The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2919 by Angharad Copyright© 2016 Angharad

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This is a work of fiction any mention of real people, places or institutions is purely coincidental and does not imply that they are as suggested in the story.
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As I drove the bus to collect the girls I was in utter turmoil. Was Debbie a neo-woman like me or wasn’t she? Should it matter? Of course it didn’t on most levels but it was driving me crazy and I was feeling very difficult about it. Of course I was, the very things which I hated people asking me were bouncing round my brain like those super balls we had as kids, which bounce much higher than an ordinary ball.

I kept telling myself it was of no consequence either way, it didn’t matter, it wasn’t relevant—but yes it was. I wanted to know—shit, why? I don’t know, I really don’t.

Was it the competitive part of me? Possibly, I was probably five years older but still looking fairly trim and I thought I was at least as pretty if not more so. I was richer and had a doctorate, I was also married and had kids—so no contest there. Damn it there is no contest—how can there be a contest? That’s like Viet Nam challenging the United States—oh that’s really made me feel better. I could always withdraw the job offer and work myself to death instead. Damn Esmond Herbert to hell and back, what had he landed on me?

I’d offered the woman a job until the end of the year to cover some of the teaching. I’d gone through the timetable with her and we’d identified the areas she could do—bugger she was going to be doing the small mammal stuff, including the Rodentia, which covers dormeece and harvest ones too. I need to sort out my own stuff, keep the department running and find new sponsors for research.

Hampshire County Council and Portsmouth City Council had asked us to do some research on the brown rat. I called in two of my best recent graduates and asked them if they’d found a suitable subject for post grad study and neither had. The one wasn’t too worried what he studied as long as he got some help with costs, the other wanted to do something in the animal line.

When I mentioned rats they both pulled faces but that was where the money was, this time anyway. I could squeeze enough for both of them to study for a year and get a small stipend as well. Leptospirosis, not withstanding, they agreed to put together a project to explore and hopefully answer the questions the two councils were asking, which was mainly involved with population figures. If they planted cameras in a few sites and did counts of the animals walking past or put down some magic pads which enabled footprints to be analysed they could set bench marks and then compare them six months later.

“Why couldn’t it have been water voles instead?” asked one of them, “They’re cute compared to bloody rats.”

“They carry lepto as well,” I reminded them.

“Bugger, so they do.”

I sent them off to do me a draft of their proposal and gave them no more than a week to sort it or I’d offer it elsewhere. Sometimes things are tough in academia—like all the time.

All these things were buzzing round my head when I took Danni to training. I said I’d wait for her as it usually only lasts about ninety minutes and I had my iPad with me and plenty of work to do.

I must not do a search on Debbie Matthews I told myself, entering her name on google. Nothing much came up anyway, other than she’d put a notice on facebook when she got her master’s. I did one on me using both my surnames and loads came up but not the transgender stuff. Oh good, but the banking stuff did when I put in my usual surname and the title and so on came up. Had I told her to call me Cathy Cameron or Cathy Watts? It should have been the latter but I suspect I said the former. Does it matter? Not really, so why was I almost obsessive about the woman?

I did deal with some emails—I have a keypad thing for my iPad which works on Bluetooth, so proper typing is possible though there can be a minuscule delay between hitting the key and seeing it appear on screen which I believe happens with several tablets. In some ways I’m glad not to be knee deep in bits of paper I can’t find, yet somehow sending electronic bits doesn’t feel so comfortable and I’ve deleted those or couldn’t find them after reading them once. Plus of course power outages don’t affect bits of paper except it might be too dark to read them. However, the ecologist keeps saying it’s greener to send emails until I think how much in waste products there is in manufacturing computers and then when they die or are replaced by newer ones. How much is really recyclable, whereas in theory, pretty well all writing paper is.

My stomach began to grumble as I remembered I’d not had my dinner yet and hoped that Simon didn’t eat Danni’s and mine as well as his own. I also wondered how David was getting on in his caravan—does it feel like being on holiday or like being stuck in a large cardboard box.

The younger girls were asking about having a caravan which was something I always wanted when I was a kid, except my dad hated them especially when driving behind them. I remembered we had the villa on Menorca and if anything we should be going there more often. I must speak to Simon as it’s his really.

Sitting in the car and thinking nice thoughts of being on Menorca I was miles away when a face was pressed really close against the window of my car and when I looked it made me jump out of my skin. Danielle pulled away laughing. I’ll murder that brat.

“You were miles away, weren’t you?”

“Yes, and I could have had a heart attack.”

“Nah, too young for that.”

“Danielle, a professional cyclist had one the other week and he was only about twenty four.”

“Is he okay?”

“No he died.”

“Oh bad luck,” she said shrugging, “Let’s get dinner, I’m starved.”

Simon hadn’t found our plated dinners in the cool oven of the Aga so we did get something to eat and very good it was too. Homemade meat and vegetable pasties; David’s pastry is to die for—I suppose if you eat enough of it, it would be to die from especially the puff pastry such as these were. I just ate the pasty and Danielle ate hers with the potato and vegetables then ate my veg and spuds. I guess she was hungry after all.

“You won’t grow up to be a big girl if you don’t eat all your dinner,” she quipped after eating half of mine as well.

“I’d rather grow up to be a slightly smaller girl, especially sideways.”

“That’s all those biscuits you have stashed in your study.”

How did she know that? By the time I’d recovered from her statement she’d gone off to torment her sisters.