UNIFORMS.

Not even first light. The chop was making my teeth rattle as the blunt bow slammed into each wave the LCU met, and a couple of the lads were already being sick. The bergen weighed far too much, but I’d managed to snaffle a Mao suit and, much to my surprise, managed to squeeze it in. We were in the second wave, and as we had heard nothing from the shore so far it looked as if we were going to be unopposed. Thank fuck my new boots had come. Too many of the lads were still in ammo boots, but I had done more than enough on Dartmoor in mine to know exactly how bad they were.

Stewie belched beside me.

“Sorry, mate” he whispered, but it was better than the sound of those being sick.

“Fucking uncivilised time of the day to be pissing about in boats. Who’d be a pusser?”

The corporal’s voice was much louder.

“Prepare for landing!”

There was a roar from the engines, and a thump. I swayed forward into the men in front, the weight of my pack nearly taking me off my feet. Stewie hauled me back just as the coxswain shouted “Down ramp!” and we were stumbling off, a couple of splashes and then up loose crap to the tide line, the pack making my whole body swing and the SLR heavy in my hands.

The NCOs were busy, and with the rest of D-coy we were marched off onto what felt just like Dartmoor: shaggy, wet grass and bog.

“Right lads, you know the drill. Two to a hole, get digging. Threat to East and South East”

We dropped our bergens and I took the first stint while Stewie watched my back. I’d managed to find a slightly higher bit of ground, so it would hopefully stay drier, but I wasn’t holding out much of that hope. This truly was a shithole, and I hadn’t even seen it yet.

We swapped roles, and in a shorter time than I expected Stewie had a hexi boiling water while I covered us with my shelter quarter. It was drizzling now. Great.

Tea. Hot, sweet, and compo. Pity about the last, but tea is tea and warm is warm, and both were needed. There was a grey light of predawn around us, and I was picking out the rest of the positions as green berets and moustaches came into view. What a cliché the average bootneck is, said neck wider than his head and a Pancho Villa comedy ‘tache over a gob usually missing one or two teeth. Thankfully, I’d kept mine, but other Marines seemed to be a bit careless with theirs, leaving them in various places, almost all involved in selling alcohol. Stewie didn’t match that, being a bit smaller than most, and wiry, hard-edged in his build. He was grabbing a few minutes in the bottom of our slit’un, snoring quietly through his broken nose.

I looked down at him fondly. If he ever knew what I was thinking he would probably kill me, or have a bloody good try.

22 years of a lie. I had done everything I could to break down my delusions, I had made myself as much of a man as possible. At 6’4” I had started with some advantages there, but the small voice inside me still kept up its little mantra.

“You’re not a man…”

Fuck off, Melanie. I may not be a man, but you’re not real. Girls don’t have moustaches, and what I felt for Stewie was just that of a good mate and comrade in arms. No more, and it would never be more. I wouldn’t let it.

A Sea Harrier from the CAP droned overhead, and a pair of RAF GR3s went past, at a level below even our lowest positions. The Rock Apes were beavering away in a zoological mishmash to get the Rapier batteries working, and I could see off to the Sound. Ships sitting there just like a target range, and the Argies should be along shortly. I cleaned up the hole, making sure my weapon was sweet, and as I prodded Stewie awake the first A4 came up over a ridge and all hell broke loose.

It popped up for arming height, and I clearly saw the bombs leave its hardpoints to splash down next to one of the frigates. Tracer was stitching the sky, and as he broke left and hit the deck a Sea Harrier came down on him. Just as the Harrier loosed his missile a Dagger came up to try his own luck.

Fuck. No plane should be able to do that.

The Harrier jinked, and the delta-winged fighter shot straight past him and out of the Sound. as the A4 hit the shoreline in flames.

“This is your early morning wake up call, Stewie”

They came over again, and again, but thankfully we saw no hits. And so it went on. Planes and rain, bombs and ratpacks. I’d dug a latrine downslope from the line, but who the hell thought of putting bogroll in a tin? Bloody compo. We shared a fruitcake, slicing it as bread to make a jam sandwich, and finally the tail boys had sorted out some bivvies and we could rotate out of line. We’d had no sign of the enemy ground forces, but their pilots were definitely busy, and they had balls.

And they succeeded at last. We saw the planes come in on the Antelope, low and fast. I heard later that two bombs hit, but all I saw was the explosion of one of the aircraft. Later she was towed to more sheltered wasters, and two days later she blew up in a spectacular fireball. Thankfully, they had almost everyone off, but the bomb disposal lads went with her.

This really was a shithole, was it worth any of their deaths?

The next day we got the news about the ship bringing the heavy-lift helicopters, sunk by missile strike.

It was going to be a long, long walk.

I have taken a number of small liberties with history here, this being fiction after all. I apologise if any of the real folk who were involved in this feel I have wronged them in any way. This tale is offered in the deepest respect. And of course I affirm copyright, 2010, in both my real name as held by the site operators and the name Cyclist.

CHAPTER 2
The bastards came over at night as well. They weren’t that effective, but having to dive off your basha into a trench doesn’t help with fatigue. We had a bit more room now to play with our toys and avoid those of the Argentines, as the paras had been pulled off to do something else.

What that was intended to be was announced quite openly and calmly by some arsehole on the BBC well before they started. I heard their colonel was threatening to prosecute them for treason. What the hell were they thinking? I did not envy the redtops at all. It was one thing making an assault at night, another thing entirely doing it after sending them a written bloody invitation.

We were catching some crap ourselves as the Rock Apes finally got their little babies up and running. A Pucara had tried to slide in and make a bit of mischief, but the jimpy crew had scared them, just before a Rapier punched a hole right through it. Stewie and I watched that from the bottom of our increasingly-damp hole, as there wasn’t much point in us being up. You don’t bring a plane down with an SLR.

Rain, more rain, and the constant sight of waterspouts in Bomb Alley, as we were now calling San Carlos Water. I wondered how the hell the Navy pilots were able to keep going back up, the weather was hard enough without having to bloody fly in it. We heard that the attack had gone in, and reports were scary. Real WWI stuff, assaulting trenches with the bayonet. I always thought that a bayonet was there just in case you couldn’t shoot straight, and to be honest I didn’t want to find out. Just let me and Stewie get out of this one intact.

“Stevens, McDuff, get here!”

“Yes, Corp?”

“Got a job for you and a couple of others. J-Coy needs a few extras for a bit of fun with the paras”

Oh fuck.

“Get yourselves a combat load, and make sure you take a good supply of grenades. The bean-eaters have dug themselves in and are being a bit cuntish about coming out. You’re going to give 2 Para a bit of a hand, things are moving”

“What’s doing?”

“I hear the paras’ Rupert has demanded that the Argies surrender!”

Balls of brass, balls of brass.

If you thought that riding in an LCU was bad, then don’t even think about helicopters. We were airlifted to the battlefield. Sounds fun. What it actually means is getting into a big, booming tin box with an extremely noisy engine overhead and a lot of draughts, and then being flung around the sky in it by a pilot with a high regard for anti-aircraft missiles and a very healthy desire not to meet any. He fired flares off a couple of times, but we made it to somewhere I was told was Darwin. An ominous name…

There were bodies, in our DPM camouflage rather than Argie olive green. Too many of them. One of the Juliets muttered to me.

“I told them not to make themselves too comfortable, said we’d be back soon”

I realised he was one of the Moody Brook boys, the party of Marines who had been here when the invasion took place, who had been captured and then sent back to the UK.

“Got a score to settle then, mate?”

“Too fucking right. And it starts here”

A para was brought down to the helicopter with a wound dressing on his shoulder, his jacket and shirt pushed down to his waist to leave his upper parts bare. He was swearing quietly as two others helped him to a rock to sit while the aircrew sorted their flight plan. He looked up at us, weary, eyes filled with pain.

“They got the boss. He’s not supposed to be charging fucking trenches”

Something very big started banging away at the other side of the hill. The para grimaced.

“Anti-aircraft gun, 40mm or something like that. They’re using it on the lads. Oh fuck this hurts”

Into the chopper he went, along with two more who arrived as we sat, their mates heading back up the hill. The Juliet’s Company Sergeant Major came along the line of us sat behind our little knoll and listening to the moan of rounds passing overhead and the sharp rattle of small arms.

The CSM was brief, concise and bloody terrifying.

“Johnny Dago is dug in on the next hill there. He doesn’t want to leave. Our friends here have taken a bit of a hiding, but they are not Marines so we will have to show them how to do it. There is going to be a stonk from the gunners just to make a bit of noise and then we are going to assault the hill just beyond the airfield. We have a couple of the boys from the MILAN section with us, so here’s the score. Fire and movement as ever, boys. If you can’t get close enough to a trench to get some grenades into it, the Milan boys will donate an anti-tank rocket for your amusement. And you will fix bayonets.”

Was he fucking mad? He really seemed to be enjoying himself. You want me to walk up a hill into a machine gun with my pockets full of high explosive…

Stewie summed it up.

“How far between your legs can you get your head, Mike?”

“What the hell are you on about, mate?”

“If you can reach your arse you can kiss it goodbye!”

We formed up in open order and made our way down to the airfield. This was what I had trained so hard for, but it was not something I actively wanted to experience. As we walked down through the gorse and the Argentine trenches,I saw more death in one place than I ever imagined. There were smells, too. Burnt grass, burnt flesh, burnt explosives. Blood, so much of it, a thick metallic stink, as well as an overpowering stench of human excrement.

So many of the dead had fouled themselves. A glorious end, I don’t think so. Empty eyes filled with rain.

I dragged myself back to reality. This wasn’t going to be like one of those Hollywood films, where the bullets throw up spurts of dust and you dive for cover. No, here was how it actually happens, something smashes into you and knocks you over, or maybe tears part of you away, and then you hear the shot. And if t was one of those 40mm shells, what it tore away was half of your body.

Please God, if you are there, get Stewie out of this intact. Me if you can spare the time, but look after the man I love.

Concentrate. The first rounds should be falling shortly.

The ground shook, and we were off, hitting the lower slopes at speed to grab cover as the jimpy crews opened up on trenches already quivering under the impact of 105mm shells Once we were there we opened up with the SLRs as the machine gunners rushed up with the MILAN team. The CSM was waving his hands at me…oh, four of us, break left for the little gully. I took Stewie and two of the Juliets at a stumbling, splashing scramble through the wet grass and patches of bog until we were looking up the hill, and rounds started hissing past my head.

Bullets make different sounds depending how far away they are. Overhead, and far way, they moan, but close to they give a little short “wheet”, like a short hissing whistle, and they’re past before you can hear any more. That was the sound from that gully. Shit.

Stewie started crawling downhill, where there was a fold of ground. If he could get in there he might be able to cross their field of fire out of sight in the dead ground.

One of the great things about the SLR is that it can be fired from either shoulder, left or right, because there is no bolt to mess up your face. I popped the rifle round the edge and banged off a few left-handed shots to distract the enemy boys. Stewie was down, and across unharmed (honest, I’ll go to church some day) and he worked his way round to another bit of dead ground not far from the trench. I couldn’t see him, but I saw the grenade in the air, quickly followed by another. As soon as they went off, I was on my feet and sprinting as well as I could through long grass, uphill, stupidly firing off all the rounds left in my magazine There were four of them in the trench, one clearly dead, two more screaming and writhing as the fourth hammered at the cocking lever on his jammed gun.

He looked up at me just as I slid the bayonet into his belly.

Half twist, to release it from the grip of the muscles down there. Pull it back, and in again. And again, screaming in rage and terror.

Stewie grabbed me and pulled me down.

“You’ll get fucking slotted standing up”

He grimaced.

“Good job that grass was so wet. Now nobody can tell….I pissed myself”

I was panting like a steam train, hyperventilating, and so glad to see him whole. I couldn’t help it, I hugged him. He hugged me back.

“People will talk, Mike, but thanks for that”

We were joined by the Juliets, and then the MILAN crew came up. This was a commanding position, but why had they not sited some riflemen in support? Bad, bad tactics. I spotted another position about fifty yards away, and the MILAN crew gave it a present of one of their rockets. Firing around us intensified sharply, and then began to tail off. One of the Juliets’ sergeants slid into the trench, hardly sparing a glance for the dead but casting a careful eye over the two wounded.

“Get them down the hill when you get relieved. Nice one, boys. Looks like they want to stop for a bit, but eyes open, heads down, OK?

I covered my dead man’s face with his cap comforter. I would see him again, as the years went by, every night as he came to say “Hello, remember me?”

Stewie got the hexi going and soon we had a brew. We weren’t relieved, they simply sent a stretcher party for the wounded, one of whom died as we waited.

It got dark. We didn’t really sleep, just catching odd moments slumped in the trench, trying to avoid the stains and keeping as dry as possible. It actually stopped raining towards dawn, and as full light came on we saw a small party coming forward with a white flag. I found out later that this was the new commander’s instruction to the enemy. After Colonel Jones had died, Major Keeble had taken command and had demanded the Argentineans surrender. It seemed like they may just have chucked it in. Thank fuck for that.

And that was exactly what had happened, but what happened next astonished me. At least 1,000 men came out of cover in a long column, laying their weapons down as they came. What the hell were they going to say when they saw how few we actually were?

Years later, I saw an interview with the two commanders. Keeble was calm, measured. He had realised that he was in a nasty spot, and had gone for a walk to put his mind straight. He had even prayed a bit, trying to avoid any more unnecessary deaths, and had then decided to go for broke and demand they surrender. I was impressed.

Then, the Argentine commander gave his version, of glorious death for the Motherland and other such complete bullshit. Young men lay in holes, empty eyes filled with rainwater, because of idiots like him

So we rounded them up and herded them off to some wire enclosures till the tail troops could sort out some tents for them, and we stacked their weapons and helmets. They were a right mixture, some obviously country boys, very young, and terrified we were going to kill them out of hand, some nasty, hard-looking city boys who seemed to be doing their level best to conform to stereotype.

The helicopters had done most of the shuttle work with the wounded, and Stewie and I managed to cadge a lift back to D-Coy.

As we walked back to our unit, Stewie stopped me by a vehicle park, and pulled me out of sight behind a Landrover.

“Now, Mike, don’t get this wrong, but you might want to wash up”

He pointed my face at the Landy’s mirror, and I realised it was almost completely covered in young Argentine blood. That was it, I started to tremble, and, to my disgust, weep.

This time Stewie hugged me. I muttered

“What will people say?”

“Fuck ‘em”

CHAPTER 3
It isn’t like that at all, you know. I wasn’t lusting after Stewie, or indeed any man. I like women for that particular area of my life, though I must admit I hadn’t actually spent any time in indulging that taste.

That little voice had whispered in my ear for as long as I could remember, and while I was very definitely aroused by thoughts of girls, the thought of doing things with what I carried around in my trousers was actively nauseating. I didn’t like it on me, I certainly didn’t like one on somebody else.

So what did that make me? Confused, for a start. I wasn’t gay, or was I? Was there a word for me? Fancies women, loves a man, doesn’t want to shag him, doesn’t want to shag the women he fancies….if I was on any “rainbow arc” of sexuality someone must have poked a stick in and stirred up the colours.

I had fought the voice all my life, or at least once I started to grow properly. I had been scorned out of dolls by my father, a miner in Seghill till they closed it. As a kid I had played rugby on their pitch, which was an odd one. The posts were made of telegraph poles, all creosote and splinters, and the pitch sloped from one side to the other, and from both ends to the middle. Depending on which touch line you were running, it was either baked clay or bog.

I played at many clubs in Northumberland, but Dad wanted me to get out of what was fast becoming a dead village. As the pits closed, and the shipbuilding stopped, and the steel mills shut down, there was nothing left to work for. I wasn’t academically gifted, except with words, and words don’t pay bills. So, I did what so many young lads from areas like mine have always done and joined up. It was meant to be the army, but a conversation with a mate of my dad in a pub changed that.

At 17 I was already a big lad, playing lock in the senior teams, and easily passing for older whenever I wanted a pint. His stories of foreign service and shipboard life caught my imagination, and I decided that I had found a way to close down Little Voice. The more masculine I could live, the less, I hoped, that my insanity could trouble me.

That is what I thought of it. I look back now and realise how wrong I was, but back in the seventies in working class Northumberland those thoughts were not ones to let loose in the wider world. This was the time of punk rock and skinheads, organised football violence and mass unemployment. I was well over six foot tall, broad, strong as an ox; which is actually rather an apt phrase, considering what an ox really is.

After all, I couldn’t be a girl. All I could be was an ox, large, strong, castrated, and far from feminine. That was what crystallised my assumption of insanity on my part: surely, if the God of my parents and my chapel had wanted me to be female, or even one of those who I had read about in the News of the World and the Mirror, I would’ve been more female in my appearance and not so downright butch?

It felt odd using that word, with its associations in my mind with homosexuality, but I couldn’t think of anything more fitting. So, I worked at it, I did as many male things as I could to try and still Little Voice, but she was still there. I held back from fornication, though, not just because Chapel God said so, but because it would have involved those parts that made me want to scream.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to score, if I had wanted to. This was the seventies, when AIDS and other problems were yet to explode onto the global consciousness, and the sixties were still fresh. I was big, and hard, and blond and, in my butch way, quite a looker. But Little Voice, Melanie, was still there.

I had a little motorbike, to suit my lack of income at 120 miles to the gallon, a Honda CG125, on which I would ride out to beautiful places to try and clear my head. I covered Elsdon and its gibbet, the Roman Wall, Lindisfarne and with my rock boots in the bag the top of Simonside and Crag Lough. Soloing the Great Chimney on Simonside with views out over Rothbury to the Cheviots, and out to the North Sea, as an attempt to silence the voice, just left me ecstatic at the place and the movement, but still hating my genitals.

And so I joined the Corps.

I was suited to it, I must admit. My rugby and climbing had left me fit and able to contain fear without freezing. Each level of pain the instructors added helped me with Little Voice, and the more men I saw naked and showering the more I had confirmed that I just did not find men’s bodies interesting beyond comparisons of strength. I remembered my father, a keen sprinter, watching a particularly powerful American sprinter and saying “I fancy his body, but I’d want it in white”

The one thing that did knock me completely sideways was meeting Stewart McDuff. To this day I do not know what exactly it was with him, but I was smitten. The closest thing I have ever been able to come up with is a girl’s “crush” on another girl. I didn’t want to fuck him; I certainly did not want him to fuck me. I just wanted to be near him, and keep him safe, not to kiss or cuddle, just to be beside him. I had to be really careful; the Corps doesn’t take too kindly to shirtlifters, and if I couldn’t describe what I was, how could they?

LV kept whispering, I kept reading. I particularly remember Jan Morris’ book, and she really connected with me. A soldier, a reporter on the Everest success, and underneath it all, a girl. Even though I was fighting all the way, her situation called to me and my dreams were filled with little moments in a dress, being swirled around a dance hall by some faceless presence.. I could never sort that one out. I definitely did not fancy blokes, what was I?

I met Emma in Pennycomequick, not the most salubrious area of Plymouth but fun in its own way. She was a biker girl, and when I first saw her she was in jeans and a ratty leather jacket, playing pool. The next time, I was on a pass and she had come in from a funeral, and was in what passed for formal wear, all black, which included the mini skirt and the four inch stiletto court shoes in black suede that brought her height up to around six feet, nine tenths of which seemed to be leg.

THAT was something I noticed. I have always been a leg and bum …man, thing, person, and she did have the most amazing legs. She was doing a marine engineering course, and yes, she did fancy a drink, and I had my first moment ever of waking up and feeling a warm body beside me and wondering “who the hell?”

She was looking at me when I woke, great brown doe-eyes behind a tumbling mane of dark curls. She leant forward and kissed the tip of my nose.

“You are very, very odd. I’ve never had sex quite like that...it was very nice, but not what normally happens.”

I had no experience whatsoever of “what normally happens”, but you don’t tell your new and presumably sexual partner such things. I just wished I could remember exactly what DID happen.

“No, most blokes seem to just want to get my knickers off, push my head down for a gobble and then it’s legs in the air and bang away till they come, and not too much thought for me. It’s all about their cock. You hardly let me near yours, you spent more time on me”

I was starting to remember bits as she spoke, the feel of her nipple in my mouth, the touch and taste of her….”I’m sorry it wasn’t too good for you”

“You taking the piss? Five times I came last night, five! I’m going to have to catch the bus for the next couple of days, lover, you’ve left me too raw to ride. You can come round any time!”

She started to giggle at her own pun, and I remember thinking that at least I was no longer a virgin, and I realised that those bits were on their own system and were responding to the memories. Emma noticed, and grinned.

“Too sore for any more of that, my lover, but I’ll treat myself to breakfast!”

She ducked down under the covers, and her warm mouth went to work. I closed my eyes and fondled her thick mass of hair as she efficiently brought me to a climax, and all the time Little Voice was talking me through it and I was imagining her mouth on my breasts and tongue licking….

That was how I got my “jollies”, then, imagining myself as just another woman. I could almost forget I had my unwanted bits when she treated me like that, but realised that if was going to perform conventionally it would appear I needed some liquid fuel first. She came back up, smiling and licking her lips.

“Mmm, protein shake for breakfast, tells a girl she is appreciated”

I pulled her naked body up and into mine, delighting in her length and her softness, and the way her eyes sparkled behind the hair. LV kept whispering about what-ifs and then dropped a big one: what would Stewie say?

I knew that one, and it would be a demand for all the gory and sweaty details, but that was the complication. The more I lay wrapped in the warmth of this woman, the more I realised that I did love him, ardently, ferociously, but that I wanted nothing to do with him other than to hold him and be held. With Emma, I wanted her body twice over, to ravish again with my hands and tongue, but also in the same sense my father wanted the body of an American sprinter. Lust and envy combined in me.

I did fancy her body, but could I have it in blonde?

CHAPTER 4
I knew it was going to be a long walk as soon as I heard about the Conveyor. We had helicopters, but nowhere near enough to move all of us, and we were the poor sods sent out on Shanks’s.

A tab all the way across the top of the island, all bog and tussock-grass. Two of the lads had already been medevacced with trench foot, and I was more than happy with my non-standard boots. I was less happy with the bergen I had got from the outdoor shop. It was more comfortable to carry than the issue kit, it had two fuck-off big pockets that clipped onto the sides, but the real drawback was its capacity.

It was considerably larger than the issue, and that was the problem. Space is not the final frontier, it’s the final temptation, and I had all sorts of extra rubbish in there that I wouldn’t have been able to fit in otherwise. So it was heavy.

Thank the great big beardy bloke in the sky I wasn’t on a jimpy crew, though the NCOs had made damned sure we were all carrying some belted ammo for them.

The bulk of the Commando were half a day ahead of us, so we had to do some serious cadging to get a lift in one of the Scout helicopters that were buzzing around. We caught up with them a bloody sight quicker than we would have done on foot, and I pissed myself laughing when Stewie jumped out of the chopper and went straight down, up to his knees in clag.

Down, up, that was the order of the day. Not just the little rises, but the plunge of your leg into some wet hole full of rancid brown shit that forced its way past your gaiters and into the top of your boot to trickle down inside like some horrible damp maggot that then squelched with each step as your sopping socks oozed up between your toes.

It was raining, of course.

Part of the route was along a Landrover track, the North Camp Road, but you are being bloody stupid if you march in column when the enemy has ground attack aircraft like Pucaras available. A very good way of using up lives, that one, so we were in extended order. I knew the Hereford boys had taken a lot out on Pebble Island, but they were still flying out of Stanley, and they were vicious little sods, slow enough to loiter and pick their aim, and carrying far too many teeth. We had a Blowpipe section with us, but I held the eminently sensible view that as long as they had nothing to shoot at there would be nothing shooting at me.

I was suffering more than most in the soft going, being one of the biggest lads in the company, but it was odd. The more I walked across it, the more I started to appreciate the beauty of the place. I mean, there was the constant thump of distant shellfire, and it was pissing down with rain, but the grass and odd rock outcrops reminded me of Dartmoor, or of the ranges up around Otterburn, and I wondered if there would be the same subtle changes in colour and shade under a day of sun and cloud.

That was assuming the rain ever stopped, of course.

That is how you cope with a long tab, even when completely chinstrapped, exhausted by the grinding drag of bog and tussock and the pain as your soaked feet start to soften in the constant wetness. You move off into a sort of transcendental state where small things fascinate you, and you solve all your life’s problems in your head, only to forget how once you stop. You pick a small feature, an odd rock, a patch of shorter grass, and make that your target. Just a few more steps….then pick another.

Jet noise, and a Dagger flashed into sight from behind a hillock, and another, too quick for the Blowpipe, but their mates would be along in a second. Sure enough a section of Skyhawks popped up and the missile was off, flares burning on the tail and jinking all over the sky as the operator tried to hold it steady on target.

No luck, it impacted on a hillside as the Skyhawks vanished. The Rupert called in their passage and the NCOs started to call out, reminding us all that if we had seen the jets, they might well have seen us, even in this crap weather. Which was actually clearing. Arse. If the weather really cleared they’d be up in their vicious little twin-props and looking to give us a right beasting.

We were moving parallel to the sea now, and when I looked at the maps after it was over I realised what it was all about The Argies had their main strongpoint in the capital, Stanley, and we were squeezing its neck.

“Capital”. Makes you think of capital cities, not places no bigger than a Geordie pit village and less salubrious than Pennycomequick, but that is what Stanley was and that was our objective.

When you are on the ground, you often don’t see any picture at all, never mind the so-called “bigger” one, but sometimes it just shouts at you. Tactics follow terrain, unless your CO is either barking mad or a genius, and it was clear to me that we were going to be doing a lot more uphill attacks. There were a number of hills surrounding Port Stanley and it was clear that the enemy would have occupied the upper slopes of all of them.

It was indeed going to be another series of uphill bloody fights. I was drifting away, as we neared Teal, walking on autopilot, and Stewie as ever was on my case. He started talking about odds and sods, anything at all away from the wind and rain.

“You been giving that Emma one?”

Straight to the point

“Nice legs, but too tall for me”

“Yeah, but being such a shortarse you could shag her and still have a faceful of tit, I have to reach down”

“So you have, then”

“Go on, you would yourself if you got half a chance”

“Nah, I prefer her mate, whatsername. She’s got a proper arse to her, and you know what they say: the bigger the cushion…”

“The harder the pushin’! You mean Shelley, yeah? The fat little blonde one with the enormous personalities?”

“That’s the one!”

And with a burst of pure sexist adrenalin we were at Teal, and digging in. Stewie always let me pick a site for our hole, as he claimed I picked drier ones, but I think that was so I would do the first bit of digging, and he could hope that he had less than me to do when it came to his turn. Once again, we were soon brewing up under the poncho and I got my boots off. Going through the ritual of drying and powdering my feet, before slipping on dry socks, I reflected on our little rant.

I missed Emma, and I was beginning to realise why. It wasn’t just the sex; it was the warmth and the waking up together, the company, the sharing.

But, then again, it WAS the sex, in a way. LV was ecstatic at times, for Emma had a really deep fixation on oral sex. Sorry to be blunt, but she did, from me and to me, and she had taken to reaching up and teasing my nipples as her mouth did its work. It is probably difficult for someone outside my head to really understand this, but lying on my back while she did that, Melanie could feel she was being made love to as a woman. Even though the sensations were mostly coming from that ugly part of me, the position, her slow pace, the way I saw the top of her head and the caresses I could give back, it was all feminine. I say things like that, and realise I must be insane. I mean, I’d read Morris’ book, and as a kid the Daily Mirror had carried a whole series about April Ashley, but most of what I had read concerned dressing up.

You wanted to feel like a woman, they said, you dressed like one and “got a man in”

I couldn’t think of anything more revolting. But, there I was, having sex as heterosexual as conceivable, and yet I felt female. You should realise by now exactly how totally screwed up I was. And, of course, I fully understood that if I had been a woman, Emma would have had no interest in me at all.

Catch bloody 22.

I suppose that was the moment I decided that I really did need to speak to a psychiatrist, to find out exactly what I was, before I disappeared in a little internal explosion. Stewie prodded me with a cuppa, and I was dragged back to here and now and away from soft, warm woman. So, I could see a trick cyclist once we were back, assuming we did get back, but for now just keeping dry was tops.

We heard that there had been some dust ups between our Mountain and Arctic boys, or “Snow and Rock” as Stewie called them, and the Argies a little to the East. The Hereford lot were in there too. The SAS were doing their best to live up to their reputation, if not extend it, and I pitied the young enemy soldiers right up to the point I found out they were their own “special forces”, whose speciality I had heard was doping young Argentine protestors, putting them into helicopters and dropping them into the sea miles from shore.

They deserved the SAS.

And so it went on. We were well out of some fights, particularly the disaster caused by some stupid Guards Rupert at Bluff Cove. It seemed he had been given a direct order by one of our skippers to get his troops ashore, and fuck knows why, perhaps he liked a warm bunk, he kept them aboard and the planes came, and 48 Taffies died and another 115 were burnt to shit.

We went in twice more before the last hill was ours, and it was at night, as usual, and I really don’t want to dwell on the events. I’ve given you enough of an idea of what went on, I’m not here to write war porn. Just a few…

I can’t call them highlights. That is not a word I could ever use. I pissed myself twice, and yes, I did add more faces to that of the lad I stuck over by Darwin. But one moment, one moment.

We were assaulting yet another machine gun in yet another trench, yet another uphill rush in the darkness and our terror, as those short, sharp whistles of rounds almost too close told on us and my breath was going slower than my heart, but only just.

He was a real pro, their gunner, his bursts short, sharp and too well aimed. As we fired and moved, fired and moved, Legs was almost cut in half just as I managed to drop into the trench and bring my weapon to bear on the Argentine.

The cocky bastard just grinned and raised his hands as if it was all a fucking game, as half of my mate lay splashed all over the fucking grass, and he thought he could just keep killing us till we were eye to eye and he could fucking give up and fucking smile and Stewie came over the parapet and just stuck him six or seven fucking times and I stuck him and he stopped fucking smiling because he was fucking dead just like Legs

And I had to stop and cry my anger and shame, and Stewie just held me again until we could both become Marines, and start thinking again.

And finally, it was over, and they were running back off the hills into Stanley, and they surrendered, and were marched out before they could be shipped back to their own stupid little country.

It wasn’t as quick as that, in reality, but we were so wiped out it all started blurring into one. And then the bloody Paras beat the Juliets to Moody Brook and took the kudos.

We went in with the other lads, at the first opportunity, to find a pub, and we did, and there was the Juliet from Darwin. We toasted the Corps, and dead mates, and live ones.

“You know something?” said the Juliet. “Those lying dago bastards said they hit Moody Brook with nothing more than tear gas. Went around to collect some gear, and they trashed it. Heavy machine guns, white phosphorus marks, the lying fuckers wanted us dead”

Stewie grinned. “Good job you were off shagging that sheep then, isn’t it? Cheers!”

*Shanks's pony: on foot

CHAPTER 5
We went home, and I wasn’t the only one crying in his sleep.

I look back now, and I can see how many men were clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, bur even as recently as the Eighties it was still a matter of being a big man, having the balls to ride it out. Some day I must work out what the suicide rate was for veterans of our nasty little war.

It left me with a real downer on politics. I had no grouse with why we had done it, the more I found out about the Argentine junta and their habits, the “dirty war” on their own people and the “Disappeared”, the more I knew we had done the right and necessary thing. God knows how I would have felt without that knowledge.

No, what gnawed at my soul was the fact that it had only been “necessary” because of the politicians, who all seemed to be running some odd fantasy game where they wanted to make the real world conform to their own odd perception of it.

Flash, flash, flash of weapons at night, like Hell’s own disco. Empty eyes, filled with rain.

It was a long voyage, and we used it to try and disengage from that automatic killing mindset. You have to. You come off something like Goose Green, or Tumbledown, and you go to a pub and somebody pisses you off, it really isn’t a great idea to just react. It’s one of the reasons we like our own pubs, without any hatters there, or civvies if we can help it. The paras even try and keep us out, but then our pubs are usually a couple of hundred miles apart. A bit like the old joke about how penguins avoid being eaten by polar bears.

I spent a lot of time at the rail, just staring. Stewie would usually bring me out a cuppa, or a can of crap beer, and we would stare out over an ocean empty but for our own ships, no more CAP, no strike aircraft boring in to try and blow us out of existence. He came straight to the point after three days or so.

“Are you queer, Mike? No, wait, it’s not a problem, and I haven’t talked to anyone else”

“Why do you ask, Stew?”

“I catch you looking at me every so often, when you think I’m not watching. You look all soppy when you do that”

“Do you want the truth, mate?”

He looked at me hard, silent for a minute.

“Yeah, if you know what it is”

“That’s just it, mate, I don’t know what it is. I don’t fancy men, certainly not to shag. Emma's exactly my type there, all legs and arse, and I could tell you things about her, but men do absolutely nothing for me. The idea of a cock just puts me right off. Fannies make me very happy”

And there was the truth, but not quite as Stewie would hear it. When I spoke of hating cocks and liking fannies, it was all rather more personal than I was really letting on. I meant my own, literally. Little Voice was becoming clearer day by day, and I was realising at last who the inner girl was, and she was as gay as a pack of fairy cakes. There was no way I could let that one out, though.

“Stewie, I can only say this once, so keep your trap shut till I finish. I love you. I don’t mean I fancy you, or want a shag, or want to stop shagging girls, but I care deeply for you. I spent the whole of our time down there scared shitless you would come back in a bag, and I would have died to prevent that. I don’t know what to call it, but it’s not like a brother, and it’s not like a lover, it’s just I am happier by your side than anywhere else.

“No, I’m not queer, I really can’t describe what I am, but that ugly little maggot you keep in your shreddies is safe from me. “

I paused, drew a deep breath.

“And now I will fully understand it if you tell me to fuck off.”

“Do not be so fucking stupid”

His hug nearly broke my ribs.

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We sailed into the Solent surrounded by ships and boats of all sizes, horns blowing, flags waving. They meant well, but they weren’t there. Again, in later years, after I had discovered PTSD through my reading and my shrink, I came across “survivor guilt”, such an apt term. You wonder what you did to stay alive that someone else didn’t and the conclusion is that you must have held back somehow, not been as committed or brave as the dead were; that they deserved to have lived because they gave the sacrifice, and you must somehow not have been worth it.

I think every Falklands veteran must feel that way. I can’t speak for earlier wars, but I don’t see why they should be any different. Witnessing violent death is not something modern humans are very good at unless they are mentally ill in some way. I know I have referred to myself as insane, but not like that. Not like that.

I took a train up to Waterloo, then a tube to King’s Cross for the Intercity to Newcastle. Dad and Mam were waiting for me at Central Station and we had a very emotional reunion, even Dad’s eyes leaking, and before we went anywhere we walked round to the Station Hotel and I had my first pint of Scotch in ages. Dark, rich beer, so different to the Devon brews and far superior to what the Canberra had offered us.

Stewie had hugged me again as he went off home to the little place in Banbury his parents had, and we knew without speaking that we had a bond that was just that, beyond words. We had four weeks leave before heading back to Devon, and it took three of those weeks before I could feel at least slightly relaxed. I had to be careful down the pub, as described earlier. People I hardly knew would offer me drinks, pat me on the back, and I had to keep the instincts chained down. A loud noise would have me on my feet; my sleep was filled with those flashes, those empty eyes.

I got out as often as I could, out onto the hills with my rock boots soloing the sandstone outcrops as the Summer waned, curlews wailing over the moorland, and as soon as my leave was up I was back at the base. When I knocked at Emma’s door, some hairy answered it, and Emma purred “I needs my cock, my lover, and you was away so long”

Ah well.

I signed up for another few years. This was my family now, Mam and Dad and my brother not withstanding, but more importantly, these were the only people who understood, who could ever understand.

And Stewie was here.

Hatter: or Harry the Hat. or craphat. Any other beret colour than bottle green (Marine) or maroon (Para), or any other beret colour than the one you are wearing. Lesser form of life.

CHAPTER 6
I had a few years of fun, after that. I was really lucky, we were lucky, never to do a tour in Ulster, but Stewie and I got to see Hong Kong a couple of times before it was given to the Chinese, and we had more than a few joint exercises with the Dutch Marines, and more than a few fights, and much, much more than a few beers.

The cloggies are an odd lot. Their troops tend to look a bit strange, some of them with long hair in nets, believe it or not, and they were to do their reputation no favours when they locked themselves in at Srebrenica, but that was all in the future then and we got on well with the Dutch.

Especially after the South Atlantic, they were careful not to take it too far. A Yank summed it up for me. He said “We are told never to gamble, fight or drink with you, and I see why. You play to win, you drink to kill, and when you fight….”

I remember him pausing, looking for the words.

“We have a fist fight, one of us knocks the other guy down, he waves him back up to hit him again. You have an every part of the body fight, and you put the other guy down so hard he never gets up again”

I laughed. “Why should I give him another chance? Getting punched hurts!”

“Yeah, but do you guys have to be so fuckin’ EFFICIENT at it?”

He bought us three rounds, soft bugger.

After the losses on the hills around Stanley, after Legs, Stewie and I got another pairing for our fire team, Dick Clarke and Alan White, and of course they became Nobby and Chalky. There are some forces traditions that you dare not break. My father had touched on one as I set off back down to Plymouth after that first awkward, shuddering period of home leave. After some stumbling attempts at expressing how much he cared for me, that made my chat with Stewie seem elegant, he said

“Just remember, son, the first rule of military life. Rape comes first, then the pillaging. Only after you’ve done those two do you do the burning”

He thought he was funny. He had no idea of what else we had ahead.

We had our play time, one of the best ones being a team leave to a ski resort in Italy. The boys had wanted to go to somewhere Germanic, and I argued successfully that we had done all the Germany bit, eaten the bratties and drunk the Black Tower wine, which honestly I really, really hated. I sold them on Cervinia, as it was high enough to guarantee snow, there were no trees to crash into, and it would be all Alpine Italian cooking, big steaks and cheap wine.

I look back at that holiday, and it really was the end of so many things. Stewie and I were off on an NCO career path that was to separate our previously joined-at-the-hip lives while still keeping us in reasonably close touch. We drank, and we did our morning ski classes like good little boys, and we fell, and drank some more, and every time the weather cleared gawked at the huge bulk of the Matterhorn hanging over us in a looming wall of rock and deep blue ice. Straight skis, not these curvy carving things they use now, and your ball size matched the length of the planks you rode. Arriving by cable car at a little platform that stuck out from Switzerland so far into Italian airspace that it had a line down one wall with a different flag painted either side.

Passports please. No, seriously.

The highlight for me wasn’t the lunatic stuff, but a long, long red and blue run that started at the top, in Switzerland, and worked its way down past two mountain bar/restaurants, before entering a narrow valley where you could swing from side to side, easy skiing and pure joy of movement, as ibex walked along a cliff top wondering what the hell you were doing, and you finally popped out into the centre of the village and the ice rink bar.

Nobby and Chalky approved heartily of my choice once they found out the place was a favourite with the Scandinavian ski set, and there were Swedish and Finnish girls EVERYWHERE. You know what they say about Swedish girls….no? Well, the boys did, and they played the percentages till they found a couple of girls that did, and then we had to play the room rotation game, Stewie and I sitting out in the hotel bar while the other two cemented international relations.

Stewie had fallen to a seagull, and moved out to married quarters not long after we got back from that holiday. She was an odd little thing, all full breasts and raucous laugh, but she got pregnant remarkably easily for a girl in a time of pills and coils, as was common in garrison towns. A serviceman may not have the world’s best wage, but he has a job, and a billet, and a damned good death in service benefit. You saw the girls at weekends, style being something they thought you climbed over to get away from an angry bull. To a young squaddy in barracks, it looked so good; she was up for it, you could see everything she had, and she gave it away on a first date.

By “date” I mean nothing more than a knee trembler in some alley, followed a little later by the impending patter of tiny ammo boots. So there was Stewie, in a grey-rendered block of a house, her belly getting bigger seemingly daily, and not just from the growing baby. I think the only thing that kept her from exploding was her steady consumption of king-sized Rothmans.

Not only did I feel sorry for Stewie, I felt guilty. Had he ended up tied to this person because of lust, or because he was scared of how I felt? We stayed as close as we could, though, and I was godfather to little Lee Diana when she was born. Stewie changed then, and I really saw him love for the first time. His wife had used him as a ticket to the billet, but she had repaid him immeasurably with his daughter. He told me that his dreams had eased after her birth.

“Of course they have, mate, you’ll be getting no time to sleep.”

I was listening carefully to Little Voice by now, and she led me through a series of encounters that ranged from the dreadful to the exciting, but I never recaptured those moments with Emma.
We had moved on, and I was living in the Sergeants’ Mess, and so was Stewie. The “first” Gulf War (Iran-Iraq not count?) passed us by, but his wife’s devotion had swung with the wind. She was living up Plympton now with Lee, and he was therefore ineligible for the billet. I was happy, guiltily so, to have him back, and it seemed our careers were mirroring each other. We both got full screw together, and then the third stripe, all of which meant that we were not in a fire team together, which was not a problem.

My brother George had a little girl, and I decided I could externalise (too much reading) Little Voice, and he took my suggestion well and christened her Melanie Louise. She was a bonny, bonny girl, but I was too far away to see much of her, and I gave my love to little Lee, along with Stewie.

Yes, that was deliberately ambiguous.

The European Union had banished war from Europe forever, hurrah! So they told us, and so they still do, but then they are a lying bunch of self-serving bastards. Define Europe, you ask, and anywhere outside the EU suddenly becomes extra-continental.

Some sharp little fire fights in Slovenia signalled something an awful lot closer to home than Darwin or Goose Green, and then Croatia, and Serbia, and all the rest started to show what happens when you draw a line around a lot of people who have hated each other for centuries and say “play nicely, it’s all one country now”

I remember one image that sums up the whole mess for me, from later on when the Albanians and the Serbs started their own land dispute, and that filthy phrase “ethnic cleansing” came into vogue.

A photo, of a young woman, in a skirt and sensible shoes, in a copse where her column of frightened people had stopped, and she had walked away from them, found a suitable place and hanged herself. No fuss, no drama, just a young woman in a modest skirt and good shoes turning slowly at the end of a rope.

We went into Bosnia in 1995, thirteen years after the rain and the mud, and it was better, but it was so much worse, and that was when I knew I wanted to give it all up.
Things came to a head with Srebrenica, and my father’s joke was just so, so bad. The UN had declared it a safe haven, and the Dutch troops were there to protect the people, and in rolled the Serbs and butchered 8,000 while the cloggies hid in their barracks so as not to get hurt.

I know this s not how they see it, but that was what we saw and heard, and if they don’t like it they can tell it to the families of the dead.

We went in as part of a “peacekeeping” force, and all the politics and crap strangled us, and they took all the men and boys and shot them, and raped the women and girls before pillaging, and only then did they burn.

And “strange fruit” grew from so many trees.

So our lords and masters did the easy thing, and bombed the shit out of them, while we pointed our Warrior turrets at them, and they laughed as the low cloud stopped the bombing from being that bad, and they raped some more.

Little Voice was louder then, so loud, and I realised something, as we came across a field where women in scarves were turning over bulldozed soil to find body parts that might belong to some man or boy they once knew, I realised that I was beginning to hate men. For this seemed to be all men, men killing, men raping, for a mixture of the same bullshit the Argie generals had spouted mixed with good old-fashioned rhetoric about their Great Sky Pixie being better than the one the others followed.

Oh yes, I lost my religion as well as my gender then.

I actually missed the Falklands. There, my enemy was clear. I shot at him, he shot at me, and I didn’t have to stand next to him while he smiled and tried to look friendly as he zipped up after raping a thirteen year old and slotting a ten year old. That was what finally turned me out of the Corps, the way these self-proclaimed soldiers tried to come on to me as some sort of kindred spirit.

No, I will not go into any more details. I spoke to Stewie, told him I had had a bellyful, and we went to see the Skipper.

“Sgt Stevens, Mike, you do know you have nothing to prove, don’t you? You are not the only one. This is not what we were made for, this s not a Marine’s place. I want you to speak to the M.O. before you turn in, but if you wish I can organise a rotation home”

“Thank you sir”

“Mike, I don’t want to lose you. You are one of the old fashioned, honourable men we need at our heart. Go home, rest, find yourself again and come back to the Corps as you should be, as you were”

There was more, and I still see what he meant. People like Stewie, Nobby, that Juliet, we had all been through the real stuff, as had the lads who taught us, and now it was all “peace keeping” where you had to smile with butchers and rapists. That’s a job for a policeman, not a soldier.

I had learnt to cope with the empty eyes of my dreams. This was beyond my powers.

Children, for fuck’s sake.

I went home, served my time, and when it was up I walked out of the gate and went to London. I didn’t look back, and I ran away from Stewie and hid.

I was falling apart, and fast.

M.O.: Medical Officer; doctor.

CHAPTER 7
I wasn’t really up to anything for a while. I lived off my bounty for a bit, drank too much for a bit longer, and then moved into the obvious line of work for a big hard lad, door work at one of the pubs I had been using. There had been a spot of nastiness, I helped somebody to leave the pub by offering them a choice between staying in the warm or remaining attached to the testicles I was taking out into the rain, and for some reason they all left together.

The landlord knew the boss of one of the local doorman suppliers, and after he had overstated my abilities I was in. These days, doormen–bouncers---are supposed to be licensed and trained and sweet and cuddly, but back then, and in Luton, where I had stupidly ended up, it was no big thing. You stood at the door and filtered the prospective clientele, and if necessary returned those already inside to the wider world. Shoes were not casual and jackets were worn, jeans being absolutely infra dig. As for leather motorcycle jackets…well, there was the thing, we even ended up doing front of stage work at biker rallies, and in an odd twist, the trade stands at a cycle show, where I felt really, really unthreatened by the evil lentil-eating hordes and absolutely out of place.

I had started wearing knickers by then, under my male clothing. Little Voice was making promises to me, promises I needed her to keep, needed her to be able to keep, that she could end my dreams, the empty eyes, the sensible shoes, the sleeve of a shirt sticking out of freshly turned earth.

I had no idea whatsoever what to do. Military life is prescriptive, filled with routine. You know that you are in an hierarchy, you know when reveille, “OCOS”, and lights out come, and you are told where to go and, with a certain level of ambiguity, what to do. I had walked away from that, and I was also having to deal with the lesser-spotted civvy on a daily basis.

The biggest problem was my previous job. There is a squaddy term, a “Walt”, short for Walter Mitty, which is someone who fancies themselves an armchair warrior. Some take it to extremes, marching on Remembrance Day wearing a beret and shop-bought medals, as if they had earned them. I kept meeting Walts; they either wanted to tell me how wonderful we had been in the war, or how they had just failed in the all-arms commando course and if their horoscope had just been a bit better….

Oh, bugger off.

I was growing my hair as well, very non-bootneck, and I had even committed the ultimate sacrilege and shaved my upper lip. Ye gods, what would Stewie say?

Stupid question. I had walled myself off from that. He had a little girl, and the chance of a normal life, and I loved him enough to vanish and leave him the best of everything to get the Corps off his back.

I still kept a few quiet contacts, Nobby being one, and I knew he had stepped out of the khaki and into mufti, running taxis in Banbury after his dad died. I didn’t speak to mine any more; each time I picked up a phone I heard that joke and saw them all.

I was really, really starting to feel that men were a burden on the world, and my own membership of that group was just a little bit confusing.

You never, ever return kit. If you do, the QM might not replace it. If something doesn’t fit, you find a mate to swap with rather than returning what you have. When I came out, but not like that, I made damned sure I kept as much as I could, which is why I found myself on more than one drunken night sitting cross-legged in my room in Bury Park with my bayonet in hand, trying to decide whether to slice the fucking thing off right there.

I was hearing two voices at once. LV was talking about making Melanie real, and my own mind was reminding me about “rape first”

What a surprise, they were in agreement. Then again, I assume it was LV who won the argument on the trivial bass of my bleeding to death in some corner of the red light district.

The girls knew me, and whenever I walked back from the town centre I would be greeted by a chorus of “Are you lookin’? Oh, it’s just you , was it a good night?”

A couple of times I would need to have a word with a customer, or a pimp, and I remember sitting on a wall with a girl and sharing a kebab because I had one, and she didn’t, and trade was slow, and she told me that I had given her problems: how the hell was she supposed to shag someone who was a friend?

I realised I was nowhere near being the only one unable to have a normal life. She associated sex with business, not with anything tender or loving. I couldn’t associate the sex I was able to find with anything relevant at all to my life. I will tell no lies, I had quite a bit, especially from some of the more refreshed girls when I was out on the piss; my bits were still hard-wired to my body and back-brain, and when some willing lass did what she did they would respond as programmed, but I still resented them.

Nobby wrote to me a couple of years after I had jumped ship, and I nearly broke again. Stewie’s wife had never given up her much closer relationship, the one with the Rothman’s king size, and one night when she had forgotten she had taken her best friend to bed with her, the resulting fire took her, the house, the one next door, and Lee.

I really, really wanted to call in, or at the very least go to the funeral, but two things stopped me. One was that I felt the need to get off his back, let him live a normal life without me mooning over him. The other was simpler.

I couldn’t face seeing another dead child.

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Luton’s library is near the Arndale Centre, a concrete monstrosity of shops next to a tower block of an hotel and just round the corner from a couple of the clubs I worked at.. I spent ages in there during my daylight free time, reading everything I could get my hands on that might help me get my head around what I was. I would walk down New Bedford Road and spend a couple of hours at the books, then go into the Arndale and fill my bergen up with food. After walking back and loading the fridge, like as not I would be back with the books.

I got to be well-known there, and after lending a hand a couple of times with some of the more fragrant gentlemen of the road who used it as a doss, I started to be fed cups of tea and coffee by the staff. There was an older librarian there, Sarah, a long, long slim brunette with bobbed hair. She always wore a fitted, calf-length skirt or dress, with heels, and though she was in her fifties at the very least she had the most delightful arse, and she bloody knew it. I would often catch her when she felt she just had to re-shelve some books near me, and she would either stretch right up so that her breasts strained her top, or bend over straight legged so that her skirt stretched as tightly around her bum as she could make it.

No visible knicker line.

She caught me staring one day, as she must have done before, but this led to eye contact, and she simply smiled and licked her lips.

It turned out she was 62, which was amazing given her looks, and she never wore knickers, having hit the menopause years before. She had absolutely no pretensions whatsoever about love and romance, though she did like a nice meal out and appreciated it when I bought her flowers. No, what she wanted was to be fucked hard and in exactly the right way, which usually meant me on my back while she ground herself on top of me, on my face and then on my cock, sitting bolt upright and grunting like a piglet as she came. She liked what she called her girly sloppy seconds, too, and while I lay back, soaked in sweat, she would turn 69 and start to feed on me, soaked in her own flavours, until I responded and she got her reward, as she called it. She was old enough to know what she wanted and how exactly to get it, and still young enough to be able to find it and enjoy it, and for the first time since Emma LV was telling me that this was good, and I could pretend that it was Melanie receiving her attentions and responding to Sarah’s teasing as a woman would, with tongue and hands and lips.

It was the afterglow, the little death, that was the real delight, though, that simplicity of being wrapped up naked by another naked woman, no need to be anywhere, no need to rush off.

Yes, that’s right. Another woman. My long months of reading and thinking had crystallised all those whispers from Little Voice into the realisation of what was stopping me from really engaging with the world and the people round me, instead of just spectating.

It’s a sick joke, isn’t it? How many women do you know who are 6’4’’, eighteen stone and with size 11 feet? But then again, even though it was clearly just the sex on her part, I got very fond of Sarah. Despite the fact that she was absolutely fixated on something I would rather not have, I managed to feel feminine. I kept that thought very much to myself, though.

Her funeral was a small affair, just me, a couple of family members I didn’t speak to, and three of her colleagues, who said all the “right” things to me and hugged me, and left me to my thoughts and internal dialogue.

Sarah had been a regular user of the gym up at Stopsley, running there three times a week and spending an hour on the machines before running back, and several times I had arrived at her flat just as she did, all sweaty and so randy I didn’t even have time to undress before I was on my back and she was on my front.

And then, one day, she finished a session on some weights machine or other, sat down on a bench for a drink, and died. Just died, as if the switch had been thrown. That was it for me, I had no ties in Luton and so I headed out one day in my old Ford Escort and finished up in Crawley. I have absolutely no idea why Crawley, apart from the fact that Mehmet, the boss of my agency, had a few contacts down there, but I finished up living in Pound Hill. It was 2001, a new century at last after the false alarm of 2000, and I managed to get a proper job in town, working in the County Mall as a supervisor for the security teams.

You know, they make me laugh, those boys. Some of them are older, ex-squaddies and calm in what they do. Some are very young, and nervous as all hell, some are Walts who fancy themselves as some sort of special policeman, and have to be reined in. I caught one of them trying to stop somebody coming in because they were wearing motorcycle leathers….

It was a long and hard business trying to explain that the shops actually wanted customers to enter, and not be excluded, and that included the shop near the park exit that sold motorcycle leathers.

Pillock.

Yes, a new century, a new town in both senses, and Little Voice and I started to talk to my doctor.

*OCOS: another term for reveille,or your morning wake up call, and an instructon to young men as to where to put their hands: off cocks,on socks.

CHAPTER 8
Dr Whittaker was a lucky find, the first piece of real luck I can remember having since Stewie and I survived that shithole down South.

It was odd, but I had never felt really threatened in Bosnia, just soiled. I digress; the luck came in two parts.

Firstly, he was ex-RAMC, an army M.O., and he therefore had some idea of what it was that ate at me in the small hours of the night. He had actually been at Gosport on attachment to RN hospital HMS Haslar when the poor sods from Bluff Cove were being repatriated. He shared a little of his own nightmares with me, very unprofessionally but in real comradeship.

“Burns, Michael. Burns…”

The second piece of luck was that he was not an old school military crusty, but a real healer. There was no request to pull myself together, no instructions to be a man (which would have been hilarious); he just asked me how I felt, and apart from the truth about Melanie, I told him, and I cried in front of an Officer. When I got to Bosnia, he had me lie down as I started shaking almost beyond my control.

“You’re a bright lad, Michael. I can tell you’ve been doing some reading, and that always gives two possibilities. You are either trying very hard to pull a fast one, or you are in deep shit. I am not going to talk a load of crap here, you are not some civvy I have to be politically correct around. I don’t think any of this is bullshit.

“What worries me is your talk about self harm. I get a lot of that, and to be honest most of it is complete attention seeking, but I have known enough of you boys to realise that if you set out to do something, you do it.

“Mike, sod the courtesies, I don’t want that. You are one of the good guys. This world is short of good guys”

He held up a hand to shut me up.

“No, you ARE one of the good guys. I get ticked off when I see the abuse that you and others get, from people who owe you. From what you have revealed to me, most of what is haunting you is a result of caring about others, and that makes you a good guy in my eyes”

He made a few notes, thinking, and then asked me if i had ever heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Yes, Doc, I’ve read about it”

“Mike, I am not a trick cyclist, but as a GP I have to have some of their tools in my bag. I am not qualified to diagnose things like that, but you have a choice now. I can either whack you onto some industrial-strength anti-depressants, or dope you into a vegetable on Valium, or you can see a friend of mine. Make me a promise, Mike?”

“What?”

“Please don’t do anything stupid, no matter how clever it seems at the time”

His friend turned out to be a woman called Sally Flint, a psychiatrist, and she was to change my life more than any other woman I ever met.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

My first appointment with her was a week after that with Dr Whittaker, and he was obviously hauling hard at a number of strings to get me in so soon. She looked a little younger than me, not bad-looking in a businesslike way. She had a very soft look around the eyes, a look that said “No judging”, and a way of listening to me talk that made me eloquent.

I have heard psychoanalysis referred to as “the talking cure”, and apart from her stressing that she had no intention of trying to “cure” anything, talking was what I did. She would ask a question by making a statement, no inflection to her voice, no hint as to which answer was “right”

We talked about all those things have already dwelt on, about children, and Legs, and sensible shoes in the wind, and after three or four sessions she started making comments. Six weeks or so down the line, I turned up for my normal session and she sprang the surprise.

Get rid of any notions of couches, and beards, and notepads. Sally had a couple of armchairs, and we sat there together with a cuppa and I talked, and she unobtrusively recorded things, partly by tape, and partly on a small pad where she kept what I assumed were what are now called “bullet points”

“Mike, I am going to tell you what I think, but remember these are early days, and I like to refine things as I go. A bit like a single malt, I suppose.

“As far as can see, Joe Whittaker was spot on. You appear to me to have quite a severe case of PTSD, compounded by an evil little syndrome known as ‘survivor’s guilt’

“This is made worse in your case by your own personality. You think it should be Legs sat here, am I right?”

She quietly handed me a box of tissues.

“What do you think he would be feeling if you had caught that burst of fire instead? Would it be any different? I think it would.

“Mike, why do you hate yourself?”

We talked past that one. Sally took me through my years in Seghill, asking why a lad with as sharp a mind as I clearly possessed had simply walked out of school and into a uniform.

“Mike, you have a massive inferiority complex. Everyone is better than you in your eyes. Tell me, why do your lot hate the paras?”

“We don’t hate them. We’re just better than them, and every so often they need reminding of that fact”

“Did you notice how you sat up when you said that? You feel you belong, that your regiment-“

“Corps”

“-Corps gives you meaning. But without it, you see no worth in yourself. What is it, Mike? What’s the secret you are not telling me?”

I wondered what ideas she had in mind, what oddities she suspected I might be hiding. Bluebeard? Train spotter? Sunderland FC fan? I giggled at that thought, as even though I am a rugby player, was a rugby player, I still hated the mackem football team by reflex.

She wrote something down at that.

“Can I speak to the other one now, Mike?”

CHAPTER 9
What to say to that one? I stared at Sally, and she just smiled gently.

“Whoever you are, there s nothing here that can harm you. I am not asking to speak to some other person. I am not saying you have what people wrongly call schizophrenia. I just know that you are also someone else that you have spent your life pretending does not exist. So please let me speak to him”

I flinched slightly and Sally’s eyes widened, just a tiny bit.

“Her, then”

She sighed.

“You’re certainly not giving this girl an easy life, are you?”

Little Voice spoke up.

“I never had a girl’s life, easy or not”

At which we realised how clever Sally’s cheeky little joke had been. And stopped being plural. Sally stuck out her hand.

“Hello, I am Sally Flint. And you are?”

“M……Melanie Stevens”

“Nice to meet you, Melanie. Now, it’s time for me to shut up, while you tell me how you are getting on.”

We ran well over our time that day.

It got easier, each time, and I realised that we had indeed ceased our internal dialogue. I had a number of those silly fridge magnets, and one of them read “Sshhh. The voices in my head are arguing and I’m trying to listen”, and finally I was in the conversation.

I read somewhere that one aspect of PTSD is the feeling of detachment from the world, and I wondered if that was how I had internalised, or externalised, or whatever, the girl in me. Sally had cleared away a lot of crap with some simple questions. Two of our meetings were devoted to nothing more than my childhood, as she worked out, or let me work out, why I had not stayed on and gone further with my schooling. That nagging feeling that I was wasting my time, that I would never succeed, coupled with my father’s definition of a man as either a real one or a skiver.

Books, studies, they were for puffs, and our family didn’t have puffs. They were so unpufflike that I signed up for the hardest force in the world, and George went off as a pro boxer and then took over a motorcycle dealership. All definitely non-P. I hadn’t stood a chance of doing anything else, certainly not anything that did not include testosterone.. Well, Dad, I am about as unreal a man as you could ever imagine. I had a really good idea of how he would take the news.

That was another train crash in my thoughts. There are moments of epiphany, of enlightenment, when your eyes really are opened to a new world. With me, they seem to come with words attached. All the years of talking to LV have made me vocalise everything; some people remember feelings, tastes, smells, but for me it’s always been words. Words bring the memories, words deliver the knowledge.

That particular revelation was that I seemed to have made my decision without realising it: I was going to leave Mike behind and spread Mel’s wings. Fuck me.

That is Sally’s skill with me, she asks the questions that let me see the answers that are already there. I had another moment of realisation when I very clearly thought “Pity she’s not gay…”

Slow down, Mel. It would be a good idea to actually be physically female before starting to look for a woman that likes other women.

Do you see how this went? I entered the Doc’s surgery as a broken bootneck, a big man having a breakdown. I’m going to Sally’s place each time now as a woman with issues, and it is so very much better.

That is where I am now. I don’t want to jump the gun, because there is still a lot to tell, but I have to make some thing clear, things that Sally helped me to understand.

PTSD is a monster. It never goes away, it isn’t some dragon that can be slain, it is like herpes, it persists. It usually gets worse with time, not better. Sally did nothing to spare me that little titbit; she told me that if I wanted to go where she thought I did, I would do it fully informed and with eyes wide open.

You don’t recover from it, you develop coping strategies. Sometimes they work, sometimes…..

I had an easier life from then on. The nights were still the same, the same dreams, the same faces, but the days–the days were so much better. I had decided my course of action, and like a good little girl I had a reward to work for, something outside the pain. I realised why Doc Whittaker had called her a friend and not a colleague, and knew that I had turned the corner. Two people had entered my life, and both were sweethearts beyond compare.

Sally was very naughty. A year after we had first met, she had me stand, and with a tape measure took my sizes.

“What exactly are you doing, Sal?”

“You need to know a couple of small things, Mel. Firstly, you are a very big….woman, and your tee shirt rides up when you lift your arms, when you pull your coat on.”

“And?”

“Pink suits you, but you might want to keep your belt fastened above your knickers”
Oh shit.

“So why the tape measure?”

“I am just preparing for when you decide you want to go that bit further. There is no way you will be able to go into some clothes shop and buy something in your size, and even less chance if you don’t know the size in the first place…”

You should see now why I love that woman, and why I said she changed my life.

Now, you will laugh. As a Marine I was always sewing. Seams would pop, things would rip, so I was always using my housewife for running repairs. I went into a shop, bold as brass, and bought some curtains, an acceptably masculine deed. Two weeks of frustration later and I had two drawstring skirts. My hair was long enough by then, to say the least, and some adaptations to a dress shirt made a quite feminine blouse, and with a pair of unisex sandals I felt quite the girl at home.

I really didn’t see the point of a bra when I had nothing to put in it. I was just happy to finally be making some sort of statement, even if only to myself. And two years into the visits to Sal I was given an appointment with an endocrinologist.

I was by now spreading my wings in the world of employment. The more Sally has helped me to see how I despise myself, how my father warped me, the more I feel confident to push forward with a career. At the moment, I am the area manager running security in the whole shopping centre, a hell of a step up from a bouncer. But again I am ahead of myself. I am sorry about this, but the excitement and relief, the joy of the whole process just has me gushing. I will try and slow down.

By 2006 I was ticking along nicely. Sally had spoken to the Ministry of Defence on my behalf, giving them her diagnosis of massive PTSD and securing me a boost in my pension that I started spending on hair removal, and my pusher was giving me the hard stuff.

I look into the mirror now, and I can see the changes that stuff has done, and I am in no doubts and have no illusions that I will ever look anything like a genetic girl, but it is my face and my life, and one thing I have learnt from Sally is to play the hand I have and not pine for another. But back to the story….

Like so many girls before me, and so many to come, the hormones did very little to boost my top shelf prospects, and a couple of years later, with a wardrobe slowly, thanks to Sally, filling with Mel clothes, she and I got together to set a date. We had a plan; I would speak to my management and make the appropriate announcement, a deed poll would be sworn, and after a hospital visit and the bulk of my annual holiday entitlement I would be back at work as an official and less flat Melanie Lee Stevens.

This was where it all went a bit ratshit. I rang my parents to tell them the news, and to be honest I don’t really feel the need to replay that conversation here. Suffice it to say that none of the family approved, and I was instructed that I was never to contact them again and forthwith to fuck off you puff. I could tell you how hard that was to deal with, but some scars never do heal. I had two visitors in hospital, and the other was Doc Whittaker.

Home was the next trial. Pound Hill is no intellectual Bohemia, but a hard-edged working class suburb, and the first time I hung my new clothes out to dry I got a couple of questioning looks from my neighbours. When they saw my new chest, some of them stopped talking to me. Unfortunately, too many of the others didn’t and it got nasty. I sorted it, but it was never more than an armed truce. They knew what I had been, and it diminished to nuisance stuff. I could live with that. Mel is living with that.

I came out one morning, and there it was, in bright pink paint, next to the door of my flat. I live in a small block, one of several, each of four flats with associated mini-garden, and I am on the first floor. The graffito read “PEEDO”

Hormones do all sorts of things to you besides the desired outcome, and I spent a couple of hours in private tears before Mike took charge. I wrote and printed the letter to the Crawley Observer:

To whom it may concern
I must correct a number of things here, the first of which is your spelling, which I have corrected for you. Your children are far more at risk from your own driving than from any notional paedophiles in the area, and as I am a lesbian and not a “peedo” I suggest that you worry more about your wives and sisters ending up in my flat than your children.
Yours Faithfully
Melanie Stevens
(Ms)

Two tins of spray paint later, and I had corrected the spelling by my door, then drawn a big red line through the word. In blue, I added the word “DYKE”

Yes, big brave Melanie, who spent another few hours in tears indoors from a mixture of hormones and PTSD afterwards. But, if you let the hyenas see fear, my big game hunting friends (of whom I have none) tell me, they will close in tighter.

Fuck them all. This is finally my life, lived my way.

CHAPTER 10
It was a bit like that at work. Senior management were caught in a cleft stick, as the law prohibited any discrimination against me, but I tried to minimise the changes, just wearing my hair in a different way, a bra of course, and doing my best to stay out of both sets of public toilets.

There was some argy-bargy with some of the stupider members of staff, till one of the older squaddies, I think from the Royal Anglians, made a point of both loudly reminding them that a pair of tits did not change my employment history, and offering to hold my handbag while I gave a demonstration. That seemed to break the mood, and he took me for a pint afterwards.

“Mel, is it? Look, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t agree with anything you are doing. On the other hand, I know what shit you went through, and if this makes it easier to cope, fair play. Just don’t expect me to pop round for coffee and fairy cakes”

No acceptance, just tolerance then. I learned to filter out the comments, but I kept an eye out for the physical stuff. Some chavs got nasty surprises, and still do, but that is the price I am paying, indeed am willing to pay. As I said before, fuck them.

I broke away after a while, once the new leave year had come round, and loaded up the old car with ropes and tent and other shit, and set off up the motorways to Derbyshire. I had a lot to get straight in my head, and one thing Sally had mentioned was my comfort zone.

I don’t know if I can get the idea across, but while I had had quite a lot of abuse, it was all on home turf. I could brazen it out at work, I had given literal and metaphorical fingers to the problem neighbours, but that was all in a very restricted area. Many of my neighbours were now coming round to my side, as they realised that I was still the same person they had accepted, even liked, in my old wrappings. No, what Sally was on about was my willingness and ability to move through the world. I had her mobile number for emergencies, I had my tent, and I had a tattered old guide for a place I hadn’t seen in well over a decade.

North Leas is a simple campsite, just outside Hathersage in the Peak District. It is a mile or so across country to the nearest pub, but the wardens are a lovely old hippy couple who take absolutely no shit from anyone, and are devoted to the local wild environment. It sits under Stanage Edge, several miles of rock outcrop, and is within a short drive of several other superb climbing sites.

There was my dilemma. I was going, naturally, on my own, but what if I met someone willing to climb with some outsized and ugly transdyke?

That was my new word, “transdyke”, and it would serve as an introduction.

I arrived, and got immediate recognition from the male half of the wardens. Mild surprise followed by a warm smile of welcome, and advice as to where was driest to pitch, were the sum total of my problems. Apparently, he remembered my help with some rowdiness some time back in the Cretaceous, and the colour of my underwear was of no interest to him compared to my being “good folks”

I could get to like this! I took my pitch, and spent that evening at the Popular End of Stanage, soloing simple and easy routes like Black Hawk Traverse and Boot Crack. The wind was its usual blistering self, unfortunately, and I fancied somewhere less exposed for the following day. It was still good, though, and I drove back down happy, and wondering what to cook.

You sit outside your tent on some old wooden pallet, mentally flicking a coin between rice, pasta, and a walk to the pub, and it is never easy. I didn’t even have Little Voice to bounce ideas off now, so I was dithering in a post-exercise daze when a voice broke into my solo thought train.

“Fancy a brew?”

I looked up and saw about six foot of Amazon in cycling kit. Nope, not an Amazon, she had both tits, and very nice tits…..stop it. I blushed when I realised that she had caught my stare, a deeper colour when I caught sight of another girl leaning against her back and peering over her shoulder, and as deeply pink as I could possibly get when I realised that the first girl had actually been checking out my own chest.

Oh dear. My attempts at a reply were spoilt at first by a coughing fit, and then by three women’s stupid laughter. Pause, breathe, smile, fix bayonet….

Jeanette and Lesley (“Don’t even THINK it!”) were a very obvious partnership who had arrived by tandem from Sheffield, with much the same ideas as my own. Tandems have limited luggage space compared to solo bikes, it would seem, so that their camping kit had to take precedence over the climbing stuff. The boot was open on my car, the kit was visible, and a favour was being begged. We shared a cuppa, and dinner became an assumed matter: there was beer in the pub.

Les was the smaller of the two, an elfin little woman with a spiky haircut and a number of very attractive physical attributes. She turned out to be a lawyer, and gave me a serous inspection before asking the big one.

“So do tell…”

“Well, I have led E3, but I’m a bit rusty, and-“

“No. How far along are you in transition.”

“You don’t hang about, do you?”

“Not when there is beer to be had and this is our only chance for privacy”

I gave a potted history of my journey up to that point, and she hit me with another “time-saving” question.

“Any man in your life yet?”

I blushed some more, and muttered about being a lesbian. She nodded.

“I know one or two of those”

Both Jeanette and I had to go and change our tops. I hoped the tea wouldn’t stain them.

The pub was hilarious. We ate huge portions at the Little John, and we got chatted up.

I got chatted up. By a man. We worked out later that the group of lads involved had selected one of their number to “take one for the team” by chatting up the big, ugly older one, while his mates went for the small pretty one and the tall leggy one with the double charms, so there I was getting drinks provided and a hand on my thigh. I was briefly tempted to take him back to the tent to see the look on his face, but by that time the other girls were having a bit of a snog, with each other that is, and my beau’s heart seemed to be going out of things, so it was a very mellow but limited-to-three group who made a stroll arm-in-arm back to the site.

I can hardly remember a happier moment in my life. Sally had been so right, as always.

The next day I repaid the favour, and I drove us all out to Froggatt Edge, which catches much less wind and far more sun. It turned out that Les had only ever climbed as a second up to Severe, while Jenny was OK at Very Severe. I decided it was time for a step up for littl’un, and took them down to Heather Wall, which is a soft touch at Severe and has the perfect jamming crack for a beginner. Jamming is a technique involving wedging a hand or other body part into a crack so it can’t be pulled out, and then pulling on it. Making sure she had an eight foot sling for the stance, I talked her through the slightly awkward start, and then trotted round to the half way platform.

She cruised it, as I knew she would, and then brought Jenny up like a pro. I got a kiss for my choice in climbs, and then got to do one of my own, Sunset Crack, a soft touch at Very Severe and within Les’ range as a second, I was sure. There is one “big move” on it, a step up from a recess onto a nose with your right foot, and nothing for your left foot but friction for a while. Loads of protection as you climb a lovely crack, and then you are there. The same slab can be climbed to the left at E2, on ripples and friction and no protection, but not today.

I soloed it to show the way, and Jenny followed with my gear and Les as a reluctant second. As expected, Jenny made easy work of the step up, being tall, but Les had a bit of a grovel and a little tighter a rope than normal, but she was still buzzing from her hardest ever lead on Heather Wall, and I got another set of kisses for that one.

I can guess where some minds would go with this one. We have a good day, head back to the camp site, clothes just fall off….but how many married couples do you know who act like that?

We had a great two days of climbing, we went to the pub, we said our goodnights, and like any other married couple they got up the next morning and argued about whose turn it was to make breakfast. I was just happy being accepted so well as another girl, and that is a far bigger rush, and comfort, than any sexual act could ever be. We exchanged numbers and addresses before we left (they were in West London) and I left there a happier girl.

So, I went back to my flat, with my sexual preferences confirmed as well as my perceived and preferred gender, to find a little note from Sally asking me to call in when I could.

“Hiya Sally, what do you need to see me about?”

“Good weekend?”

I filled her in on everything, even the boy willing to throw himself to the sea monster for his friends, Jenny, Les, the lot.

“You have really, really come a long way, girl” she said. She straightened some papers on her desk.

“Do you have anybody at all who could look after you this coming May?”

“What exactly do you mean ‘look after’?”

“Post surgery”

She let a little smile creep in there, and I suddenly realised what she was offering me. Sally, of course, had a box of tissues handy. After more than a short while, I begged the use of her phone.

“Oh, hi Mel, we didn’t expect to hear from you so soon”

“Les, I have a huge favour to ask. In May, I will need someone to stay with me”

“Whatever for?”

“Just one of those silly rules about post-surgery patients being home alone when discharged”

I had moved the phone away from my ear at that point, fortunately. Within half an hour she had contacted her partner, and I had babysitters arranged for my home recovery from my final visit to the plumber. I looked at Sally moistly, mistily, and she started to laugh.

“One, Mel, it would be unethical, and two, and more importantly, I do prefer my partners to be those who use different shops to myself. Sorry, girl, but not only am I your doctor I am also straight!”

I still got a kiss out of it, and a hug, and the ticket to my new life.

So, tonight’s a night for celebration. I am putting this in here because when I get back later I might well be pissed, and say something into this machine that will make perfect sense at the time and confuse the fuck out of me when I play it back. I’m going full tilt as Mel, short skirt, shoes far from sensible…

I’ve even sprayed my hair to give it some “sleek body and…” .lot of rubbish written on the tin. I think it makes my hair look like some crap wig, but too late now, it’s done. I‘ll pick this up tomorrow.

Off to the pubs!
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For the rest of Melanie’s story, please read "Something to Declare" episode 45 onwards.