Annie and her Granny

By Susannah Donim

Steve’s mother runs the secretive Transformations consultancy. This means he has a number of interesting jobs over the years.

Prologue

Steve helps with the testing of some interesting new technology.

“Here, Granny, hold onto my arm,” Annie said. “I’ll help you up the steps.”

“Thank you, dear,” I said gratefully, in my creaky ‘old lady’ voice.

I struggled up the steep staircase from the car park to the street, mimicking the laborious movements of a fragile female septuagenarian. I moved slowly and painfully, leaning heavily on my walking stick. The ascent actually was a challenge because of all my bulky padding, even in only one-inch heels.

“Is he watching?” I asked, in a softer voice, trying not to move my lips.

My spectacles were plain glass but they were still thick and they inhibited my distance vision. Annie took a surreptitious look back over my shoulder.

“Afraid so,” she confirmed. “You need to stay in character.”

This still felt very strange as only last night I had been making love to Annie with a vigour quite incompatible with the elderly lady I appeared to be. The weight of my portly figure had meant she had to go on top, which I found a little humiliating, but there was no doubting her enthusiasm, or her agility. It was the best lovemaking session we’d had in the two months we had been together. I had hoped we were getting serious, but my current circumstances had definitely thrown a spanner in the works. How could I talk of our future together when I was living as a seventy-year-old woman, and her grandmother into the bargain?

We made our way toward the little diner. I pretended to lean on her arm.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” she said. “You’ve only just found out about him. Why not wait till you’re you again?”

“But who knows when that will be?”

We had reached the door of the diner. I looked inside.

“Come on, there’s a table free at the far end,” I said. “I’ll sit with my back to the window, so you can keep an eye out for our friend.”

Annie helped me off with my overcoat. I leaned my stick against the wall and hung my handbag over the arm of my chair. Sweeping my dress underneath me, I sat down, glad to get my extra weight off my feet. I was careful to make sure that my skirt covered my wrinkled legs in their support stockings. My tight shapewear helped me to keep my knees together.

“I’m still amazed at how convincing you are!” Annie said softly, taking the seat opposite me. “You’d have to know my Granny really well to be able to tell that you’re not her.”

“Thank you, dear,” I said, trying to stay in character. “Any sign of you-know-who?”

“I can’t see him at the moment, but I expect he’s watching us from somewhere out there.”

The tubby waitress with the fake-looking ginger perm was approaching with a smile and two menus.

“Morning, ladies,” she said brightly. “How are you today?”

I stared at her closely. She looked puzzled at my scrutiny, then nervous. I was sure she had recognised me; that is, Granny. I looked around. There was no one nearby to overhear me.

“We’re fine,” I said in my normal voice. “How are you, Dad?”

Chapter 1 - The Test Subject

That summer I went home as soon as I could, the day after my last exam. The taxi from the station dropped me in the courtyard behind the main building and I started emptying out my belongings. In three trips I had my suitcases, dirty washing (obvs), books and laptop stacked inside by the service lift.

Most of the big old building was given over to my mother’s business. Clients came and went through the main door round the front. I had only ever used our private back entrance. Since my Dad left us – more than fifteen years ago now – my mother and I lived ‘above the shop’ in our very comfortable two-level, three-bedroom apartment, round the back and isolated from the business premises.

I took my stuff up in the lift. There was no one in the flat. I checked my watch; it was about ten past three. Mum was probably with a client, but there would be tea in the staff common room shortly.

* * *

For most of my childhood I wasn’t allowed in those parts of the building where the customers went, which was most of it. Mum had long ago warned me that her business depended on absolute discretion. Clients only came to her by referrals from people she knew she could trust. She didn’t advertise, and there were no signs anywhere to identify the place. The building was set back from the main road down a long tree-lined drive. If you didn’t know where to turn off, you would never find us. There was a bus stop half a mile away which served the tiny village nearby, but no one ever walked along the road past our driveway. Even if you did see someone and stopped to ask them for directions, they probably wouldn’t be able to help.

My mother told me what she did for a living on my sixteenth birthday, when she thought I was old enough to understand. She was in the business of changing people’s appearances, using techniques that would be the envy of most movie studios. She explained that everything they did was entirely legal as long as they never knowingly did anything to help a client commit a crime – fraud, or bigamy, for example – or help one to escape from the consequences of committing a crime. The key word was knowingly. So she always warned a potential customer that she didn’t want to know their motives. If she knew too much, she might have to refuse their business.

So I finally understood the need for secrecy and why I wasn’t allowed in the main part of the building. It was essential that clients were exposed to the smallest possible number of our staff – for their benefit and ours. It also explained why I was discouraged from inviting people home. If I wanted to get together with friends outside school, I always had to go to them, even though we had a tennis court, a putting green, and an outdoor swimming pool in our extensive grounds.

I had met some of the staff but only knew them by their first names. They were always friendly to me but they were all as discreet as Mum was. The only one I knew well was Fred, our expert software engineer, because he was family, sort of. He and Mum were close. I didn’t know how close, but he’d been around for my entire childhood. When she realised I was interested in working with computers she let Fred take me under his wing. He taught me a lot. He gave me free access to his precious Local Area Network and allowed me to learn by playing (under his watchful eye). Later, after I finished my GCSEs and the summer holidays approached, my mother suggested I work for him properly.

“It will be a holiday job,” she warned me, “and we’ll pay you. But for that, we’ll expect you to show up every day, nine to five.”

“All summer? I was planning to go away with my mates – surfing at Newquay, or something.”

“I’m not sure about that; you’re still only sixteen.” She saw my reaction. “How about you work till the last week in August? You don’t have to go back to school after GCSEs as long as they’re satisfied you’re doing something ‘educational’. That will give you eight weeks. If you show me you can be responsible and mature, you can go away with your friends. Also, you should earn enough to fund your holiday properly.”

“That would be great!”

She looked thoughtful.

“Actually we may want you to do a few other things, besides computer programming, I mean.”

“What sort of things?”

“Oh… just odd jobs,” she said, vaguely.

I found out what she meant a few weeks later.

* * *

All our computers were deep in the bowels of the building, well away from any clients. The basement area was Fred’s domain. There were three large rooms, all air-conditioned, renovated to the most exacting standards of modern high-tech companies, and painted brilliant white. We called it the Bunker. There were no external windows, but the artificial light made it seem like daytime, twenty-four-seven. One of the three rooms was given over to the servers and two state-of-the art 3D printers. I vaguely wondered where the money came from for all this expensive equipment.

I was soon spending most of my daylight hours down there, and often quite a bit of the night-time too. When I joined him, Fred had completed the design stage of the software the business needed but there was still a lot of coding to do. He assigned me several of the subroutines while he developed the master program. I loved the work and we made great progress. I wrestled with software that didn’t work; then worked but didn’t work properly; then worked properly, but didn’t work all the time. Eventually everything worked, all the time.

Fred’s clever programs built 3D images by sampling hundreds of photographs taken by our camera system. The models were based on a collection of points in three-dimensional space, connected by various geometric entities – triangles, lines, curved surfaces, etc. Obviously when modelling the human body – especially the female body – curves were mostly used to ‘connect the dots’. The more points we used, and the closer together they were, the smoother and more convincing the images looked. Unfortunately we found that using too many points slowed the processing – and later the 3D printing – right down. So we had to compromise. It was a challenge to strike the right balance between speed and accuracy.

The shapes of the models were our main concern. We did want to be able to reproduce surface textures – wrinkles, scars, etc – for transformations into older people, but we didn’t need to worry about hair or fur, as they often have to do with CGI creatures in the movies. The 3D printing would make prostheses based on the volumetric differences between two 3D models – the one of the client’s actual body and the one he or she desired. We wanted the software to allow us to rotate the models on the screen, so that clients could see for themselves what they would look like post-transformation from any angle – front, side, back, even from above or below.

But it wasn’t easy. Aligning the cameras was fiddly and took ages. At first, we had to calibrate them by hand. Then as soon as we moved on to a new test subject of a different height, we had to change all the camera angles. We realised we needed to automate the calibration process. So from then on the first readings we took were the height of the subject. Then we added a new subroutine to realign the cameras if we needed to.

The next step was to create a 3D model from the readings. Off-the-shelf, open source software was available to do most of that, although it took a lot of configuration for our needs. The same program could be used to construct a model of the customer’s desired figure. Then we had to work out how to expand the target model to encompass the client’s actual figure completely. The challenge was to superimpose one image on top of the other and calculate the differences between them in three dimensions, so that we could manufacture the prostheses needed. This process used programs originally developed to create 2D image slices from an MRI or CT scan. We used interpolation rather than actual X-rays, stacking multiple 2D images together to form an accurate 3D picture.

The last problem was the 3D printing. Most 3D printers use fused deposition modelling (FDM) technology, with plastic filament replacing the ink cartridges. Various types of material are available. The most commonly used are Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS), a petroleum-based thermoplastic; Polylactic Acid (PLA), a biodegradable thermoplastic polymer made from plant starch; and Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA). The first two were no good because they set hard – think Lego bricks – and we needed our artificial flesh to remain soft so that it would move realistically. Also ABS can generate mild fumes, the objection to which was obvious, and PLA was brittle as well as hard. Finally, PVA was no use because it’s water-soluble and we couldn’t have our prostheses dissolving in the shower or outside in the rain.

Fred had solved the problem earlier that year, just before I joined him at the end of the school summer term. He had found a promising material that held its form but stayed flexible after printing. It was used in food-packaging and medical devices. The manufacturer was a German company. He spent two weeks with the materials scientists at their Frankfurt R & D facility. Without telling any actual untruths, he said, he had implied that he worked for a medical supplier. His hosts were fascinated by the idea of using 3D printing to make realistic, custom-fitting prostheses. They saw working with us as a way to get into the artificial body parts business. They were able to make slight modifications to their formula to make a new, supple plastic that could replicate soft tissue and was ideal for our purposes. They promised a regular supply in exchange for introductions to UK manufacturers, which Fred and my mother were easily able to do from their extensive range of contacts. We paid only for the cost of materials and everyone was happy.

It was a real thrill when the first 3D model appeared on Fred’s 65-inch monitor – especially as it was me! We had mostly used mannequins before, but he decided he needed a live test subject so I had stood stark naked on the dais in our little photography suite while the high definition cameras clicked away. Now a perfect image of my adolescent body was slowly rotating on Fred’s screen.

“I should probably pixilate your private parts out before any of the ladies see this,” he grinned.

“Yes, please. Though it looks like you won’t need many pixels,” I said, gloomily.

“Hey, don’t worry, mate. You’re about average down there.”

“Are you an expert then?” I grinned.

“Well, yes actually.”

Which maybe answered my unspoken question about how close he and my mother were.

The next job was to upload a range of body type templates which Fred had sourced from a fashion house website. The basic template was for a size eight woman, five feet ten inches tall – not that you would be likely to meet such a fabulous creature anywhere other than on a catwalk. But it wasn’t too difficult to inflate the model’s figure up through the dress sizes or shrink her height to whatever we needed. From this I assumed that the target models for the first tests would be female.

I had thoroughly enjoyed working on the software modules Fred had given me to do, but at this point I hadn’t really grasped the point of it all.

“OK,” he said, when he had finished the template program, “now I can show you what this has all been for.”

He brought up the model of my body beside the female template. One click and the figure shrank proportionally to my height – five feet, eight. Another click and the two figures merged. There were patches of red where my body crossed over the boundaries of the female figure. This was most obvious around the shoulders, the trunk, and the waist, although my hands and feet were also a little larger than those of the female template. There were green areas where she protruded outside my figure – her breasts and buttocks, and a little around the thighs.

“So if we wanted to transform you into a female of the same height,” Fred announced triumphantly, we would use 3D printing to make prostheses shaped like those green areas.”

“I see,” I said, a little uncomfortably. “Not that I want you to do that, of course. What about the red areas?”

“Well, the female template is currently set to dress size eight, which is on the small side.”

He clicked an icon. The female figure ballooned and the red areas shrank.

“That’s size ten…” He clicked again. “…and that’s size twelve.”

The red areas were mostly gone.

“You’d get away with that, I think. Amazingly size sixteen is the average for a mature woman in the UK nowadays, but you wouldn’t need to go that big. With the right dress, hair and make-up, no one would notice that your shoulders and waist are a tiny bit wider than most women of your height.”

“Theoretically, you mean,” I said. “I have no intention of finding out.”

“Ah,” he said, “so your mother hasn’t talked to you about the other part of your job here with us this summer? I’ll just give her a call…” He began dialling on the internal network. “You see, more than ninety per cent of our business is in transforming men into women...”

* * *

“We need a guinea pig to test our processes for the photography and the 3D printing,” my mother explained when she joined us in the computer room. “You’re perfect for testing every type of prosthetic we use. You’re a little below the average height for a man, which makes you tallish for a woman, but not conspicuously so. You’re slim, so we can try and make you a pretty, young woman, but we can also pad you out to any shape we want. You have nondescript, unlined features; your face is oval, not long and thin; you don’t have a large nose or a pronounced supraorbital ridge. With the right wig and make-up, you can be believable as any age and either sex.”

“So, basically, you’re saying I’m bland-looking.”

“You’re physically versatile,” she corrected. “Protean, mutable, a human chameleon…”

“Mr Blanditty Bland; dull, boring, nondescript, and androgynous, to boot.”

“That’s not what I said!”

“S’okay. I got my genes from you, after all.”

“Actually, you’re the spitting image of your father. If you took after my side of the family you’d be over six foot by now.”

“Sure, blame the parent who isn’t here.”

“There’s no blame involved,” she replied. “You may not have memorable features, but that’s not a bad thing. There are advantages to being… anonymous. And you’re actually not bad-looking.”

“Gee, thanks. So I’m just… bland.”

“Oh, get over yourself,” she said impatiently. “You’re exactly what we need right now for testing our systems, and don’t forget we’re paying you.”

“Not enough, you’re not.”

But she had already gone, leaving me and Fred to get on with the 3D printing.

She was right about my genetic inheritance. Her father, uncles and brothers were all tall, and she was a big woman herself. She wasn’t really fat, although some middle-aged spread had certainly started to make its presence felt. She had been called a ‘handsome’ woman, though I suppose that’s a euphemism for ‘not unattractive but slightly masculine’. You’d certainly never use the word ‘pretty’ in any sentence describing my mother. Embarrassingly, although I was about half an inch taller than her, she was bigger than me in every other dimension. I took after my father, who was a shrimp, apparently. I often wondered how they got together in the first place.

* * *

She promised me a bonus if I cooperated. From then on I spent half my time writing software and the other half as a test subject. And it wasn’t enough for her just to stick prostheses onto me, she insisted I go the whole hog. For my first transformation my mother wanted to find out how young and pretty she could make me. Could she change an average-looking sixteen-year-old boy into a convincing schoolgirl of the same age, or even younger?

Once Fred had sourced the right additional materials – liquid latex, flesh-coloured dyes, etc – and proved that the 3D printer could add them to the basic structures, making the prostheses was easy; or at least simple ones like breast forms. After some abortive experimentation, he and my mother decided that it would be easiest to make the padding for my hips, thighs and butt as a combined prosthesis. So we had some work to do to fine-tune the processing and the 3D printing software to join the pieces together as a single, wearable unit.

This ‘abdominal prosthesis’ finally came out like a pair of tight, flesh-coloured shorts, with long legs nearly down to my knees. It had very thin edges round the waist and leg holes, but gross flabby padding in the thighs and buttocks. It was designed to be skin-tight everywhere and to stay in place without adhesive. It had a slit at the back which needed to be carefully aligned to my anus.

The most complicated part of the design was to create an internal pouch for my penis. This took ages and several tries to get right, and the fittings ranged between uncomfortable and downright excruciating. I certainly earned my wages as a ‘crash test dummy’. The best prototype only worked if I – actually Vera, our prosthetics specialist – gently levered my testicles back up into their cavities. In all the failed versions, either my genitals formed tell-tale lumps at the front, or the prosthesis was too painful to wear. I realised I would have to sit for all my toilet functions while wearing it.

Although I was still far from enthusiastic about being the one who would be testing this contrivance, I had to admit the creativity, even genius, that had gone into making it. It put my male organs completely beyond reach, but this didn’t worry me unduly at the time. I was sixteen years old, inexperienced and naïve for my age. Currently no young lady stood to benefit from access to my wedding tackle.

Throughout this part of the work, Fred seemed a little reluctant, but he didn’t explain why. I supposed it might all have been my imagination. He’d certainly been enthusiastic enough throughout the design and manufacturing stages.

When all the necessary components were finally ready, I had to undergo my first complete transformation. I reported to Vera’s treatment room after breakfast one day in early July. There was an ominous-looking trolley on which were the disgusting lumps of wobbly fake flesh that Fred and I had spent nearly a month getting ready. These particular examples were a good match to my skin colour and quite small, as I was to be as ‘petite’ as my basic frame would allow. A latex odour permeated the air. I would smell like a newly manufactured mannequin.

At Vera’s command I stripped off and lay down on her operating table. First, she had to wax me hair-free all over. That experience should have been enough to earn me a hefty bonus by itself. She delicately lifted my briefs when necessary to ensure I was smooth everywhere but around my genitals. That might all have been pleasant in an erotic way, had it not been for the searing pain when she ripped off each length of wax, taking my minimal body hair with it. I tried to bear it all without making a fuss and Vera admitted she was impressed. Apparently most people screamed in agony during this process. When she had finished, she massaged me all over with a soothing lotion. That was enjoyable and also dulled the pain somewhat.

While I was recuperating, tingling all over, she went to the trolley and picked up the first two fleshy lumps.

“Breasts first, Steve. I’m using medical adhesive and it sets quite quickly. Try to keep as still as you can. You don’t want these all lop-sided and I don’t want to spill any glue on you.”

She applied adhesive to my chest and the first form and pressed it down hard on top of my left nipple with all her strength. I held my breath while she counted a minute out loud. When she got to sixty, she stepped back. The form stayed in place. She prodded it a couple of times and it wobbled realistically (she said) but didn’t slip sideways.

“That seems to have worked,” she said. “I’ll do the other one.”

She repeated the process on my right-hand side.

“OK, try sitting up,” she said. “How do they feel?”

“Like two lead weights pulling down on the skin of my chest,” I said.

They really weren’t comfortable. She laughed.

“They’re tiny compared to a fully mature woman’s breasts. They’re barely a B cup! And they’re exactly the weight that real breasts would be. If a girl your age can live with them, so can you.”

“Yes, but her breasts take months to come in. She gets used to them slowly…” I began, but there didn’t seem much point in complaining.

She had picked up a fine brush and a small pot of something. She started painting the edges of the forms.

“This is just make-up to hide the edge between the forms and your chest. It will make them look like they’re really part of you.”

“Why bother? I thought I was supposed to be a schoolgirl, not a stripper,” I grumbled.

“I’m just being thorough,” she laughed. “A girl never knows when she might need to go topless. Anyway we need to see just how good we can make your transformation. Some of our clients may want to be convincing even in the nude.”

I snorted. When she had finished, she showed me my new bosom in her mirror. It was totally realistic. Not that I had first-hand experience of many – well, any – girls’ bosoms.

“Here – you’ll be more comfortable with this on.”

She passed me a plain white bra. I slipped my arms in, and she helped me fasten it behind my back and adjust the straps. The support was a relief as my new breasts had stopped pulling at the skin of my chest.

“How long does the glue last?” I asked.

“It’s good for about two weeks…”

“What!”

“…but we have a special solvent if you need to remove them earlier.”

“Well of course I’ll need to remove them earlier!”

“Why? Have you got a date or something?”

“Well, no,” I admitted, “but I may want to go out to the shops or the gym or something.”

“Oh, I’m quite sure you’ll be going out.” She smiled. “Your mother has every intention of testing your disguise in public.” I gaped at her, aghast. “Don’t look so worried. When we’ve finished with you, no one will be able to tell you’re anything other than a pretty teenage girl.”

“Well that’s not reassuring at all!”

I sat back down on the table with a thump.

“Seriously, Steve, don’t try and remove them without the solvent. You’ll tear your skin. I’m afraid you’re stuck with them for the moment.”

She grinned at her pun. I wasn’t feeling like laughing. I noticed that, even though my new bust was on the small side, it was still hard to see my feet over it without turning sideways.

“Now for your lower half,” Vera said, getting back to business. “You’ll have to bear with me. This is the first time I’ve fitted one of these, not counting the experiments.”

I shuddered at the memory of the half-finished things I was subjected to when we were still trying to get the design right. She reached for the complete abdominal prosthesis and handed it to me. Its weight caught me by surprise.

“Yes, it will feel quite heavy at first,” she said, “but it needs to weigh the same as real flesh, so it will make you move as if it was actually part of you. I’ll sprinkle some talcum powder inside to make it easier to get on.”

I stepped into the fearsome device I was partly responsible for creating. (Oh, the irony!) I pulled it up carefully, afraid it would rip. Even though my new female self would be by no means overweight – well, OK, maybe a little – the prosthesis was really heavy. Its fleshy thighs and curvy buttocks jiggled realistically.

“Let me help you tuck yourself away,” she said. “It will be a little tricky.”

Vera then became only the second female in the world who had touched my private parts, something which neither of us really wanted. She gently pushed my testicles back upwards. Then she awkwardly manoeuvred my member into a tube inside the prosthesis and tucked it away between my legs.

“Is that OK?” she asked, with concern. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for ending your dynasty right here.” I nodded, but she saw me wince. “Yes, it’ll probably feel a little uncomfortable at first, but we’re pretty sure it’s safe enough. Hopefully you’ll get used to it.”

She handed me a pair of plain white panties to match my bra. Realising I was now indistinguishable from an actual naked female down there, I hurried to put them on. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror – I saw a teenage girl in plain white underwear with my head on her shoulders.

“Let me take your new measurements,” said Vera.

She fetched a measuring tape from her desk and took my vital statistics. It had been a while since I was last measured for anything. I recalled a slightly over-familiar tailor shoving his hand up to my crotch to take my ‘inside leg’ measurement for school trousers. It was weird to have a woman running a tape around my bust, waist and hips.

“Hmm, not a bad figure for a girl your age, except that your waist is a little on the large side. No more cream cakes for you, young lady. Perhaps we’ll let you off wearing a bikini to the beach.”

I pretended to find this banter amusing, though I was afraid she might be serious about the bikini thing. Vera was used to dealing with men who actually wanted to appear as women. She had clearly forgotten that I hadn’t volunteered and was only doing it for the money (and because my tyrannical mother insisted).

“Now make sure you wash all your new orifices very thoroughly every night to prevent infection,” she said. “You’ll probably find it easiest to do it in the bath. You must take it off every couple of days anyway to clean the inside of the prosthetic. Come to me and I’ll help you. We’re trying to find some way of dealing with perspiration but we haven’t come up with anything yet.”

Vera was inspecting me too.

“I must say those prostheses are really good,” she said. “I had my doubts when Fred and Ingrid described the process, but I don’t think anyone could tell that all that flesh isn’t genuine; at least, not without a really close inspection. The fake skin even has visible pores and freckles!”

Still gazing at me admiringly, she passed me a pink woman’s dressing gown and matching slippers. I put them on quickly, anxious to cover myself up as much as possible.

“You’re to go next door now,” Vera said, “for your hair and make-up.”

I dutifully plodded next door, Vera following. Sharon was our chirpy hairdresser and make-up specialist. Her jaw dropped when she saw me. She burst out laughing.

“That’s amazing!” she squealed. “Take your robe off, sweetie. Let me see your figure.”

Sighing, I dropped the dressing gown on a chair and stood there in my bra and panties, thoroughly embarrassed, while Sharon circled me, giggling. She smacked my left buttock, playfully. I sensed rather than felt my soft, newly-acquired flesh ripple under the blow.

“It’s so realistic!” she said. “How does it feel?”

“Well, I can’t feel your touch through the prosthetic – obviously,” I said. “But if you mean ‘what’s it like to wear these things’, it’s as if someone’s strapped a pillow to my backside.”

“And two pillows to your chest, I assume?” said Vera.

I smiled, despite my discomfort. The two women’s enthusiasm was catching.

“When Ingrid’s regular clients see these new prostheses, we’re going to be inundated, aren’t we?” said Sharon.

“I’m sure we will,” said Vera. “She’ll probably want you and me to go full-time. Which reminds me – we have to take lots of photos for marketing. Fred’s building a website.”

“What! I’m not having pictures of me dressed as a girl on the bloody internet!”

“Don’t worry, dear,” said Sharon. “You won’t be recognisable when I’ve done your hair and make-up, and Fred will obscure your real face in any ‘before’ pictures.” She turned to Vera. “Now, how does Ingrid want her dressed?”

Her?

“Schoolgirl,” Vera said. “I’m off down to the store room to dig out a uniform and accessories.”

“OK, minimal make-up then,” said Sharon, “and long hair. We can do an Alice band, a pony-tail, and finally plaits. I’m just going to tidy up your eyebrows first. They’re a little too bushy for a young lady.”

The eyebrow plucking was even worse than the waxing, but at least it didn’t take as long. I put my dressing gown back on and sat in Sharon’s hairdresser chair. Then she did a subtle ‘no make-up make-up’ – thin foundation, a little eye liner and natural colour lip gloss.

She had stretched a nylon mesh cap over my short haircut, and was selecting a plain, long brunette wig, when Vera returned with a wheelie suitcase. It contained my schoolgirl costume. Despite my embarrassment, by now I was as curious as they were to see how I would turn out. I found myself cooperating with no further resistance. Sharon finished brushing my wig, pulled it on me over the cap, and added hair grips to hold it in place.

“Ingrid says she doesn’t want you to get a haircut until it’s time to go back to school,” she said. “She’s hoping it will soon be long enough that you won’t need a wig.”

I first had to put on a crisp white blouse (with the buttons on the ‘wrong’ side) and a girl’s school tie. On my feet were white ankle socks and black Mary Jane sandals. The piêce de resistance was an old-fashioned school gymslip. It was black, and the pleated skirt came down to my knees. I was allowed to stand and examine myself in the wall mirror. “My God, I look about thirteen!”

“Well, a slightly plump thirteen,” said Sharon, “but they say childhood obesity is… er, mushrooming these days, don’t they?”

“Surely no one wears gymslips like this anymore, do they? Outside St Trinian’s films, I mean.”

“Actually the juniors at some of the private girls’ schools still do,” said my mother, who had come in quietly while I was staring at myself in the mirror.

“You look great,” said Sharon. “By the way no one calls that a ‘gymslip’ anymore. In England it’s a pinafore dress; the Americans call it a jumper dress. Come on, let’s get some pictures for Fred.”

I had to stay still while Sharon took what felt like hundreds of photos, trying several different ways of arranging my wig, and my mother made her expert evaluation of my transformation.

“Yes, I think she’ll get away with thirteen or fourteen,” my mother concluded, “especially with her hair in plaits. Slight issue with her waist, as we expected, but it wouldn’t give her away by itself.” She turned to Vera. “Do we have a blazer that works with that gymslip?”

Vera delved into the suitcase again and pulled out a short black girls’ school blazer with a fancy crest on the breast pocket.

“Good, thank you,” my mother said. “Come along then, Milly. We’re going to the shops.”

Milly? Shops?

I think I’ll leave this experience out of my ‘How I Spent My Summer Holidays’ essay...

* * *

Before I knew it, we were in my mother’s elderly Range Rover headed for town. I would have made more of a fuss about this outing, but the force of her personality was hard to resist. Protesting was useless. She explained that presenting me as Milly, a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, in a busy shopping centre was an excellent way of getting independent feedback on my transformation. We would be a mother and daughter looking for new clothes. If my disguise was good enough, I should attract no special attention or curiosity.

“Why ‘Milly’?” I asked sullenly in the car on the way.

“I like the name,” my mother said. “If you’d really been a girl, that’s what we would have called you. Why? What’s wrong with it? What girl’s name would you prefer?”

“I don’t want to be called by any girl’s name. I don’t want to be a girl at all. This whole thing is stupid.”

“It’s not stupid – it’s educational!”

“No one’s going to believe I’m a girl.”

“Nonsense! The way you look, you’ll fool anyone. Just try and act like a schoolgirl.”

“I don’t know how to do that!”

“Well I suggest you try and figure it out,” she said, devoid of sympathy. “Otherwise you’ll be embarrassing yourself. It’s no skin off my nose if passers-by call you a transvestite pervert, and shop assistants call security. I’ll just slip away and leave you to explain yourself.”

That was a terrifying prospect. She wouldn’t really do that, would she? Actually I wouldn’t put it past her. But she was right; if I failed to act like a pubescent girl on a clothes shopping trip with Mummy, I would be the one to suffer, not her.

“Your voice is the only thing that could give you away,” she continued. “So try and say as little as possible, and speak softly. You’ll be fine. You sounded just like a girl when you were the leading lady in that junior school play.”

“That was three years ago and my voice hadn’t broken.”

“Actually it broke during rehearsals. Mr Jameson was afraid he’d have to recast, but you managed to deliver all your lines in a high enough register to sound female. He was most impressed. He kept telling everyone you had a really flexible voice, ideal for a career as an actor.”

I remembered that. As Head of English and Drama, he was disappointed when I never auditioned for any more plays. Since I had opted for double-maths and physics for my A levels, I wouldn’t be seeing much of him in the future either.

“I don’t understand why we’re doing this,” I said, hoping to make one last attempt to get her to take me back.

“It’s business. Look, I’ve been running a transformation service for some time now, just using wigs, make-up, and padding that’s commercially available. But some of my regular customers have stopped coming. I suppose we’ve taught them enough that they think they can manage without us. But if this new computerised prosthetic system is a success, it will change everything. Our transformations will be much more realistic – and no one else will be able to do what we do.”

“Who are your customers anyway? There can’t be many men who want to be schoolgirls.”

“You’d be surprised! But no, they aren’t our primary business. Many of our clients are transgendered, or think they are. Our service gives them the opportunity to try living as a member of the opposite sex realistically, and thereby separate fantasy from reality.”

She became more serious.

“It’s a sign of the times, I suppose. Society is becoming more accepting of transsexuals nowadays and the medical profession is rushing to offer their support. That’s basically a good thing, but there are already signs that the pendulum may have swung too far: giving children who are struggling with gender issues puberty-blocking drugs, for example. Critics say that this is happening too often, and that in many cases the onset of puberty ‘cures’ gender dysphoria. I don’t know about that, but an increasing number of people who have changed sex have regretted it, and want to change back.

“So we offer a service that allows people who think they may be gender dysphoric to try living as a member of the opposite sex, and hopefully find out for sure – one way or the other. With this new technology our transformations will be much more realistic. Also, anyone who wants to go for full Sexual Reassignment Surgery usually has to live as their new sex for at least a year before any doctor will authorise the operation. We can help them be more convincing during that time.”

“I’m surprised there are enough customers of that kind to make the business viable,” I said sceptically.

“Well, no,” she admitted, “but we do have a wider range of clientele than that. Cross-dressers and transvestites, obviously, but anyone who wants to change their appearance for any reason. It doesn’t always involve a change of sex.”

“Does that mean you help criminals?” I asked. I was starting to get worried.

“I make it a rule never to ask a client’s motives. Oh, I’ve no doubt that we have occasionally helped people with criminal intentions, in the same way that banks must sometimes oblige criminal money-launderers, however careful they are. I take every possible precaution to avoid participating in illicit activities, but I can’t be certain it’s never happened.”

We had reached the shopping centre by now. It was very busy and she had to park on the roof level of the multi-storey. She gestured to me to get out of the car. Reluctantly I complied. I tried to think how a thirteen-year-old girl in school uniform would be acting under these circumstances.

“Isn’t it a bit odd that I’m in school uniform?” I said. “It’s the holidays.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Not all the schools have broken up for the summer yet. Now come on; we’re supposed to be here to buy you some casual clothes.”

“But we’re not really going to do that, are we? I’m taking all this stuff off when we get back home. I don’t need any more girls’ clothes.”

“Of course, you don’t. This is a pretend shopping trip – mostly. We might buy a few cheap things for additional realism, but mainly we’ll parade you around in public to see if people notice anything amiss. Try and look happy. Young girls love getting new clothes.”

I put a big fake smile on my face and tried to bounce up and down with excitement.

“All right, all right! No need to overdo it,” she tutted. “Now we might get you a new skirt or a pair of trousers. I assume you don’t want to wear a school blazer and a pinafore dress for longer than you have to, do you?” She smiled. “Though it’s a shame; you look really cute.”

I didn’t want to wear a skirt much either, though anything would be better than this gymslip. Our first port of call was a large department store and the ‘Junior Misses’ section. I scanned the display.

“Ooh, can I have those trousers, please, Mummy? Can I? Please, Mummy, please?” I whined, trying to sound like a thirteen-year-old girl, but I was handicapped because I didn’t know any.

I had deliberately chosen a pair of skin-tight mock-leather pants that I knew my mother would hate. Two middle-aged ladies, browsing a display of underwear which was much too young for them, glanced in our direction.

“For heaven’s sake, Milly,” my mother said, sounding exasperated. “You’ll look like a biker girl.”

“Please, Mummy, please?”

One of the ladies nudged her companion and grinned.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to try them on,” my mother said grudgingly.

“Try them on?” I said, alarmed. “You mean, go into the women’s changing room?

“Of course. Why not?”

“Because I’m… a boy!” I hissed.

“Well, you’d better hope no one finds out, hadn’t you?” she said. “I’ll ask the assistant for a pair in your size,” she added more loudly.

The ladies couldn’t have overheard the quiet part of our conversation, and they were sure they were listening to a mother and daughter arguing about suitable clothes. They were thoroughly enjoying the little drama, probably having been on both sides of the debate themselves in their time.

The assistant came over. She sized me up by eye and got out her measuring tape. She eventually decided on a size 14, muttering something about them possibly be a little ‘snug in the waist’.

Nevertheless I took them to the fitting room, which fortunately offered individual cubicles with curtains. I hung my blazer on a hook, pulled my gymslip over my head, and took off my school tie. I kicked my sandals off and stepped into the trousers. They were very close-fitting and quite a struggle to pull on. As the assistant had guessed, they were a little tight at the waist, but the real problem was to get them over my prosthetically-enhanced bottom. I eventually managed to pull them all the way up and fastened the waistband. They were like a second skin. I didn’t dare bend over, but somehow I slipped my feet back into my Mary Janes.

I put my blazer back on and rolled my gymslip up in an untidy bundle around my tie. Then I went back out to show my mother.

“I love them, Mummy!” I said in a high-pitched, giggly voice, playing up to the stereotype.

My mother rolled her eyes.

“You can dial down the girliness a little, I think,” she said. “You sound like Violet Elizabeth Bott. You’ll start attracting attention for the wrong reasons.”

Some people are never satisfied. I twirled in front of the mirror. My butt looked enormous, but in an undeniably feminine and sexy way.

“They do look quite good though,” she mused. “If we do some window shopping for an hour or so, they will certainly show off your figure, and I can watch out for anyone looking at you askance. How much are they?”

I grabbed a label attached to a zipper at the side.

“Er… forty-nine, ninety-nine. It says they’re in the sale and would normally be seventy quid.”

“Well, I suppose we can put them in our wardrobe department, though I can’t imagine any of our clients squeezing into them – or wanting to.”

She waved to the assistant who came scurrying over. That was another strange thing about my mother. When I wander around a large store looking for help, all the sales staff are dealing with other customers or on their coffee break. When she wants one, they appear as if by magic.

Five minutes later we were making our way down the central concourse towards the coffee shop, my new leather trousers creaking with each step. I was carrying one of the store’s carrier bags with my gymslip and tie in it.

* * *

After a pause for refreshments – I had orange squash; thirteen-year-old girls don’t drink coffee – my mother dragged me into several more shops. I had to try on dresses, skirts and tops, and examine several styles of lacy underwear. I was allowed to replace my little girl ankle socks with a pair of grown-up tights, but my mother refused to waste any money on replacing my Mary Janes.

In the changing rooms I saw lots of women and girls in their bras and knickers, which as a naïve sixteen-year-old of the opposite sex I thoroughly enjoyed, apart from the additional pressure on my member inside its restraining tube.

My mother bought some of the clothes I tried on. Milly was assembling quite a wardrobe and we had to make several trips back to the car with stuffed shopping bags. I was puzzled.

“Why are you buying all this stuff?” I asked. “I won’t need any girls’ things after today.”

“We keep a wide range of clothes for our clients,” my mother explained airily. “Many don’t have anything of their own. It’s an additional service, and quite a decent money-spinner. We’ll probably recoup the costs of this lot quite quickly.”

“Do you have many customers of my size? I assumed they would mostly be older and fatter.”

“Some,” she said. “Actually the biggest problem is shoes. We have to go to specialist stores to find women’s shoes in men’s sizes. You have quite small feet for a male, but you’re still at the upper end of the range. That’s another reason why you’ll have to put up with those Mary Janes.”

Why did I have the feeling she was being economical with the truth? Still, the whole experience wasn’t too bad. From what we could tell – and my mother had the eaglest of eyes – no one suspected me of being anything other than a teenage girl. The more confident we became that my artificial flesh was passing the test, the more cheerful she was. When we finished shopping, she even let me go home in my new trousers.

We were crossing the roof level of the car park, when there was a squeal of brakes behind me. We both turned quickly, in time to see a young man sprawling across the tarmac and a BMX bike skidding sideways in the opposite direction. He’d been showing off, doing wheelies, when he caught sight of my well-upholstered backside describing its erotic circular motion in my new skin-tight leggings. The accident was accompanied by mocking laughter from two other youths leaning on the wall twenty yards away.

“Damn! Your ass is a danger to shipping, girl!” the boy said, picking his bike up, and leering at me suggestively.

“You leave my daughter alone, young man!”

My mother had thrown her arms around me like a hen protecting her chick. Instinctively I started to shrug her off, but aborted that when I realised that a thirteen-year-old girl would have done the opposite. I hugged her closer, pretending to be frightened.

“She’s only thirteen!” my mother remonstrated.

“Cradle-snatcher!” yelled one of the observers, laughing.

“You shouldn’t be riding your bicycle here anyway,” she continued. “You’re endangering pedestrians.”

The boy was back on his bike now. He winked at me lewdly and rode off to his mates. When she was sure no one could see her, my mother smiled at me.

“I suppose we could consider that your final test, Milly,” she said happily. “A boy falling off his bike at your feet!”

“So I can get all this clobber off when we get back home?”

“Well, no.” She was almost apologetic, but then she never actually apologised for anything. “You’ll need to stay like that for a few days. We have to make sure the prostheses will last. If they crumble or fall apart, we can’t sell them. So we need you to test them to destruction, as it were.”

Which explained why we needed all the new clothes. As I suspected, my mother always had two reasons for doing anything, and she usually kept the real reason to herself for as long as possible.

* * *

Mum wanted me to learn to act like the girl I appeared to be. She argued that if I attracted attention because I looked like a schoolgirl but walked like a docker, it would hardly be a proper test of the effectiveness of their creations. So I had to spend a day with Alice Parr, our part-time movement expert, learning how females walk and speak. That was hard work, but after I got over feeling like a fool, it wasn’t so bad. In fact it was quite interesting to learn about the differences between the male and female anatomies, and the prostheses helped me get my wiggle right.

During the working day Milly replaced Steve at his workstation in the Bunker. At first it was embarrassing to be with people I knew while dressed as a pubescent girl, but they were all used to transformations like mine and treated it as an everyday matter. They all called me Milly and gently corrected me whenever I said or did anything unfeminine. I found this irritating at first but I soon got used to it. I didn’t really understand why I had to do this, but Mum said she was just being thorough. She also reminded me that my bonus depended on doing as I was told.

In fact, I found it helped to talk about Steve in the third person while I was Milly. It kept my two personas separate. The last thing I wanted was for them to begin to merge. So for the next two weeks I slept in the apartment’s third bedroom, with all of Milly’s things and nothing of Steve’s. His clothes wouldn’t fit me now anyway, so this was partly for convenience, but it was also to remind me to think of myself as Milly, and to separate her personality entirely from Steve’s.

I had to carry a little handbag around with all my girly stuff in it. I hated that. It included a new pink smartphone my mother gave me – not that I was going to call anyone as Milly, and I fervently hoped no one would call me. I left Steve’s phone in his – my – old room so that I didn’t accidentally answer it in my Milly voice.

Mother took me out a lot, to shops, restaurants, and the cinema in the evenings; and for walks in the hills and by the sea at the weekend. The lessons paid off. At first I had to concentrate to work out what a thirteen-year-old girl would do in any situation, but soon it began to come naturally.

In any case, no one we met ever seemed to see through my disguise or even give me a second look – apart from a couple of lads lounging around on Clacton pier. I was wearing a particularly short dress and the wind blew my skirt up exposing my knickers. The boys whistled at me, to my crushing embarrassment.

As per my mother’s instructions I took my abdominal prosthesis off every other day to clean it out, and to have a good wash and make sure my skin was healthy underneath. I couldn’t remove the breasts but one morning at the end of my second week as Milly, I woke up to find that one of the forms had slipped off during the night. It was still in the cup of my nightie but it wasn’t attached to me anymore. When I got out of bed and stood up, the breast dropped through and fell to the floor. I took my nightgown off and gently tried to move the other form. It peeled off easily. Either the adhesive had broken down at last, or I had lost the top layer of skin, or both.

I was delighted to dress as Steve for the first time in a fortnight. There was no need to put my prosthesis back on this morning, and no need for wig or make-up today.

“Morning, Steven,” said my mother when I appeared at breakfast.

She seemed unsurprised and unconcerned at the loss of her daughter and the reappearance of her son. She thanked me abruptly for my forbearance at having spent a fortnight in drag and rushed off to a client meeting.

She didn’t give me a chance to ask about my bonus.