Sometimes you encounter a person who just stands out from the crowd. When they do, you remember it for a very long time. The day I saw her was one of those.

The day began as normal as I like hundreds of thousands of others with a commute into London by train. On this day of all days, I alighted from my train which had arrived at Platform 2 at Waterloo Station. I can even remember the time. It was 08:29 on a Monday morning. So, what was so remarkable about her then?

I didn’t see her face but her hair shone just like those adverts you see on TV for shampoo. You know the ones that when you try that very product out, you find that your hair does not look anything like the Advert yet you still but the same product until you see another advert for a different product and so the cycle goes. But I digress…

She was wearing an off-white thigh length coat. It was almost a trench coat but shorter. She had nearly black opaque tights and knee-high boots with a low but not flat heel. Her hair was a shoulder length ‘bob’.

So why did she stand out even though I never saw her face? There was just something about her, perhaps it was an aurora that drew my eye to her? I don’t know but whatever it was, it did, big time.

With the throng of people heading to work, I soon lost track of her in the crowd but I never forgot the way she walked. No, not walked but virtually glided across the platform.

The next time I saw her was when I was having a dinner at one of the Restaurants that are situated on the embankment in front of what that formerly called the Royal Festival Hall and is now part of the South Bank Centre. I was with a group of people from work celebrating the pending nuptial of a colleague when I looked up and there she was walking along the embankment in the direction of Tate Modern with a girlfriend. I say girlfriend because she was walking arm in arm with another but slightly older woman. They were laughing and joking. I still didn’t get a good look at her face but what little I did see, she looked great.

I felt sad because I could not get out of the restaurant and go after her such was the magnetism of ‘her’.

I didn’t see hide nor hair of her for six months but it was not for want of trying. I kept an eye out for every day when I travelled to and from my work. My job was an Assistant Stage Manager at a pre-eminent London Theatre. I lived in a tiny, no, make that a really tiny bedsit some twenty minutes walk from Raynes Park Station that wasn’t on a bus route. If it was then the rent would have been a lot higher…
I commuted by train into and out of Waterloo every day. As I said, each day I looked out for her at the station and on the Embankment and just about everywhere I went but of her, there was no sign. I didn’t give up though. Somehow, I always knew that our paths would cross again… Eventually.

In parallel to my job, my boring and ordinary life and keeping an eye out for her, I’d been seeing a counsellor in relation to a little or not so little problem depending on your point of view, I had.
To put it bluntly, I had the misfortune to have born a male but my mind said that I should have been a woman.

At work, I dressed very androgynously. People didn’t mind and I answered to Mike or Michelle. The Theatrical world was a very accepting sort of place when it came to sexuality but I didn’t have the confidence to go the whole way and live as a woman all the time. I had major doubts about the whole thing even though I’d spent a whole week as a woman with the help of my friends in the Theatre. One of them even said that I needed a real kick up the backside to… well get me to finally decide which side of the fence that I was going to live my life as.

After some six months of visits to my Counsellor, he had arranged an appointment with a Gender Specialist to try to work on some of the issues I had with the physical side of things. Normally, this would have been at St George’s Hospital in Tooting but because I worked where I did, the appointment was at St Thomas’s which is on the opposite side of the Thames to the Houses of Parliament. St George’s is a pig of a place to get to and from anyway so it suited me a lot better. There was no way I could afford a car especially when for six days a week it would be parked somewhere near my home. Even with a residents parking permit, actually finding somewhere to park was a real problem.

It was with some trepidation, that I turned up at the clinic at St Thomas’s on a wet Thursday morning in March. My appointment was for 09:10. It was well past that when ‘she’ came into the waiting room for the clinic and went straight through to the consulting rooms. My mind was still all a tis-was when my name was called. I could not work out who she was or why she was here. It was probably obvious but I couldn’t think of it before I

I walked into the consulting room and there she was sitting at her desk, reading what I guessed were my notes.

“Come in and sit down, Mr Johnstone. Sorry for being a bit late, someone got stuck in the train doors at Earlsfield. I’m Dr Bartholomew by the way.”

I mumbled, “That’s ok.”

She looked at my notes and then after closing the folder, she smiled at me.

“You look at lot different to the last time I saw you. Do you remember that?”

My mind was a total blank. How on earth could I not remember meeting someone as frankly gobsmackingly as beautiful as she was. Now that I saw her face, my feeling about her ever since that day, had been right but she was even more untouchable than ever.

“I… I don’t remember. When did we meet before?”

She sat back in her chair with a smile on her face.

“You were about six and I was a spotty teenager. We both attended our mutual cousin’s Gerald’s Wedding.”

I managed a small smile.

“That was a long time ago. He’s been married at least twice since then.”

“Yes, it was a long time ago. Perhaps you will remember having a jug of water poured over you?” She asked grinning.

I remembered that event quite clearly. I’d accidentally stood on the foot of a small girl aged about five. The result was that she wailed like the world was going to end. One of her cousins took issue with my big feet and did the dirty deed.

“I remember someone doing that to me. Was that you?”

“Yes, it was cousin, I’m guilty as charged,” she replied still grinning.

“Wow!” I replied still stunned by her revelation.

“However, it does mean that I can’t really be your doctor. I’m going to have to refer you to my colleague, Dr Davison.”

“I think I understand…”
My mind was still confused.

“Don’t despair Michael. Why don’t you come around to my place for dinner on Saturday? I can at least be your friend if I can’t be your doctor. After all, we are related, aren’t we?”

“I’m sorry, my job is an assistant stage manager. We have a matinee on Saturday afternoon. But we don’t have a show on Sunday though.”

“Great. Sunday Lunch it is. Here is my address. Say around one?”
She scribbled and address on a bit of paper and gave it to me.

“I’ll be there,” I said. Then I remembered I didn’t know her first name.

“I can’t call you Dr Bartholomew on Sunday, can I?”

She laughed.

“No, you can’t. It is Yvonne.”

“Thanks Dr Yvonne. I’ll see you Sunday.”

I stood up to leave and then it hit me.

“But the person who poured that water over me was that wretched bully David?”

She grinned back at me.

“So? Can’t a person change?”

That was my ‘Doh’ moment all right. I was right about there being something very special about her but I never dreamed that it was that!

Still anything she can do I can do too but not necessarily better. But one thing I did know was that she was really something special and of that, there was no doubt.

As I walked along the South Bank towards my work, I realised that all my doubts about going ahead with my transition had just disappeared. Seeing her and finding out who she’d been had made my problems seem trivial to say the least.

I went to Lunch with her that Sunday dressed as who I really was, Alicia Thomas. Michael or Mike Thomas was dead and buried as far as I was concerned.

That one meeting with someone really special had changed my life for good.

[The end]