as well do the landing while you’re at it,” he said, trying to sound casual, but failing to sound anything but exploitative. But I did as he suggested and when the carpet there looked better than it had since I had moved in, I stopped.
“Well, how did I do?” After doing all those hotel rooms every day this week I felt confident.
“Yes, you seem quite able at it. I’ll ring my tenant and ask him when he’d like to interview you”

I was thrilled.
That’s what desperation can do. Desperate to manage to survive, every little chance to earn some money was something I’d give such a lot for, show willing for, submit to any indignity for, it seems. But I had actually forgotten at that moment that Mr Gunn had used the word “maid”. Something which would have rung alarm bells in my mind in the oh so recent past, instead seemed innocuous against the background of being a chambermaid already.

An hour later Mr Gunn was back at my door.

“He said he can interview you right away,” said my landlord, breathing heavily after his latest climb.
“Wh– what, now?”
“Yes my dear.”
Without thinking, I looked down at myself, wondering about being interviewed while wearing pink shorts.
“Well, yes, perhaps wearing something a little less casual – if you want the job, that is.”
I looked up at him, because Mr Gunn was a big man in height as well as girth.
“How much does it pay?” I asked.
“I think he was talking about £5 an hour or something like that, for maybe two or three hours on a weekend. Something like that.”
The cogs in my mind turned and I realised that £15 a week would mean I could afford decent food, second hand trousers, even new ones in a few weeks.
“Um, so what should I wear?” I asked, to myself really, looking down at my shorts – but he answered anyway: “Heavens, dear, something pretty. I don’t know. What would you normally wear for an interview?”
“I haven’t had many,” I said turning towards my wardrobe.
“How did you get your job then?”
I turned back: “I was recommended, the interview was a bit abrupt, actually. And I signed on with an agency before that. Before that I was at school.”
“Well, wear your school uniform then, that should be smart.”
I looked at him, saw an unhealthy glint in his eye, and realised that grey trousers and a blazer weren’t what he was thinking. “I don’t think…” I started.
“Look, I’m not good with all this girly stuff,” he interrupted, looking away. “I’ll go down and get ready to start the car. If you get changed into something smarter I’ll drive you over. Can you be downstairs in 10 minutes?”
“Ah… I…” I needed the money though, so I said: “If you can give me twenty?”
He frowned, but agreed, and lumbered back down the stairs.

I went into the bathroom and felt my smartest trousers – soaking wet. The ones I’d planned for Monday were also still too wet. I had few choices left. A dress or a skirt would be expected. The grey shorts might be okay.

With a heavy weight inside of me, I pulled out one of the pantycorselets. I stepped out of the shorts and the teeshirt and pulled the restrictive garment on over the lacy knickers. I adjusted the straps and saw that the cups in my mom’s undergarments were bigger than in my sister’s old bras. I had a slightly sickly feeling at this, because though I was more or less aware my mum had been bigger than my sister, what bust size my badly missed mum took really wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to think about, and I hated the way I was finding out.

After a moment’s pause, in which all my doubts surged around my head, somewhere beyond words the decision to continue was made on the basis of financial imperatives. I zipped the front of the corselet and found it was as tight around my waist as the pantygirdles had been. I walked to the wardrobe and chose a top which looked semi-smart. Not a blouse, because they were all wet, but a black top in cotton with inch-wide straps running over the shoulders and a high square neckline. It gathered under the bust where there was a pretend belt and a knot at the back which didn’t come undone. It zipped up at the side where my left arm was. Then I slipped back into the grey striped shorts. I stood in front of the mirror and was a bit shocked. I had thought of the shorts to hang around in my room in with a teeshirt. But thinking of going out in them with a smart top changed what I saw. I looked girlish enough that I knew what others would see and what they would see would be a teenage girl showing an awful lot of leg.

I simply stared for what seemed a long time. What had I come to? The cups of the pantycorselet had deflated when I put it on, but with the gathered bust line and the slight fill they still had, there was a clear impression of youthful development. The shorts fitted much better now with no bulge at all, and my bare legs with only a slight blonde down on them looked sexy as hell.

I sat on the bed. I needed this job. But not like this. But I needed it and had to try. I glanced at the clock. I’d taken maybe ten minutes already. I stood and looked again, quickly unzipped and pulled the shorts off. I realised my idea of using some black tights was stymied because they were soaked, but I checked anyway – yes, the black tights were too wet. So I opened the packet and slipped carefully into the fishnets. I pulled the shorts back on. I’d naively hoped they would de-emphasise my legs and the whole thing would look more like one colour, like trousers. Clearly I’d not been paying enough attention to the way women dressed. When I stepped in front of the mirror somehow my legs looked slimmer and more sensuous; they looked longer and even more sexy.

I was pressed for time and felt there was no other choice. I went to the wardrobe, found a simple dark blue dress and with tears in my eyes took it out. I blinked back the tears, slipped off the shorts but then spotted a knee-length skirt which was a dark colour. I pulled it out and saw that it was almost exactly the same fabric as the shorts. I slipped it on wondering whether, if there were two garments like this, there had been a matching jacket; probably matching trousers too, but my sister hadn’t left them behind.
I fumbled for a minute with the skirt and realised that the slit went to the back, so the zip also zipped at the back. I untucked the top where it had been caught in the waistband and went to look in the mirror. My hair looked a mess but the rest was smart. More feminine but less sexy, uncomfortable, but smart enough to be a help in an interview. After spending a week in a dress, the discomfort was mostly in my head. I quickly brushed my hair into a pony tail as I had become adept at doing, twisted it and used the dinosaur to hold it up in a nice twist. I applied some mascara and a little smoky eyeshadow which I had experimented with on Thursday and then put on some pink lipstick, full colour rather than the insipid colour I’d used for work – might as well, I thought.

I decided to try the strappy sandals. In retrospect something had snapped. I had now, in my spare time and without compulsion, exactly, put on a skirt. There seemed nothing left to resist. I had a job to get, and the fact of it was the prospective employer was employing a girl and right after a week of humdrum life as a girl I had lost any immediate sense that I should fight it.

I heard Mr Gunn yell up the stairs as I closed the strap on my left foot. I stood and wobbled. These were a little higher than my work shoes which I now forgot were high heels when I wore them, but the heels on these shoes were narrower and I though found I could walk in them well enough, I had to stay conscious of them. Suddenly I remembered a bag – house key, hairbrush, pink lipstick, room key. They were all already in the bag apart from the new lipstick, so I popped that in as I grabbed it and stepped out into the hallway. I closed my door and looked down as I planted the half-inch wide heel on the step below the landing. My view of a sexy fishnet enshrouded leg in strappy heels was clear from the knee down. The skirt was just knee length and straight, very much an officy outfit and I realised my sister had probably bought it for the secretarial course she had done in the sixth form holidays. As I took my second step, Mr Gunn yelled up again and this time I could make out his words.

“You said twenty minutes! Are you ready yet?”
I poked my head over the banister and said: “Yes, Mr Gunn, I… I’m ready.”
Despite my small victory in making him carry the hoover, he still made me feel uncomfortable and he had far too much power over me.

I carefully but quite quickly descended, and as I reached the last flight Mr Gunn appeared at the door. He looked up at me and a darkness seemed to lift from his face and the frown was gone. “You’ve been half an hour,” he said. “The engine is running.” And then, as if an afterthought: “You look very smart Miss Tertullian.” He watched every step I took with an intensity which unsettled me.
“Um, thank you. I hope your tenant likes me.”
“I’m sure he will,” he smiled.

Mr Gunn’s car was actually a dusty, rusty old Volvo estate. He opened the door and seemed to realise that my nice smart interview skirt might suffer from contact with his dusty seats and quickly muttered: “Um, hold on a sec I’ll give that a wipe.” He rushed back into the house and I heard the jangle of keys, the click of his door opening and then little but the traffic and birdsong for about 10 seconds, and then he came bustling back into the corridor. Like a small fanfare, the jingle of keys and the slam of a door immediately preceded the glint of sweat as his brown entered the sunlight. On his ruddy face he wore a smile which seemed both smug and slightly playful.

“Can’t have you ruining your smart outfit, can we?” he smiled and flourished a duster and I had to step aside as he bent over the front seat and gave it a quite vigorous dusting. “There you go, my dear,” he smarmed and stood back, but only far enough that I had to squeeze past to get in. Having used Shank’s pony every time I had needed to transport myself since having to resort to more feminine clothes I was caught a little off guard at the sudden constriction of my stride as I tried to step into the car, and the heels gave little traction so I was half bent sideways with one foot in the car and the other starting to crumple sideways when I had to grab onto the back of the seat. Suddenly Gunn’s hands caught me, and I cannot claim it wasn’t a good catch and quite possibly saved me skinning a knee and I completed my manoeuvre with more care, finding I had to turn my knees towards each other to allow the width of stride which allowed me one foot on the pavement and the other on the floor of the car.

I sat and found my skirt had ridden up considerably, and Gunn, instead of hurrying around the other side to drive as I expected as he had been hurrying me, now seemed able to find time to pull out my seatbelt a little and hand it to me. I was in the process of trying to pull my skirt back down towards my knees, but now felt I had to take the offered seatbelt. He stood there solicitously, but when I looked up and gave a polite smile of thanks I found that eye contact was not available as his gaze was occupied by my fishnet covered thighs.

I shuffled and said, “I’m sorry to have held you up so much”, and this moved his glance to my eyes. He quickly glanced back at my legs and then as an expression I couldn’t make out flicked across his face he grunted a little in the affirmative, nodded and moved around the front of the car to the driver’s side.

As he went around I could still feel the aftermath of his left hand which, when I slipped, had caught me under my left upper arm and had balanced me again. But I could also still feel the warmth of his right hand which had lightly caught my right hip. I felt uneasy about this. It hadn’t been my buttock – close, but no, it hadn’t been. Neither had it actually steadied me, but I suppose that had I been slightly more off balance it might have helped. It was quite avuncular and attentive and it wasn’t sexual, but I couldn’t shake off a slight unease that it had been almost suggestive. Perhaps it hadn’t been the touch at all, just the way he looked at me earlier and then as I got into the car, but it contributed to my feeling even more vulnerable than I had become accustomed to of late as we pulled away. My mind churned trying to compute the unfamiliar territory that a simple uninvolved relationship with someone of the erstwhile “other sex” now seemed to involve. A part of my subconscious guiltily questioned how I had, myself, thought about and perhaps unknowingly treated girls in the past while the conscious mind fumbled trying to grasp the enormity of how small everyday things seemed now to have changed shape when cast in the new light of the gender gap reversed.

Interrupting my thoughts, if not my mood, Gunn chirpily launched into conversation: “Mr Pratt, the tenant you’re about to meet, is not very neat, I have to say, but he has always paid his rent punctually and over many years, so I don’t criticise too much. However, when I suggested he needed assistance keeping his place neater he immediately seemed to like the idea. He said he had always worried, however, about pilfering and so had never got to the point of approaching a cleaning service”.

He glanced at me and I gave him my raised eyebrows and a nod to assure him I was an attentive listener. His eyes caught mine, he smiled but as he turned away they slid down furtively into my lap. He quickly picked them back up and put them back on the road and I quickly realised that my lap was the place my handbag should be. I lifted it from the floor of the car in some half-hearted pretence of looking for something as he spoke but I omitted returning it to the footwell after the feigned mooch.

“When I told him about you, explaining you were very honest and hard-working – so I do hope that’s how you see yourself – ” another quick glance at me for confirmation perhaps, or perhaps just for effect, also included a quick but fruitless slide down to my handbag, the eyes then bouncing much more quickly than before back to the road, “and that as you’re my tenant too, should he have any complaints he will know where to find you,” I frowned at that but he was more fixed on the road now, “Mr Pratt seemed to feel safe enough to give you a try.”

“I hope he’s not going to come around calling if I don’t fluff his cushions properly,” I said in a concerned tone.
“Ooh no,” cooed Gunn, “I didn’t mean I’ve told him where you live. But he knows that if there’s a problem he can tell me and I can pass it on to you.”
“Oh, okay,” I said turning to look out of the passenger window in order to hide my frown.
It was starting to appear that getting this job might mean I would have an awful lot more to do with my lecherous landlord when all I wanted was to be alone and to save enough money to escape this ridiculous pickle I was in. Everyone at the Sherlington was either lovely to me or aloof. Most of the time in the job I was alone, with just coffee breaks for breathers with one or two of the other staff, actual girls, who shared my shift being my only social contact. Even that felt too much, when wearing heels and a dress when I thought about it. When I didn’t think about it I was starting to feel indifferent, as if everything were just normal; which meant that when I did think about it I felt that much more disturbed at my acceptance and then embarrassed in retrospect at any social contact. Seeing more of Gunn, who seemed to be taking an unhealthy shine to me, was something I really did not want.

It was a 15 minute drive, far further than the walk to the Sherlington and we had left the area I’d grown up in and passed through a couple of villages where I had known some people when I was at school. It was with some trepidation that we got out in the small area known as Love Bridge, little more than a square, a few shops, a small stand of trees by the stream and, of course, the bridge.

Getting out of the car I let Gunn stand first, hoping to avoid giving him a show, but as I opened my door and disentangled my bag from the seatbelt, he was already there, holding the door open with his left hand and proffering his right for support. In my head I snarled to myself, “How damned chivalrous,” but I said nothing other than glancing sharply at him and then away again, too timid to be forceful.

Keeping my now disentangled bag in my lap with my left hand, I swivelled to the left and panicking slightly as I felt the right side of my skirt ride even higher up my thigh, I decided grabbing his hand might not be so bad an idea. I grasped his palm, he took my wrist and with considerable strength he helped me move smoothly out of the seat. Once standing I quickly let go of his hand, wanting to straighten the right side of my skirt which I was sure was up at my hip by now, but he didn’t release my wrist but, instead guided me past him and closed the door behind me. Then he walked behind me, gently forcing me away from the car and in that move he released my wrist and this allowed his hand to fall in the small of my back, again solicitous, not overtly crossing social taboos and yet making me feel pawed.

If it happened now, at my age as I write this I would have put my foot down firmly and nipped it in the bud. If he wanted to be chivalrous, I would assert, he should join a mediaeval re-enactment society and leave me out of it. But as a psychically scarred and battered teenager living in a constant state of confused embarrassment as my gender was somehow accidentally wrested from me by everyone around, I did not know where to put myself and just felt queasy and confused about whether I was paranoid, whether girls put up with this all the time and he was just being nice, or whether maybe girls like the attention. I was clueless. I didn’t like it one bit, but was scared of drawing attention to myself by any unwomanly behaviour, since exposure seemed to be the one thing that could very quickly make my life materially and emotionally worse than it already was, collapsing the relationships and income I relied on to exist. I lived in fear of being on the streets, which again, looking back, probably would have been a fine solution, more easily solved than where I found myself. There is help for homeless people: not enough help, and it’s not very quick help. Most long-term hopeless people have, I believe, other problems too that got them there. Mine was grief and there would have been support and help, if only I had known it. Fear of falling over that cliff into homelessness kept me to clinging to the constant anxiety and discomfort and embarrassment of accidental womanhood.

With Gunn’s sweaty solicitous palm at the small of my back like a bandit’s revolver we walked from the parking space at the edge of the small square around two sides of the sloping central lawn, maybe 20 by 20 yards. This brought us to crossing the narrow cobbled street in front of the shops. The shops were the ground floor of what would once have been a row of artisan cottages facing the stream which, in spate, probably rose up its banks and up the gentle slope perhaps as far as the cobbles. Now, except in the very rainiest years the partly bricked channel the stream ran through stopped it rising over its banks and the weir just past the bridge had sluices to control the flow, so the former flood area was now a decorative square, and beyond the confines of the square a street of workshops had been built in Victorian times which were now shops and offices, flats and cafes. It was all a little oasis of commerce and leisure in the midst of a boring and otherwise humdrum town.

I felt very self-conscious and was almost shaking with anxiety. Not only was this the first time I had ventured out in public wearing a skirt, only 200 yards over the bridge was the school I had been going to until I dropped out when mum died. Although it was June, and Exam season was winding down, I was still afraid I would meet someone I knew from school. Although I had bussed to school some few miles when mum couldn’t give me a lift, a lot of the pupils were more local and there was a good chance of seeing someone. They would know my face and the skirt would not fool them. I was in the strange state of anticipating being terrified at any moment, but not actually terrified yet: so far I was just paranoid and anxious that people who had never met me might also not be fooled by a skirt and heels. But I guess it was more than that that had kept me on the wrong side of the gender tracks – the longish hair, my underfed build, and also, today, the makeup.

It was a Saturday and the bridge was busy as were some of the nearby streets, but the cobbled street itself was busy at a slower speed, the uneven cobbles encouraging only slow progress from most drivers, though one SUV driver who cared nothing for his suspension or tyres earned some glares from mothers with young children as he tore down the street at all of 30 mph.

We crossed and I found that uneven cobbles were not nice in high heels. Gunn immediately sensed my difficulty and closed in taking my left hand in his and steadying me with his hand on my waist. I would have made it without his help but I had certainly felt much steadier with his stability bracing me. I hated to be grateful to him, but it had actually been helpful and I turned and gave him a tight smile and I leaned slightly away from him as I said “Thanks” to break his hold on my waist. We had crossed directly in front of “Planes and Boats and Trains”, the Love Bridge model shop.

Mr Pratt lived above the small model shop there and it turns out that he was the shop’s manager. Quite a few of the boys from my old school, though rarely the girls, would frequent the model shop from time to time, sometimes buying models, or parts for models, often just buying magazines about boyish things like classic cars or old steam locomotives or military aircraft, as the local newsagents rarely had such publications; and the man in the model shop, Mr Pratt as I now knew his name to be, had seen the niche in the market. I had never gone there, but had heard of the shop by repute, especially as he had expanded his stock of magazines and books to meet the interests of the young men who had found the shop, and he also now stocked, I was told, magazines full of pictures of models stripped right down so readers could see exactly how they were put together. If you get my drift. This knowledge increased my trepidation a little as Mr Gunn took reached past me to open the door of the shop and introduce me to my interviewer.