8

Meg and me flew back to London the following day. We’d no sooner got home than Meg was away again – she’d landed the role of Desdemona in Othello at the Everyman in Liverpool and rehearsals started that week. I saw her off from Euston and made my way to the flat, closed the door and slumped onto the sofa. It had been a crazy couple of weeks and I was looking forward to a bit of downtime. After the sunshine and optimism of Los Angeles, London was grey and wet and depressing. I hated autumn. Someone had described the season to me as when it gets cold and dark and everything dies, and I could understand their way of thinking. Still, the weather gave me the perfect excuse to go out shopping as none of the clothes I’d bought in LA were suitable for the drop in temperature. I had plenty other things to get on with too. I collected up Dave’s clothes, put them into bin bags and dropped them off at the local charity shop. I made an appointment with my GP to talk to him about a referral to the gender clinic. And, like many an aspiring actress before me, I invested my first pay cheque with a cosmetic surgeon, and by the end of my first week back in the UK I was the proud owner of my own beautiful, soft, sensitive, gorgeous breasts.

I took it easy for the next few weeks to let the surgery heal. There was still no news about when our pilot would be aired. Ryan texted – he’d been lucky with his house, the fire reaching his garden and burning down his fence, but a change in wind preventing further destruction. He was off to Kenya now for several weeks. I still hadn’t heard anything from Rachel since she’d dropped me off at the studio gates for the audition. I went to see Meg’s play in Liverpool. But I was bored, and tired of waiting for news from others. I got in touch with the catering company I’d been working for before I went to LA and started waitressing again. If nothing else, it kept my mind occupied. The other staff there were fun, even though most were new faces. I picked up as many shifts as I could, and was soon working most evenings and occasional afternoon shifts too. I’d been back working a couple of weeks when, one evening shift, I found myself working the same table as Rob, the boy who had given Meg and me a lift home the evening after the premiere.
“Sue! Great to see you! I’d heard you’d gone off to make your fame and fortune!”
“Hey Rob! How are you? Yeah, I’ve been doing some acting work, which has been great. Back to the grind for now though. How about you?”
“Oh, you know, same old, same old. Nice to see you back!”
We chatted away for the rest of the shift. He was easy to get on with, and I’d been so starved of human contact that when he asked if I wanted to catch a film with him the following night I said yes. Then I remembered I was working.
I bit my lip apologetically. “Evening shifts every night this week. And most afternoons too”.
He tried not to look disappointed. “No worries. How about a walk and a coffee tomorrow morning? There’s a cool new café opened just off Chiswick Common?”

I got home that night not sure if I’d accepted a date, or just a walk with a friend. Rob seemed a nice guy, and he was kind of cute in a boy-next-door kind of way, but, my sex life being a weird mixture of non-existent and yet still complicated, I wasn’t ready for a date. There were a lot of things unsaid when I’d last seen Rachel, including the not insubstantial elephant in the room that I was now living full time as Sue. And I couldn’t think of Rob without comparing him to Ryan, which didn’t do him any favours at all. It had felt like Ryan and I had a whole lot of mutual attraction going on, and yet there was a distinct possibility, which every day that passed without hearing about the pilot reinforced, that I might never see him again. And there was the added complication that Rob didn’t, unlike both Rachel and Ryan, know anything of my background. If we were to build any kind of relationship at all, even just as friends, I’d have to tell him about that at some point soon.

The next day dawned crisp and bright. I picked out a black leather miniskirt and a toffee coloured cashmere roll neck to wear with some opaque tights and black boots, topped with a metallic copper puffa jacket. I met Rob at the park gates, and we strolled around one of it’s meandering paths whilst we talked inconsequentially about a whole bunch of stuff. The sky was cloudless and that intense bright blue that only comes on autumn mornings. The trees had begun to lose their foliage, and the path was bordered with deep drifts of golden and rust coloured leaves. Rob joked about my puffa jacket acting like camouflage. After an hour or so we arrived at the café, ordered a couple of lattes, and sat at one of the tables. It was busy – a nearby school made it a popular spot for parents to meet after dropping their kids off.
“So, you never did tell me about what you were working on in LA.”
“Ah, it was a pilot for a new tv series. We’re still waiting to hear when it gets shown on telly. Then, depending on the reaction, it either gets shelved and I carry on waitressing or I go back and film the rest of the series.”
“Sounds amazing! So what’s it about?”
“It’s set in an LA detective agency. I play the new intern and a bit of a lurve thing develops with my boss.”
“Sounds cool!”
“The twist is…” I looked up at Rob so I could gauge his reaction, “…the intern’s a bloke. He goes undercover in drag, and realises he likes being a girl and, well, things develop from there.”
“Eww! Sounds a bit weird to me.” He grimaced. “How did you get the part? I mean, no offence but…” he glanced down at my breasts “…it must be difficult to make you look like a convincing bloke.”
I put my coffee down and fixed his gaze again, speaking quietly but determinedly. “I’m trans, Rob.”
He leaned back into his chair and smiled briefly and awkwardly. “You’re joking, right?”
I shook my head silently.
“You mean, you used to be a man?” He was speaking more aggressively now, his charming date persona gone. I averted my eyes and stared down hard into my coffee. He stood up whilst stepping back from the table, his chair falling over backwards. Some of the other patrons looked up. He turned towards them, pointing at me. “She’s a fucking tranny! A fucking tranny!”
He looked at me, disgustedly, and fled the café.
I burst into tears and buried my head in my hands. I could feel dozens of eyes staring at me and wanted desperately to run, but HE was outside. A waitress picked up the chair and sat down at it, resting her fingers gently on my forearm.
“It’s alright, luv. You’re safe here. He’s gone.” She turned around to the rest of the café. “Nothing to see here folks. Let’s get back to our own business, eh?”
I continued to sob for a few moments. “Thank you.” I rested one of my hands over hers.
“For what it’s worth, luv, he’s not coming in here again. He’s banned. I’ll remember his face, the little twat.”
I smiled briefly.
“Have you far to go?”
“Sorry?”
“To get home. I’m not having you going outside again in case he’s still hanging around. I’ll book you a cab. On the house.”

I was still shaking when I got home an hour later. I phoned the catering agency and told them I was resigning. I zipped off my boots, made myself a huge mug of tea, and climbed under a blanket on the sofa. I was lucky. I’d had a reality check, but nothing worse than that. In Hollywood I’d been living in a fantasy world where I’d been primped and pampered and told all the time how beautiful I looked. In real life it was inevitable that some people would react the way that Rob had, and it could have been much worse. I’d been made aware of my new vulnerability and I’d need to be more careful. I looked across at a picture of Meg on the wall opposite and I though of what she’d had to go through as she grew up. If she was tough enough to deal with all the racist crap she’d had to put up with all her life, then I could deal with a few transphobes. I took a gulp of tea, opened my laptop, and googled ‘catering jobs in London’.