I am offering this titbit up for sacrifice. I have some idea where it would go, but a comment or two would help me decide whether to push it further. Now on Kindle

CHAPTER 1
I don’t drive. I have a licence, but I have never felt the need to own a car. This has brought all sorts of odd questions into my life, from friends, relatives, employers, passing drivers keen to share their wisdom and advice as to the desirability of my using the cycle path.

It seems I am a freak of some kind because the only engine I employ is my heart. Of course, I am a freak, but that’s simply a matter of viewpoint. I like to think of a point of view as deriving from a metaphorical viewpoint, the sort of thing marked on maps.

Where you are standing defines what you can see.

My life has changed often, and each change has led to that new viewpoint, that altered field of vision. Three years ago it was the physical fact of being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be, at a particular time, which brought new sights. The sight in question was my wife’s heels locked behind the arse of a police liaison officer she knew through her work. He was obviously very effective with his liaising, he was liaising in and out like a good’un.

“I’ll be in the living room when you finish” brought a certain number of gasps and swear words, but as that was what they had been doing when I arrived I couldn’t really be sure if it was aimed at me.

Jane was alone when she joined me. I hadn’t heard the front door, so I assumed he was still in the bedroom. Our bedroom. My bedroom. This was not the way things were supposed to go. In the ordinary script, he grabbed his clothes, dressed hurriedly, and rushed off red-faced. He didn’t lie there, still naked, smelling of her and...I sniffed.

Having a cigarette. In my house.

“So, Jane, how long?”

“As long as I have known about your lady friend. I tried, you know, but you were so careless I couldn’t keep it up. I couldn’t keep pretending I didn’t see things, or smell her on you. It’s me that does the laundry, you know…”

Oh shit.

“Every time I visited my mother, there would be traces left when I got back. I tried, you know, I really tried, but the more you continued the more I realised how little you cared for me. Mark was there, and I just decided to have some sauce of my own.

“Who is she, John? One of your students?”

Oh double shit. The viewpoint now was of a deep, deep hole, and Jane waiting with a shovel at the top. I went into literary analysis mode, finding refuge in my academic life. There were schemata being played out here, but the one I thought I had walked into was rapidly being replaced by another. Which is a complicated way of saying that the person in deep shit was not who I had assumed it to be when I walked in on their little pair-bonding session.
Schemata are the literary equivalent of a kata in karate, little set-pieces that everyone knows that feature in every piece of literature, even the weirdest. I had walked in on “cheating wife”, and she had turned it into “cheating husband” and “wife’s revenge”

Unfortunately for me, her analysis was rather wide of the mark. I was now faced with a truly lovely choice, which of two hells to open up for my private use. Do I invent some smooth-thighed nymph who hoped to shag some good marks out of me for her BA, take the divorce and the nastiness, and keep my life otherwise intact, or do I tell her the truth and watch my whole world end? I needed time.

You have to try hard to visualise this. I am sitting on my own sofa in lycra, drinking tea. My wife is standing at the door in another man’s shirt and holding a tissue she had clearly used to wipe her privates clean of his semen as he lay naked on my bed smoking. I didn’t need my eyes for that, I could smell most of it. And there i am, trying to come to some sort of decision. Do I invent some girl, promise it is all over, and try to rebuild my marriage, or tell the truth and definitely see everything go. Job, wife, reputation… I couldn’t do it. Not just like that. I had been planning on bringing it up at some point, as it was hardly something I could continue to hide indefinitely, but not without preparation and a choice of ground.

If I told her now, I would have two people to laugh at me. My courage failed me, as it always does, and I simply rose, put my gloves back on and rode off to my mother’s. What a big man I was.

She was not surprised in the least.

“I told you not to marry her, but would you listen? Too strong-willed, says I, but no, you knew better, and now there she is in the house with him and probably changing the locks as we speak. You need to get a solicitor ASAP, and make sure you get what you put n that house.

“So what was it in the end, John? Did she find your clothes? Don’t look at me like that, I’m your mother, of course I knew.”

My mother had the shovel now. This really was the end of everything.

“Oh for God’s sake, John, nobody’s dead. Not yet, anyway. Put the kettle on and stop crying”

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I slept in my old room that night, smells as familiar as my skin, and of course “slept” is not a good description. I really, really did not know which lie to choose. The rest of the conversation with my mother had revealed that no, she did not know, despite her maternal standpoint. She knew something, and because of where and who she was she assumed the answer. I suppose that as it had taken me 31 years to come to some sort of understanding in my own right, I shouldn’t expect others to do any better.

The clothes in question lived in the attic, of course, in an old suitcase tucked out of sight behind the cold water header tank. We are back in schema territory here, the private vice only indulged in when the wife s away, the guilt, the alternating binge buying and clearing out, the sneaky indulgence and hasty climaxes.

Wrong again.

Good literature has to surprise. There s a market for the predictable, even n the weird stuff I mentioned earlier. Boy meets zzssxx from Planet Z, boy falls for zzssxx, boy loses zzssxx, and gets him/her/it/them back. Reader is happy, all preconceptions and patterns happily reinforced, which is another little literary analysis term. Well, here’s another one, pattern reformation, where a bum note drops in as in Beethoven’s 8th, and then turns out to have been the right one all along.

Yes, I am a culture nerd, I see everything in terms of literary or other forms of artistic pattern, and that is me. A pattern about to be reformed. And I witter on and on. Rather useful as a lecturer, I suppose, but stupefyingly useless as a husband or any other type of social human being. My psychiatrist (yes, it goes with the territory) suggested I was borderline Asperger’s in my behaviour, but then she would, she has her own schemata to work to and things must fit neatly or her world will end.

Well, mine was making a pretty fair attempt at doing so. I mean, how do you tell your wife that you are your very own “other woman”?

Yes, I know you have all worked that one out, probably from line one, just like my mother. The sneaky indulgence and hasty climaxes thing.

No, not me. No arousal, no sweatiness. Just peace. And an acceptance that at some point I would have to foreground it. More literary terms, no wonder she got bored.

I would have to come out into the light and actually talk to somebody about what my problem was in all its simple complexity, and I supposed I would have to do it in English.

I’m a whizz at analysing it. I just can’t speak it that well when there are others involved.

Bugger.

CHAPTER 2
Why is it impossible to talk to my mother? I have read all of the literature, all of the academic papers I can find on ideational and interpersonal function, and how to use it. I have looked up the non-verbal aspects, I have even practised them, but it makes no difference. She talks, I sit quietly.

She uses the same patterns, endlessly reinforced. The wise elder, the reluctant critic, “I hate to have to say this but…”.I fall into my own little reverie, counting the words she uses most, sometimes writing transcripts at home so I can see the patterns emerge. Jane always hated that, my sitting in bed with a pad and pencil, so I started doing it in the toilet. I’d pretend I needed a dump, and work out the structure while sat there, sometimes so long my thighs would fall asleep and it was only my pyjama bottoms that hid the red mark on my rear. She would be asleep when I got back, snoring away with the light on. I kept a packet of foam ear plugs by the bed for those nights.

Often, she would sleep with earphones in, listening to some odd story or other to “help her sleep”. I could never understand that. Stories are structures, they are open to analysis to find the engineering that makes them work. That is their attraction, for me anyway. It is like music; J.S. Bach is the best example I can think of. I really cannot understand the later stuff, later than Beethoven. All that syrup and lack of structure; compare it with “The Art of Fugue” and you will surely be able to see what I mean.

I won’t even mention pop. Or folk. The word that always comes to mind is “why?”

There are shapes to things, patterns in the world, and I love finding them. I cannot abide a lack of structure, and that was what confused me about my surreptitious pastime. I had, of course, read everything I could about it, and it frustrated me. Everything was fluid, there were no boundaries, there was no structure, nothing I could put into order. Everything seemed to be based around sex in some sides, and body image in others. I struggled to find anything that fitted me.

All I knew was that I felt at peace when wearing a dress or skirt. There was no arousal, and when I looked up the various internet sites my choice of clothing certainly did not fit any of their patterns. No odd lingerie, no silly shoes; I liked comfort, pleasant textures for my skin, not constriction and definitely not exposure. I suppose an outsider might use the word “frump”

An apt word. Outsider, that was my viewpoint. I stood outside, and watched, and tried to make sense of the patterns that people wove among and between themselves. I had met Jane through a newspaper personal ads section, “kindred souls” or some such. We had written for a while, met for some meals, and she had sort of moved in with me in a very short time. My mother said I was being railroaded, but then she had always wanted me to wed, and what with the lower tax loads for married couples, it made sense, and so we had made the necessary arrangements at the registry office, and I was officially normal.

I must allow myself a wry smile at that one. I have never been normal. Ignoring the clothing issue, I have never fitted easily into this world. I was beaten up regularly ay school for the crime of not liking those enthralments that other boys found so important. We lived in Gosport, and the local football team was Portsmouth, play up Pompey, and so on. Unless you were a Scummer, and supported Southampton, of course. I had no interest at all in 22 alleged adults chasing a bag of pigfart around a square (well, rectangle) of grass, which made me a Scummer to the boys at school, and a Pompey fan to the Scummers, and so on. I happen to like both red and blue as colours, and either could be the ticket to a beating, depending. At least there was structure to that one; I could minimise the risk by checking who was playing at home, and dressing accordingly. Of course, as I worked out later, my suggestions that one should support the team that had the best chance of winning, such as Manchester United, were actually not that well thought out. For some reason, the boys seemed to think that was being a little disrespectful, and that usually ended up in another beating.

University was different. One was expected to be different, it was almost de rigueur, but it did deprive me of access to my mother’s wardrobe. You have to understand that the internet was not a big thing in the UK in the nineties, and so my access to suitable clothing was not great. I had a couple of items, bought in charity shops and so forth, with the usual stories of costume parties and rag week events, but it wasn’t much. When there was an actual “drag ball”, I borrowed some bits off a girl in my hall of residence, and I remember my sheer joy afterwards when I didn’t have to get changed, nor hide in my room. I wore a nice frock with very modest neck and hem lines, some long boots with a three inch heel, and make up applied by the other girls.

It was the walk back to my room that was the best part. I was definitely ogled by some of the boys in the dim lighting, and while the normal pattern here would be to rhapsodise about the feel of the breeze and the swish of nyloned thighs against each other, it simply was not so. I just felt more real, more natural, more myself.

I was very loth to give the clothes back, so I made up a story about dry cleaners and kept them for a few days before I took them there. I hadn’t exactly lied, more sort of adjusted the time scale. I did get an odd look from the cleaner, though.

The trick of a good piece of fiction is often schema breaking, where a familiar route is signposted and foregrounded only to take an unexpected turn somewhere. The classic “shortest horror story”, for example, goes “The last man on Earth sat in his room. There was a knock at the door”. I am assured that schema theory explains a lot of jokes, those which do not rely on cruelty. The latter are the jokes I am more familiar with, of course.

I break so many of the things myself. This is the problem I have with my psychiatrist, as I have already intimated. She has attempted to fit me into one of a very precise set of patterns, and yes, she does know about my clothing choices, it is after all the reason I went to her in the first place.

I read, I read voraciously, I read for work, I even read what my students hand in, and I even do that with late submissions. The world is made of words, John’s gospel even starts with that assertion, and I find it impossible to follow things through unless they are verbalised. I spent the first part of my life trying to find the right label, because if something has no name can it really exist?

I told you, I witter. But my analyst gave me a number of labels and invited me to choose. Ask you, how can a thing classify itself? I tried…and she tried, and all she could say was that I had an illness. So let me put some of the “nots” into play.

I am apparently not a fetishist. I do not objectify particular items.

It is not a sexual thing, but then I am not really sexual, which was one of the problems with Jane. I mean, I performed on occasions as necessary, but she knew them for what they were: performances. I don’t think she appreciated the washing I would do immediately on finishing.

I do not hate my body, it’s where I live and I suppose it isn’t too bad for that purpose. I am small, slim and fair-haired and well within statistical norms.

As far as I know, I am not homosexual.

I do not see myself as a woman trapped etc in a man’s body, and that is where I believe I confused the doctor. I read a number of articles on the subject, and a commonly used phrase for that sort of individual was “When did I realise I am a girl? When did you realise you are right-handed?”

That is, in truth, very apt for me. I am a bastard type of ambidextrous, and am not “handed” at all. It is not that I do things equally with either hand, but that I change hands depending on what I am doing. I write with both at once when marking, for example, I deal cards left-handed and at school I played badminton and batted with whichever hand was convenient, and boxed with both stances.. In the cadet force, however, I fired rifles right-handed and pistols as a lefty. But I wipe my bottom with my right.

Wittering again. I did that with the lady, and then tried to use that pattern to bring out how I feel. I am a human being, as far as I can see, and that is as far as I can work it out. Viewpoint, again. I cannot empathise with handedness in people because I am not handed. I cannot empathise with the idea of gender dysphoria because as far as I can gather I have no absolute gender.

That is what sent my good lady doctor into a state of confusion. It is also, now, what I am trying to resolve. Do I need gender? What can it do for me that I really need? And if it turned out to be hiding deep within me, like a viral spore awaiting some signal, what would do if it were the wrong one?

My sessions in the surgery were leaving me more stressed than ever. I hate, hate, hate it when a routine cannot continue, and my other clothing was my comfort blanket, rather like the smells in my Mother’s house.. The more I struggled to find any evidence of my handedness beyond the physical, the more I had to unwind the spring of my life. Hence my carelessness at home and Jane’s wrong deduction.

She had asked if I felt like a woman, and I had replied that I couldn’t answer as I didn’t know what being a man felt like.

She said something about needing alcohol as I was leaving that day.

CHAPTER 3
I left my mother’s house the next morning for the University, wearing my Dennis the Menace (the real and original UK one) cycle shirt, the one I am told gives me a dangerous, devil-may-care, appearance.

I don’t see that; it is bright, visible for some distance off, and unusual enough that drivers respond to my presence on the road hopefully before they drive into me rather than afterwards. Above all, it is comfortable, which is an attribute I have always prized.

I had no idea how to deal with the Jane situation. To be honest, she had suited me for various reasons, and the running had been done by her rather than me. There has never been what has passed for passion in my life; I didn’t even feel much when my father died, but to be honest I can’t remember much back then. I was a sickly child, spending stints in hospital, and such things blur together. He died when I was nine, of complications caused by diabetes, but I remember rumours at school that he had a hand in his own demise, something about insulin.

I don’t have much truck with medical things, as I have enough trouble trying to follow human mental processes without adding in endocrinology and other biological processes. It’s like listening to Mahler; the music would be wonderful without all those attempts to ‘talk’ about adulterous wives (how apt) or dead children. I usually avoided that as much as possible, taking a favourite book with me to work on over lunch, Hofstadter’s “Gá¶del, Escher, Bach”, and today I would be immersed in two lectures on intertextuality, with emphasis on Genette’s five subtypes…exactly my sort of day. I had, of course, plenty of marking to do, and then this afternoon, before the second lecture, another meeting with my doctor.

I had, I suppose, already written Jane off. My mother had been right, as usual, and the priority was to find a reasonable solicitor and salvage what I could.

“Get on the fucking cycle path you fucking cunt!”

Ah. I must be near St Denys, in my reverie having lost my sense of time. The van skimmed me, with a suggestion find gainful employment from the passenger and the passage of a half-eaten apple close to my head. Patterns continue.

I clattered along the hall to my office, running into Dave Forbes as I did so.

“John, glad I caught you! How are you for tomorrow?”

“What do you seek, Dave?”

“Well, I have a freshers’ lecture on Formalism at ten, but I rather want to go out on the piss tonight at the club after training, and might not be at my sharpest for the dear young things.”

There are times people speak to me. It is when something is wanted. Before I could answer, there was a cough, and a very quiet “Excuse me, Dr Evans”

Abigail Thorpe, one of my third years, was standing waiting to speak. She is a plump little girl, and I wish she would use a proper bra-fitting service. Hers are clearly too small, making her bulge out in a very inelegant manner, and she had obviously realised this because she kept fiddling with the top button of her blouse, which seemed to be coming undone. The colour was wrong for her, anyway.

“Have you marked my essay yet, Doctor? It’s just, I may not have explained all my argument properly, and there might be a couple of things you need me to make clearer for you”

“I think that is something you should have done in the essay itself, Abigail, but I will bear that in mind. Thank you”

I turned my attention back to Dave, and caught him staring at my crotch.

“Amazing”, he sad, “You really have absolutely no idea at all. Not a flicker. Tell you what, I’ll mark her paper for you if you want.”

It took me the rest of the day to work that one out. I only did so because Dave told me.

I could share my lecture notes with you, but I suspect that a surfeit of Genette and Lévi-Strauss would stun you into somnolence. I will never, ever understand how such exciting concepts can be seen as ‘boring’, but apparently many people seem to feel that way. I am reasonably certain I caught the hint of a snore in the second lecture.

I worked further through my book over lunch, engrossed in Hofstadter’s argument about the cognitive process. I already knew Bach, of course, and was familiar with Escher’s work, and as visual art it was unusual in the way it spoke to me.

Things moved in circles. His figures observed impossible water flows, or walked endlessly around flights of self-swallowing stairs that ate their tail, like Ourobouros. Patterns repeated themselves, changing from one thing to another across the canvas, only to reveal that they had always been both one and the other. Yin was indeed the other side of yang, even if it was a case of fish and fowl.

Patterns, cycles.

The meeting with the doctor was a surprise. She hit me with her usual vague attempts to get me to categorise myself into one of her little boxes, and I stayed outside them, until

Until she picked up a bundle of documents that were very obviously my consolidated medical records. I remembered the usual disclosure stuff when we first started, but was unaware that she had actually accessed them.

“John, what happened in 1985?”

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The second lecture, as I have already intimated, may have found me at my least interesting, even for such delights as Genette, and when I emerged Dave was awaiting me.
“So, are you up for it tomorrow?”

“Yes, and I will ask a favour in return”

“Does it involve marking that girl’s assets in any way?”

“No, I can do that. Why are you shaking your head like that? What I meant was to ask if you will be in your estate car tomorrow. I need to pick my things up from home”

“Ah. You finally cracked. We’ve been wondering how long you would last”

Once more, it was apparent to me that everyone else on the planet seemed to have known something I was in ignorance of.

“Oh, come on, John, that copper, he’s been porking her for nearly a year now! She’s even been down to the pub with me and Sharon when he just ‘happened’ to drop by!”

I must have looked a little lost. Dave was a lot gentler in his tone.

“Make a list of the essentials, otherwise you will forget something important and never get it back. Trust me on this one, I’ve been there. Where are you staying?”

“My mother’s”

“Oh shit, the black widow…sorry, John, but can I make a really important suggestion? Find somewhere of your own or you will, never, ever leave until she is dead.”

I just stared at him. Still gentle in his tone, he continued.

“John, you are an odd fish, but you are very good at what you do. I think the two are related, and there is no harm in you. You just don’t see things that are right in front of you.

“Tell me, what was that girl after earlier?”

“She wanted to fine tune her paper with my assistance, which is not really the proper way to do things”

“No, John, she was pushing her tits in your face and offering you a fuck or a BJ for a mark”

I could feel myself blush. Dave laughed, not in a nasty way.

“You really, really didn’t, don’t get it, do you?”

He actually reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. I am not one for physical contact, but didn’t move away.

“John, I don’t know what it is with you. You are either just very strangely wired, or you have had a life sheltered beyond belief, or your parents were barking. Tell you what…if you don’t want to stay with your mother, Sharon and I can squeeze you in for a while. What do you think?”

“That is very kind of you, but I am already at my mother’s and it’s simpler all round. It matches the normal schema, after all. I will find a place, though, I promise”

Why exactly was I so concerned to make a promise to this individual? I supposed it must be because, like my psychiatrist, he seemed to have genuine curiosity about me, unlike Jane. My mind went back to the psychiatrist’s question. I knew the answer, or some of it.

What happened in 1985? I was nine. I ended up in hospital again, but I can’t remember why, exactly, though I do remember some surgery. Something nagged at me about repetition, patterns.

And my father died.

CHAPTER 4
It was a typical evening at my mother’s. She had the Glass Tit on as I read, watching some “Britain’s Got X-Rated Dancing Talent” or something, a style of programme I find profoundly irritating.

They all seem to focus on whichever tuneless style of wailing is currently in fashion with the prepubescent, in combination with a very narrow range of physical appearance. Following my conversation, my enlightenment, with Dave, I wondered how many of the contestants were prepared to offer similar deals to that allegedly proposed by the female student.

I did the lecture for Dave the next morning, after a night spent in the smells of my room. It is a subject that intrigues me, as I disagree deeply with the Formalists’ premise, and having delivered material on intertextuality the day before I was finding it hard to maintain due respect for the argument. I cannot accept that something can be fully examined in purely technical and isolated fashions. Context should be everything in understanding a text, and the strict technique advocated here, or in my case described, was arid even for me.

There was an interruption early on, as a man a few years older than the other students was brought in in a wheelchair. It was no ordinary National Health Service juggernaut; as a cyclist I recognised the look of good components. His right leg was missing, and a pair of crutches was mounted on the back of the chair rather like an odd flagpole.

“Sorry I’m late, Dr Forbes, I had difficulty finding the lifts”

“It’s Dr Evans. I am standing in for Dr Forbes today as he has another engagement.

There was a snigger from more than a few of the students, and I caught the whispered words “pissed” and “hangover”

Well, they weren’t wrong.

I found his presence troubling. I am used to standing to give my lectures to a reasonably well-arrayed expanse of faces, usually blank, but all more or less arranged n my line of sight. The older man was, of course, to one side of the tiers of seats, and I had to keep turning to include him in my words. It was odd, he seemed to pay more attention than almost any of the others, who were the usual collection of people who wanted to learn, people who thought they should learn, people who thought they should be at university, and people whose parents thought they should be there.

I can deal with the first, I do my best for the second, and I tended to leave the other two categories to find whether it was the right place for them. He seemed to be in category 1, and the pattern there is lingering at the end of the lecture and asking more questions. The questions chosen were usually an advanced indication of their intellectual ability, and so I resolved to pay particular attention to this one. Dave would need warning of any upcoming problems; they were his students, not mine.

I wasn’t disappointed. After I had left them with Dave’s essay title, which was to consider the blindingly obvious question of context in Formalism, the older man came up to me and asked the other obvious question.. Dave’s is indeed one that shouts to be asked, but the answer is a devious collection of apparent contradictions. Like so much of this subject, it is not the answer we seek but the thought processes that take then to their answer. If there is any ability to think, of course.

The other “obvious question” came from the cripple: “Why?”

“It was a reaction to Romanticistic analysis, in which the suffering artist was the focus rather than their work. It was an attempt to set absolute criteria for analysis, and for a certain sort of mind…”

Mine, for example, in most cases.

“…it allowed a direct comparison of widely variant texts. The real problem is that it has a lot of political freight. Look at it as a tool, like schematic analysis, not as an answer. Both Dr Forbes and myself will be looking for a toolbox approach in your work. Think of it like that: a spanner will undo a bolt, but screws, though mechanically similar, require a screwdriver.. We will be delivering a number of different tools this year, but the choice in which is appropriate will be yours.”

He smiled, which revealed a number of small scars around his eyes, and I wondered what had happened to him. He stared at me for a while.

“Are you local?”

“Gosport, so not that far away”

“Which junior school were you at? I’m sorry to pry, it’s just that II think might have gone to school with you”

“Hardway Junior Mixed…”

“I KNEW it! John Evans, your father…”

He stopped dead.

“I’m sorry, I have a bit of a problem not putting my foot in my mouth. My trick cyclist says I will learn, but it’s early days…”

I realised he was no longer looking at me, nor talking to me. In a shocking moment, for me, of perception I realised he was no longer in the lecture theatre. He shook himself.

“Sorry, I drift off now and again. Makes lectures fun; I carry a tape recorder, which was something else wanted to run past you”

He smiled again, and I saw more tiny scars, and realised something had cut his face up rather badly. There was a small chunk missing from his right ear..

“Yes, that John. I don’t recognise you, I’m afraid”

“Pete Hall?”

I had a sudden bright memory of a young face, squealing ‘gotcha!’ as he snapped a towel against my bare bottom in the showers after games, and I remembered it hurting more than it should. He had wet it first.

“Good god. What happened to you?”

“IED, they call it. Roadside bomb, I call it. I was lucky. I was drinking a real find, a proper bottle of Coke, you know the glass ones? A fragment went through the bottle, and my face got sprayed with broken glass. I had my sand goggles down, though, so I kept my eyes. Couple of inches either way would have been my arm or my head. The other bit wasn’t as much of a fluke, though. Caught one piece right in the middle of the ceramic plate”

And two or three other pieces of jagged whatever had sliced and diced his right leg. Lucky, I suppose, compared…I remembered him now, always a clown, always with the latest things to read, though, and in a sudden rush of very old memories I remembered how many books ha had lent me, magazines too. His mother had run a newsagent, and each month when the new editions came out the old ones would be stripped of their covers for pulping. She got her credit from the returned covers, and I got the innards of the magazines free. He had been a keen cyclist, footballer….for once I was feeling a connection outside the patterns, a vicarious loss on his behalf. If I had ever had a friend at school, and in truth I hadn’t, it had been him.

“What are you doing, Pete?”

“Sitting in a wheelchair talking to my lecturer”

No change there, then.

“No, where are you living, what are you doing here, that sort of thing”

“As eloquent as ever, John? Well, I have sheltered accommodation out at Hedge End and I’m trying to do a BA in English and Literary Criticism. And trying to get back to the real world after rather too long in and out of hospitals. You?”

I ran out of structure there. Too many variables, wild cards from another planet it seemed, to allow me to answer. I think I stood for about fifteen seconds until I could find the thread.

“Short answer? I found my wife in my bed with a policeman a couple of days ago, I am staying at my mother’s for now until I can sort something out, and today when your regular lecturer has recovered I will be going with him to collect as many of my things as I can from my former residence. Apart from that, my life is uneventful”

He started to laugh. “You haven’t changed, have you? Is your mother still in Grotspot? We shall have to get out for a pint some time”

He paused. “You do drink, John? No offence, but you seem very on edge”

“I have my own issues, Pete”

There was a sudden overwhelming need to unburden myself, there and then, ell him everything. My one and only sort-of-school-friend shows up, and I go irrational. I came back from my fugue to see him holding a piece of paper out to me, his address and mobile number I realised.

“Call me, John. I am afraid I am a little isolated these days, and it would be extremely helpful to have a face from my past to give some grounding again”

His smile had disappeared. “I’m a bit lost, you see. A bit fucked. Sorry to drop that one on you, but I would really appreciate a chance to look back at brighter days. If you can’t, I will understand”

We said a particularly stilted goodbye, and I went off to find Dave.

She hadn’t changed the locks, and I managed to get a fair bit into his car, with the back seats lowered, including the other woman. One of the things I really wanted was my collection of orchestral music scores. They cost a fortune, but I can read them and the structure leaps out at me, and it is better than a recording or a performance, because everything is unfiltered by the interpretation of anyone other than myself. As we would have to leave the car in the open until the run down to my mother’s, I had to leave my other bikes behind. There would be other times to pick them up. I didn’t really think she would be vindictive; the word she had used was “tired”.

So was I, and that last conversation with the doctor had left me very confused, and drained, and the scene with Pete just added to it all.

CHAPTER 5
I should have expected it. We dropped everything off, went straight back to college, and by the time I had ridden home my mother had put everything away.

“Your transvestite stuff is in the wardrobe in the spare room, John”

What exactly had Dave said about my parents? Her next was easier to answer.

“You have no brassieres, John, and no nightwear. “

“You may have missed it mother, but I am without breasts, and Jane would have noticed the nightwear”

This was definitely removing me from any territory I was familiar with. She kept on, criticising some of my choices, praising others. Now, I know that I am seen as an odd fish, Dave had just been telling me exactly that, but this was surreal. I made a small prediction, based on her current train of thought, and she fulfilled it.

“So, when do I get to see you in your finery?”

When pigs fly. Dave was right, I needed to get out to my own place. The problem would be cash flow until I sorted the joint finances. Deep joy clearly awaited me, and it would probably involve being asked to dress for dinner.

The next week or so was awkward. My mother kept on, Dave and I did another run to collect the bikes one evening, and I spent hours trying to work out what the script was telling me. The schemata usually involved a heated discussion between spouses, but that never happened in my case.

She was calm incarnate, and to what should have been no great surprise on my part, given Dave’s revelation of how long liaison had been in session, she had a whole financial settlement planned out for us. Apparently, Mark was selling his place and would buy me out of the mortgage. I realised two things at that point.

The first was that my arrival while they were in bed was probably not at all accidental. It may well have been Jane’s way of making a point even I could not miss. The other made my head hurt.

I have taken pains to try and explain how I see the world, bow my mind filters it. You can only see as far as your stance allows, and I found myself trying to see around corners. There were big issues here, and I could feel the thing the doc had described as a form of Asperger’s Syndrome wrapping round my thoughts. I stand outside situations, I look at them, I perform my own little dance of Russian Formalism, and here I am analysing my own analysis.

I do not truthfully think I can make any headway in explaining how that feels. That was connected to the other thing that pushed its way into my mind, and that was that I really, really had to find some way of meeting other people in their own world. I had had three, no, five interactions that had thrown me. One of them, an offer of sexual bribery, was exactly the sort of thing that I realised could land me in prison in the wrong circumstances. I had to learn how to be human, which is no easy task. I resolved to take Pete up on his offer of a drink, as a start, but I would try and get Dave along as an interpreter. It involved beer, so I would be back on safer and more predictable territory. I could only hope that I would be able to speak without going into fugue for minutes.

I tried to explain all this to Dave, but he simply said to me “Do you know you just stand with your mouth open for ages when you are stressed?”

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I had a small moment of panic when I thought I had lost the paper from Pete, but found it in G,E,B marking an interesting digression on how to prove all ravens are white. I rang him that evening, and he suggested the Barn, as it was not far from the station. That would allow me a pleasant enough ride up by way of Lee and Warsash, and then a post-drink train back to Fareham and a much shorter run home. I suggested a Thursday evening to avoid too many crowds, and Dave leant on Sharon to drive.

“Why don’t you come in the car with us, John?”

“I think better when riding”

“What, nearly 30mph, mouth open and away with the fairies? Not safe at all, that”

I knew what Dave meant, but he was wrong. I didn’t do that at all when riding, it was too natural a process for me. In the end the ride was pleasant, running up the Solent and across the end of the Meon before following the Hamble past other people’s obsessions floating at their moorings. Well, mostly floating, there was at least one rowing boat that seemed to be exploring a deeper role in its life.

I was there before anyone else, and I was not impressed. The place was indeed close to the station, but the bar staff were more interested in each other than me. Dave and Sharon pulled in after twenty minutes, Dave driving the Volvo, Sharon dismissing the bar menu with a shudder. Five minutes later, Pete’s chair came into the car park, at quite a speed. It seemed I had been right about the components, it was a sports car for cripples. He too was not impressed, and suggested we move on to the Barleycorn, more than a walk away. Dave looked at his chair.

“Does it fold? If so, we can stick it in the back with his bike. Pop your wheels out, John.”

The next pub seemed more in keeping with the men’s ambitions, and they were straight into their beer, Sharon and I settling down for an evening of sobriety as the designated drivers.

“So, if it’s not too rude a question, Pete, what the hell happened? John said something about a bomb?”

“Out in Helmand. It’s odd, I’ve known him since infants’ school, but there’s such a gap it’s like talking to a stranger. Where to start?”
I settled my hind brain into following his story, while I watched Sharon in particular for clues on how to behave. There were patterns there, her posture and other non-verbal communication, her avoidance of ideational function in favour of the interpersonal. She wasn’t quizzing him, which would have been more efficient, she was letting him talk with the occasional empty comment. It was a long story, and partway through I realised how much I had missed from observing Sharon when I saw her getting a tissue from her handbag for Pete, who I suddenly saw was in tears.

He had moved to York, of all places, to be with his father’s parents after the sudden death of his mother. It appeared his father wanted a complete clear out after the shock, and at 12, everything sold, he had moved to Acaster, just outside the city. He described a good pub there, which did not surprise me considering how many pints were being disposed of.

School, restlessness, a sort of rebellion, and from 16 he was in Arborfield learning to be a Craftsman with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, the REME. Catterick, Bovington, Sennelager, all followed in their usual sequence.

“I was lucky, avoided all the nasties, not much call for a Tiffy in some of those places”

Sharon looked puzzled. “Tiffy?”

“Artificer. Engineer, mechanic, that sort of thing”

He got to staff sergeant, eventually.

“ I was due out this year, as it happens, off to find a job with my dad’s people, probably, running lorries. Not really up to it now, as you can see.

“That day was a hot one. We had found this Coke machine, and it did the proper old-fashioned bottles that you never see any more, and they come out of the bottom with a bang, all covered in dew, so I’d collared one, and we were on a shout to deal with a mechanical on a Warrior.

“It’s odd out there, you watch the crowd, and when they gather in numbers you get more careful. We’d dismounted to have a recce, and I remember I was on one knee behind the vehicle with my weapon in my right hand and I thought I would just have a swig while it was cold, you know? Put the vehicle between me and the hostiles, just in case, and I should have known better, they were doing the same. The bomb was on our side.

“One of the other lads saw it, you know? He saw the kid, about thirteen, pull out a mobile and press a button. I didn’t hear the bomb, you understand, I just saw the bottle smash, and there was this ‘SPANG!’ as something hit my ceramic, and I couldn’t stand up, and there was an awful lot of blood.

“I really couldn’t understand what had happened, I just realised that Lefty had thrown himself over me after the blast to protect me.”

I was away from Sharon now, fully on Pete. There was a look in his eyes I had read about, where they are focused on things that happened elsewhere but are still happening internally.

“The other boys got my bleeding stopped, and they got a patrol of bootnecks in to cover my casevac, and I was stabilised and flown back and, well, here we are. Trying to make a new life.”

I felt I should really contribute something.

“I suppose you owed Lefty a pint”

Pete started crying openly now.

“Oh, John, you don’t watch the news at all, do you? Lefty didn’t throw himself over me, what was left fell on me. They flew him back to Wootton a few days after I got back”

I really did not know what to say. Once more I was trying to find some way of bringing a pattern to this, but violent death was so far outside my sightline that was lost. How did the others react? Sharon was now hugging him, and Dave had a hand on his shoulder. I reached out and took his right hand, and in a moment of inspiration unlike me I said quietly,

“This is not a good place for conversations like this. Dave and I have rooms at college, if you ever need space or privacy, and whatever we can do to help we will. Right, you two?”

I saw Sharon staring at me open-mouthed.

“Are you a pod person? What have you done with the real John?”

CHAPTER 6
We dropped Pete off, slightly squiffy, at the British Legion home who were currently caring for him, and I was talked into a lift back to mine on the basis that my bike currently had no wheels attached. There was silence in the car for a while, until Sharon spoke.

“John, you did well there. That must be one of the first human things I have seen you do without written instructions”

Dave snorted. “You can still fine tune it, you know. You could start by avoiding words like ‘cripple’, and using people’s names. Do you realise that you only ever referred to Abigail with the tits once by name, and every other time she was just ‘the student’?”

“Do tell more, David” Sharon purred in a rather controlled way.

“Nothing really to tell, love, just some chesty bird trying to boost her marks by offering young John here her body, and it went right past him!

“No John, I am serious. You have to look at your vocabulary. You teach this stuff, for God’s sake”

He paused. “Put it this way. Context rules, and the interpersonal function is partially served by the choice of lexis and register. That better?”

They dropped me off at mother’s, and the day having already been so odd I was half expecting to find a nightdress on the bed.

After the weekend, I had another meeting with the doctor.

No. Dave had told me I needed to change that. Doctor Oliver. Mary Oliver. Remember that. People, not things, not processes.

We went back to 1985 again.

“John, I have your records here, so I already know quite a bit, but I need you to tell me, not the other way round. It doesn’t work that way. What happened?”

“My father died.”

“How?”

“He was a drinker, and that led to diabetes. I believe he had some sort of accident with his insulin”

“How do you know?”

“My mother sent me with a cup of tea that morning. They had separate rooms.”

“Go on”

“He was cold, and I pulled a blanket over him, and he didn’t move”

“And?”

“And I saw he had the needle he used stuck in him, and the syringe part had snapped off, and he had bled onto the sheets and he still had his hand around the barrel”

“John…John…”

“What?”

“You have been staring into space for thirty seconds.”

“Oh, sorry, doctor. Mary.”

She gave me a very, very sharp look at that. That was one thing I did spot.

“Why did you go to hospital that week, John?”

“I really don’t remember. I was often there”

She paused. “Tell me about this week so far, John”

That took quite a while. She made copious notes, and I caught a wry smile, quickly effaced, when I spoke about learning to be human.

“Was Pete a school friend?”

“I didn’t really have friends. I don’t make friends”

“He sought you out”

“Yes, but he is broken up very badly. I think he just needs someone outside the round of hospitals and care home, and he is older than the other freshers. There is no natural connection there, he has a different context to them.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“Flattered, I suppose, that he chose me, Dave and Sharon to confide in”

“How did you feel after hearing his story?”

That threw me. How did I feel exactly? I tried to measure my words, treat it as a textual analysis.

“I realised I have had it easier than many, but at the same time I realised I am actually a cripple in my own way. Sharon in particular said some very, very sharp words to me last night, and I am trying to find a way to reshape my life to become more fluid. That is what I lack. I cannot bend, flow; I must have structure and boundaries or I cannot properly connect with things around me”

“John, that is the first time I have ever heard you express your problems as you see them. Do you feel like this because Sharon spoke to you, or because Jane left you, or because of Pete, or is there anything else?

“All of that, I suppose, but mainly Pete. I like to make things run smoothly, reset the patterns and functions so that they work. I like to make my bikes as perfect as I can, all pressures just so, gears slick, everything lubricated and clean.

“Pete is broken. Fixing people is not a skill I have, but if I approach it logically, surely I can learn?”

“People are like mirrors, John. You can fix them so they work, up to a point, but you can always see the cracks. Are you ready for the effects such a project might have on you?”

I couldn’t answer that one as I had no idea. Mary--–I am really trying, here---abruptly changed track.

“Are you still dressing now you are at your mother’s?”

“Er, yes.”

“In front of your mother?”

“No, but I think she would like me to”

“Would you dress in front of your mother?”

“Possibly”

“Would you do so before colleagues?”

“No”

“Friends?”

I started to make my usual protest, and she cut me off.

“What are Dave and Sharon if not friends? Pete?”

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That evening, I took another ride up to Hedge End, to see exactly what the place they had given Pete was like, arriving about seven o’clock. It was almost a self-contained settlement, clearly built with disability in mind, which said an awful lot about the people the Legion cared for. His flat was well laid out, with wider doors than normal, lowered work surfaces, handrails by the bath and toilet, and alarm cords in each room. Pete himself was clearly on the edge of being drunk. I made a decision. I was getting more experienced with that.

“Curry. No arguments. My shout.”

It took a while to wrestle him into his coat and…shoe. That one struck me very hard. I ended up with him sort of draped on me as I unfolded the chair and dropped him onto the seat. It was easier after that, rolling down the footpath to the village centre where I had seen a couple of Indians. I tossed a mental coin to choose, and then realised that one had steps. Choice made.

I was impressed. The waiters fussed around, moving tables and chairs to allow us in and ignoring the fact that Pete was slumped slightly and slurring his words. In hindsight, I suppose he fitted all their internal schemata of the brain-damaged invalid, and I had to dissuade one of them from tying his napkin as a bib.

“What beer they got, John?”

“No.”

I ordered us two large Cokes, as at least I could be certain he drank that stuff, and we had the full popadom and pickles set up followed by a rather pleasant thali. I tried my best to follow Sharon’s lead, repeating to myself that there was no need, no need at all, to impart information in conversation.

Pete rabbited on about people I could hardly remember, but I made the right noses, I believe, and then he began tales of his REME life. There was a hiatus when he got to Lefty, but somehow I managed to turn us down a different street, and we ended upon safer ground, for me, discussing Genette and the Russians. I was back in my comfort zone, and Pete had sobered up a lot, and it was becoming apparent even to me that I was actually having fun, a very odd concept.

No, not ‘fun’ as a concept, but ‘unstructured fun’, no programme, no pattern. We ate, we talked, he laughed, I felt better.

I pushed him back to the shelter, laughing all the way, and helped him to bed.

I don’t want to talk about the scars. He hugged me before I left. As I wheeled my bike out of the gates, the guard, caretaker, attendant, Martin his name badge said, stopped me. Martin stopped me.

“You did well there, sir. Thank you. We need more people like you to come in and break them out of it. It feeds on itself, you know, like a snake eating its tail.”

He paused.

“If it’s not too much, how is it you know Staff Hall?”

“We were at school together, years and years ago”

“Well, sir-“

“John. John Evans”

“Well, John, call round here anytime. We have social evenings in house, and a new face is always welcome.”

“Thank you Martin. Good night”

As I rode off to the station I remembered Mary’s last few questions, about who I would dress in front of, and a memory surfaced.

Pete. I had dressed in front of Pete.

CHAPTER 7
I was suddenly standing on a hill, all views open to me. There was something very real to what Mary was prodding at.

I had a ghost of a memory, nothing concrete, but it hinted at more. For once, the pattern was showing itself. If I had things like that unspeaking in the back of my mind, I had others. Mary had set her focus on my ninth year, based on my medical records and the death of my father, and I felt there might be something more there. Typical; the more you communicate, the more you need communication.

I didn’t speak much with Jane. There didn’t seem to be much point, and my mother had taken everything over, as I half expected and, yes, she did leave a nightdress, two actually, on my bed. They went into a drawer.

I made a point of lunching with Pete, and Dave if he was about, at the University, and I went for a chat with the Faculty head. The incident with Abigail had alerted me to the fact that the perceptions of others could be dangerous things. Alerted me, that is, when Dave had rubbed my face in it. I could see the structure of that, and realised that I needed to be careful, for Pete’s sake.

That was a joke, by the way..

Seriously, if it became suspected that I was involved in some form of favouritism, it might harm his studies. I needed to explain that I was a friend, and make sure I was seen not to be involved in his assessment in any way.

It was all very simple, in the end; I declared an interest, I was barred from any access to his work, and we had lunch. I ended up paying. He likes port. It was still a tense day, and when I got home (‘home’?) I made a decision.

Mother insisted I tuck a napkin in at the neck.

“John, I would never have cooked spaghetti if I had known you would be wearing silk. The sauce would ruin that blouse! And would you mind removing your heels in the house?”

We ate in silence for a little while, and then she simply said “Thank you, John. It has been an awfully long time since I last saw Laura”

I don’t know how long I was blanked out for that time, but my lap was full of spaghetti.

“Mother, I have no idea at all what you are on about”

“Of course you have, dear. I thought you’d remember it well, seeing as your friend is back”

She continued calmly winding her spaghetti into her spoon as I gaped again.

“When you were a little boy, you would dress up all the time. I remember you making a mask by knotting my headscarf. When I asked if you were Batman, you sad ‘No, Catwoman’

“You always dressed up…and you chose that name, and it was only after that night that you stopped. Stopped doing it at home, or in front of people.”

I pressed her for more, but she was adamant that the past was over and done, and we were living in the here and now, and other platitudes that added up to a very clear refusal to talk.

“You know, that blouse would hang so much better with breasts. I must get you some…”

I suddenly realised my mother was crying, and the weeping became sobs, and she insisted I wrap a clean napkin between us to prevent tears ruining my best grey silk when I held her.

She would not tell me what had started it all off. None of this was making any sense to me at all.

She wound down from the sobs. “Laura, darling, could you please go and get changed for bed? I really need to cuddle up, and that silk will be ruined. I will make cocoa.

I went and put on the long, pale blue cotton one, and my slippers, and wrapped a blanket over my shoulders. My mother was in much the same rig when I returned, and she had put some music on the stereo, syrupy stuff, Sibelius I think. She patted the sofa, and we cuddled together under the blanket with our mugs. Whatever her state of mind was, she was calmer talking to me like this, and I wouldn’t spoil it while it lasted.

She is my mother, and if I am capable, truly capable of love, it is her I keep it for.

“You always loved costumes, and games, but you were always the captive princess, and usually Peter the rescuing knight, or cowboy, or whichever role seemed to fit, and I worried at first that you would have problems at school, but you would laugh, and it was such a lovely sound, and I could always see how happy you were.

“I know I come across as a harridan at times…shush, don’t make false protestations, you never wanted to come back here. The thing is you are my child, only flesh of my flesh that I ever produced….”

She trailed off again, and this time the crying was awful. She caught her breath, eventually.

“You would have had a brother, that was the funny thing. He would have been happy with that.

“Laura, do you remember when you were seven, and you stayed with Aunty Hannah for a couple of weeks, at the caravan near Christchurch?”

There was a little quiver of memory there.

“Just about, Mum”

“I was in hospital, dear. I was miscarrying your brother”

I stayed with her till she calmed. She asked me to let her sleep on the sofa, to the sounds of two of her favourite Sibelius symphonies playing on ‘repeat’ at a low level. For an instant, I was reminded of Jane and her talking books, but this was different. I was indeed seeing further, and I knew that I had only ever loved, only did love, one of these women.

There was clearly more to this whole mess than anyone was telling me. The evening’s revelations alone were enough to rock my world. I had dressed down for my mother, in a dove grey silk blouse belted over a darker wool knee length skirt, with black tights and simple courts with a 2” heel, and had limited the makeup to just the basics, a bit of mascara and lippy, as I don’t have a heavy beard. My mother had smiled with genuine pleasure when she saw me, but it was only with the assistance of a couple of glasses of wine that she opened up.

I didn’t sleep well that night, and it was barely awake that I wandered into the kitchen to grab a cuppa.

“Morning Laura!”

Bugger. I was still in the nightgown.

“Mum, you will have to stop that. I am 31 years old, I have a Doctorate and I am called ‘John’ “

She just hugged me.

“When is Peter coming round? You haven’t said much apart from that he turned up at your college”

“Peter is…a little different, Mother. He’s been hurt.”

She went quiet again, looking at me.

“Not the only one, love”

Dave was picking me up that morning, as we intended to do a food run for Pete in the Volvo. We were also looking around at the prospect of an adapted car for him, as we hoped the Motability scheme would cover most of the costs. I dressed as quickly as I could to minimise my mother’s Laura-fixation, and was soon on my way to Southampton. Dave looked at me, and popped the glove box.

“There are some wet wipes in there, mate, you might want to clean off the mascara.”

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I was silent for a while then, not surprisingly. We got through the day, but I was on eggshells throughout. Too many secrets, too many changes, I was caught in turbulence and chaos is chaos. No patterns to focus on, no signposts.

Pete joined us after classes, and we headed out to Shirley where Harrison’s, the specialist car dealer, had what added up to a showroom. There was what looked like an ideal vehicle there, depending on how things went when Pete got his final fitting for what he was calling his tin leg.

A Citroen Berlingo van conversion, with sliding rear side doors, looked good. A side-mounted wheelchair hoist sorted the chair out, while he swung himself into the driver’s seat. It was an automatic, so the driving was one-footed. Even with the chair is place, there was still plenty of room for luggage, and a seat for a passenger.

“Not exactly a fanny magnet, is it?” laughed Pete wryly, “but at least I am someone able to drive when he’s legless!”

Believe it or not, we laughed at that, and I was left trying to work out how it was funny when he said it, but not when anyone else did.

The deal was done. Motability would confirm it, and Pete looked really upbeat. We ran out to Eastleigh to hit the supermarket, and loaded his freezer with the essentials. Martin was on the gate again, and smiled at me with real warmth. Especially when I remembered his name.

When we had unloaded the car, I sat and thought for a while. What had Dave done when I had told him about Jane? Invited me down to stay with him. When he popped into the toilet, I looked at Pete and said “Fancy a meal at ours tonight? Mum’s been asking after you.”

He looked a little closer at me, tight in the eyes, then a lot closer, and smiled.

“Will that be with Laura?”

CHAPTER 8
I was losing control quickly. This was not me, this was not good. Too many things coming at me from too many directions. I made a mental note either to use less mascara, or clean myself more rigorously.

“You remembered. I didn’t”

“How could I ever forget Laura? That was the only time you ever stopped reading!”

Another moment of insight came, just then, that while I had always realised that others around me knew more about life than me, they also knew more about my own life than I did.

“Pete, I am not trying to be funny, but I remember very little of my childhood.. I just remember being sick a lot”

“Aye, you were always that. One day you would be demanding I kill some dragon or Indians, the next you would disappear off to hospital..”

He grinned, the little scars standing out around his smile.

“We used to have a lot of fun back then, even when you were doing the Sleeping Beauty or Snow White bit”

“Explain…”

“You’d get your Mum’s nighty, and say it was a ball gown, and I had to bow to you because you were a princess.”

He was looking uncomfortable at that point. I left the subject alone as Dave returned.

“One last favour, Dave, I have just asked Pete if he fancies a meal round mine tonight. You don’t mind dragging his wheels along again?”

“Course not. I think you should tell your mum first, though. Especially if she’s cooking. Women like a bit of warning”

Oh hell. I made a quick call.

“Mum? John. I seem to have invited Pete back for tea and forgotten to ask you first. Sorry….”

“What time will you be back? I feel decadent…would you be a dear and stop off at the chippy? You know what I like, a small haddock, tail end. Oh, and we are out of wine for some reason. And I took your skirt to the dry cleaners, it’ll be ready tomorrow. Shall I make up the spare room?”

How many questions does an invitation bring on its heels? I covered the phone and asked him.

“Stopping over? She will not be safe to drive, and I have no car”

He busied himself with an overnight bag, kit for the following day, and so on, while I asked Dave the all-important question.

“What wine goes with cod and chips?”

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Dave took us back past the supermarket, where Pete picked up three (THREE?) bottles of Frascati, and then to the chippy by the ferry terminal, where he secured his own peace offering, before dropping us off at my mother’s. Pete cuddled the wine and the food while I pushed him to the door.

We have a step.

My mother opened the door, and her eyes widened as she took in his condition.

“Oh, Peter, what have they done to you?”

So many assumptions were suddenly falling apart. Steps to the front door, an upstairs bedroom…what else had I overlooked? Idiot. We got him up into the house by my pulling the chair backwards while my mother lifted it from the front, and then it wouldn’t fit through the door. We left the chair in the porch and I took Pete’s arm across my shoulders as he hopped and lurched into the living room.

Thank God we have a downstairs toilet.

Mother fussed around, just as I had expected, and pointed out that she actually had a bed settee in the conservatory, if Pete didn’t mind the lack of curtains. I was despatched to collect the bedding while mother did the mother-chips thing.

They should be eaten out of paper, on your lap, not at a dining table off china. Mothers never see that particular pattern, because they are following their own, especially with guests present.

She produced cheese and biscuits to follow, and we were already onto the second bottle, when she threw yet another oddity into my already turbulent world.

“Laura is back as well, Peter, thought you would want to know”

He blushed. It seemed he was happy, to a point, to tease me about it in private, but something held him back in company. My mother, however, was going for gold in some internal competition to be as peculiar as possible.

“John, you can pick your skirt up tomorrow, they say the stains came right out.”

I spent a while pounding Pete’s back as wine went everywhere but down his throat, and then got some kitchen roll to clean it up. Fortunately, Frascati is about as white as a wine can get, and stains were not a worry.

Apart from my mother’s attempts to channel the spirit of Viv Stanshall, it was the sort of evening I had hoped for. There was a proper order to events; She asked, Pete described, I commented, he was made welcome. My mother in particular was solicitous almost beyond belief, and I half expected her to complete the script and invite him to stay permanently. Pete was very clear on that point; until he had been fitted with a leg, and more importantly come to terms with it, he would need properly adapted accommodation.

That was his phrase, “come to terms”, not “learn to use”. I struggled for a while to understand the subtext there, but he was actually being quite straightforward. Every time he strapped on a prosthesis, he would be reminded directly of his loss. I was struggling with that concept. I could not see how any one could suffer so terribly and remain sane, and I mentioned that when I saw Mary Oliver again. She gave me an odd look, and gently pointed out that he wasn’t actually well. I am ahead of myself, though. I must try and keep some sense of order to events.

I left my mother to continue entertaining Pete while I made up his bed, and the evening wound down as the wine vanished. A bottle each…I felt rather fuzzy, and at the same time deeply relieved that Mother had not suggested Laura make an appearance. I was very unsure about that; I had done it for my mother, and the result had been some truly nasty shocks. I had done it, apparently, with Peter, but we had been very young, and circumstances had changed almost beyond belief. I nearly wrote ‘beyond our wildest dreams’, but half carrying the wreck of my friend into the house was not in any way something I ever wanted to dream about.

‘Friend’. Was that the truth?

I settled him down under the duvet and went upstairs to find my mother laying out pyjamas for me, which was a relief.

“John, I am sorry if I made it obvious how shocked I was. Peter doesn’t need that sort of thing. You are doing amazingly well with him, and I am proud of you”

“I think he needs me, mum”

“Yes, and you are not used to that. I think you need him, too. He asked me a few questions while you were doing his bed for him, you know. He wanted to know what had happened to you to make you so odd”

“Am I odd, mum? I don’t mean the frocks, I mean me”

“Yes, John, you are very odd. You are incredibly hard work at times, but what is so awful is that you are such a good soul. You care for people, when you realise they are in need of care, but that is your problem. You never do realise unless it is pushed in your face.

“I could be very wrong here, but I feel that you and he may be able to help each other. You both need something outside yourselves. As far as I am concerned, dear, he is welcome here whenever he needs us. I care about him, but I care more for you, and I think he is good for you, will be good for you.
“Now, I’ve put some cleansing milk and other stuff in the bathroom cabinet for you. Make sure you get the rest of that mascara off before bed.

“Goodnight dear”

“Night, Mum.”

“ I do love you, John. I will do you both a proper breakfast tomorrow, then I shall drive you in.. Sleep well.”

CHAPTER 9
There is a peculiarity that should be obvious with the one-legged: sitting in a chair.

Balance is thrown, and it is too easy to tumble sideways towards the void. I made sure Pete had his crutches the next morning, as I drew the line at sitting him on the toilet, but I made sure I had a chair against the wall ready for his breakfast.

I felt rough from so much wine, but he seemed fine, and my mother….my mother was whizzing round the kitchen like a madwoman. Every conceivable breakfast item was set before us, including two types of bread, two styles of egg….I needed to have him stay more often.

That thought brought up others, and realisation that I didn’t just want him to stay again because of the effect on Mum, which was incredible, but because I was realising that I did have a friend, who was my friend, and mine to keep. It felt like getting my first bike, when the world had opened up and become much, much wider in potential. Pete was also a link directly to my past, and that was becoming important to me, especially after my mother’s recent agony. I realised that for good or bad, I had changed a lot in the past few weeks. Sharon’s nagging, Dave’s humour, Mum’s need.

Pete’s own need.

Something, that oddness that Mary spoke of, blocked my connections with others, and now it had been shoved into my face I could see that I was damaged goods in my own way. My dealings with people were like stroking a cat wearing gloves; with care, it could be done to the cat’s satisfaction, but not really to my own. That was my frustration: knowing I was ‘wrong’, but not how, or why. I suspected I wasn’t even aware of half of the effects it had on me.

The breakfast was a reflection of the fact that my mother had had time to go to the shops before our arrival with the fish and chips, and Pete had found something else.

“John, did you know your mother had left me a toothbrush in the bathroom?”

A heavy hint indeed. My mother’s fussing was beyond normal, though I clearly knew little of the N-word, and I spent the rest of the day wondering whether it was aimed at Pete for his sake, or for mine. Then, we were suddenly discussing logistics. I would have ridden in, as I did every day, while Pete would have taken the train and pushed his chair across town, doing the same in reverse. My mother’s car could carry his chair, but not my bike ,unless I fitted the cycle carrier. She wanted me in the car. She won.

Her prattling continued all the way to Southampton, and it was as if he was the Prodigal Son returned rather than a very old school friend. Before we got to the college, she seemed to have his entire year’s social events planned for him, including several visits to ours. I could not follow the links, she was changing too often. I had a small moment of worry, when I wondered whether the events she had revealed the other evening had damaged her sanity, but that was a really unworthy thought.

As far as I could see, and despite her fixation on Laura, it had been grief that tortured her, not anything like my own oddness.

Pete had already gone for his train when I came out to meet her at the end of the day. I was in a post-lecture daze as we headed along the Solent ,mum eschewing the M27 in favour of the old road. There was a large white van parked outside the house. We pulled into our drive and I realised that she had been ploughing ahead on her own head of steam: there was a brand-new wheelchair ramp built over the front steps.

My nightdress was back on the bed, along with a dress and other items, as well as a carrier bag and a small box. She had, though, collected my skirt for me, saving some worry.

“We are having a small pork roast tonight, dear, and I thought it would be nice to dress. Dinner will be at six thirty.”

After a shower, some hair removal and a little more preparation than normal, I joined her for dinner.

“I was obviously right, dear, that dress hangs much more nicely with breasts. How do they feel?”

“Did you have to get them quite so large?”

“A B-cup suits your figure, dear. Any smaller would have made you look too boyish, any larger too silly.”

The bag on my bed had contained a number of bras, in a variety of colours and styles, and the box a pair of wobbly silicone rubber lumps. No doubt as to their purpose.

Why was she doing this? I was starting to get very worried about the subtexts surfacing bit by bit. I had to admit, she was right, I did look a lot better with them on than I usually did, and it was one of my favourite dresses, a cream sheath just to the knee. .It didn’t really work with the fluffy slippers which were the last part of my mother’s gifts, but she had been very clear about not wearing heels indoors.

This was getting seriously strange.

I didn’t see Pete for a couple of days, and then it was time for my visit to Mary. The more I used her name, the easier it got. I talked her through the week’s events, though I decided my mother’s revelations were her business, not the doctor’s. She looked at her notes for quite a while, in silence, then looked up.

“John, I am going to say something you don’t often hear from a doctor, certainly not from a mental health practitioner. I have been wrong about you.”

She paused again. Something was not sitting right with her, even I could see that.

“I gave you an initial diagnosis of low-end Asperger’s Syndrome, or part of that spectrum of autism-related problems. I do not feel, now, that was right. I wouldn’t normally do this, but I feel the need to explain.

“The key elements of Asperger’s are a failure to properly engage with others, and a lack of impairment of language and cognitive skills. That latter you demonstrate clearly, and the former was a given.

“You are a lecturer, John, rather aptly. You talk at people, you don’t pick up on their signals. You impart information, you don’t communicate. You have obsessions, deep focus on narrow fronts. I thought at first your crossdressing was part of that, an aspect of ritual.

“There is a big problem with that diagnosis, John, and that is that you are doing something someone subject to Asperger’s doesn’t do. You are changing, quickly and in obvious ways.. That does not happen with Asperger’s.

“John, I do not normally do this, but I will justify myself by saying that I am not telling you what I think, but what I do not think. There is something I do suspect, though, and I will once more be a little unprofessional.

“There is something going on in your mind, John, and I do not like the suspicions I am having. If what I think….no. I will stop there. I would like to try something with you next time, if you are willing”

“What are you proposing, Mary?”

“See? You are using my name, easily and naturally. John, I would like to try something that has a bit of a bad reputation, but it may do some good here. Hypnosis is what I am on about”

That was a surprise, well, two surprises. Mary had never explained herself at such length before, and as for hypnosis….I made a decision not to tell my mother. If something was going to erupt, she was fragile enough and I did not want her to be hurt further until I could work out a way to control things.

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A few days later I rode back out to Hedge End, this time as a guest of Pete. Martin seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and said so.

“You seem to be making a real difference to Staff Hall, John. He should be ready to leave soon”

“Leave? Why?”

“Oh, it’s the way we work. Think of this as a half way house. We try and get the gents, and a few ladies, ready for the real world again. Some of them never are, of course, but the idea is to get them back to as normal a life as we can. They have to move out at some point, you see, there are always more who need the care”

“I hadn’t realised…”

“Few people without connections ever do, John. Out of sight…”

Out of mind. Rather apt considering my meeting with Mary.

Pete was on a real up.

“Did you see, it, John?”

“See what?”

“My van, it’s been delivered. I’ve got wheels!”

“Well, forget it. We are walking to the pub. You can drive when you aren’t drinking”

“Yes Laura dear”

“And that can stop before we go out!”

I pushed him down the street to the centre. He called out as we left.

“Hey, Mart! I got wheels!”

“I saw, Staff Sarn’t! You will no doubt be leaving us soon.”

Any chill in his words was wiped out by the genuine warmth of his smile, and I made yet another connection to humanity. This man did this because he cared about his charges.

It was a good night down the pub, Pete’s buoyant mood lighting the whole bar up. A couple of times he got a nasty look, as somebody recognised him as a squaddy, but two people insisted on buying him a drink. One sat with us for a while. A spare man, with an empty left sleeve, he looked to be in his fifties. He had asked very politely….

“Are you staying with the Legion? Do you mind if I join you for a bit?”

I braced myself, thinking it was going to be a black cloud on a so far upbeat evening, but I was astonished to find that Ted, the older guy, and Pete said nothing at all about their injuries. Instead, it was a truly riotous swapping of tales of debauchery, practical jokes, willing (and unwilling) NAAFI girls, Catterick pubs, how to avoid pubs the Paras had claimed for themselves, just two old soldiers talking about daily life.

It really seemed to be doing Pete the world of good. Finally, however, they had to grasp the nettle.

“Afghanistan or Iraq?”

“Afghanistan, Helmand. Was it the Falklands for you?”

“Yup, Sapper Hill. Mine was a fifty cal MG, I’m assuming yours was a bomb?”

Pete started to shake a bit, and Ted shuffled his chair round, wrapping him in a one-armed hug. I heard the whisper..

“It gets easier, son. It really does. If it doesn’t, I’m often around here if you need to talk. “

They stayed like that for a couple of minutes; I felt completely useless. Ted eventually disengaged himself, and picked up his glass.

“To absent friends”

We drank.

On the way back, we grabbed a bag of chips to share, Pete holding them in his lap and feeding me over his shoulder as I pushed him. He seemed to have shaken off his attack of the horrors, and we were soon back at his little flat. He bustled round making a cup of tea, and I laid out my sleeping mat and bag. I talked to him about little nothings (I was learning) until we were ready to hit the sack, literally in my case. I stripped to my boxers, settled down and he killed the lights.

It was about three in the morning, and he was talking. I struggled to hear the words.

“Gdffme lfffty”

That little phrase repeated itself amid other mutterings I couldn’t distinguish, but he was getting louder, until I heard

“Geddoff me, Lefty”

I sat up near his bed, and saw him start to thrash. I squirmed out of the bag as he started to moan the word “blood” over and over again, until I could take it no more.

I put my hands on his shoulders and in the dim light saw his eyes snap open.

“Lefty?”

“No, it’s John. You were having a nightmare, Pete, it’s OK, you’re safe now”

He started to weep. Everyone seemed to be doing that to me these days, apart from Jane. I sat on the bed and held him till he calmed, just rocking him the way….

The way I remembered my mother rocking me.

He did calm, though, and I lowered him onto his pillow again. He turned onto his left, facing the wall, and I tucked the duvet round his shoulders and rose to return to my bag.

“Stay for a while, please, John. Just till I fall asleep.”

Ah well. I picked up my bag and stretched out on top of the duvet with it on top of me, lying against Pete’s back. I could still feel him trembling, but it gradually eased until I thought he was asleep. I am sure I heard it, though his voice was very quiet.

“Good night, Laura”

CHAPTER 10
I woke up disoriented. Somebody was snoring gently, and the back of my neck felt damp. There was an arm draped across me, and I needed to pee.

I disentangled myself and padded across to the bathroom to take care of it, to the sound of a muffled grunt from the bed. My neck felt awful, a night spent without any pillow other than my arm, and I was glad it was nothing complex today, just phonetic definitions, which I could do in my sleep. The way I felt, that might well come true.

Bladder drained, I busied myself with the kettle, Pete stirring as the cups clattered from where he had piled them in the sink, unwashed. I handed him his crutches so he could follow my earlier example, and sat to await his return, trying to put some sense into the events of the night before. Something was really nagging at my mind, but what was making me squirm with frustration was that I knew, knew without clear information or for any structured reason, that there was something deep linking him and my mother. I can’t normally function, as Sharon reminded me on a regular basis, without a road map and a co-driver, but there was something so overt between them that even my oddness was pulled up short.

Pete’s return had thrown a huge pebble into the still waters of my life. Jane’s adultery, her departure, all the ensuing events, they all fitted nicely into how I saw the world. I was surprised at first, but once I saw how they fitted into the plot of my life, they made sense.

None of these events made sense, and I was starting to get more than a little nervous; it didn’t fit, any of it. Just to add to the unpredictably, Pete was in a buoyant mood as he chugged his tea.

“I got wheels, John! I’ll run you in!”

That actually made sense. If he found the van too much, I could take over, even with my lack of recent experience. Once dressed, we were on our way, bike and chair loaded. A little jerkily, we sailed out of the gates and off to the road through Bitterne to the Itchen. He didn’t do too badly, and I kept off the subject of that night until he had parked up and stuck up his “disabled” badge.

“Pete, how well do you remember last night?”

He looked rather pink. “Very well, actually”

“Well, we need to talk. There s a lot going on here, and I am getting lost in all these changes. I do not do change, certainly not at this pace. Would you mind dropping me at home tonight and staying for a while?”

He was clearly unhappy about that one. I offered him dinner….and then remembered that if I was going to do that I should speak to someone else first. I made the call, and she sounded as if I had just offered her the secret of eternal youth.

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Dave was, of course, more than ready to poke fun at me. Firstly, I had arrived in a car, which was a major source of mirth to him, considering my views on them. Secondly, he assumed that my deep tiredness must be the result of alcohol abuse, which was another thing I was not renowned for. I had another surprising moment of insight; would I swap the old life of calm and predictability for my improved and improving social skills, or would it be easier to drop back into certainty, predictability, the deep comfort of what Mary called ritual? Before I could decide, I needed more information. I could not sit still, my thoughts bouncing round the walls of my limited imagination and getting nowhere but frustrated.

Finally, the college day was over, and we set off back along the waterfront for my mother’s place, Pete seeming particularly tense as he drove. I had to call out a couple of times when we came up to one of the many red lights on our way, and now and again he was starting to get far too close to cars in front. Was I pushing him too hard? It was beginning to look like it, but in a sudden burst of selfishness I decided that it was time I got some of what I wanted for once.

When we pulled into the drive, I thought Pete was going to die of shock.

“When did she do that?”

“The morning after you left. She assumed you would be a regular visitor, it seems.”

“Bugger me!”

“Not the way you fart after beer.”

Did I just make a joke? The ground was shifting too much. My mother had opened the door as we arrived, and getting Pete in was so much easier with the ramp. She gave him a rather long hug, and led the way as he insisted on crutching in by himself. I caught a glimpse of the bed settee in the conservatory, already made up. She was running a powerful and consistent set of assumptions.

“I am doing nothing special tonight, just a stroganoff and rice. Peter, get settled in the living room and I will bring you some tea. And you, off upstairs and change”

“No, Mum, that is not going to happen”

She seemed to stiffen, and her voice went low, measured and very, very cold.

“You will do as you are told, and you will do it now”

Then, immediately, she shook herself, and her head turned slightly to one side.

“Please indulge me, dear. I have things we really need to discuss, the three of us. Please, for me, it will make it easier for me to do this. And no silk please; the sauce is not good for it”

I returned a little later, feeling rather self-conscious. I had chosen a simple floral dress to mid calf, with button front, tan tights and some flats in deference to my mother’s rules about heels in the house. I kept my make up as simple as ever, but one thing I did left me in fugue for a little while, something I only realised from looking at the bedside clock. I decided to wear my breasts, as they did make the dress look better.

Why did that seem important? Sodding hell, what was my mother up to? This wasn’t something I did reluctantly, after all, but it was something I didn’t normally do at all in front of others. I gathered my courage and walked down the stairs to the dining room, where my mother was ready to serve the meal. She smiled in thanks.

“You look lovely Laura, I liked that dress when I hung it up for you.”

Pete looked gobsmacked.

“You have definitely grown up, Laura. You are not the little princess I used to wake up…”

His voice trailed off as he turned pink again. I left the table in a hurry and locked myself in the downstairs toilet. What the hell was going on here? What HAD gone on? He was showing no shock at me dressed up, just surprise, it seemed, that I had “grown up”

I sat for a few minutes to calm myself, and realised I had no choice but to continue. My mother had an agenda, and I needed to find out what this pattern was, before my own unravelled. It was becoming clear to me that if I lost any more control of my life, I might just lose all control, and then…

And then I would be lost. I needed my anchors, I needed at least some givens in my life. Perhaps if I started that game, noting the utterances, looking for the patterns later, in bed, on my own, not with some cripple dribbling on my neck in his sleep.

Do it that way, on familiar ground, back in my own world. In front of my mother and my oldest, only friend, in a dress and plastic tits.

Ten minutes later I re-emerged and took my place at the table again, eyes repaired. I cast my eyes down, and quietly ate, as my mother prattled on about vans, and the Legion, and the price of builders. I drifted off into a world of words and patterns, lexis and register, letting her words flow past me, conscious more of the weight of my “breasts” on my bra straps than of the conversation.

Something caught my attention, firstly the words “Aunty Hannah”, and then I realised she was telling me again about my poor miscarried brother, and I realised was not the only one running in little repetitious loops. Came back to what passed for reality in this odd world where my mother put me in a dress for dinner and she and a school friend called me by a girl’s name and both acted as if there was nothing whatsoever unusual about the farce I was trying to get through without going absolutely raving mad.

I looked up at my mother, who had a soft, sad look on her face, and spoke as gently as could.

“Do you remember, Mum, you told me all that the other evening? It seems to be preying on your mind more than you realise”

She looked down, and I realised that Pete, with no drama, no noise, no fuss, was in tears. My mother gave a long sigh.

“Oh Laura, love, that is why I wanted Peter here to talk to. That child would have been his brother too.”

CHAPTER 11
This was too much, as I found out later. I found myself lying on the sofa in the living room, and my mother, bless her, had put a damp flannel on my forehead.

I felt quite the fainting Victorian heroine, but I believe I was actually in real, clinical shock. My mind was stopped, like an overwound clock. I simply could not see where, or how, I could untangle this twisted mass of snakes, all of which seemed to be eating their own tails.

I then realised Pete was missing.

“Where is he, Mum?”

“He’s outside n the garden, dear. He said he has to think”

“He’s not the only one. Look, I’m back now. I’ll go and get him, you pour some wine, or make some tea, or whatever it is women…”

--adultresses--

“…do”

It wasn’t till I was leaving the room that it struck me. It wasn’t necessarily my mother who had played away. If the poor dead one was brother to both of us, it only meant that we had a parental link, and not necessarily the same one. The patterns…oh, dear god the patterns, the possibilities. The child and I shared a mother, that I knew, but Pete and I did not. So did we share a father? Or was it just Pete and the lost brother who shared that relationship? And if so, which one? Pete senior? My dad John? How? I could obviously work out the ‘when’, biology was easy in that respect, but WHY?

What the fucking hell was going on when we were children? Betrayal? Some odd bloody swinger scene?

Who the hell was I? I had never known ‘what’, but now it was personal as it had never been before.

Mum shook me back to life.

“Go and fetch your friend, dear. You are coming and going tonight, and we do need to set this one to rights, for all of our sakes”

I walked out, the air cool around my calves, grateful for the darkness that hid my shame. Pete was sitting on the bench by our tiny fish pond. I sat down beside him, and almost, it seemed, without thinking he took my hand. We sat there for about ten minutes, neither of us saying anything. Finally Pete drew a long breath.

“You really don’t remember being a kid, do you, Laura?”

“Why do you call me that, Pete?”

“It was what you always demanded, just like the games we played, you were always the beautiful princess. Used to send your dad ballistic if he caught you. But….you always insisted. I had to be the hero, you the damsel.”

He looked at me from the corners of his eyes.

“I suppose should remind you, then. Your favourite story was Sleeping Beauty. You’d lie down in the greenhouse among all the tomato plants. They were your enchanted forest. I had to come and wake you”

I suppose I must have looked completely blank at that point. I mean, what was so important about tomato plants?

“For God’s sake, Lor, what is the main point of her bloody rescue?”

Oh. Oh dear God.

“I had to run one day when your dad came home early, I mean really, really run. You were away from school for a week after that. Then you kept walking into doors, or tripping, or…tell me, have you ever listened to Suzanne Vega?”

“Who is she?”

“’I’ll lend you the CD, a track called ‘Luka’, it might give you some idea”

We sat in silence for a few minutes more, until he squeezed my hand and smiled across at me.

“Come on, let’s get in out of the cold and see if we can’t sort out this festering pile of shit”

I got his arm over my shoulder and with one crutch and my stagger we got him into the living room, where my mother was dabbing her eyes dry. She gave a very wan smile, and after pointing out that it was actually Friday evening, we were all off the next day, she suggested that we have a good attempt at getting seriously drunk.

“Do we need to, Mum?”

“No. However, I would like to. I have several things we need to get straight tonight, and it would help me. There is another reason, Laura. I have noticed that when you are relaxed a little you don’t disappear from this world so much. You have left us three times to my certain knowledge tonight, and it hurts me beyond belief to see you like that and so I would prefer you to join me in a drink or seven”

She sat silent for a while, and then added in a small voice “And I won’t be able to say what I need unless I am very, very relaxed”

She already had the bottles and glasses out, and we ended up on the sofa together, her nestled between me and Pete. After a couple of large swigs, she began.

“Laura, your dad was a charming man. I was a big thing for him, though, and we marred when I was quite young. I was rather a catch, you know? A local beauty, I say in my pride”

She was right. My mother’s pictures showed a stunningly beautiful young girl, a real 1960s fashion plate, all Mary Quant, big eyes and pale lips. She had been quite a looker, and as she explained it Dad had courted her with the big guns. A successful local builder, he had buried her under flowers and sweet words, and she had swooned like the heroine of one of the romantic bodice-rippers she had loved to read.

And they had married, and realty had come home to roost. He drank, not as we were doing, but thirstily, hungrily, even, as that word seems better to reflect his need for alcohol. It seems I had been an accident, after Mum had given up on the hope of a child.

“And you were there, and I had real hopes for us, the three of us. I thought, surely he will settle, surely he will heal, but, no. When you were born, though, he tried, he really seemed to, he had a man to follow him, and then he realised you weren’t what you should have been, what he thought you should have been…..

“Then, the drinking brought the diabetes, and he was even angrier because he had had limits placed on him, and that did not happen to John Prentice Evans, no it did not, and things came to a head when somebody dared to burgle us. How very dare they, didn’t they know who he was….

“And when I said ‘yes, they probably did, it’s why they picked this house’, he ht me yet again and told me to deal with the police and the insurance because that was all I was good for.”

I pulled my mum to me and held her as tight as I could for a while, and felt Pete’s arms go round us both. After a minute she pushed me away, and stood up. She moved over by the fireplace, pacing slowly. Pete took my hand again.

“You see, Peter, that is when I met your dad, when he came round to do the crime report. That is why I call you Peter, because Pete, my Pete, will always be your father to me. Your mother was so obsessed with her little shop she had even taken to spending nights over it, and he was lonely, and I was hurt….”

There was another long silence, and I felt Pete interlace his fingers with mine. I Also felt him trembling again and so I gave his hand a squeeze to let him know, and I kept pouring the wine down.

“And his smile was so sweet, and he was so gentle, and so lonely…”

And suddenly she was six months gone, and married to a man who hadn’t got it up in a couple of years, and when she couldn’t conceal it any more he had, as so often before, taken matters into his own two fists, and I had spent an extra holiday with Aunty Hannah and a big man had kept his pride but gained more suspicions.

And I had continued to trip on the stairs, or walk into doors, or fall off my little bike while things fell out of cupboards onto my mother.

But a princess in her mother’s old shorty nighty still managed to get rescued by her knight, and Sleeping Beauty was awakened day after day, in the traditional way.

With a kiss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCXnJIAQd1o

CHAPTER 12
We sat in silence for a few minutes as my mother’s story ran down. I noticed her look at me, really look at me, and there was something else there, something unspoken, and she seemed to shake herself and carry on.

“After he died, my Pete pulled right back from me, just stopped. I had had to work really hard to keep him from attacking your father, Laura, but the death drove him from me. Three years I had to watch him in the town, unable to touch him, wanting him beside me and still crying with loss from my child’s death, his murder.

“That’s what I think, you know. That’s what I call it when I cry at night. And Pete would, or could, do nothing to help, and then his wife died…sorry Peter, your mother died, and you were gone, both of you, off to York, and that was it for my dreams.

“And my glass is now empty, and I have said too much, and not enough, and I need to go to bed and start again tomorrow. Peter, do you have any idea how much you remind me of your father, how much joy you bring to my life by your presence here?”

Pete’s voice was bleak. “And what about my mother? How did she feel about all this…this love and stuff? Did she wish you both well?”

I could feel him tense, and for a moment I thought he was going to throw his glass, so I took it from him and pulled him to me, and his head lay on my breast as his fingers dug into my shoulders and he shuddered, just shook like someone freezing. I found myself gently rocking him again, until he calmed down. My mother came and knelt before us, her hands on his knees.

“Your mother was sick, Peter. She was totally obsessed with her shop, even to the exclusion of feeding you, Pete had to do that. She was almost like John used to be, but worse.”

‘Used to be’? Had I been worse than I was, I asked myself, and answered the question immediately: if I had not improved, the question would have passed me by. Worse than I had been was not a reassuring idea. Pete kept on.

“But you didn’t think to help her?”

“We tried, Peter, how we tried, it was one of the things that brought us together, if you can believe that. We were going to get her somewhere to stay where she could be treated, perhaps helped to deal with the compulsions, but we were too late. She got that gas fire in for the flat that last winter, and she looked so alive when I found her”

Mum reached out and took Pete’s chin, forcing him to look at her.

“Yes, Peter, when I found her. Who do you think was going round with food for her larder, and hot meals, and doing her laundry while the customers drifted away? Do not look at me as some predatory man-eater, out to steal your dad. I did everything I could to help him, AND her, and when we failed we comforted each other, and he stayed with her till she died. Don’t you dare sit there and accuse me of stealing your dad and hurting your mother! I loved your father.”
She drifted away again. “I still do, you know, but after everything he just had to leave, he said, and that was it, until you came home, and I could feel my dreams again instead of my nightmares”

She moved her hand from his chin and stroked his cheek. He continued to look her in the eyes, but the hard stare was fading.

“Mrs Evans, how could I ever hate you? But please remember, you weren’t the only loser back then. I lost my mother…”

“And yet you still gave to us, to me and my Laura. You were the only other person that understood her. And afterwards, when it all changed, you stayed her friend until you left, and you gave John three years of love at a bad time. How could I ever hate YOU, Peter?”

I was beginning to realise how much strength Pete had developed from his chair when my hand started to hurt.

“Pete, let up a bit, you are crushing my fingers”

He dropped my hand, and lifting his arm pulled me into a cuddle. I found myself with my head on his shoulder, my arm across his chest, hearing his heart hammering far too fast. That is when I had my out of body experience.

I do not mean some odd mystical nonsense, but a real feeling of detachment. I wasn’t blanking out into what I called a fugue, I was finding deep objectivity, as if these two were not my mother and my best friend, only friend, but two characters to analyse for motive and emotion, and there I was with them, another construct to break down. It felt profoundly different, though. It was more like watching a play than my usual pattern-seeking; I wasn’t looking for technical features, but for plot. Questions were piling up unanswered but demanding, children tugging at my skirts.

Metaphor. There I go again, out onto unknown seas.

What exactly did Mum mean, ’understood her’? More pressingly, why did I feel so comfortable in a dress and other things, in the arms of a bloody man? How the hell was he making it seem so natural for him to be holding some transvestite as if she were his lover? His woman, to be blunt?

The only thing that was screaming out at me from the scene was the fact that it was all so wrong, there was a very large elephant in the room that the other two were ignoring, and that was the fact of my true nature. Or was I missing something myself?

“Mum, what is it that you are not telling me?”

That was enough to confirm to my own satisfaction that there was more. She sat back on her heels, looking sharply at me.

“I see you are healing, my darling, but you have to trust me. There are things I will tell you later, when I am sure you are strong enough, but not now. Not yet. Peter, would you be a dear, and just remind her of some of your time together. I think you have understood that she has a few….small difficulties in remembering.”

He squirmed a bit to get his glass for a refill, and we naturally seemed to sink deeper into the settee and the cuddle when it was done. I felt profoundly disturbed by the way my body memory seemed to be taking over, and at the same time it seemed so natural. He caressed my cheek, and began to speak softly to the top of my head as I lay on his chest.

“You were a lovely, happy kid, Lor, when I met you, a real talent for invention. You know the way some children can take anything, a stick, a cardboard box, and it becomes a toy, something magical, the key to another world? That was you. Everything became a story, an adventure, and you read so much there were always ideas from other people as well, and you were never bored or boring because the world was so bright for you.

“And I have already told you the games you preferred, and the stories that spoke to you, and if that doesn’t say enough about how I understood you, then look at how you are now.

“All that stopped, after that night when you went to hospital, and when you came back you weren’t there behind your eyes. It was like that joke from Sharon, you were a pod person, you weren’t my best friend any more. I watched your back for four years, and I tried to liven you up, and then I had to leave….”

Mum interrupted him. “Peter, we have talked enough for one night. I do not want to overdo it, I have already told you things I thought I would take to my grave…

“Darling, help him to his bed and up to yours. We will have a family day tomorrow. Peter, when were you last on the Island?”

“Oh, decades ago!”

“Then we have a plan.. Ferry to Fishbourne, and a drive round, and dinner at Yarmouth.”

She stood up, seeming to creak slightly from sitting so long on her heels, and I sat up as well, feeling an odd reluctance to move away. I did as instructed, awaiting Pete outside the bathroom until he was done and then helping him to his nest in the conservatory before heading up to my own room.

He kissed me on the cheek before I left him.

I stood awhile in my dress, breasts heavy on my chest, trying to sort my feelings. I don’t mean emotions, though they were there, I mean literal feelings, as I felt like someone trying on a new skin. I was squeezing my hands into the fingers, pulling the eyes up my face so I could see. That is a very odd thing to say, I know, but everything I was touching and seeing was off, skewed from what I had become used to.

For starters, I was sexually aroused.
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My mother woke me with a cuppa the next day, and a hearty “Morning, Laura dear, I am making breakfast, it will be ready in about half an hour”

If that was not a hint, I don’t know what would be. It seemed she wanted me to dress for breakfast. Bugger. I leapt into the shower and spent a large part of the half hour depilating before slobbing into a long skirt and sweatshirt. With breasts.

I had spent my time in the shower trying to work out my situation, especially with the erection I had experienced in the night. It had been so insistent, so painfully hard…

There is no way to say this other than directly, and I do not want to get excessively prurient, but I will admit I masturbated to ejaculation with mental images of Pete behind my eyes. That was not good. I do not mean that it was not pleasurable, I mean that there were changes going on in my life that were disturbing enough and I wanted NO MORE THANK YOU!

To discover I was gay, or bi, or whatever, was just the icing on top of everything else. And now my mother wanted me dressed for the daytime.

There are much darker things coming from this chapter onwards.

CHAPTER 13
I find as I go back through the events of three years ago I can still feel the changes that rippled through my life like waves on the incoming tide, some reaching further, some not as far, but the water steadily advancing. Not a comfortable image in some ways, as I had, then, no idea of what was riding the flood tide.

I wandered down to breakfast, still yawning, to find that my mother had transferred Pete’s chair to the kitchen so he could help sort out the cooking. By that, of course, I meant ‘get in the way. I remembered when I used to help Mum make a sponge cake, and he would hang around, similarly getting in the way, just for a chance to lick the bowl out after the cake went into the oven.

Where the hell did that one come from?

I was astonished, given the night’s pain, that the atmosphere was so jolly, until I realised that they had had at least half an hour to get some order into their relationship, while I, in response to maternal direction, had primped and fussed over my appearance. Not the clothes so much, more a critical examination of myself as a sort of woman.

I suppose it is time I gave you a better idea of what I look like. I have said ‘small, slim and fair-haired’, and that is basically it. I am only 5’7”,and my hair then was rather like that of the odd cycling man who is or was London’s mayor, a sort of shaggy mess. I do believe that, despite my rather restrained taste, or perhaps because of it, I passed quite well in public. Not that I had any empirical evidence to back that up, as I did not go outside when dressed, up until that moment in the garden with Pete. I began to realise my mother’s odd idea of a drive on the Island was being put into practice, and she expected me to come along, Laura dear to be there.

I look back three years and I remain astonished that I gave in so easily, and the only schema that explains this is that of unconscious desire, coupled with outward protest. My mother even sent me upstairs to make myself ‘more presentable’ and I ended up looking like some caricature lady dog walker, in tweed (yes, really) skirt, flesh coloured tights, cardigan and ‘sensible walking shoes’

We took her car, and were soon in Portsmouth, queuing up for the second most expensive ferry crossing in the world, mile for mile, second only to the one from Gosport. Less than an hour later we were rolling up the hard at Fishbourne on a superb Autumn day, Pete twisting and peering round to see what had been out of reach for twenty years for him.

She took us across the eastern end of Wight, past Bembridge and its yachts and up to the viewpoint at St Catherine’s, from where, on a clear day, you can see an awful lot of water. We sat in the car park for a while, the quintessential English daytrippers, sitting in a car to enjoy the views towards Normandy over the horizon. My mother passed around some scones and we shared a flask of tea. I asked one of the obvious questions.

“Why do you insist on calling me Laura, Mum?”

Pete laughed. “You would ask the easy ones first! It is the easiest, actually. We had a friend at school, and she had a mop top just like you, and you said she had a pretty name, and the same hair as you, so you decided, just like that.”

Mum giggled, which was incongruous to say the least. “You were quite insistent; you said that as she had your hair, you should have her name. You were very logical back then”

“But why? It makes no sense. Why would I want a girl’s name?”

Mother sighed. “Peter is right, dear, you asked him the easy one first, but I see you leave the hard ones for me.”

She turned away from me where I sat behind John, and spoke to the Channel. I had to lean forward to hear her, her voice was so faint.

“You came into the living room one day, you were about five, and you said you didn’t want to do boy things any more ‘cause they were silly. That was your word, ’silly’

“I asked you why they were silly, other boys didn’t think they were silly, sad, and you said…..you said ‘but I‘m not a boy, Mummy, I’m a girl’ “

She was breathing raggedly now. No tears, but they were haunting the corners of her eyes.

“Your father was reading the paper, and he called you over, and he said ‘is that right, son?’ and you nodded, and he hit you so hard he knocked you into the wall and you lost two baby teeth, and that was your first trip to hospital for walking into a door, and after he hit you he just carried on reading as you screamed.”

“And after that, after the burglary, after more such little moments of family togetherness I slept with Pete and he was kind and loving, just like his son here. And yet you stayed the course, my darling, you outlasted almost everything he could hit you with. I started researching your condition, because I realised you were not having some childhood phase, you were sincere.

“The worst thing was when I would try to ease your pain afterwards, and you would ask me why you were so naughty, and were you bad, because didn’t daddy love you….”

The tears were there now, flowing steadily without fuss. I realised Pete was the same, and he reached back to take my hand as I leant forward to hold my dear distressed mother.

“You still insisted, though…Peter, you may laugh at this one, I won’t mind. Peter was always there for you, darling, but I could never tell him why you couldn’t come and play, but when you could, and your father was out, you were my little girl, and you always said that one day…”

She started into some sort of spasm, and I was terrified until I realised she was actually laughing ,tears still flowing, and she guffawed, until she could speak again,

“One day…one day you would marry Peter here and make me a grandma because if I was such a good mummy I must be a good grandma”
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The thing was, the frightening thing, was that it made so much sense to me. All of my oddities, my feeling of fitness, of rightness when dressed like I was, the way Pete acted around me, it all made sense. Except for one thing… all I had ever read about transsexuality, for surely that was exactly what my mother was talking about, it all said that the condition was something that did not go away. It was a continuity, a condition of life, and I did not have that certainty in me. I did not, as I have already said, have that ‘left-handedness’ certainty. I had no ‘handedness’ whatsoever.

There was more to this. There was much more, but I really did not know if I could take so much in one 24 hour period. We packed up the flasks and Mum drove us down the steep road into Blackgang and along the Military Road to Freshwater Bay and its cliffs, before we cut inland past Golden Hill to Yarmouth.

With a whispered instruction of “Ladies use the ladies’, dear” Mum treated us both to a pub lunch involving, for Pete, some Timothy Taylor Landlord and for me a rather rich cafetiere of good coffee. I was out, I was dressed and I was relaxed. Nobody seemed to bat an eyelid, and the bar staff were solicitous to Pete in his chair. Mum asked him another obvious question, which resulted in a plan; we would stop at the supermarket outside Cadnam and get the makings of a Sunday lunch, and a Sunday tea, and a Monday morning breakfast, and I would get to keep Pete for another couple of nights.

That was another surprising thought, and the tide metaphor replaced itself in my mind. Like an Imagist poet, I was moving from snapshot to snapshot, and this new one was that of a collapsing dam; as the flow increased more and more chunks would break off, and I was praying that the inevitable collapse would not be a catastrophe.

But for now, it was a mixture of surprise, confusion, moments of genuine delight and revelation, and one supremely important fact.

I had discovered that I could actually talk to my mother, and that she loved me completely and without reservation. That was a result beyond price.

CHAPTER 14
The trip across the Solent from Yarmouth to Lymington is more scenic than the one from Cowes and the East to Portsmouth. For a start, there are views of the Needles, and then of Hurst Castle as Lymington is approached.

Mum took us on a drive up over the heathy parts of the New Forest to Beaulieu Road station, past ponies and deer, and then down to Ashurst, bypassing the jams of Brockenhurst and Lyndhurst. We parked up at the supermarket and I helped Pete into his chair. It was amazingly domestic, pushing him round the aisles, slapping his hands as he tried to sneak nice things as he passed the shelves, while my mother pushed a slowly-filling trolley.

Domestic. What a very strange word. I wasn’t at home, I wasn’t even fully at home in my skin, nor my clothes. My new breasts changed my balance and my spatial sense, and I had to make a conscious effort not to keep resettling my bra straps. I still felt good about this, though. It was like painting by numbers. I had all of two colours in place, and the rest would surely follow. At least I now had some idea of what I was, and perhaps who, but my mother had closed the conversation down while we enjoyed the glorious Autumn colours of the Forest. Pete seemed to be almost horizontal he was so relaxed, but I knew there was something hiding just out of sight. There were also the multiple images I was getting.

I was Laura, daughter of Lucinda, and sort of girlfriend to Pete, out for a drive through the National Park and marching around with her similarly country-wife mother, arguing over whether a lamb joint or some pork with the prospect of crackling would be better. Pork won.

I was John, in women’s clothes and false breasts, pushing his maimed school friend around a supermarket in a skirt he should never be wearing, with an insane mother prattling on beside him as if it was all perfectly natural.

I was me, the recent me, unable to understand what was going on, and slowly melting down as the conflict between images became too intense, trying to work out what the hell was going on, to pick the patterns out and deconstruct the utterances and events,,,

Context was, and is, everything, but all of this was so out of any realistic and appropriate context I would have been in danger of blanking out repeatedly, except for the way I had been shocked into reaction. You see, it was rather like recovering from a hangover, where little vignettes and hints come back at random, but steadily accrete, all through the next day. It was also like speaking a foreign language, one I had known in the past but not practised. I had progressed from “Yes, no, two beers please” and was heading towards more complex stuff, but there were still huge gaps in lexis and grammar.

There I go again, Old John’s voice sneaking in. Lexis is, in layman’s terms, vocabulary. I was remembering what I used to know, how to speak human being, but with an accent. I was making mistakes, using the wrong register or awkward words, but I really felt that with practice I could make a fair fist of it, and the accent might fade.

What had my mother been thinking? Was she trying to recover her little ‘girl’, whatever that did to me, or was she trying to let me do the recovering myself? I had no idea at all, but there was another side to this, one far more important.

Did I want this? Did I want to take the steps out on this route? It was clear that I had changed markedly since I was small, and I was profoundly confused about the pressure I felt she was putting on me, both in dressing and the way she seemed to be pushing me closer to Pete. I had another moment of insight: did she want to recapture her lost romance by proxy?

I was looking at my handedness, and that was the end and the beginning of everything. I was standing in front of a number of deep pools, each inviting my dive, pools of gender, of sexuality, of humanity itself.

As we drove back along the M27 I lay in the back of the car, musing on life itself and for once not at all pretentious in doing so. I watched my mother as she chattered brightly to Pete, and I realised I never, ever wanted to drift back into that swaddling numbness that had wrapped me most of my life, never.

I looked at Pete, and realised that we had had more physical contact than Jane and I had ever had, and all in a very few days, and I hadn’t shrunk from it, and, very oddly, neither had my big macho soldier.

‘My soldier’.

’My’. Where had that come from? I couldn’t imagine any intimate contact, and I mean I literally could not raise any images in my head, but he made me feel comfortable, so that was one pool I would plunge into, and another I would not shy from.

The last….who was II? There was a world of difference between the John who had dressed for comfort and peace in the house he shared with a woman, and the Laura who was slowly recovering …not memories, flashes of those certainly, but more feelings, moods recalled from bright days of play and ‘help’ in the kitchen…

I think I dozed off as we crept through the afternoon traffic, and I woke to a sudden pressure, suffocating darkness, something crushing me, pain, my mother’s face wet and oddly lit

And she was shaking me awake in the driveway, and I tried to hang on to the dream, and I couldn’t, and I was nearly crying with frustration. Pete asked if I was ok…

“Just a bad dream”

“Not surprised, Lor, after all we’ve been through just now. Come on, girl, get me out of here and I’ll get the kettle on”

It was nearly seven o’clock by the time we had everything stowed away, Pete delivering tea as promised, and Mum decided we would simply order an Indian meal delivered and sit and watch a film, which engendered a certain level of dispute. Pete wanted something noisy and action-filled, I fancied something with a little more challenge. I had Cyrano de Bergerac in the original rhyming alexandrines, with the Anthony Burgess translation in the same metre as subtitles, which is a wonderfully complex text, but for some reason they both refused to accept my choice.

As we settled down with our Indian on our laps, she hit me again with a devious one. The film she chose was a British romantic comedy, and where she found it I have no idea, but it was indeed underhand. It was called ‘Different for Girls’ and turned out to be about two old schoolboy friends who are reunited years later. One has changed….

I was at the edge of those pools, and she was pushing. Somehow, though, we ended up with Pete stretched out along the sofa, resting against me, with my left hand resting on his chest, bare where his shirt was open.

It was some time before I realised I was playing with the hairs. I started to pull my hand back in realisation, and he reached out and put it back, patted the back of it and then simply left it to carry on with its ‘duty’, and I began to realise there were two of us in this dance.

Was he gay? Was I? There had been a scene in the film where the girl goes to kiss the man, and he shies away, saying he is straight, only for her to reply ‘So am I’

If I had no idea what I was, what did that make Pete? Damaged, was the only certainty.

Bedtime came, and he pecked me on the cheek after I had helped him to settle down, which eased one worry I had had, especially after some of the more…direct scenes in the film. I did not sleep well, my head in Old John mode trying to categorise everything, and my body feeling wrong. I was sleeping without breasts, and after two days it felt odd.

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The next day, after another breakfast preceded by another cup of tea in bed with heavy, heavy hints about my clothing for the day, my mother wanted to go to the Gun Wharf Quays centre for shopping, and I drew the line at such close and crowded places. I insisted that we had done shopping the day before, and it would be nice to do something for Pete. He chortled; “Some girl, who doesn’t want to go shopping!”

Exactly, Pete. I suddenly had a brainwave. We needed somewhere wheelchair friendly, which the ‘Historic Ships’ certainly weren’t, and we needed something with man appeal.

“Pete, I have an idea. It may not be a good one. Be honest if it isn’t.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Bovington”

His face lit up; if I hadn’t liked him so much already I would have been bowled over.

“That would be magic, but it’s a bit of a drive”

“It’s not that far past Poole. Depends what Mum wants to do, I can always drive”

She was nodding. “Excellent idea. Far enough that Laura is unlikely to run into anyone who would embarrass her, just the place for a REME boy, and if I drive I get to choose what music we play, as long as you are happy with the roast as an evening meal, we have a plan, dears”

I should explain, as I say so often, that Bovington is the home of the Tank Museum, and as a REME ‘boy’ it was like a sweet shop for Pete. I had worries that he might suffer some sort of flashback, but he was that little boy incarnate, wanting to rush to the next exhibit each time, after spending what seemed like an hour looking all over some steel monstrosity or other. He gleefully informed us that the badge of the Royal Armoured Corps, their famous ‘mailed fist’, was known throughout the Army as the ‘wanking spanner’

I felt feminine. Never, ever more femme, looking over his head at my mother as we both pretended to stifle yawns, as Pete raved over some APFSDSCBCHE or some such. We took tea part way round, and an elderly man serving n the cafeteria looked at Pete and softly asked who he had served with, and when Pete told him he smiled, and they talked about Arborfield and Catterick while our tea got cold.

About twenty minutes later, a couple of museum staff came in and spoke to our new friend, and he pointed us out, and over they came. One could only have been about twenty, lean, leggy ,with pert little breasts and buttocks and long dark hair, and I hated her on sight. She sat down next to Pete.

“Excuse me, Tom tells us you are ex-REME. Can I be really rude and ask….where did it happen?”

“Helmand….why?”

“I’m sorry, my dad was REME too, and I lost him in the first Gulf War. I have a sort of… I like to try and be nice to soldiers”

She laughed, a really lovely sound, and I hated her even more.

“No, not like that! When did you last get into an AFV?”

“The day before…the day before this” said Pete, indicating his leg.

“Well….we have rigged up something for lads like you. Hand controls…we have a circuit, and a Leopard II, and if you would like to take a test drive, it will be free as a thank you”

“Thank you for what?”

“Being Tommy Atkins”

At that, I almost loved her.

Some short time later, an old German tank was roaring and farting round the demo track outside the museum, Pete laughing and yelling from the driver’s seat. It had been a wonderful day, and I nearly forgave him for the kiss he gave that girl as we left, and he was so, so happy.

The drive back he bubbled and bounced, and Mum even let him choose the music to play, and I couldn’t help holding his hand most of the way home. Dinner was perfect, the mood wonderful, the day relived in every detail. As I tucked him in that night, he took my face and kissed me rather firmly on the lips. I floated up to bed, and went off to sleep with a smile as wide as my head.

The darkness, the suffocation, my mother’s wet face, the pain, came in about three AM.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116102/
http://www.tankmuseum.org/Exhibitions

Please be aware that this is not a pleasant episode.

CHAPTER 15
It had gone again when I woke, just hovering at the edges of memory. John was back, ready for work, and I also had to do something to push along Jane. Call it resentment, call it realism, but I was still paying out for the house each month while a cuckoo lived there rent-free.

Pete was quieter over breakfast, and subdued on the drive back to college. He pulled up into one of what he called the “raspberry” bays and switched the car off.

“John, that was one hell of a weekend. In all sorts of ways. We both have a lot of thinking to do here, and probably best that we do it in our own space. There are …accommodations I need to make in my mind, and they are not easy.”

He stared hard at me.

“I am very fond of Laura, I always was, but you are not Laura. I can see her in you, and she came back a lot over the weekend, but you are not her. I don’t know whether to say ‘yet’, because I have a big problem there. Would you be going down such a route because you wanted to, or because you felt us pushing you? Your mother gave you no choices this weekend, and that sat badly with me

“I want you healed, and I want you happy. Whatever route works out to be right for you is not for me to say, and it is not for your mother to decide. Be your own man, John”

We looked at each other, and as one started to laugh. “Be your own man” for god’s sake! And after a quick look around, he kissed me smartly on the mouth and I got out to start unpacking our respective wheels.

That week I saw him only in college, but we spoke on the telephone each evening, and naturally I did so as Laura. It felt natural, and it felt good, and I felt more and more that John was a character in a literary sense. I had spent all my working life disassembling texts, and almost all of my personal life treating the world as an academic exercise, and suddenly that was a reality: my persona was drifting from the subjective.

Jane was being surprisingly efficient, and had already had the house valued. She seemed remarkably cheerful when I called her, and then admitted the reason.

“I am pregnant, John. Something you could never do for me, it seems, and it would appear that it was a good job you didn’t, as there is no way on Earth you could ever have been a father. Keep that in mind with whomever she is.

“I don’t hate you, John, we are just wrong for each other and I would rather it were neatly and quickly done. I will let you know what the valuation results are and we shall have a clean start”

Perhaps I should introduce her to Laura….no, not yet. There again was an ambush thought, an assumption. Pete had been absolutely right; I could see clearly now what my options were, all I had to do was work out which one was right for me, and only for me.

A couple of days after the revelations, I had my next session with Mary Oliver. I knew it would be an interesting one, to say the least, and my apprehension was increased when I saw the other person in her room. He looked rather like a cartoon bank manager, all plumpness in a suit, and Mary introduced him as Alan Johnson, a hypnotherapist. She asked him to wait outside while we went through the week’s events, and I found myself stalled. Where to start?

“Where do you want to start, John?”

“Laura is what my mother and Pete have been calling me…”

I ended up talking almost non-stop for forty minutes, Mary prodding me along with little questions as I endeavoured to get across my sense of recovered moods, of a painting by numbers partly finished.

“So are you John or Laura?”

Did I say ‘little’ questions?

“I really do not know. The full answer, or as full as I can make it, is that it seems that Laura is who I declared myself to be when I was young, and John is who I have been since whatever it was that my mother is keeping from me. I see that person as Old John. Since recent events hit me, I have been changing, and I find myself seeing Old John as someone else, as a persona rather than a person”

“So, are you John, Old John, or Laura?”

“I was Old John, but I never want to be him again. I think I am both of the other two, but I have no idea, and perhaps I should say no idea yet, as to which one is my future.”

“Does there have to be a choice?”

“I think so. I think that the name is really just a label, I remain myself, but I think I need to fall one side of the divide or the other”

“Male or female, eh?”

“I believe I wouldn’t be comfortable on a tightrope, Mary.”

“OK. I’d like to see how we get on with Alan, if you don’t mind now”

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I was lying on the couch, calm, relaxed, and wondering when it would all get under way, and suddenly realised the clock hands had moved. I was also soaked in sweat, and when I swallowed my throat hurt. I looked up to see Alan and Mary at a tape recorder, and heard the whine of it being rewound. Alan was mopping his brow, and Mary looked grim. It had already been done, I realised. I sat up. Alan nodded to Mary, and took a piece of paper from her that looked like a prescription, then left.

“So what did you find out, Mary?”

“Oh, John….”

She looked down at her notes, and I could see the wheels turning as she thought.

“John, it seems that a lot of what I suspected was rather on the mark. We have a recording of the session, and I am going to play it to you. You will get very upset, and I have asked Alan to pick up a prescription for you. I want some promises from you. I want you to talk to your mother about this, and I want someone with you for the next few days while you come to terms with it. I also do not want you to ride home today. Do you have anyone who can come and pick you up?”

I was now in real fear. I gave Pete a ring, and he said he could be at the surgery in ten minutes as he was still at college, and that led me to make another decision: whatever had come out I wanted him to hear with me.

Alan was back with a paper bag from the dispensary just before Pete came in, and I was surprised Mary took his presence so easily. She handed me two of my pills with a glass of water and told me to take them, and when I asked what they were she said “Valium. They will help relax you a little. Doctor’s orders, John”

They seemed to fuzz the world as they kicked in, and Mary started the recording. Alan whispered something to her and left the room. I thought I caught the words “not twice”

The tape started with a sequence familiar to everyone, the calm voice of the hypnotist, the instructions to close the eyes, the ‘When I say wake up…’

Mary started talking.

“Hello, it is 2005, who am talking to?”

“John Evans.”

My voice was cool, stilted, very careful in its enunciation.

“Who are you, John?”

“I am a university lecturer. I specialise in textual analysis, particularly in English literature of the 19th to 21st centuries”

“What do you do for fun, John?”

“I do not understand your question. I read, that is what I do”

“Is your tutor group all male, John?”

“I do not recall.”

“Don’t you look at them?”

“I mark their work. Why would I need to look at them?”

“John, you are four years old. It is your birthday. Is it a good day?”

My voice lost its precision, and became softer, not sounding like a little boy but speaking like one.

“Is a nice day. Got a cake wiv candulls. Got to blow’m all out.!”

“Who’s with you, John?”

“SLaura. Wanna be Laura. M not John.”

“Who is with you, Laura?”

“Mummy, and Daddy, an Pete, an Beffan, an boys, an Sally, an Jill, an Caffy, an Suzy, an Wendy, an Kelly”

“Who’s your favourite?”

“Mummy! An Daddy!”

“Apart from mummy and daddy, who is the best?”

“Pete!”

“Why is he the best?”

“Gonna get married to Pete when ma big girl”

“Have you got any presents?”

“S”

“Are they nice ones?”

“No. Sall football stuff.”

“Laura, you’re at your fifth birthday party now. Any nice presents?”

“I’ve got a bike!”

“What are you going to do with your bike?”

“Go riding with Pete!”

“Laura, it’s February 1985. You are in hospital. Why are you in hospital?”

“I broke my arm”

“How did you do that?”

“Not supposed to tell. I was naughty.”

“How naughty were you, Laura?”

“Very naughty, Daddy said. “

“What naughty thing did you do?”

“ I played Snow White with Pete and Daddy saw, and Pete ran away”

“What did Daddy do?”

“He took me to my room and I got spanked with his belt”

“How did your arm break?”

“Got to say I fell off my bike”

“Did you?”

“No, was when Daddy was carrying me up the stairs”

Mary stopped the tape at that point, and wiped her eyes. Pete was hugging me, I realised through my drug buzz, and I felt the dampness of his tears. Mary started the tape again.

“It’s your eleventh birthday. Do you have any nice presents?”

“Yes, Mum’s got me a Spesh road bike in a small size, it’s still too big for me really, but with the saddle at its lowest I can just about ride it. I‘m going to get some shorter cranks and then I can see if I can start time-trialling”

“Are you having a party?”

“Why would I have a party?”

“To invite your friends to, Laura”

“Who is Laura?”

“It’s October 1985. You are in hospital”

There was no reply, just sounds I slowly worked out to be sobbing.

“Why are you in hospital?”

“It huuuurts”

“It is now the night before and you are in bed”

“Sleepy, don’t want to talk”

“Are you warm, Laura?”

“All warm an snuggly”

“Who is with you?”

“Barnaby”

“Who is Barnaby?”

“Smy teddy”

“Is anyone else there”

“Daddy here to tuck me in”

“Is he happy?”

“No”

“Is he talking to you?”

“Yes”

“Can I hear what he is saying?”

“Not allowed those words”

“It’s OK, you are allowed to just this once. What does he say?

“Fucking fairy”

“Just tell me what he says and what you say and I will listen”

“Fucking fairy showing me up. Please don’t hit me Daddy, I didn’t mean to be naughty. Fucking little girl. Please Daddy, not tonight.

The voice on the tape, surely not mine, started to sob.

“Please Daddy, not that, it hurts. So you want to be a fucking girl? Then you can be Daddy’s girl!”

Mary’s voice interrupted.

“All Is calm, Laura, nothing hurts, I just want you to tell me what Daddy is doing”

“He’s pushing his willy into my bottom”

“What is happening now?”

“No Daddy ,it hurts! Mummy, tell him, please, I don’t like it!”

My voice went into a scream of agony. Mary stopped the tape. All of us were in tears, and I realised that without the drugs I would probably have left the room in my own little way. Pete was shaking and hugging me so tight I had difficulty breathing. I managed to get free, and walked over to the desk. Picking up Mary’s phone,I rang my mother.

“Oh, hello dear”

“WHY DIDN’T YOU FUCKING DO SOMETHING TO STOP HIM?”

“Oh. You know, then”

“WHY?”

There was a long pause, and then, coldly, calmly, she spoke.

“I DID stop him, dear”

Oh.

CHAPTER 16
“Laura, darling, may I please speak to Peter?”

I waved him over and held out the handset, and as he took it I walked over to stare out of the window. Mary came up behind me, and softly said

“The rules are generally no touching, John, but if it is all right with you I am prepared to break them”

I nodded, and she enfolded me.

“We now know that what I suspected was happening did indeed take place. What I fail to understand is how such a clear pattern of physical and sexual abuse was not spotted by your GP. As soon as I started reading those early records, I was appalled. If a child had been presenting such injuries to me there would have been someone in prison. I believe he is dead, though?”

“Yes…..the next day”

Even through my fuddled state I saw her put two and two together, and her eyes widened.

“She loves you very much, doesn’t she?”

“I just wish I had realised how much, and earlier”

Pete put the phone down, and came over to hold me again. Mary looked at us together.

“Um…Laura, are you up to continuing with our chat? I would like to try and settle you a bit before you leave, and there are one or two things I want to involve Pete in, if he is willing.”

Pete was, and I was, and we covered those parts of our childhood together that had already been revealed, resurrected, by him and Mum. Dad’s part was sidestepped, thankfully, but Mary drew Pete out about our “dates” over the weekend, my time as a little girl, my declaration of marital intent, and so on.

For my part, I was as open as I could be, despite my mouth feeling as if someone had filled it with cotton wool. I spoke of the diving pools, of gender, of doubt and utter certainty, and as I did I realised that I actually loved my big, broken soldier. I always had done, from our infancy onwards, and wondered what would have happened if we had still been together in adolescence. A steady gay couple? Unlikely; he didn’t seem to feel that way about other men, and he definitely fancied women, from the way he had stared at the bum of that dark-haired trollop at Bovington.

Jealousy. Clear and simple it came to me, it was him, and me. He loved me. He fancied Laura, but he loved me. And I loved him. I could, of course, adjust myself so that I ticked both boxes, but would that work for me? I needed time for such a decision. If I were to be Laura, it would be because it was right, not because someone else wanted it. Not for my mother, and not even for Pete.

Mary closed down the chat as time ran too fast for us.

“Laura, John, whichever name you wish, just say. I am not going to start discussing things such as any possibility of gender confusion, or even what you would consider full-on transsexuality, until you have had time to digest these events and come to terms with them. You have my office number, and I will give you my mobile before you go. Call me if you need me, whatever time it is. And speak to your mother.”

Pete led me out to the van, if being pushed in a chair can be considered as ‘leading’, and once I was settled he turned to me and asked how lucid I felt.

“Not bad, I feel a little distant from things, a little slow, but not that bad. I think we need to lose these pills somewhere, though; I am not going to run my life on chemicals. What did my mother say?”

“She asked me to come back with you, and she wanted to know my father’s number. This is really a day for old wounds. I have my own things to say to her, and him, and you. She did it, didn’t she?”

“I think so. I think I know how, too, but I am sure that she did what she felt was needed. I am more concerned over what Mary said, if she could see the pattern, why not our doctor? Pete, can you stop at St Nicholas’ before we go home, I just want a look at his grave”

It wasn’t too long before e were at the church, empty under greying skies. I pushed the chair into the grave yard, looking for the place I remembered, and there it was, stone aslant, grass unkempt. “John Prentice Evans. 1945-1985”, that was all. I took a careful look around the area, and saw nobody. I unzipped, and pulled out my cock, and proceeded to piss on his grave.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I zipped up, and turned to Pete. He was looking away.

“That sort of interferes with my picture of Laura, you know”

“How do you feel about Laura, Pete?”

“Like I always have. I love her.”

“Laura loves you. I love you. I just need time to sort out who I am before we take things any further, but I think I know where I am going now. Just be sure this is me you are talking about, and not a day-dream from your childhood, because I am real, I am here, and I can be hurt”

My mother was waiting in the driveway when we pulled up, and I could tell she had been crying, but she was as collected as always when she spoke. We were seated in the living room, I having done my duty as Pete’s crutch.

“Now you know, and now you realise why I pushed you in the direction I did. I hoped it would help you recover.

“I had almost given up on my child, the child I lost to some inward-turning robot, and then you came home. I thought if I left you enough hints, fed you enough clues, I might get you back without too much pain. I wanted you whole, and if that could happen without those events surfacing, I could die happy. You, of course, needed to do it the hard way, contrary as you are, dear.”

“Mum, Pete and I, we’ve been wondering, why did our GP not spot what was going on? Mary says the pattern was really obvious”

“I have a lot to talk about, dear, an awful lot. I am afraid that I do not feel I can do so right now. I will be honest with you, if someone says a cruel word I will break. I do have a plan of action, however, for the weekend. In the meantime, I need to clear a few things up so that we are all open about what we want and expect.

“Firstly, my love, what are we to call you?”

The answer came easily. “Laura, Mum”

“Thank you, dear. And Peter, would you be willing to stay with us for a while? We have the space, and I do believe Laura would like you here. I have arranged for a plumber to remodel the downstairs toilet and shower, and I have already purchased a seat for the latter. That was not intended as a hint, but I rather suspect your presence here will become more frequent. Do you want to change, Laura?”

Oh yes indeed. I suddenly realised I needed that, deeply. As I went through the door, Mum called out “What was the delay on your journey, dear? I expected you a little earlier”

I looked her in the eyes. “I went to St Nicholas’ to pay my respects”

One eyebrow lifted, just a little.

“Well, dear, I trust you had a full bladder”

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I was downstairs again reasonably quickly, in a comfy long skirt and sloppy jumper. Mother had a nice bacon broth for us, with proper dumplings cooked on it, of course, and as we sat and ate I realised that Mary’s doping was wearing off.

“I asked young Peter for his father’s number, as there are a number of issues with which he can help. Peter, your father will be joining us some time on Friday evening. Laura, I trust that you will confirm my pride in you. The grey silk, I think, with that wool you soiled, and the carpets will survive one or two evenings’ worth of abuse from proper shoes.”

It was an early night for us all. The stress of everything that had happened was telling, and I had a moment of pity for Alan, the hypnotist, who had been compelled to hear what came out of me. Would he sleep easily that night, I wondered.

The horrors came back in the small hours, and I awoke from the pain. For a moment, I considered taking some more of Mary’s little helpers, but I realised I needed to deal with this without chemical aid. In my nighty and slippers I approached the sleeping form, who stirred and grunted.

“Nightmares again. Can I please sleep with you?”

“Of course”

I slipped under the duvet, and nestled myself into my mother’s arms.

CHAPTER 17
The next couple of days were very odd, for me, as I Johnned my way to work and Lauraed round the house in the evening. Pete was driving me each day, and I had to concentrate on being appropriate in each phase.

He was apprehensive about his father coming down, and not just about the revelations that might emerge. On his return home from hospital, he had felt smothered by his father. Whether that was from guilt that his son had gone out to ‘be a man’ and come back so reduced, or simply that Pete’s perceptions had changed, he could not say, but either way he had decided to take the educational opportunities offered, and go back to what he still thought of as his home, and find his own way. The rest, we knew.

His worry was that his father would be unable to handle his refusal to rely on him. It was OK being independent at about 300 miles’ distance, it was another doing it in the same room. And then, there was myself.

I will try to be very precise in what I say here. I have already mentioned my sexual arousal, but I really do not think that there was any scope at all for a sexual relationship with Pete as I was. Laura had apparently been me, and I her, from my earliest memories, the ones I used to have. Everything bore that out. The more I remembered, and it was still moods and feelings rather than incidents, the more I realised that Laura was me and Old John was a construct. I actually thought of him as Odd John, after the Small Faces song on an album my mother had, and the fact that I thought of him as ‘him’, as ‘other’, made the point.

Apart from the horror of the last part of the tape that Mary had played, I had been profoundly disturbed by John on his eleventh birthday. Not just the dispassionate way he described his bike modifications, there had been the genuine puzzlement at the question about having a party. Laura had bounced her way through her answers, and I was still smiling at the response when she listed who was coming to her party: PETE, a whole list of girlfriends, oh, and some boys.

And my father (NOT my ‘dad’) had taken all that, and shat all over it. I resolved to visit his grave again.

Enough. The point I was going to make was that I was terrified as to Pete senior’s reaction to finding his son cuddled up to a drag queen, a bender, a transvestite, pick your own abusive term. I held fast to the fact that his son had stood by me throughout all of the horrors of the past weeks, and he seemed willing to stay and continue the work. And loved him, which was becoming less confusing each time I saw him.

The day he was due, we got back to find that Mum had been shopping again, and had found a narrow wheelchair that fitted neatly through all the doors n the house. Pete’s super whizzy beast had canted wheels to help contain the speed he cornered at, but if he was going to race through the house I would let his tyres down. Now he was mobile, and I would not have to do crutch-duty any more. I had a small pang of regret at that. I loved my mother more every day, a feat I thought impossible. Pete made a number of jokes about mothers in law, and I was secretly pleased.

Mum drove up to Fareham to pick up Pete senior, and I did my level best to look as Laura as possible. The wool skirt and grey silk blouse, as suggested, were on show, coupled with black stockings (yes, I wanted to feel good for Pete) and as my mother had insisted, three inch heels on black suede court shoes. If he didn’t like it, sod him.

Just as I finished putting my face on, I heard the car. Pete was on kettle duty, and I heard him get the door, courtesy of his second set of new wheels. I decided it was time to make my entrance.

He was a big man, at least 6’4”, going slightly to fat but still solid. Bald as a coot, or shaved, with a pepper and salt beard, he made me feel smaller than ever.

He was talking to Pete, my Pete, in what seemed a relaxed way, and he was holding Mum’s hand. I came into the kitchen, my heels loud on the floor. This was the moment when I would find out…he turned, and his face lit up.

“Laura!”

I was swept into a huge and comprehensive hug, and my doubts swirled down the drain and out to sea. This was a man, a man’s man, and I was a girl in his arms.

“You have grown girl”

“Well, I have had over twenty years to do so!”

“No wonder Pete is stuck on you. Can you answer one question?”

“Yes…..”

“You couldn’t possibly fancy an old, bald man that knows your mother?”

“Oh you sod!”

Just like that, from fear to slapping him and laughing. I looked at my mother, and back at Dad Pete, and realised why she loved him, and where my man had come from.

Mother eventually shouted for calm and cooperation, and we settled ourselves around a simple buffet meal of bits and nibbles.. I noticed that at no time did they drop their hold on each other.

Mum loved him, and he did her, so why so long apart? The conversation around the table steered clear of nasties by what seemed general consent, and I was astonished when my mother, as we finished clearing the table, appeared with two board games.

“Scrabble or Monopoly?”

Pete laughed, “No way am I going up against my bloody lecturer in Scrabble! Monopoly, of course,”

So, there we were, sat round a table playing a board game, like some ordinary family. I had grabbed the little dog, Mother the car and Dad Pete the top hat. Pete looked in the box, grinned, and took the boot.

“Seems apt, I suppose”

He won, and he knocked me out first, the bastard. I may slowly be learning to speak human, but was still a long way from reading the unspoken stuff, and Pete’s poker face was so far beyond my skills I just gave up.

It came down to Mum and him in the end, so Dad Pete and I settled down on the sofa for a chat.

“I believe you have had a couple of heavy days, Laura”

“That is putting it rather mildly, Pete. I have a lot to come to terms with”

I indicated my clothing. “This was something remarkably private till a few weeks ago, and yet, as I recover myself, it feels more and more normal, more normal than being John, at least, but he was never normal.

“Can I ask you one question, Pete, one single one before we go into the rest of things?”

“I may not answer it, you know that, but try me”

“Mary---my psych---says that the pattern of my abuse was obvious from my childhood records. Why was that never picked up? Surely my doctor, our GP, should have spotted it?”

His geniality went on pause for a second, and I saw someone hard behind the smile.

“Your father….John and your GP were in the same Lodge. A funny handshake or two, a bit of free building work, you should get the picture. No more, girl, leave it till tomorrow.”

There was a loud shout from the table. Apparently, my mother had just landed on some expensive property, and Pete wanted her kidneys or something in payment. The game was over. My game would start tomorrow.

I joined Mum again in the small hours. Dad Pete wasn’t there.

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My mother, being the perfectionist she is, went all-out on the breakfast front. Pete was fresh from the shower, which he could now use on his own, but Dad Pete was yawning as I came down in my dressing gown and slippers.

“That bed’s too short. I should have climbed in with your mother”

She was calm, clear and controlled.
“I am sorry, Pete, but I already had a guest last night”

She was also bright red. I pointed this out to her, which of course made her redder, and then she burst into tears and ran out of the room. I went after her, finding her sitting on her bed. I held her, and she clutched at me.

“I knew last night that you might come to me again, and I know the horrors that come to you, but I wanted him there, and I resented you keeping him away. I resented my own child”

“That is understandable, you have missed him, I can see that. You are always so precise, Mum, so controlled, and you aren’t when you are near him. Please understand, your own life doesn’t stop for your children. I want you to be happy. Pete can cuddle me if I need it”

She sat up and looked at me, turning my face to her gaze.

“You have decided then, my love?”

“No, Mum, there is no decision. I realised that as I lay beside you last night. Little Laura knew from the day she understood the difference, and I am still that girl. I just had a few years of illness and confusion. I am not rid of Odd John yet, I never will be, but I think I know who I am again.

“Knowledge, not choice, Mum, and I do believe I know. The decision will be what I choose to do about things. I am Laura, I will be me, but the mechanics…they will need very careful thought, and help from my loved ones”

“And those who love you, dear. Never forget that.”

This is the conclusion to this part of the story, There is some nastiness here, but not as bad as has been shown so far.

CHAPTER 18
We went into the bathroom together to repair our faces. Not that either of us had any cosmetics on, but a splash of water does help to reduce the redness of crying. Mum started laughing.

“I have no space left for my own stuff now you are here. Make up, hair remover, AND shaving kit. Not to mention these”

She picked up the stockings I had rinsed out the night before, laid over the bath.

“You were wearing trapping kit last night, dear? I do believe I have some more that…hang on, whose are these?”

“Er, I just thought I might borrow some…”

She kissed me on the cheek. “My darling, I will be blunt. You have had sex with a man, but there is a huge difference between sex and love, and between love and rape. You and Peter will find your own way, just do not feel that there is any script, any prescribed way, for you to show your love for each other”

That startled me. She smiled fondly.

“Yes, I know. I could never read Odd John, as you call your past, because there was never anything there to be read. You, my dear, become more human each week, and it is both wonderful and painful, painful because I lost you for two decades. Now, breakfast, and then Pete and I have some things to talk about.

We went down, and the feast was demolished in short order. Dad Pete sighed,

“Next time I will bring some decent black pudding down”

My mother squeezed my hand under the table. Such a simple statement, so much meaning behind it.

“Pete, Laura, your mother and I have a lot to go through this morning. I want to clear the decks now, so that we have a weekend to deal with any issues. Firstly, though, we need a promise. There are things we need to tell you that could have savage consequences for the two of us, and if you cannot promise to keep them in confidence, we can go no further. Do we have your promise?”

Pete and I both nodded our agreement. Dad Pete grunted.

“OK, then. We will simply speak, get through this with as little fuss as we can .Please just listen; this is hard enough for both of us already, harder than you know.

“I met your mother, Laura, when I turned up for that burglary. She was a beauty then, just as she is now, so elegant, and it was a real shame to see the mess that had been left for her to clear up. I asked where John was, and she said that she had been left to sort out the Police report because he had better things to do”

Mother interrupted.

“He said that I should deal with the fucking plod, he had a business to fucking run, just make sure I got the crime report sorted so we could get a decent screw out of those thieving fuckers in the insurance”

“Yes, too important to speak to me, that was it. Anyway, Pete, your mother, you have to understand, was already heading off into that odd little world that took her, and Lucy here offered me a cuppa, and of course it was a proper pot, china cups, biccies…”

He trailed off, smiling at her, and she melted back. Twenty years apart.

“Anyway, I found her so easy to talk to, I ended up telling her too much, more about me than the job I was there to do. And I made sure I came back a few times to …answer any queries, and one thing led to another, and there was a dance group that we ‘coincidentally’ both joined”

“None of that rowdy silliness, proper ballroom dancing”

“I am not going to go into details, but we knew each other slightly because of you two, and I knew all about John Prentice Evans, as he made such a point of letting the world know exactly who and what he was, or at least what he wanted the world to think he was. And one thing led to another, and suddenly Lucy had missed a couple of periods, and we decided to pass it off as his.

“He was a drinker, and that had led to diabetes, and even though he couldn’t get it up any more Lucy tried to persuade him that one night, one pissed night, he had managed, and that worked for a while till he lost it again, and beat her again, and then SHE lost it. Lost him, lost our son, your brother”

“You were both six, my dears. Laura remembers it.”

Dad Pete’s face hardened, and I realised that he could still frighten people if he wanted to. He almost frightened me, then.

“That was when I wanted to kill him, but your mother closed everything down. She made me promise. Pete, you know what happened to your mother, I am not going to go there, but understand that Lucy stuck with me all through that. She did her best to help your mother, because she knew I loved her and she loved me in her turn. I don’t want you to see this as some tacky bit of playing away”

My Pete spoke up.

“Dad, Lucy and I talked about that. I think I have managed to get my head round it, and seeing you two together helps”

“Thanks, son. She called me from the hospital that day in 1985. She had never, ever mentioned how he was treating you, Laura, and I was shocked at what that bastard had done to his own child. They had to operate, he had torn you so much. The only time he could get it up, he got it up his own daughter”

Dad Pete was shaking now. Mum got up and went to sit on his lap, wrapping herself around as much of him as she could. As the tears fell, he kissed her and continued

“I wanted to go round and kill him, and she…”

He paused, gathered strength.

“When your mother is stressed, she pulls everything in, tighter than a duck’s arse...sorry. She has a way of locking herself so she looks and sounds completely in control”

“Years of dealing with that man taught me some important lessons, my love”

There it was, dropped lightly into the middle of our ‘little chat’. Dad Pete carried on.

“ I said to her, I will deal with it now, permanently, and she said…she just lifted an eyebrow a little, as she does, and said ‘Just give it another hour’ and….and I knew. So, we went to the Friends’ café in the hospital, as they worked on John, on Laura, and once he was as stable as they could make her…sorry, this gets confusing”

I sighed, “Tell me about it…”

“I know. After a while, Lucy asked if I could take her home. He was dead, as I had suspected, with his hand wrapped round a broken hypodermic. The needle was still in him, and he had bled into the sheets. I asked your mother what she had done, what she had injected him with, and she just raised that eyebrow again. Such control….”

She looked round from his chest. “Somebody needed it. We had to get through that night with no more hurt”

“I asked what she had injected him with, and she said ‘nothing’ “

“I did indeed, my love. I said that he had injected his own insulin, which I measured for him”

Oh shit.

“And then, after maybe a little too much of his medicine, as he lay there, drunk and snoring,, with my child’s blood still on his penis, and my other child cremated, I injected him with nothing. I found a vein, and gave him about four syringes full of nothing. Air, my dears.”

Dad Pete hugged her to him again.

“Murder, pure and simple in the eyes of the law, and I was the law. But I knew it wasn’t simple, so we had a lot of work to do. I called your doctor up, and he didn’t want to come out, so I offered him the option of being collected, and he came. When he saw the body, he wanted to call it a suspicious death, autopsy and all that, so I just told him his fortune.

“It was a full and happy future that awaited him, in Lewes, or Brixton, or the Scrubs, for complicity in child rape. That for starters, anyway. As he certified the death by natural causes of that man, I called it in. After it was all cleared away, after that, I failed you all.”

My mother looked so small, like a child, wrapped up on his lap as he stroked her hair.

“I ran away. I tried for a couple of years, but she was a murderer, and I was a copper, and I had buried a murder for my own gratification, and I could not deal with that. Pete had lost Laura, because she ran away that night and never came back, and so I resigned, and moved us as far away as I could, and slowly built up my little haulage business, and I have missed this woman for every second of every day.

“If I could make that right, I would. It looks like my son has been doing what his father should have finished”

My mother reached up and pulled him down for a kiss. I looked at Pete, my Pete, and it just seemed the right thing to do, and it was.

VIEWPOINTS EPILOGUE
Thank you for staying with the story of John/Laura and her traumas.

I have written about PTSD, and survivor guilt, things that will live and fester forever in my soul, but this time wanted to try and write both a mystery and an exploration of how a soul can be destroyed by cruelty and selfishness. I wanted to try and get under the skin of an obsessed, broken person, and let them find redemption through the things we all hope for: family, friends, love.
I hope I have succeeded here, it has been an awfully distressing tale to write. There were times when I was consumed by the story, others when the nature of what I was attempting to bring to life almost made me ill.
The story continues, obviously, but now that Laura's pain has been laid bare on the page, along with that of Lucinda and Dad Pete, I feel that the nature of the story that is left to tell is fundamentally dfferent.
If people want to know what happened next, and can't work it out, I wll try to do it justice, but the nature of the story will be so, so different.
I need to breathe for a while. Too many demons.

This episode is offered up to see if there is a desire for a continuation of the story of Laura and Pete. Odd John is leaving the building, and unlike the first 'book' this is not a mystery story. The first part came to a natural end; this can be read as a separate story.

CHAPTER 1
That weekend, oddly, was one of the best I can remember. Dad Pete and my Pete seemed to have recovered a spark, a family bond that had been lost with his leg. Seeing them smile together warmed me, and it was hard work slowing my man down. He wanted to show his father everything at once, all the changes that had taken place since his so-called failure and run to York. More importantly, I was seeing my mother in love.

That was so obviously how she felt it was almost painful to watch, and he was so clearly in the same boat I wanted to cry at the thought of two wasted decades. They made an odd pair, to outside eyes, the perfectly turned out elegant lady with that huge bear in a checked shirt and jeans, but whose business was that beyond their own? She was so happy it looked painful, facial expressions beyond a raised eyebrow not being her thing.

That morning turned into a sort of group hug after what I would think should be called their confessions, and no words were needed to seal what was obvious between us. The two culprits were long dead, I was healing, and it seemed nobody else needed to know. Mary might suspect, but that was something I would deal with if it arose. What was important now was also between the four of us: what were we going to do with each other? I couldn’t see Dad Pete and Mum letting go of each other again, in fact, I hadn’t seen them let go all through breakfast, but what about my Pete?

Laura was back, almost fully it seemed, and she was me and always had been. There were huge gaps in my memories, and I think always will be, but the moods, the feelings were all there. I was thankful that one particular set of memories were locked away, only surfacing as confused nightmares, but I knew they were there. They always would be, but I now had a way of dealing with them, and I was no longer alone. I never had been alone, of course, but in my retreat from life I had felt it.

Feelings…Odd John had never really had feelings, just obsessions, focus. I was still learning how people worked, and as I watched I tried to tune my own behaviour, to live in my skin rather than simply wear it.

I dressed after breakfast, shivering a little as I slipped my wobbly bits in. They were becoming second nature to wear, and I felt really odd as John, without them. At some point…I pushed Pete out into the garden.

“We need to have another talk, Pete. About us, but mainly about me.”

I drew a deep breath. Where to start? How about where to finish?

“Pete, where do you see us going?”

“Wherever you want to go, but with one condition. Well, two, actually. The first is that you are happy with it, and the second is that I come along.”

“Well, there is one thing I do have in mind. You will need to move out of the Legion centre eventually, and you will have to find somewhere suitable for your wheels, work surfaces at the right height, and so on”

”Not necessarily, if I get my new leg I will be able to live almost normally, but what are you thinking?”

“Well, we have stairs here, but I rather suspect Mum would be happy to do some more mods to the house for you. That would do short term, but much as I love her, I do not want to live with my mother permanently. Once Jane has sorted out the payments, I will have half the value of the house in my hot and sweaties”

“Don’t you think you should raise the assumption you are making about me before that move, Laura?”

“Nope, I will be looking for somewhere of my own anyway. I just need to know if I should make it a bungalow.”

I kept very quiet about the other thought very much bubbling away. How many bedrooms?

With every breath that came into me, more of John left, more of his oddity.

“Before we cover those assumptions, I am asking for your support. I know I will have Mum’s.”

Breathe…

“I think it is about time that I started fitting myself to my soul. It will be a long, messy business. Will you please be with me for it? Please be my friend? I am rather short of those…”

He kissed me gently. No passion, just tenderness.

“No, John was short of friends. Laura will be different. I am with you, as much of the way as you want me. I have an idea as to where to start, if you feel brave.”

He fed me his little plan, and I nearly wet myself with terror. He held me, and whispered “Not alone”

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“Dave? It’s John. What are you and Sharon up to today? Fancy a run out to Bosham for lunch? Yeah? Well, you would know the tide tables, it’s a pub. One ish? See you there”

Done. I had just sealed my fate, after a rather shaky discussion with Dad Pete and Mum. We would head out for the Blue Anchor in Bosham, a tiny village right on the edge of the sea. In fact it is occasionally IN the sea, as high tide comes up onto the streets, and the garden walls serve to keep the houses dry, with a step up to pass through the gates. Parked cars serve to amuse the locals, especially with a spring high tide, which is why Dave had checked the tide tables. Good food, real ales for the boys and pretty views, and a falling tide.
I borrowed some more of my mother’s undies and stockings, and stayed with the suede courts from the previous night, which reminded me that I only actually had five pairs of shoes, discounting my male items, and shopping would be a real necessity at some point. Another hurdle to overcome, but one that would be necessary. What a horrible thought, more nice clothes….A cream blouse with a light grey mid-calf flared skirt would be warm, but still shout femininity, if the bloody shoes didn’t do the trick. Mum helped with my face, and teased my hair out, and by twelve we were out the door and into Mum’s car.

We arrived as the water was leaving, the best timing possible, and on a surprisingly warm Autumn afternoon we took seats outside. There were views across the water, a little egret fishing not far off, gulls crying and the rattle of rigging on masts as small boats swung at their moorings. We turned out to be about three minutes in advance of Dave and Sharon, and the boys went into the bar to choose ales, Pete managing a treat on his crutches. I realised that all the leaning on me may just have been a little…. unnecessary.

It was hilarious. Mum was looking out over the water as Dave walked right past the two of us, Sharon in tow. The beer was calling, and he was focused. Odd John wasn’t the only one, quite clearly. A few minutes later, four people came out of the door, three carrying drinks, the fourth making the introductions, and leading them to our table.

I stood up to say hello, and Dave dropped his glass. Sharon managed her surprise better.

“It is definitely not a fair world, he’s got better legs than me!”

Dave just nodded, and Sharon slapped the back of his head. I hugged her, and after a slight moment of stiffness, she hugged me back.

“This will be good….but should we get the food in before the juicy bits?”

We sorted out the orders, Dad Pete as errand boy, plus a replacement drink for Dave, and I made sure I was seen touching Pete. Let them see the truth. Dave snorted a couple of times, and I braced myself for one of the more traditional schemata…thar she blew.

“I didn’t realise you were gay, John. I mean, I spotted that mascara you had on the other day, but I just thought it was, well, dunno. So Pete here as well, then…”

Sharon was looking at me with narrowed eyes.

“No, lover, I think this is something else. This isn’t just dressing up, is it, John? And… is it John now?”

“Laura, and no, I am not gay, and I bloody well hope Pete isn’t”

Pete leant forward from his chair, peered at Dave, and murmured

“So…what are you doing tonight……big boy?”

Dave almost lost his second drink at that.

“Dave, there s a lot to tell here, and it was Pete’s idea to drop you in it like this. I have a story for you, but what I am really after is a little support for what will most certainly be a stressful time”

Sharon was still watching carefully. “You are so different from John, Laura. You are actually communicating. What the hell has happened to you?”

They got the abbreviated version, of course, and I left out the identity of my ‘attacker’, but in essence our childhood was replayed, and how the return of the warrior led to my recovery and re-entry into humanity. Sharon asked pointed questions, Dave asked blunt ones, and Sharon slapped his head a couple of times. Food was served, and then puddings were succumbed to, as redshanks and oystercatchers called over the receding water. Finally, as the boys supped, and we sipped, Dave asked the bluntest of his questions.

“Yes, Dave, that will be the plan. I need to fit me to me, but timing, work, all of that will need support. That is what this little lunch is really about. Do I have your good will, and your support?”

“Oh, come on Jo–Laura, how long have we been mates?”

“Since about one o’clock, Dave, you have only just met me. You knew a construct, a fiction, called John for a few years, though”

Sharon interrupted his stumbling attempt at a reply. “She’s right, Dave, we need to get to know her all over again, but do me a favour, just say bloody ‘yes’ “

She leant forward. “Fancy damaging some credit cards? I think we need some retail therapy in the near future, and I am going to hazard a guess that you don’t have the biggest of wardrobes. What credit limit has Pete got?”

CHAPTER 2
Dave was back to bluntness, but necessarily so.

“What exactly is the plan, then? I don’t think clip-clopping into college in those shoes would be quite the right thing.”

“Well, not unless I can fit cleats to them. Make pedalling a bit hard otherwise. I need to have a long chat to Mary, and get her confirmation officially, and then we start the preparation. You have to understand, Dave, that I have had 22 years locked up, and the tragedy was that I never realised how completely screwed up I was. I have to say this, I have major mental illness issues and to come straight out and drop that on the college leaves my job at risk, never mind my sanity. And what exactly is wrong with these shoes? I rather like them!”

“Bit fuck-me, aren’t they?”

“So? Pete, do these shoes say ‘fuck-me’ to you?”

“No, love, I let you speak for yourself”

Dave nearly lost that drink as well.

“Can you slow down a bit, please, you two? You are doing my head in completely, and I haven’t had nearly enough beer to relax me”

There was something, though, in that exchange that cut me deeply. I hadn’t slept with Pete beyond the time I had comforted him at his little flat, and I realised with a lurch and a skipped heart beat that it was what I wanted, needed to do. The thing that stood in the way was exactly what Dave was talking about, if he only knew.

I had a number of alternatives ahead of me. I had very little idea of sex beyond the rather arid performances of John with Jane, if I ignored the rape, and that was what hung in the air. I knew that such an act was actually commonplace between men and women, and not just gay men, and it would be a long time before I would be in a situation to offer the more conventional…route, but it was something I was profoundly unsure about. Would Pete want to? Would I? Could I, in fact, with all the unavoidable associations?

More to the point, in all physical respects except packaging I was male. Would, could Pete accept someone like that? If it was my illusion of femininity that turned him on, then it might be impossible for years.

Then, I remembered. Gentle kisses, hugs, with me as he dropped me off at college. Passionate kisses when I was ‘male’. The confusion of his declaration of his love. Whatever his inclinations, his tastes and preferences, it was me he had set his cap at, me in whatever wrappings he found me in.

I reeled myself back in. One little sentence and I am off trying to decide whether I am going to start something messy and possibly painful in a lot of ways, and there were so many other things not only more important but more urgent. I remembered Mum’s words: we would find our own way, and it was time for me to stop thinking in standard patterns just because that was what some other people might do.

And that was so important to me just then, just at that moment. I realised that the old male schema of ‘boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy tries his hardest to get into girl’s knickers’ wasn’t how I was thinking. This was Laura turning herself up to eleven, and John waving a last little two fingers of defiance. What was important was Pete, and me, together. Everything else was secondary, even adjusting my body. As long as we had that mutual support, we could cope with anything.

I suddenly realised that Mum was talking to me, and from her tone of voice had been doing so for a while.

“Sorry, Mum, I was miles away”

She looked worried. “Not one of your little absences, was it? I had hoped we were moving away from there, dear.”

“Not at all, Mum, I was just thinking about the future”

“Nice thoughts?”

I felt my whole face smile. “Very nice thoughts”

Dave got up, and came round to hug me. “That smile answered all the questions I ever needed to ask. John could never have done that.”

He kissed my cheek. “I am really, really pleased to meet you, Laura. Now, how do we start sorting this mess out?”

I caught a look from Sharon then, and for the first time ever I was able to see how much and how deeply she loved her husband. All the little slaps, all the mickey taking, it was all a dance between two people who really cared. If Pete and I could achieve even half of what they had, I would be happy.

Pete suddenly started to laugh. He leant over and whispered something to Dave, and he was off too. The rest of us stared and waited, until the chortles and the snorts subsided, and then Sharon said “Well?”

Dave grinned. “Remember Abigail? She’s going to be REALLY confused now!”

As Sharon started to laugh, and another wave took the boys, Mum simply looked at me and asked “Who is Abigail?”

Dave cupped his hands before his chest. “A student with…large personalities who wanted to offer herself to John in return for a mark, and he was so dim it just went straight past him”

I loved Dave just then. He had managed to say so much, just with a third person reference and the past tense.

Even Mum cracked a little bit of a giggle at that one.

I suppose I look back now at that day, and it really was that first day of the rest of my life. Dave proposed a toast, to renewal and rebirth, and then in his direct way looked straight at my mother and said “Do I need to get my suit cleaned, or isn’t he going to bother with the honest woman bit?”

That led me onto the other discussion, about moving out. I had run this one past my mother in the ladies’, and while she had not been best pleased that I was already looking to ‘abandon’ her, in reality she understood that we would need our own space. Finding a suitable bungalow could take months, though, and everything, of course, depended on Jane sorting out the finances. No hurry, but the sooner acceptance was gained the easier it would be for all of us. I walked over to the sea wall and rang Mary on her mobile.

“Mary Oliver”

“Hi, it’s Laura Evans, you said to ring you and let you know how things went.”

“And?”

“Well, I am out in a nice John Rocha number at the Blue Anchor in Bosham, with what is starting to look like my potential stepfather, Mum, Pete and a couple of friends. We laid some demons to rest this morning”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Reborn, renewed. Free…and frightened.”

“What are you frightened of?”

“Rejection, I suppose”

“Who from?”

“People at work, people who find out about me”

“What about Pete? Your mother?”

“Oh god no, they are being absolutely brilliant. To be honest…….Pete and I may well be moving in together. No, it’s the other people”

“Are they as important as those two? Are they important at all?”

“Well, no….”

“Then you have answered your own question. Laura, we need a proper assessment of your position. I already have my own opinions there, but I need to do it properly before you can move on. Can you ring my office to see me as soon as possible this week?”

“Certainly”

“Oh, and Laura….can I please meet you this time?”

CHAPTER 3
Now, there was a bridge to cross. It would be a necessary one, of course, but it was still daunting. So far, apart from the shock tactics on Sharon and Dave, I hadn’t been out anywhere that might hold people who knew me.

It also left me with a reminder of another dilemma: if I moved into a bungalow, as I was proposing to do, and did so as John, how would the neighbours react to Laura?

That was the decision made, really, I, we needed to start as I intended to go on. Work was another oddity, that Monday morning, after such a decision, getting all dressed up as a man for the day and having to remember to limit my contact with Pete to “hail fellow well met!” rather than “hello, my love”

Laura was fighting hard, but after a stern talking to, and some pouting, she agreed to stay locked away for a little while. I thought I heard a faint chorus of “Are we nearly there, yet?” and the answer, thankfully, was “yes, nearly”

I got some very odd looks in the first lecture on Monday, and later in my two tutorial groups. I realised I was actually engaging with the texts I was analysing, rather than just dissecting them, and in the tutorials I was actually animated. It is hard to describe what the difference is other than by analogy. The anatomist sees a cheetah as a collection of body parts that act in particular ways, the naturalist as a top predator in an ecosystem, the human being as a spectacle of grace and beauty that thrills him or her to the core.

And the gazelle sees it as painful death, of course, but let’s not strain the metaphor.

My approach to literature had always been as the anatomist rather than the lover, and now that I was finally and truly a lover, it took on a life that I had not perceived, and I found myself getting animated as never before. I might even be able to understand Mahler if this kept up, or even my mother’s Sibelius. Wonders beyond imagination.

I had managed to get an appointment the following day from Mary’s office lady, and hoped that my official recognition could soon follow. I was a little surprised that morning to be called into the Faculty Head’s office. He had a pot of coffee brought in, and sat me down in one of his easy chairs.

“John, pardon me for being so blunt, but what exactly is going on?”

“What do you mean, Howard?”

“I need to list it all out? Firstly, some human being seems to have replaced the alien life form that previously worked here. The students are astonished, you actually talk to them in lectures instead of, well, lecturing them. One of them told me your voice cracked when reading some Owen the other day, almost as if you were getting emotionally bloody involved!”

“Yes. ‘Dulce et Decorum’, terribly moving.”

“Exactly! You have never done ‘moved’, nothing ever moves you. And you are coming to work in a car now. What else is going on, I shudder to think”

He paused, looking nervous (see? I can do it now) and then said softly

“What exactly is the relationship between you and Mr Hall, John?”

“Well, he was my best friend in junior school”

“So that is why you kiss each other, then?”

Oh arse. “No, that s not why we kiss each other. People who are in love do that sort of thing occasionally.”

This was moving a little faster than intended, but I trusted Mary to do the necessary thing that afternoon. In for a penny…Howard took a deep breath.

“We have, of course, a full diversity policy at the University and as such no negative inferences or outcome will take place. I note that you have already distanced yourself officially from any involvement in his tuition or assessment, which is excellent. However, if I may be a little personal, neither of you has ever struck me as gay”

“We’re not”

“John, John, I am an old man and very easily confused. Please explain, in short and non-technical words if you will, how you are not gay. Heterosexual gentlemen generally refrain from such activities with each other.”

“We are both heterosexual, Howard, and Pete is most definitely a gentleman”

“Oh. I see”

Howard is a faculty head in a University. Stupidity in such a post tends to be frowned upon.

“Please, please John, explain.”

“Well, my name is actually Laura…”

The explanation was as censored as it had been for Dave and Sharon, but as detailed as necessary. I was astonished to see Howard in tears at the end of it.

“You say he died soon after, the man who did that to you?”

“Yes, he did, thankfully”

“Painfully?”

“No, in his sleep”

“What a great pity. I Have never been a religious man, John, Laura, but I do hope there is a special hell maintained just for his sort. Forgive an old man his emotions, do”

He visibly gathered himself, and I realised that what I had come to terms with was profoundly shocking to any normal person who heard the story cold. No wonder my childish mind had gone for such a long walk.

“Laura, did you say you were meeting your therapist this afternoon?”

“Yes, Howard, at three thirty. She wants to meet Laura, and I anticipate the issue of her official diagnosis of my gender problem. The first step so that I can stop confusing poor faculty heads when I kiss my beloved.”

“Where did you plan to, er, transform yourself? It is just that, well, this is something I will have to deal with, and if you do not mind I would like to discuss with your therapist how best we can assist you. To that end, I live nearby, and you are more than welcome to change there. I will drive, if you wish”

I would have kissed him, but I wanted such a lovely man alive a bit longer. So, when the bitching hour arrived, and after a word with Pete to let him know my plans, I rode alliteratively in Howard’s Saab to his rather posh pad up by the park, where he showed me to a guest room and awaited my appearance.

This was not a day to slap people in the face, more one simply to let them know who I really was. Dressed down, in effect. I wore flats over tan tights below a mid calf skirt and pale green blouse, beneath a forest green wool box jacket. Enough paint to make the point, but not to beat it to death.

Howard drew in a sharp breath when he saw me. “My dear, if your therapist can’t see what is before her, I know a decent optician.”

While changing, I had taken the chance to give Mary a quick call to warn her that Howard would be coming, and to stress that my father’s part should remain secret. We ended up parking next to Pete’s little shoebox so that I could help him out into his chair. We needed to push along his new leg, if only for his own self respect.

Mary had to ask for extra chairs from the office for the two boys, and before we started I noticed a number of envelopes on her desk. Pete and I, perhaps deliberately ostentatiously, sat next to each other and held hands. Mary smiled, just enough to let me see without being unprofessional again.

“Well, Laura, you seem to have come along a bit since our last meeting. You will have guessed that I have already made my decision, and that we have some paperwork to sort, but I want to get a few things cleared up first.

“Howard, where does she stand at work?”

And off we went. Pete was there, solid as ever; Howard expressed all the required policy statements, Mary gave me my certificate.

Run that one again: Mary, with no prompting or fanfare, handed me a letter declaring that I was a woman who needed a couple of adjustments. I can’t really say how well the session went, other than to sit and smile. I had my diagnosis to confirm what I already knew in my heart, I had my man beside me, I had the scrip for the magic pills in my hand, and totally unexpectedly I had my boss next to me nodding in agreement.

Howard left me with Pete in the car park, and we decided to cross another Rubicon up at Hedge End. My head was now spinning, so one more outing could make little difference.

“Are you sure about this, love? These are ex-squaddies, hardly the most tolerant people in the world”

“It has to be done some time, so why not today? Are you telling me now, after all the hoops you have jumped through, that you have doubts?”

“No, but….”

“Exactly. No buts”
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Martin was on the gate again as we drove in, and when I swang my legs out of the van his eyes widened. I was wrestling Pete into his chair, grateful for my flat shoes, when he came over to help.

“Is this a private fancy dress do, or can anyone join in?”

Well….for the first, but certainly not last, time I pulled out Mary’s letter.

“Ah, not what I thought then.”

Pete looked up sharply. “Martin, what exactly DID you think?”

He looked a little embarrassed. “Well, that you two were, you know, a bit crafty butcher sort of thing”

I looked at Pete and did the Mother thing with an eyebrow. He laughed; “I’ll explain that one later”

“No, Martin, neither of us is ‘good with colours’, nor do we ’jump puddles’, and as far as I know none of our friends are called Dorothy. You may also have noticed that I can no longer be described as ‘light on my feet’

“In short, no, we are not gay. Neither of us. Straight. Hetero. On the same bus as you. I’ve been reading the same book as you, Martin, so I know all the terms as well. This is Laura, my fiancée, and we wanted to let the Legion know that I will be leaving them soon, so they can arrange for someone else who needs help to take the room.”

When exactly did that little event happen? Pete caught my frown.

“Look, love, we’re moving in together, so not only does it go with the territory, it makes things a little easier for the rest of the world to grasp”

“That may be the case, Mr Hall, but you will be doing it properly, and I cannot guarantee a positive answer!”

Martin was now laughing. “That settles it for me! Definitely a bloody woman!”

CHAPTER 4
Pete was a little nervous, in the end, as we collected a large part of his possessions to take to my mother’s place.

“Moving in with the mother-in-law-to-be…not exactly easy on the nervous system”

“Why’s that?”

“Just look at her. Everything just so, no shoes on the carpets, clothes, I am sure, racked in order of colour….and me, a squaddy more used to hanging stuff on the floor.”

He paused. ”Look, love, it’s like me. I am slowly getting accustomed to losing a leg, you lost your entire life”

“I wanted to talk to you about that. We need to get you fitted with something other than wheels. I mean, you can hardly chase me round the bedroom in the chair, can you?”

Pete laughed at that. “Well, you’re in the wrong shoes for that, according to Dave!”

And there it was, almost in the open. At some point, there would be something to be done between us. I had repeated the masturbation several times since that first night, but while the images in my mind were of Pete, the rest was without form. My body was responding as a male, and I was thinking as the woman I was now remembering I had always been. I literally did not know what to do next, because I could not offer him what I should.

It was a truly odd mental trick, but then I had a history of that. My penis was giving me relief from the sexual frustration engendered by wanting Pete to do something to a part of me that didn’t exist, and I was looking at it as a temporary ‘toy’ that I would be trading in. I didn’t hate it, I was just waiting for it to leave, something like a guest who has overstayed their welcome. How odd; frenzied male masturbation serving to confirm my femininity. My life was passing from one confused state to another. One thing that was absolutely certain, though, was that I actually wanted no involvement from Pete in any way for that particular activity.

Well….as he drove, I reached across and put my hand half way up his left thigh. Let him make some of the decisions for once.

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We stopped at the chemists’ on the way back, and as Pete waited in the van I filled my prescription from Mary’s scrip. That took me about a quarter of an hour, so I wandered around the shop picking up some new make-up and avoiding the sexual health displays. This was turning into an obsession. As soon as I had my little package I took the first of my new pills. Back on the road, and into my mother’s, and a rare display of open emotion from her when I produced the letter and my medication.

“We have to sit down together and work out some form of timetable, young lady. When to change your legal name, when to attend work as yourself, and, to be brutal, when you will let that errant spouse of yours know the truth.”

Just then, the phone rang, Mother answered it, and it turned out to be Howard.

“It is your Faculty head, dear, and he is asking directly for ‘Laura’”

She looked rather puzzled by that one. He seemed to be in a much livelier mood than when we had left him, chuckling as he spoke.

“I have had two little things come up, Laura, which you may find amusing. Firstly, my lady wife wanted to know who the rather attractive young lady was that our neighbour spotted leaving the house with me”

“Oh dear, Howard, I haven’t caused you any trouble, have I?”

“Not at all, Laura. I took the rather presumptuous liberty of telling my wife the basics of your story, she was rather supportive. When I mentioned the…attack, she just asked me a question, which was ‘Where is the animal now?’ ”

“I understand, Howard, you have my thanks. People will have to know sooner rather than later, and I think I can trust you to filter the story as necessary. What was the other matter?”

“Do you remember a student of yours, one Abigail Thorpe? A young lady of considerable frontal aspect?”

“Yes indeed, I have a story about her I could tell you”

“Well, she is alleging that you have deliberately marked her work down”

“Why would I do that?”

“Apparently because she has refused your sexual advances”

At that point he burst into a fit of very healthy laughter. “I meant to beard you about it today, but events sort of took over. I tell you, though, this is one misconduct hearing I am really looking forward to with relish”

“Oh, indeed, Howard, but can you do one thing for me? Get somebody other than Dave to mark her work and assure my verdict on it. I presume you wish me to attend the hearing as myself?”

He sniggered, really sniggered. “I would have it no other way, Laura!”

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Mother had made a daube for the evening meal, and we talked strategy as my mother wrote lists on a pad beside her plate. Who to tell, the priority, banking details, deed poll, social security and electoral roll, she had obviously been planning away in private for some time.

“After dinner, dear, we are going over to Gun Wharf. They have a late night opening this evening, and you need to buy a lot of clothes for work.”

“Mother, I have not yet decided when I will have my coming-out”

“Oh, Laura darling, that has already been arranged. As soon as the first misconduct hearing is arranged, that will be your date.”

She descended from her little ivory tower just then. “Remember what we have been telling you ad nauseam: you are not, and never have been, alone”

Gun Wharf Quay is a large shopping centre in Portsmouth, just the other side of the harbour by foot ferry from Gosport. It is dominated by the Spinnaker Tower, famous for its failing lifts and whose early resemblance to a sex toy as it was being built led to it being referred to as the Rampant Rabbit. Long, knob on top, twin-forked arms sticking up from the bottom…..

We wandered around from shop to shop, and it was amazing how natural I felt doing so. Clothes were tried on and a proper fit found, shoes were bought that felt as well as looked good, and I saw (and bought) one pair of strappy heels that didn’t just say ‘fuck me’, but rather ‘screw my brains out NOW on a bed of chocolate”

Pete joked that he was luckier than most men, because he had his own personal Husband Chair. He claimed he could see no real difference in the various court heels I tried on, but saved himself from further injury by remarking on how nice they made my legs look.

There was one other place I looked in, apart from the clothing and coffee shop, and that was a laser hair removal studio. I booked an initial course of treatment starting the following week. Goodbye, beard, don’t write.

Eventually, the feeding frenzy abated a little, and we made our way back to the ferry.

“I see why you insisted I come” said Pete, “so you could use my bloody chair as a pack mule”

I snorted. “Some of this stuff is yours!”

“You mean the two paperbacks and the one shirt?”

My mother interrupted. “You two might as well be married, the way you go on”

“Funny you should say that, Mum, but he sort of proposed today”

Sometimes, just sometimes, I manage to crack my mother’s shell.

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Once again I was in John mode for work, and the more I did it the more I realised how unnatural it was for me, compared to how I felt properly dressed. I was beginning to realise that there had been a reason I had found dressing in the marital home so relaxing–it wasn’t a case of ‘finding my feminine side’ but of the simple removal of conflict. There were a number of things involved, and none of them involved sexual gratification, something Mary had prodded at in our first meetings.

Firstly, I felt now as if I was taking off a costume rather than putting one on for a while. Laura was becoming my default state, exactly as my mother had always known she would. When things were more advanced, and my body more obviously female, I would be able to dress down a bit, but a second factor was that I really liked clothes, and shoes in particular. I know they are silly, and impractical, but nothing is more elegant than a nice pair of heels. According to my mother, I have excellent taste, neither brash nor clumsy. Pete seems to like it, anyway….I just like prettiness, and elegance. Heels start to look truly ugly above a certain height; skirts too short look horrible. If I had a cleavage, displaying it the way Abigail did would definitely not be my style.

Rather like my mother, in fact. Then again, having had a rummage in her knicker drawer, I had my preconceptions overturned emphatically. Ye gods, she could undress like a whore! I wouldn’t normally use that word in association with Mum, but let me just say that she liked her underwear. I rather liked her underwear, too, and that thought brought back the earlier ones.

Work the next day. Mum parked up, Pete took a shower on his new chair, and I went to get ready for bed. After a good night kiss to Mum in her room, I started back down the stairs, and definitely heard her call out a soft ’good luck, dear’ at the first creak.

Pete was in bed by this time, and I caught a faint snore. I pulled off my slippers and lifting the edge of the duvet slid in beside him. He grunted and cuddled up to me.

“Thought you’d never come. If you have cold feet warm them somewhere else. I can’t exactly kick you out, can I?”

A kiss on the mouth, a wriggle, and he was back to sleep. No drama, no passion, just the best thing to happen in my life since he came back.

CHAPTER 5
The next morning was remarkably normal, Mother up early to bring us a cup of tea in bed, clearly checking my whereabouts. Pete had slept straight through, without nightmares, and I woke as before with an arm across me and dribble down the back of my neck.

My mother, as usual, was right. I really had no choice except to come out, as I would be leaving John behind at some point, and unless I stayed indoors all my life I would have to ‘face my public’. The only real choice would be to pick a moment for least harm, and best benefit, and the thought of getting one over on little miss Chesty was an attractive one.

That was another little moment, remembering Dave’s explanation of what she was up to. John hadn’t even noticed her tits, and here I was, envious as all hell of them! Funny world.

I arranged to have my lectures covered on the day of the first hearing, and my mother arranged a visit from a mobile hairdresser she knew. My mad mop passed as a woman’s hairstyle, sort of, while not being too out of place on a chap, but it was time to start the process of finding my own look, my own style.

Ginny was a stick-thin redhead, far from natural I was sure, and I was soon having what my mother insisted was my first proper wash. For god’s sake, it’s only dead keratin, there’s no ‘life’ to it by definition! Mind you, having my head massaged in that way was rather nice. Perhaps I could train Pete…..

She cut remarkable quantities of hair off my head while leaving it still somehow looking full, and layered it down to my ears so I looked as if the top of my head was wider than the bottom. Some slight waviness gave me a look I really liked, and I resolved to use her again.

“It makes your features look smaller, Laura” Ginny told me, “More feminine”

It seemed I was already out in several places. I had assumed the neighbours must already know, as I had been in and out en femme, but it was still an occasion for nerves. Ah well, today was the day.

I had a sudden thought, and after the noise of the drier had finally ceased I asked my mother a question that had surprised me with its appearance.

“Mum, what was Mrs Hall’s name?”

“Elspeth, dear”

“Do you think Pete would mind if took it as a middle name when we swear the Deed Poll?”

“I think he would be honoured, my darling”

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Mum drove me into Southampton so that I could stay as elegantly non-glowing as possible. I had gone for the full powersuited business lady look, in a charcoal skirt and jacket over black stockings and patent black courts. On Mum’s advice, I added a dramatic flash to the ensemble with a bright scarlet blouse with a large bow at the neck. Ginny had done my nails as well as the hair, and they were set up to match the blouse, as were my lips, courtesy of Mum. No accessories beyond a watch and a plain briefcase in place of a handbag. Powerful, efficient, strong yet fully feminine.

We had arranged with Howard to be there an hour or so before the meeting so as to have a last look at the allegations, and the plan was that the hearing would convene while I waited in an adjoining office until called for. There were two other representatives from the faculty, Professor Harriet Smythe and Doctor Sam Cordice. Both had been briefed on my situation, and I felt just a little exposed beneath their gaze. Sam just nodded. “Yup, works for me”

Harriet leaned in closer. “Has anyone ever told you, dear, those are SERIOUSLY fuck-me shoes? Wherever did you find them?”

I nearly passed out with relief at that point.

Things began on time, and Howard had rigged up a speaker phone so we could hear what was being said in the next room. It was a dreadful story. Young Abigail, not long out of the parental nest and inexperienced in the Ways of Wicked Men, had come to the Big City from her tiny village of thatched cottages and milkmaids, where small children fed ducks with organic wholemeal bread, or something, all for the love of English literature. Virginal and innocent, she had been unprepared for the frenzy of lust unleashed in her direction from the testosterone-crazed lecturer. He kept staring at her chest, which she knew was unnaturally large, so she always wore clothes like today’s baggy sweater, cause she didn’t like to think of things like that, being so innocent, like. And virginal, of course.

But even so, he had been making inappropriate references to her chest, and then she noticed her marks were dropping, so she had asked the evil sex-hormone-filled lecturer what was wrong. That was when he suggested that there might be a way to sort it out, but she was too shy to spell it out in front of people, but it definitely would have involved something utterly non-virginal and far from innocent, so in extremis she had finally turned to the Faculty for help and protection from this evil would-be rapist. And so on at great and inventive length. I had great difficulty in not collapsing with the giggles.

Harriet was first in. “Miss Thorpe, we have taken the liberty of having your submitted work assessed by other tutors. They actually have come to a pretty similar level of mark to each other”

“But higher than Doctor Evans, yes?”

“Er, no. Dr Evans seems to be quite generous”

I was fascinated by this. Could they keep up a gender-neutral reference to me throughout?

Sam was next. “You have a very extensive Facebook page, Ms Thorpe”

I am sure I caught a very, very faint “oh shit”

“Let me see…..four down, eleven to go on the Rugby 1st XV front…first prize in the Wet T-Shirt Competition at the New York/New York nightclub…I could go on”

“Yebbut, that don’t change what he wanted me to do, does it?”

Harriet said “Howard, do you think we should ask Dr Evans to step in for a while to address these allegations?”

“Certainly, Harriet. The good Doctor is waiting next door, I believe”

I was pacing when Howard came into my room. “Virginal, sweet and innocent! Howard, would you care to make a small wager with me?”

“Certainly, my dear”

“Five pounds says she uses the C-word”

“You are on”

I came into the room from behind Abigail ,and there was a fine moment of theatre as my heels left the carpet by the door and hit the wood of the parquet flooring nearer the desks. Abigail span in her chair, and I saw she was wearing a big floppy jumper, a long denim skirt, and no make up at all. Still couldn’t disguise her chest, though.

Tick, tock, tick, tock as I swayed up to the desks and took a seat, legs properly crossed at the ankles, knees tilted demurely and just so to one side. I folded my hands together on the desk so that the scarlet of my nails couldn’t be missed, after pushing a purely imaginary stray hair back into place. Abigail’s gaze had tracked me like a gun sight as I strutted across the office, her mouth hanging open in a particularly bovine way. Well, it would be, of course, it went with the udders. She managed to close her jaw and after a few false starts to speak. Rant, really.

“What the fucking hell is this?”

Harriet looked up over her glasses in that archetypical menacing-manager way. “Oh, didn’t you know? Your evil would-be rapist is a transsexual who is not only not interested in women sexually, but is actually engaged to an ex-soldier. I believe that to be the case, Laura?”

“Yes, indeed, Harriet, he proposed to me last week.”

“Oh you fucking cunt!”

“Howard…?”

CHAPTER 6
Howard looked around the three of us as Abigail sat tight-lipped and furious.

“Are we agreed, Sam, ladies? Right. Ms Thorpe, you have made serious allegations against Dr Evans here, allegations that could have resulted in a prison sentence for her if they had been true, which clearly they are not. To support those falsehoods, you have attempted to misrepresent yourself in a truly grotesque way.

“Dr Evans would be fully within her rights to take a civil action against you for slander, and as I would be more than happy to stand as a witness on her behalf, and…yes? Yes, my two colleagues here also, I believe that your chances in court would be as that of the well-known infernal snowball.

“We have another matter to consider now, and that is whether we can allow you to continue as a student at this establishment after such disgusting dishonesty. Accordingly, I would strongly suggest you take legal advice before your own hearing ,and at the very least consult your student council.

“For the time being, you are suspended from access to the University, its grounds and buildings.”

“Yebbut, that fucking freak’s not even a proper woman!”

Harriet leant forward, just a little. “Mss Thorpe, if you are offering yourself up as a feminine role model, I am afraid I will go with Laura here”

Abigail was crying now. “But it’s not supposed to go this way! You’re all just sexists!”

I almost felt sorry for her at that point. Harriet, clearly, did not.

“We will be in touch when a date is available for your disciplinary hearing. Close the door as you leave”

She almost stumbled out of the office, in floods of tears. Harriet stared at me.

“You feel sorry for her, don’t you? Typical bloody soppy woman, no wonder we get trodden all over! Listen…I have spent my entire career striving for equal treatment, respect, all of that, and too many women are just like you, the slightest bit of emotion and they crumble. Cows like her use that, and they destroy everything the rest of us fight for, and girls like you are too bloody soft to stop them!”

She paused, opening and shutting her mouth almost like Abigail.

“Ye gods, you really are a woman, aren’t you?”

“A couple of small areas that need adjustment, but, yes, I always have been.”

“Well, less sympathy and more ‘let’s nail that bitch’, and you still haven’t told me where the shoes came from”
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Harriet insisted on taking me for a coffee, and I called Pete up to meet us at a little café in Above Bar. I spotted him on the pavement, and trotted out to help him with his chair into the place.

“You look absolutely gorgeous, love. Those are definitely Dave shoes. The hair suits you as well, really nice”

“Keep talking and you’ll get me into bed, young man”

“I was sort of hoping that might be the case! Who is this we’re meeting?”

“Harriet Smythe. She has all the letters and stuff, but she seems to prefer the high-powered admin stuff to what we lowly lecturers slave away at”

“How did it go n there?”

I snorted. “Tell you inside”

Harriet stood to offer him her hand. “So you are the magic bullet, eh?”

“Perhaps an unfortunate metaphor, but I take it as you meant it. Just don’t follow it with a comment about going down a bomb or finding our feet”

That was a moment that truly warmed me. I looked at my Pete as my healer, my rescuer from the living hell of Odd John, a hell so deep and dark I didn’t even know I was in it. With that little flurry of jokes, I realised that perhaps it was far from being one way traffic, that I was healing him as he did me. I also knew I loved him, but that was like the sunrise, it was there each day.

Some time later I realised they were still talking, and Harriet seemed to have thawed considerably in his presence. We worked through the rather unequal meeting of minds with young Abigail, and when I mentioned my side bet with Howard, Harriet brayed with laughter. “You utter bitch! I wish I had thought of that!”

She finished her coffee, and taking my hand pulled me off to the ladies’

“Well, you can hardly use the gents’ like that, can you, and you will need to get used to it”

Where exactly did she think I had been going since Hurricane Mum turned my life inside out? Never mind.

“Laura, are you familiar with Richard Thompson’s music?”

“Is he a popular singer or some such?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought John had buggered off for good! He’s a folk singer”

“I don’t do folk…”

“Bear with me, Laura. Richard writes seriously deep lyrics, usually rather dark, and on one of his albums he wrote a song about a girl watching her friend go off out, and the tag line is ‘has he got a friend for me?’ ”

She looked straight at me then. “Well, has he?”

I realised she was deadly serious. There was a vulnerability there, behind the sharp suit and the perfect make up, hidden by the hard professional manner, and I saw the need within her. I was finding out that there are currents in people’s lives that don’t always show on the surface, and to have them confide in me was confirming my shiny new humanity.

“Yes, I am at least half serious. Watching you together almost hurts, he loves you so much and so obviously. For somebody with your…anatomy, you are so wholly female you make me realise what I have squandered over the years. So, when I see how totally John, that peculiar and profoundly irritating tit, has softly and silently vanished away, I seek my own boojum”

I did what women do, and hugged her, and we talked some more, and I resolved to speak quietly to Pete that night in bed.

A thought that had me trembling with joy. I kept it from Harriet.

We tottered back to the table, laughing, and Pete just looked puzzled.

“Girl talk, love. Let’s get back, we’ll be a little early, might have time to go down to the front for a wander”

We were indeed early, and there was a Landrover Discovery parked in the driveway.

“That’s Dad’s….”

I had a sudden suspicion, and with Pete on his crutches, I opened the front door of the house as silently as I could manage. I was right, and rather surprised.

My mother makes a LOT of noise when having sex.

CHAPTER 7
As soon as the indecent requests and instructions from upstairs had died down, I busied myself noisily in the kitchen, calling loudly out to Pete to ask if he wanted a cup of tea.

My subtle hint to the loving couple that the house was now occupied fell a bit flat when Pete shouted up the stairs “Do you want a cuppa, Dad?”

The two appeared looking a little sheepish, in the case of Dad Pete, and rather smug in the case of my mother. She looked at me, and with the usual facial twitch said

“Darling, we have the same taste in shoes, and Pete was always happy to follow instructions”

That got me chortling, while both men looked puzzled. My Pete was the first to twig, and then had to explain it to his father, and suddenly my mother was crying, and I was holding her as tears ruined my blouse. Harriet’s question about Pete having a friend came to mind, and I realised that he did, and it was his father. I resolved to look up the song in question.

“Mum, we have all wasted so many years, can I begrudge you doing some catching up? We have lots to tell you about today, and then I need to run that question past both boys, and I must have a little chat with my Pete”

I went through the events once more, with laughter at the appropriate places and frowns at others, and my mother got very pushy about a defamation suit against the girl. I pointed out that she was likely to have her studies terminated, which was something that would follow her around for life, and that I myself just wished to close the chapter.

“Pete, Mr Hall, sod it, Peters both, I have something I wish to ask. I will be going this week to swear a deed poll at mother’s solicitors, and I will thereafter be Laura Evans for all legal purposes.

“Would either of you object if I took Elspeth as a middle name?”

Nem con, and it was Dad Pete’s turn to cry.

We did indeed have time for a wander along the front, and Dad Pete drove us out towards Stokes Bay for some fresh winds and a sight of the many yachts that use that part of the Solent. I was touched by the gentle way he lifted his son into his Discovery, and how he seemed proud to be pushing him with my mother on his arm. This is my son, and my woman and I love them both.

We stopped at the café by the nature reserve for more tea, and I got a few moments alone with my Pete.

“Love, what did you think of Harriet?”

“Out of ten, I’d give her one OUCH”

“No, Pete, as a person, not whether you think her legs are better than mine”

“How could that possibly be?” (he was clearly learning) “Seriously, she seemed nice, if a bit intense. A bit like you used to be, in a small way. Why do you ask?”

“How are you off for single friends?”

“Oh no, you’re the English prof, you must’ve read ‘Emma’!”

“Of course, but I was thinking more of simply letting the dog see the rabbit than pushing people at each other. That never works. It was also for me”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you have met my friends, my colleagues, and John being as he was he didn’t make many of the former. I just think that it is time I started meeting some of yours”

Pete looked a little apprehensive at that point, and I realised that one thing his friends would bring with them was memory. Could he cope? Then, of course, I realised that it was ‘could we cope’. I reached across to him.

“You are not alone now, you know. I understand what you are afraid of, but I am going nowhere without you.”

“Yes, I know you say that, but what have I got to offer you?”

“Are you taking the piss, Hall? I wouldn’t even have a life if it wasn’t for you! I thought we’d got that clear! What the hell has got into you?”

“Shit, love, can’t you see? Can’t you tell? What do you think I see when I look at you? No, shut up for once, since you came back you talk far too much, and that’s just like a bloody woman, ’cosi fan tutte’, yeah? Look, I love you, so much it hurts. Do you understand that?”

I went to speak, and he put his hand over my mouth.

“Just answer. No speech, no lecture, answer the question”

“Yes I understand”

“Do I see you as a woman?”

I thought on that one, and all my inner arguments came back to me. “Yes, I think so. I am a woman, and I hope, I trust you see that”

“Oh, love, I do, I do. Now, do I want you in my bed?”

“I hope so. I hoped you would last night”

“That should be an easy one for you to answer, but yes, I did, I sleep better by far when you are there to catch my nightmares for me. But there is more to sharing a bed than a cuddle and a good night’s sleep. Just think how your mum was screaming earlier.”

“Pete, I know, but….”

I had to take a number of breaths to sort my thoughts and next words. “Pete, I want you to make love to me,I want you to be my man, for your woman, I want what my mother has, but I can’t just now. I haven’t got the bits, and I have thought about the alternatives, but, that, after, well”

I couldn’t help it. I blame the hormones, the same ones that make my chest itchy; I started into tears.

“I want you, Pete, but my body is still wrong”

He was still holding me. “I want you love, but my body just won’t”

I pulled away slightly, just so I could see him. “The…injuries?”

“No, nothing there or then. More of an impotence. Before,I would look at a girl, like that one at Bovington, and it would be phwooar, look at the legs, tits, whatever, and Soldier Blue would be up for it without a second thought. Now, you come in dressed like that, or you slip into bed with me, and nothing. Not a stir.

“What can I offer you if I am not a man?”

I kissed him, hard, and repeated my earlier words. “Listen, stupid. No you, no Laura. You think I expect more? We will do as my mother says, find our own way. You do NOT get away from me without a fight, I intend to be like bloody Colditz with you. It has taken me all these years to get you back, to fucking get myself back, you are NOT running off, got me? You are MINE, Peter Hall, you bloody well proposed to me!”

I paused, whether for breath or dramatic effect, I am not sure, then added “Do you think you could bring yourself to do it properly? We have some witnesses….”

Pete suddenly started laughing. “I suppose you’ll want me to go down on one knee!”

At that joke, I realised I had broken the bleak mood that had taken him, but I made a sudden and thrilling decision for that evening. Impotent? Not if I could help it. On the other hand, I wanted to push the point about the “proposal”

The other loving couple were returning. I waited till they were back at our table, and looked at my mum, who had clearly spotted the puffy eyes. I raised an eyebrow of my own, and in a moment of simple telepathy she simply nodded. Pete sighed, and turned to his dad.

“Can you help me out of my chair please, Dad?”

As Dad Pete lifted him up, he whispered in his ear. The older man smiled, and kissed his son on the cheek. With amazing gentleness and care, he knelt with him till my Pete was balanced on his intact knee.

“Laura Elspeth Evans, will you marry me?”

I screwed everything down tight. “I suppose I could check my calendar….oh, my love, of course I will!”

Dad Pete hugged his son, then looked at Mum.

“I’m on my knees as well, Lucy. I ran away, and left you in pain. We wasted a lot of years because I was stupid and a coward. Can I now make it up to you? Will you….?”

I hadn’t realised that we had gathered an audience with our gymnastics, but when my mother said yes the round of applause let me know.

CHAPTER 8
I laughed happily as Elder placed Younger back in his chair. “You have just made my life easier, you know, I can call you ‘Dad’ now so tiny brain here doesn’t get confused!”

There was a lot of work left to do. Abigail was certain to have passed the word about the ‘freak’, so I would be attending work from now on as Laura. That brought on another long chain of thoughts, where I tried to work out if there was actually anywhere I would need to dress up as a man, and I could think of none. Jane, perhaps…no. It would clear the decks, and that was all I still needed from her.

My wardrobe was large enough, a last relic of masculinity insisted, to see me through work for a while, but I would definitely be dressing down a bit from the Abigail Offensive. Serious Academe required more of a librarian than a laser-sharp management bitch, and I would be able to relax a little. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my sharp suits, and I think I have dropped a few hints about my taste in shoes, but I wanted no distractions for the students.

That got me giggling properly. Dr Evans turns up in a dress and the students aren’t distracted. Yes, of course.

I had a lot to do, indeed. Mary would need a visit, the solicitors, Jane, registering interest at an estate agent for our flat, the banking details…

“Pete–no, not you, my Pete, what do you want to do about the Legion?”

“Well, I suppose that is up to your mother, love”

She smiled. “If you have to ask, she was right to call you ‘tiny brain’. Of course you can stay, as long as you need until your own place is ready. Your father is here till Sunday, so there will be plenty of brute labour available from the lower orders.”

Dad snorted.

Dad. Not my father, but someone who seemed to care for me. Perhaps as a response to his son’s feelings for me, but for whatever reason there was a clear affection growing in his voice when he spoke to me.

“OK ladies, here is a plan. We get as many of these visits out of the way tomorrow as we can. Tonight, we go out to dinner somewhere nice, and perhaps invite a couple or six friends out, so we can toast today’s engagements.

“Which reminds me, son. We both have jewellery to buy. How are you off for funds?”

“Not too bad, Dad, and I will be saving on the Legion rent. Which reminds ME…Mrs Evans, I need to start contributing if I am to live with you. I don’t like to freeload.”

She laughed out loud at that. “You have already paid, Peter, you gave me my daughter. All I will ask is that you tidy up, and perhaps help with the food bills. We seem to have got through a phenomenal quantity of wine since your return”

“Food bills” I murmured…”That reminds me, what did Martin mean about ‘crafty butchers’?”

Dad snorted again, and kept doing so until he could keep in the laughter no longer. Pete was blushing slightly. “Crafty butchers, er, take their meat in at the back door….”

“Oh. Ah. But you set him straight, if you excuse the pun.”

“Yes, remember what he said? ‘Definitely a woman’ ”

Why is being human so complicated, and why do they have to have so many bloody in-jokes? We, or rather Dad, got Pete into the Discovery and we set off by way of the supermarket yet again. Mother had decided that if we were to invite guests to dine with us, we would have to have the wherewithal to have them back for cheese, biscuits, coffee, all that “Good Housekeeping” stuff she does so naturally. As I was ringing the usual suspects, plus Harriet, Sam, and Howard, and Pete a few friends via HMS Haslar, the local naval hospital, my mother started to laugh.

“I have just realised something, my dears. You have deprived me of a true maternal tradition. Peter has known you so long, how can I show him embarrassing pictures of you in your childhood? He’s probably in half of them himself!”

That set us all off. The joke wasn’t that amusing, but the mood was so good, the atmosphere buzzing with the sheer joy of four people, that anything would have been funny. We cleared the shopping needs, and as Mum set out the various plates and bowls for later, Dad made reservations at “Le Chat en Oeuf” for our party. I took a bath before we went out, and made bloody sure that I had disposed of any stray hair. I looked forward to the end of my zapping sessions.

Mum laid out my clothing for me, as she said that we would match as much as we could, and detected just a little of that common mother-daughter ploy of ‘sister, not mother’ She had dug deep into her knicker drawer, and I found myself offered a black basque, stockings, very abbreviated knickers, and an absolutely adorable LBD.

As I stood in my towels admiring the outfit, she came in and hugged me, damp from her own shower. “I overheard part of your conversation today, my dear. Please, just see if these can help. Have no wish to know of your intimacies, but if he can see you in that underwear and NOT respond, we will have to work very much harder than I would imagine possible.

“I have my own laid out for this evening…..”

She was blushing. My mother was blushing! “He, er, likes the look, and it seems to work rather well for both of us…”

I hugged her, and she whispered the rest into my ear. ”You will be feminine tonight, my dear, feminine and as beautiful outside as you are inside. Let Pete’s little problem have both barrels!”
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We had quite a party at the restaurant. The four of us were joined by Dave and Sharon, Howard, his wife, Sam, his partner John (confusing….not at all!), Martin and his wife Anna, plus Harriet.

Pete had called on the staff nurse who had looked after him on his return to Gosport, a ridiculously cheerful ‘Badian called Tyler, as well as his physiotherapist, Ollie. And, I must admit it, I thought “sod professionalism”, and Mary could make it. I was losing count, but I made it 16. The owner of the restaurant must have blessed his good fortune, being so full on a weekday evening, and he returned the favour by giving us some free bubbly for toasts after the meal. I don’t think it was quality stuff, but what do I know about wine?

And do you know what? I couldn’t have given a toss. It could have been tap water, it mattered nothing. This was my night, and my mother’s, and our two men’s. The owner, who spoke to everyone in French or broken English, but admitted to me that he was Dutch, had pushed and shunted tables until we had a hollow square for our party, and from somewhere balloons had been found. Harriet ended up lodged between Ollie and Tyler (remember Emma, Laura!), Pete quietly advised Martin about his sense of humour around Howard and John, Dave passed a number of comments about me and Mum while Sharon slapped him, and Mary just sat and smiled.

I really felt for her. Unlike her hypnotist, she had been compelled to sit through all of the shit that passed for my life, and I owed her a huge debt for her strength in seeing it and me through to life and sanity. How did, how could, someone like her unwind?

I made several visits to the ladies’. I was learning quite quickly that we don’t have weak bladders; we just have a deep need for gossip. Harriet in particular was cock a hoop.

“Two, you sod, two! They’ve each slipped me their bloody number, what the hell do I do?”

“A threesome?”

Sharon chipped in, “Bugger me girl, you take my Dave home and wear him out so I can sleep, and I will suffer the horrors of those two in your place, ‘cause I am a selfless cow! Or is that ‘selfish’?”

Mary murmured in a cod German accent, “Tell me about your childhood” and we were off into giggle land.

Oh, I could write a book on that evening, it was a real eye opener. I had learnt, or recovered, so much, thanks to Mum, and Pete, and Mary, but was still learning, and that night I saw a group largely made up of strangers united by a mutual bond, who came together in a happy social unity, and it came home hard to me how much I had lost, how many years I had wasted, and how much I really hated my fucking father.

Pete caught my mood, as always, and turned it around, which is one reason I love him, and Dave stood up to play toast master.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and my wife. I wasn’t doing anything tonight, so this little party filled a bit of a loose end for me. Seriously, I have had a friend for a number of years, but I don’t think he knew he had me. He was always in his own world, obnoxious as all hell, but despite the fact that I am as sensitive, according to my wife, as a sloth on valium, I could always tell there was more to him than was obvious.

“There was never any harm to John, never any malice, but he could never connect unless on ground he knew. To my credit, he adds modestly, I stuck by him till this young chap came back into her life and it all went silly, in the nicest possible way.

“I found out why my odd mate was odd, then I found out she was lovely, and now we are here to see a circle completed with four long-split halves coming together again after far too long. If this world were perfect, they would never have been apart in the first place. Then again, if that were so, we would not have had such a joyous night, nor the chance to eat so much at someone else’s expense, which is never a bad thing.

“I could talk all night, but my wife would kill me, so, please, my friends, raise a glass to love divided, love revived, Lucy, Laura, and two Peters.

“The happy couples!”

Tears are a natural thing when your heart is bursting.
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Some hours later the house was empty again, crumbs and plates the only sign of the crowd of friends and locusts who had swept through. Dad had literally carried Mum up the stairs to their–wonderful thought–bedroom, and I had helped Pete into our–even better thought---bed.

I was still in the LBD, and my best ravage-me-mercilessly shoes, and I stood by the bed, unzipped and let drop. Pete gasped, “Fuck me, Laura”

You know, I didn’t, but Mum had been right yet again, and what we did do was very, very satisfactory. I must put a box of tissues by the bed.

CHAPTER 9
I woke up yet again with the dead weight of an arm across me, and dribble down my neck, which, of course, is why I decided I needed the tissues.

I slipped out, still wearing the bloody stockings and stuff, and made my way to Pete’s shower, where I spent a while getting myself human again.

I remember many years ago reading a piece about underwear, how women look good in theirs, and men don’t. Men don’t in male underwear, that is, as the alternative would just be silly. When women disrobe, though, the lingerie that looks so good to the men leaves a lot of red lines and indentations that look pretty horrible, especially with nasty elasticated things like hold-up stockings. There was I stripped of my trapping gear, and covered in smeared make-up, with red lines from my various bits of said kit.

I was also stripped of my breasts, which had become so nearly real a part of me since Mum had bought them. As I soaped myself, I could feel the puffiness building up around my nipples, and they themselves were rather nicely sensitive, as Pete and I had discovered that night. I dreamily wondered how big I would get...

That was a thought, the disappearance of Pete’s impotence. I would have to talk to Mary about that, but I had a theory of sorts. That night, Pete had been rather well refreshed. Not too refreshed to respond nicely, though; my own little attribute hardened at the memory.

That was so odd, feeling as a woman, responding by reflex as a male, but STILL feeling feminine. Anyway…Pete had been relaxed, and I had gone all out on the seduction front. He was only a man, after all, and certain things, certain well-worn strategies, will almost always take charge of a mere male. As Sharon had remarked, I do have rather nice legs (no false modesty there) and for almost any man, stockings, suspenders and heels on a decent pair of pins go straight to the little brain. A little personal attention in just the right way…..mmmmmmmmmm. Fond smile at the memory.

What I was considering, though, was Pete’s mental state. He had a bad case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as any idiot could see, and that first time I slept with him I was introduced to Lefty, the one in his nightmares. That seemed to be the crux of his problems, and I had surreptitiously been researching a subject called ‘survivor guilt’ that seemed to fit his case. And there was a joke; a girl who wasn’t even a girl, who had been in fugue for two decades, looking to deal with the mental illness of another.

Two words foregrounded themselves in my mind (John still paid little visits when I went into analytical mode), and they were ‘illness’ and ‘disorder’

Illnesses can be healed. Disorder can be put straight. My beloved man would be fixed as well as I could manage.

Standing naked under a shower, newly feminine hairstyle washed flat under the spray, ‘breasts’ sitting in a pile of underwear and penis dangling semi-hard as I stroked my lovely nipples, I had a real moment of revelation. I was Pete’s Christmas present, and once we got these wrappings off and he saw the real contents….oh gods, doubts washed away with the soap, and I was all female despite those extras, and I loved him completely and without reservation.

Pete was stirring when I reentered, with the obligatory cuppa, and after I had put it down, and it couldn’t spill, he hauled me close and proceeded to kiss me very, very hard and deeply.

“Did we really do all that last night?”

“Oh, yes!” I purred. “We need to get you tipsy more often”

“No, we need to see how it goes when I am sober, now that we know it can go.”

“Mr Hall, are you offering me lots of sex?”

“No, I am offering you as much lovemaking as I can manage. There’s a difference”

Can’t argue with that, and as at least part of me is sane there is no way on Earth I would! After a snuggle while we drank our tea, I helped my grubby soldier off for his shower while I started breakfast. My mother came down with hair all over the place, and I recognised the look on her face. I grinned.

“Snap!”

She smiled dreamily. “Oh yes indeed…..”

Women and tears. I hugged her, and asked a serious question.

“What can we possibly have done to deserve such a pair of diamonds?”

Mum looked at me sadly. “Survived your father”
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It was a busy, busy day. Had to take in a briefcase full of documents to the bank, including the stuff from the solicitors who were our second port of call, the first being a photo booth. Along with the deed poll we obtained a letter and signature for the third stop, the Post Office, where my driving licence amendment was set in train.

“Mother, I don’t drive”

“You have a licence, my darling, and Pete has a car that you might need to drive f he refreshes himself. He is a man, Laura”

The Bank.

“Most irregular…”

“Come along, my dear, after this nice man closes our accounts for transfer to…”

“…but I do believe there will be no problem”

His gaze was rather unpleasantly tracing my body. If he was undressing me with his mind’s eye, what was he seeing? What did he want to see, considering that he knew my previous details? Ugh.

We ran through as many errands as we could think of, including dropping in to see Howard. He had already arranged a change in my University documents, and all he needed was a copy of the deed poll and a photograph for my ID.

“Morning Laura, Lucy!” with a kiss to each of us.

“No hangover, Howard?”

“Just a little, but made far worse by Harriet’s infernal jollity. I don’t know what has got into her”

He grinned. As he opened his mouth, Mother simply said “No. No jokes about getting into her, OK?”

Those were the nice bits. An early tea on a terrace at the Slug and Lettuce on Gun Wharf Quay was also nice. In between was horrible; a session of beard destruction. I will draw a veil over that one.

And so it went, from good to better. The weekend was a rather pleasant time, a family time, where nothing particular gets done and nothing is needed apart from being together, but it was spoilt a little by Dad’s departure for York on the Sunday. Mum cried, of course, as did I, but we knew that it was a temporary thing. Our decisions were made, and our course set.

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Monday morning and back to work. For a number of reasons, such as feeling sneaky, went in by bike for the first time in ages, and could feel the drop in fitness. I needed to get out more, and so did Pete, and I idly wondered if he fancied doing some wheelchair competition stuff. How fast could a chair go? Would it be too slow for me to ride next to? I remembered a Belgian who had passed me near the French border once, in a skinsuit and cleat, his leg pumping away as he powered his carbon roadbike along. What was left of his right leg sat under a sort of stirrup arrangement, and he was truly flying. Perhaps….

I met Pete with the garment case outside my office, where I changed into my librarian costume. Tan tights once more, a floral mid-calf dress with plenty of flare to the skirt and a reasonably high neckline, with a royal blue cardigan over the top. Face done, hair fluffed, feet slipped into black shoes with a modest heel, and I was ready. This was my moment, when I would emerge from the shelter of family and friends and meet my public. I suddenly realised that having my lecture notes might be useful: the American versus the French concept of Film Noir, with schematic analysis, a fascinating subject.

No, really, it is! That’s not John speaking; anyone with a heart must see how the intertextuality and homage elements tie into so many other fields…you are not listening.

I left time for the lecture theatre to fill before making my entry. I could be sure that Miss Udders would have made sure that my gender issues had been spread as widely as possible, so this was going to be brutal.

I stepped in and mounted the podium, eyes downcast as I laid out my notes. When I looked up, the theatre was packed. All come to see the freak, I supposed. Ah well…better get it moving.

“Good morning, all. Before we proceed to address the origins of Film Noir, I realise there will be questions bubbling away. I do not want this lecture to degenerate into a whispering session, so we will have a few minutes to clear the air. Any questions?”

A forest of arms flew up, and I started the process of point, listen answer.

“What do we call you now?”

“Dr Evans”

“Are you going to have it all cut off and stuff?”

“Yes”

“Are you gay?”

“No, and neither is my fianc锝

“Did you proposition Abi the tits?”

“Not at all. I told you, I am not gay”

That one caused a real murmuring.

“Dr Evans, Abi said you looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. You don’t”

“Thank you. One last question before we start. You, with the deathwish, in the Pompey shirt”

“What are you doing tonight, darling?”

“Going home to my fiancé, but thanks for the offer!”

That one broke the mood, and after the laughter had died down we made a start, and as it really is a wonderful subject it all went very well.

I was flying solo at last, and it was a delight.

CHAPTER 10
The staff rooms were my next hurdle, but that was helped along by the presence of Dave, who gave me a kiss on the cheek when I arrived.

“How did it go?”

“Need tea…..”

He did the honours, and Harriet joined us. “You OK?”

“Never better, except when….but you don’t want to hear about that stuff, do you”

Harriet just grinned. “Oh yes I do, my girl! But look at poor Dave, he’s gone pink!”

When someone is on the edge, or in the actual process, of blushing, the mere mention of the word ‘pink’ can set them off. He was crimson.

“Bloody women”

Harriet frowned. “Ladies, David, ladies. In case you hadn’t spotted that fact, Laura here is particularly ladylike”

She turned to me. “You are, you know, always so elegant. I know this has been said a stupid number of times to you, but you act so naturally it is clear what you are. I just wonder where John went.”

“John never really existed, Harriet. I have been doing a lot of reading on this, and there were two things that came up. One was false memory syndrome, but that is certainly not the case here. With all the other people who witnessed what happened when was little, the miracle is that I was able to function at all. No, the closest I can come to an explanation is something called fugue state. I used that word to explain my little absences, but true fugue is something different. It is as if you have all of your memories replaced; people have been known to simply go away, to be found ages later living an entirely different life, different name, history, everything.

“In my case it wasn’t quite that, but an entirely different personality was adopted. When I say John wasn’t human..”

“John was you, Laura”

“No, Harriet, he wasn’t. John was a shield built around me to keep me from dying. That is why he could never deal with people, because he wasn’t a person, he was the psychotic equivalent of a small child putting their fingers in their ears and going lalalalala I can’t hear you”

“Psychotic? A bit strong…”

“Not at all, I was insane. With good reason, after what my father…oh, can you please forget I said that”

Harriet had been the only one to catch that, as Dave had drifted away to some sporting discussion. Harriet just nodded. “Your father, my uncle. What a world we share. My problems only stopped when he fucked off to New Zealand. I was 12 then, and it was my best birthday ever, because I was getting old enough to understand what ‘our little secret’ really meant. I am one of the lucky ones, I suppose, I have managed to come to terms with it. I can still enjoy sex, just wish I could get some more”

“What about those two mates of my Pete?”

“Both test driven already, my darling!”

She licked her lips, the strumpet. “Not sure where they might lead, but I will see what happens and take t as it comes, one day at a time, with no presumptions, eyes wide open, and I’m running out of clichés!”

“Legs wide open, it sounds like!”

“Ooooh mmmmmm yes indeed!”

Her face fell at that point. “The truth is, I haven’t actually had the courage to ring either of them. I am great at banter, I just fold when intimacy comes along.”

“You seem to be doing all right with me”

“Yeah, but you are a woman, I can do that. Men scare me”

Thank you so much, Harriet, that was so unconsciously lovely. “What if we are in a group, so you have me and, say, Sharon as back up? Might that work?”

“It can’t hurt to try, Laura, and as I said to you, I have to do something before it fucking heals up”

This was a girl using a lot of banter to cover some very deep pain. If it worked…”So, which one, or shall we toss up for whom you get to toss off?”

In a very small voice, ”I rather liked Ollie, the physio guy.”

“OK, we shall see what we can do. Remember that word, H, I wouldn’t be here without support, so you have mine. Now shush, Dave’s coming back.”

The rest of the day went much as the morning had started. Questions, banter, laughter, and then down to the business of teaching young folk. Pete collected my garment bag at the end of proceedings, and by the time I had put the miles in he was waiting at home for me with a cuppa. Mum had a light meal for us that night, salad and cold meats, and I talked them through Harriet’s problem. Mum looked grim.

“You know, my dear, it would be so, so easy to hate men as a whole, were it not that we have such fine examples close to us. Darling, don’t scratch your breasts at the table, it isn’t ladylike”

“Sorry, Mum, it’s just that they are getting rather sensitive”

Pete smiled. “So I had noticed, my love”

“Oh shut up, the pair of you. Pete, did you get any feedback from Ollie?”

“Absolutely nothing at all. Unless you count the large number of times he has asked me when she will next be out with us”

“Mother, perhaps you can revise your opinion of men downwards. So Ollie is interested, then?”

“Very much, but he thought she’d be a bit stand-offish. You know, University professor and MOD torturer. Laura, please don’t kill me, for he clearly has no taste, but he said he thought she had better legs”

How very dare he! That brought on the giggles. You know, whenever Pete grins, the scars stand out on his face, and remind me again of how oddly luck works. Even the loss of his leg had brought good. Without his wound, he would never have met John, and John would probably have still been here. If he had that courage…

“Peter, my love, there is a loose end to us that I must tidy before we start sorting out our friends. We will arrange a meal once again, and get a few people along, and I know exactly the excuse. Have you bought the jewellery yet?"

He fumbled in his pocket, and blushed. “Er, yes”

“Well, you can give it to me when we have our little soiree, and that will give Harriet a reason to turn up and some close support. Now, I need you to drive me somewhere. I won’t change, this will do.”

It wasn’t that far. I pushed him up to the door and rang the bell, waiting patiently by his chair for it to open.

“Yes, can I help you?”

Jane looked well, and more relaxed than I had EVER seen her before, and i felt real guilt at how I had spoilt her life.

“Hello, Jane”

“Do I know…fucking hell, John?”

“Can we come in? Pete has his crutches if we need them”

“In, in, someone might see you like that”

As we entered, I said “People do see me like this, it is who I am”

We got Pete sat down, and Jane seemed in shock for a second, then it clicked.

“There was no other woman, was there, John?”

“It’s Laura, and this is my fiancé, Pete Hall. Pete, Jane, my wife”

“Fuck me backwards, John, Laura, what is this?”

“Oh, Jane, it’s a very long story, and I need some promises of confidentiality from you. Can you do that?”

“Yes, J-Laura. Tea first, I think. “

Cup in hand, then, I started the story, leaving out, naturally, my mother’s starring role, but this time I made it clear who had attacked me. It is a testament of how unpleasant my story truly is by the fact that everyone who has ever heard it has been left in tears, and Jane was no exception. She was in a real state, and I moved across to hold her.

“No wonder I could never get through to you. If I had only known, I would have stuck with you”

“Darling Jane, if you had I would never have recovered. No push, no Mum, possibly no Pete. I owe you my life”

That set her off again. I needed to change the subject.

“How is it going with Mark?”

“Very well, love. I think he is planning to ask the question soon”

“Pete already has, and I have to ask: would you come to our wedding?”

“Oh god, woman, I can see bits of John in you, just little tics and mannerisms, but you are just so much more REAL than he ever was. Of course I will come. I loved John enough to marry him, Perhaps I can make that up with you? What about Mark?”

“He will be welcome. Please, darling, be very careful what you tell him. People can still be hurt”

“Worry not. Just a thought…what have you done about that cunt’s grave?”

Ouch. She really had cared for John. Pete just smiled. “There were no flowers, there, but Laura watered it rather well”

CHAPTER 11
That was a hard job, but once again my soldier was there, solid as a rock.

Jane had revealed deeper emotions than I had suspected, but I knew I was right. No separation would have meant me staying in hell. John had, sort of, cared for Jane, and if I could recover more than just ‘being civilised’ it would be wonderful. Would smoky Mark be as positive? I doubted it, but time would be the only way to find out.

Anyway, more pressing matters. I started the long round of phone calls for my ‘Mission Emma Possible’ as I was mentally calling it. Matchmaking for friends, not often a good idea, but we did at least have the admission from both targets that they were rather interested. There was a quiz night at the Anchor and Hope near Mum’s on the Saturday, and we set aside the spare bedroom for Harriet.

You know, the spare bedroom, not the guest bedroom. The guest bedroom was my room, the one I used before I ended up downstairs having happy nights with Pete,

Harriet was bloody early. .Utter panic was the only way to describe her nerves, and that was one reason we had settled on the quiz. She was so ferociously competitive that once we began, she would dive so deep into the contest that she would forget there was a man watching what he could see of her legs. Hopefully.

Ollie was going to meet us there, along with Dave (“Mmmmm! Beer!”) and Sharon. It turned out to be a typical affair, with preprinted sheets for our answers and a taped music round half way through the evening. That was the one I was dreading, as my involvement with popular music was non-existent.

We found a table, and then had to choose a team name. It was Pete who came up with it–the Raspberries. I should explain that in English rhyming slang there is the phrase “raspberry ripple”, and it was another mark of how far my man had come since the days of shuddering nightmare that he could make a joke of it. Then again, we had three raspberries in our team.

“Shit, Laura, he’s not fucking coming ,is he?” muttered Harriet, just as the man in question entered the pub.

“Will you take a deep breath and just be yourself?”

“But I’m shitting myself!”

“Put it this way, which of us is sitting here with plastic chicken fillets in their bra?”

Harriet blushed. “Er, both of us, actually, I thought I’d boost my chances a little”

I had to snort at that. “H, not only is he a leg man, but once you get him talking he’ll be lost in your eyes. Lose the plastic while you still can”

We gave the new arrival a quick wave, and scooted off to the ladies with my handbag, found an empty cubicle, and quickly popped out Harriet’s boosters.

“Oh, that’s better! I didn’t have a bigger bra, so I’ve been a bit squashed in there”

I looked at her breasts, covered only by her bra, and had a sudden wave of pure jealousy, swiftly followed by tears. I wasn’t real, I never would be, and as itchy and puffy as my nipples got, could I ever grow something as natural in their beauty as hers? She realised very quickly what the problem was, and of course she held me till I could get my control back.

“We’ve both been through the mill, girl, but I wouldn’t swap mine for yours for anything. You have more balls, more courage than I could ever have. I never did anything but wait for him to fuck off or die; you are taking your life back. Don’t ever see yourself as fake, or second rate. Now, come on ,clean up, and let’s go and shaft these plebs.

Ollie was standing, coat still on, when we returned. Pete whispered that he had assumed Harriet was doing a runner. How we make assumptions; they make perfect sense at the time, and prove to be so wrong.

Of course, we shuffled seats so that Ollie and Harriet were pushed together. Dave appeared, having left Sharon to get the drinks, and made sure we had ours. The seats were taken, the quiz called to order, our team name giggled at, and we were off.

The first round was on Books and Writers. Oh dear, it felt like cheating, but poor Sharon and Ollie were right out of it. Then Sport, for which I felt useless till they asked one about cycling, in two parts: to which opponent, and at which climb, did Armstrong give ‘The Look’?

“Ullrich, Alpe d’Huez”

Pete nodded. “Yeah, she’s dead right.”

I had to explain later, but it was a great moment in cycling.

The next round was geography, in which Pete, Ollie and Sharon did well, then TV, which seemed primarily to be about soap operas, so I was the spare wheel in that one.
Harriet, however, with help from Sharon, was cruising it. She caught my stare.

“What? What else do you think I have to do in the evenings?”

Ollie stuttered a bit. ”I tend to be at a loose end as well, and even cooking’s boring for one”

I kicked her, then again, and finally she muttered something about not being a cook, and Ollie said how much he enjoyed it, and finally, finally she suggested he show her. That became a visit to his place in three days’ time.

Pete squeezed my leg under the table. Job hopefully done.

And then it was music, and it was all pop, and then both Harriet and I jerked up and started to giggle as one of the tracks we had to guess came on, with the lines “Your boyfriend’s good looking, he’s got it all there…”

In unison, we whispered to Dave the chosen scribe, “Richard Thompson, has he got a friend for me?”

What with Sharon’s odd knowledge of shouty men who can’t sing, and Ollie’s deep insight into the music of dwarf Australians (“II like her voice, it’s got nothing to do with her bum”) we did surprisingly well.

Science next, and over to my tame engineer in the wheelchair, and a final flourish with a General Knowledge round, which turned out to be quite hard. Harriet kept leaning over Ollie a lot to check what Dave had written, and for some reason she seemed to need to steady herself, at one point with her hand on his thigh. For his part he kept whispering to her, which apparently needed his hand on her shoulder to turn up the volume, or something.

I had another poignant moment on realising that John would not only have missed every one of the little tells, but would have had no interest. I reached down to squeeze Pete’s hand.

“What’s that for, love?”

“Because I can”

The marks were counted, and we had, indeed, won, and as it was a bottle of wine we decided that it could best be consumed together with its friends back at Mother’s. By this time, Ollie and Harriet were walking hand in hand. Dave was pushing Pete as Sharon and I walked behind, and she began the old refrain.

“You were born to this, Lor, weren’t you? I understand John now, I just wish I could have known you when we were both girls. Just think of the stirring we could have done! The way you have prodded those two along, you are clearly as devious as me”

She stumbled to correct herself. “I know we weren’t young girls together, Lor, but you know what I meant”

I smiled, and linked arms, and we swung into that step-lock that women in heels do when they are cuddling up for a proper gossip. “I do know what you mean, Sharon, so let’s not waste any time fretting over it. I am back, I am here, I am in love with and loved by a wonderful man, I have friends who stuck with me even though I was so lost, what more could I ask for?”

“World peace and a cure for all diseases?”

She can never stay serious for long.

Mum was still up, largely due to the fact that I had phoned ahead and asked her to get some chilled white out ready for the house invasion. Once in I took everyone out to the garden for a bit of trivia. Jupiter was high, and I had a pair of binoculars that let one see four of the moons, the same ones that nearly got Galileo burnt. I handed them around my friends, one by one, saving Ollie till last. As he took them and tried to restore the focus I had deliberately altered, the rest of us slipped away into the house.

Harriet and her friend were a few minutes behind us, and she was smiling rather dreamily. I found Ollie a tissue to wipe his mouth.

Time ticked on, and Mum went off upstairs, followed by Sharon and Dave, who had the guest bedroom. I offered to call a taxi for Ollie.

“Or, you could stay if you want, but you’d have to share with someone. My mother’s spoken for, I‘m afraid”

Ollie was laughing now, his arm around Harriet. She frowned at him.

“Oh fuck it, I suppose I will have to take one for the team. I sleep on the left, and no snoring or farting?”

I reminded myself to take her plastic tits out of my handbag in the morning. No, she wasn’t as loud as Mum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7THIhZEP4QM

CHAPTER 12
Mum was first up on Sunday morning, and brought me and Pete a cuppa as we lay snoring and tangled up, as she described it. As I sat up, she smiled.

“My little girl is starting to get bigger, I see! Now tell me, dear, how many cups for Harriet?”

“Two, I believe, Mum”

“Good-oh. I shall do the necessary”

I looked down, and she was right. There were definitely lumpy bits appearing in my chest, which brought a smile to my own face until I remembered I was due yet another torture session to said face. I was still shaving, though not as often, and it was strange when I went from treated to untreated sections of the skin, the razor speeding up and slowing down. Odd. I cuddled into Pete’s warmth for a bit and realised I could not and did not want to lose these moments, nothing said, no passion, just comfort and love.

Breakfast was at the big table, which was the same as the small table, just pulled out. Harriet looked happy and soppy, Ollie a little haggard. I wondered if he had found it hard to keep up with her; she had a lot of lost time to make up. Just for a moment I wondered if it had been one push too far, and then he smiled at her, and I knew that, at least for now, they were fine.

Astonishingly, Dave was in the kitchen helping my mother with her usual mammoth guest breakfast, while Sharon did teas and coffees. Once we were all served and seated, my mother called for silence.

“I have spent far too many of the last few years sitting here on my own. It is dispiriting to prepare a meal when you are to be its sole consumer. Since my Laura came back, this house has rarely been empty, and that is a wonderful thing. I would like to thank you all for bringing new cheer to an old woman!”

Dave laughed. “Now, Lucy, you know how happy I am to eat free food. Keep serving breakfasts like these and I will abandon my wife and move in with you permanently!”

Harriet whispered in my ear “Already had MY breakfast…..”

“Oh, I had a nightcap…” and we were off, giggling like teenagers.

No wonder Ollie looked so tired.

People dispersed from around ten, Harriet giving Ollie a lift home. If all that had happened was the scratching of a mutual itch, that would be fine, but Harriet’s string of clichés was rather true. Watch and wait.

What to do with the day? What else does a girl do on her day off, but shop?

I can hear the sigh of boredom as I write this, but there were a number of things I needed, not least being a top-up on my medications. There seems to be little difference in Britain these days in shop hours from Monday to Sunday, and there was a huge branch of Addison’s the chemist in Gun Wharf, so off we went on the well-worn track to the foot ferry. Mum was chattering away as we pushed Pete up the ramp, and I realised that she had felt every word she had said over breakfast. It wasn’t just the return of Dad Pete, nor my own rebirth, but a whole mishmash of stuff. There was life n the old house she had rattled around in, there was life in my mother.

I know I have said this before, but it bears repeating. There is always more than one victim for crimes like that of my father. It wasn’t just me; everyone around had been soiled by him, from my mother to our men. Even that miserable bastard of a doctor had been brought lower than he might otherwise have been.

It was a day for better thoughts, though, and after a coffee on the quayside by the Tower, I handed in my prescription at Addison’s, getting a sharp and slightly puzzled look in the process, which pleased me. With a promise to Pete of “no more shoes” (I lie well) we started a trawl through some of the nicer shops. I needed some bras, as after my mother’s observation that morning I had decided to dispense with the plastic and go fully natural. I was rather hopeful about my chest, and I rather think Pete was too.

We worked our way along the racks, Pete looking rather embarrassed.

“This is odd, love, I like this stuff on you, but it just looks so weird hanging up empty”

“Well, I’ll just go and see how a few of them look filled, then!”

I grabbed my handful of bee-sting bras and clattered off to the changing rooms. Some minutes later, feeling rather pleased with the fit, and especially the look, I went out to ask Pete what he thought.

“What the fuck is that man doing in the women’s changing rooms?”

It was a scream, and I almost didn’t recognise the voice. I turned, and there they were, Abigail’s face purple above them. She was waving at the sales assistants.

“Call the fucking police, that’s a queer in a dress trying to perve in the dressing rooms!”

“Abigail, if I were a queer, as you put it, I would have no interest in perving at women, would I? And as a straight woman, just as uninterested”

“Shut the fuck up, you fucking turd burglar! Jay, this is the fucker!”

Oh dear, there was her current paramour, ratty jeans belted below his arse and a grubby T-shirt bearing the rather dreary slogan “You stare at me because I am different, I stare at you because you are all the same”

Listen, son: that is a mass-produced T-shirt….got it?

I was rather amused by this time, and almost missed her next move, which was to throw the contents of a soft-drink cup at Pete. Cow. I leapt at her, but Jay got in the way and Pete went flying out of his chair, and it all got complicated. I felt her kick me in the tit, and by god did it hurt. Pete had got hold of one of his crutches, and was whacking at the Neanderthal, but it was only light alloy and not too effective.

There was another loud scream, and as I struggled to my feet I saw my mother hanging off the back of Abi, tearing a chunk of her hair out, her expression terrifying even to me, I managed to trip Jay up as he went to punch Mum, and suddenly another body slammed into him, hands clawing at his face.

It was Jane. She was quickly followed by Mark, who delivered a few very precise blows that made the bastard collapse, as Jane and Mum, followed by me, piled onto Abi, who I sort of punched in the face. There was a loud shout of “Stop fighting!” and I turned to see two coppers, batons drawn. Mark backed away, hands up.

“I’m in the job, intervened in an assault here”

“Got any ID?”

“Warrant card?”

He went off with one of the coppers. Abi was stupid enough to keep fighting, and in a remarkably quick time was cuffed and stood up. Her friend had obviously been sprayed or struck before, so he just sat on his hands and waited.

Poor Pete was bleeding from the mouth, and his crutch was bent beyond repair. I hugged him, and he winced. “I think I’ve cracked a rib”

Three more police officers had turned up, two of them women, and shortly after some paramedics began attending to poor Pete. They decided he had better go to hospital, as he may have had a broken rib, and I rode in with him. My face and chest hurt badly. Before we left, I checked Mum, who was unhurt but breathing like a train, and then hugged Jane, carefully. She grinned, ruefully.

“Told you I loved you, girl!”

There was a sort of conference between the coppers and the other witnesses, and then the bovine and her mate were arrested. You know, she still wouldn’t shut up. Remember what I sad about students who are unable to learn?

I gave a statement to the police as they worked on Pete, taking a couple of X-rays. The WPC (“No, love, we’re just PC’s these days”) was a nice touch, showing that the police were taking me as I wanted to be seen and not as a bloke in a dress. She efficiently took my statement, and then sat for a talk about our circumstances and the likely outcome.

“Oh, the store girls are all on your side. They had thought it quite sweet the way you were teasing your fiancé, especially with him being in the chair, and they thought t particularly sweet that such a pretty girl was staying with a wounded man”

“Wounded?”

“Yes, one of them recognised him as a soldier from the Legion home. They got a good view of the two attackers, so they are all on your side. Apparently your mother was described as terrifying”

“So what happens now?”

“Let’s see, attack on person in wheelchair, hate crime on transwoman, multiple witnesses to it all, CCTV, any sense and they should plead guilty. Their brief will be advising them of that, I hope. Now, as you are a victim of a hate crime, we can offer you a family support Officer, but I rather gather you have some quite fierce support already”

Oh gods yes.

CHAPTER 13
That was effectively the end of Abi’s crusade against me.

We healed, as, for once n my life, the scars were physical, and we got to see the CCTV footage after Mark called in a favour, and watched it at home as a group, with wine and nibbles. It was hilarious at times, Pete trying to land blows with a crutch while lying on his side, and there was a groan as my mother attacked. The girls had been right, she was bloody terrifying. I asked her how she had felt when we had a few moments alone, and she simply did her thing with the eyebrow and said “I wasn’t going to stand by a second time while my darling was hurt”, and then I crumbled, and so did she, and we had to do some repairs before we rejoined our group. They were replaying the right hook I had landed on Abi, and Pete and Mark were giving it points out of ten.

This was an extremely odd situation, if looked at from outside. A male university lecturer in women’s clothing, cuddled up to a one-legged man. The lecturer’s wife is cuddled up to another man, whom the lecturer has kissed on arrival. The mother of said male lecturer is now discussing underwear sizes with him, while they all wait for the kettle to boil for coffees.

Look at it anew, from the inside. As I lay against my lover, and my mother asked how my new things were fitting, my closest girl friend was snuggled up to her rather delightful hunk. Pity he smoked…

That is the key, that the two pictures are not congruent. A little girl went to sleep and was swallowed up, only to emerge years later. John was not me. I am not John. That is how I can look at Jane and be happy for her, not jealous. I am not her ex-husband, he never existed.

I continued on with work, even getting a cheer when I turned up for my first lecture with a black eye. I was extremely glad of my new bras, as the chicken fillets would have made my bruises extremely uncomfortable, but I did have to explain to Harriet why I had apparently shrunk. She just cackled.

“That’s us both bloody equal now, then!”

In the end, Abi and Jason/Jay pleaded guilty to assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and were sentenced to 140 hours community service each.

She did not bother turning up for her own hearing, but I did, my initial sympathy for her vanished in a haze of painkillers. Fuck her. Well, no, you know what I mean. She was immediately evicted from course, college and Hall of Residence, and I made a note to look up her (sore) Facebook page later to see what the latest fun updates might be.

“First XV campaign on hold till further notice.”

And so it went. My face took more torture, my chest slowly rose like a well-made soufflé, and Jane and I began to share more confidences. I have tried to explain this, but I now had three best friends, Pete, Mum and my wife. Of course, Dave and Sharon were still there, and Harriet was coming up on the rails, but the intimacy of old relationships trumped so much.

Six months into my recovered life I confronted Mary.

“When?”

“When you have done your life test, Lor. When did you intend starting?”

“Oh, you sod, stop teasing. This is my real life!”

“You still have to wait another six months…”

“Ah, so you admit I have had six months, then!”

Gotcha.

There was one other event on the horizon, and that was Pete’s leg. We had an appointment at the Naval Hospital at Haslar some months later, after ribs had healed, and I collared Ollie to find out how I could help. I did the collaring by the simple process of ringing Harriet’s house one Sunday morning, which should tell you all you need to know.

“Laura, just be there with him. He will be frustrated as all hell when he starts, he will hurt, there will be tears, and as he hasn’t walked for so long he will be really weak on that side. That will make him even more frustrated, and I can guarantee that at one point he will try and throw the leg at me.

“Please, just be there, it’s all we need”

So, one dreary morning he drove us out to the hospital, and if I had thought my hair removal torture, this was ten times worse. Not because it was painful to either of us, though it clearly hurt Pete, but because I had to sit and watch.

The fitting had been reasonably straightforward, it was the parallel bars that tormented him. Hauled to his feet, and pushed to stagger along the short course, Ollie cajoling him.

“No, Pete, the bars are there for stability, not support. Walk, don’t hop!”

This went on for some time, Pete getting steadily more frustrated, until he sat for a rest and started to unfasten the prosthesis. Ollie nodded at me, and I stood up.

“Peter Hall, put that back on, NOW! You have come here to learn to walk, and that is what you are going to do! I am NOT getting marred to some fucking loser in a wheelchair!”

He looked at me, and I realised he was starting to cry. I walked over and enfolded him.

“Love, that is true. Not a threat. I want you standing proud by my side, but you have to do this yourself, and for yourself, and for your dad, and for me, and for Lefty and all the others.

“Look, what we will do is try again. You have the bar on your left, and you can have my hand on the right. I am never leaving you, and that means you are not doing this alone. You have me here, you have Ollie, and if I can walk in my best fuck-mes, you can walk on this. Come on, up, my love.”

We started again, his body lurching as he tried to balance, knuckles white on the left hand bar as his right crushed mine.

“A little less squeeze, love”

“Sorry, Lor”

He was sweating by now, and Ollie brought over some towels, and a paper cup of water.

“You’re getting there, mate, you’ve got weight on it now. Can you give me five more runs?”

“Run? You are fucking kidding now, Ollie!”

“You know what I mean, Pete. Laura, you OK?”

We did five more passes through the bars, and then Ollie looked at me.

“Laura, are you ready to do the Ginger Rogers bit?”

I caught his meaning, but had to explain it to Pete.

“She complained that everyone raved about Astaire, but while she did everything he did, she had to do it backwards, in heels”

That was Ollie’s suggestion. I would walk backwards, holding Pete’s hands, while he walked without any support other than me

He was sweating again, and it was like watching Karloff as the monster, but much better looking. We managed three runs before Ollie called time, Pete getting steadier with each pass, and on the last one I just let him walk into my arms for a kiss. He was sweaty, and trembling with fatigue, and I helped him over to a seat where Ollie removed the prosthesis. Pete hugged him, one armed as the other was holding my hand. He sighed.

“Sorry mate, being a bit of a wimp today.”

“Not at all, Pete, not only do I get a lot worse, but I get paid for this. Just be glad you have this woman here for you. A lot of the lads don’t have that advantage.”

So, Mary, have I started that real life test then?

CHAPTER 14
It got easier. No surprises there, but the day was getting closer when I would be able to walk properly with Pete. Do you know, I had no idea how tall he really was?

Even though we had a leg at home now, so Pete could continue to build strength and balance, he was still hunched as he walked.

Jane came through with a settlement, and it was decision time. No, not whether to move in together, that was as certain as sunrise, more where Pete was going. He had to make some decision about a career after he finished his studies, and that would influence where we lived, and at the same time I needed to be within a reasonable morning’s ride of Southampton. I also wanted to be away from my mother.

That sounds nasty, but what I mean is that I wanted to have both personal space for me and Pete, and to leave space for her and Dad. It wasn’t just the rather direct way she gave him instructions when they were being intimate, though that was rather embarrassing for all concerned, it was that all of us needed to recover some independence.. I also wanted to make visits special, not just something that happened every day.

We finally found a three-bed bungalow in Woodlands, just on the edge of the New Forest. The previous owner was being moved by their family to a home for the elderly, so there was no chain, and two months later it was ours. The only real problem was the terrain. Being in the country, I had to start wearing sensible shoes occasionally, and that really went against my nature.

My nature. A slowly blooming pre-operative transsexual rape survivor who had been living in fugue for two decades. As the students would say, “Yeah, right”

And I was blooming. I had breasts at last, not udders like Abigail (and I hoped I had hormones of taste and breeding) but definite, wobbly, sensitive breasts. I had finally finished the beard removal course, which pleased both of us as mutual stubble sort of spoils a good morning kiss, and my mother had treated me to some waxing sessions.

Treat is a word I associate with presents, gifts, not torture. Thank you, Mummy dear.

Jane was pregnant, and engaged, though I am unsure of the exact order, and when Harriet saw the ring she sighed.

“Fucking typical. I walk him past so many jewellers, you two flash your rings, and he still can’t take a hint. I’ll have to stop shagging him until he gets his arse in gear”

She paused, and grinned. “Nope, that would be punishing myself. I‘ll stop his beer instead!”

Mother was my big worry, though, and this may sound selfish. At some point, there would be a wedding, and the decision would have to be made as to where the two of them would live. Dad still had his business in York, and while it would be unfair to expect him to drop it to move down here, it would be almost as unfair for Mum to leave all she knew and move up there. I realised that although this was clearly a matter for the two of them, a family chat about it made sense.

The next time Dad was down we held a housewarming party, with as many of what I now saw as “our friends” as possible, including Howard, Martin, and some of Pete’s cohort of students. That was an interesting experience.

I am the child, a word I use quite deliberately, of my mother. She is a refined lady of impeccable taste, which I know is impeccable because I share it. All except the syrupy music, of course. Jane is a solicitor, so enough said. Howard, Harriet, they move in the same world as I do, and Pete does as I tell him, so we have a general level of refinement that means a party is more of an evening of interesting snacks and conversation over wine than a madhouse of beer and shouting men who can’t sing.

I was able to stand and watch a group of six young things who clearly felt that everything from their clothes to their choice in the bottles they brought was being weighed and found wanting. They were also in a private house with not only lecturers but their faculty heads. I am certain that some of them expected the hand to come out of the air and start writing “mene, mene, tekel upharsin”

The thing was, that while I was dressed as one would expect ,in a rather nice LBD that showed off my, ahem, cleavage, plus the usual shoes and accessories, I was in essence as out of place as they were. Of course, they all knew that, but what they didn’t realise is that I both sympathised and empathised with them, and once we had done all the necessary refined bits, I took everyone down the pub.

Or rather, sent them, in the charge of Ollie, Dave and Martin, while I took a few minutes to have that discussion with Mum and our men. I was straight to the point.

“Mum, Dad, you have probably guessed what I want to talk about. I can’t set any dates or make any plans till my little readjustment is finished, but you two can and should. I see no point in either of you losing any more time, and I am sure you agree. It is just that I would like an idea as to where you will be when we have our own nuptials”

Dad smiled. “You never do anything for just the one reason, do you?”

“ I disagree entirely! There s only one reason I am marrying your son, for example”

“Oh? And that is?”

“Because he has an absolutely enormous……(long pause while Pete and my mother slowly reddened)…amount of love for me. Sorry, Mum, but being human for such a short time has given me a sense of humour proportionate to that age”

Dad smiled. "I can see the little girl in you when you grin, you know. It’s actually quite simple. I am getting on, and I do not want to spend the rest of my life as a worker. This may surprise you, Laura, but us clever businessmen discovered, many years ago, a thing called a ‘manager’. Does that answer your question?”

My hopes were lifted, both for me and Pete. “You are coming down here?”

“Oh yes! I have two kids back, and I want to enjoy my time with them”

Dad left to wipe my lipstick off, and I began to sort out Pete’s chair. He called out to me.

“No, Laura. The Gamekeeper is only a short walk away.”

“Are you sure?”

“You, Mum and Dad will be with me, and I will have a stick. It is a short walk, so I am bloody walking it”

We got everything attached, for which task sent my mother out of the room. Dad was almost in tears as his face was all but rubbed in the state of his son.

“Sorry, Dad, but this is how it is. Look at it this way: when was the last time I walked to a pub with you? New house, new beginning, OK?”

We got him fastened, his trousers up, and I helped him to his feet. Foot. Feet. He stood up as tall as he could, and for the first time I could measure myself properly against him. About six foot one, I guessed, and as my heels brought me up to about five foot nine, it was perfect, but then I thought he was perfect anyway.

“Cinders is going to the ball” he said, “and he’s taking his mother in law!”

We slowly made our way up Woodlands Road to the pub, Pete eschewing the stick for my arm, and when we joined the rest and they saw him upright, there was a cheer, Ollie in particular looking so proud I thought he would burst.. Pete did the boxer’s salute thing, and once again I could see every scar in his face as he grinned, and I knew he was happy.

It was a very different evening to the house party, and I felt a little out of place in my posh frock, though I did get my bottom squeezed, and not by Pete. The only slight darkener of the evening was when a couple of well refreshed men started bumping into Pete at the bar, and I saw Dad have a quiet word with them, after which, for some reason, they decided to move away. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Martin put back down the empty glass he had picked up, and as I looked round the group I saw that almost everyone seemed, well, ‘poised’.

It was one of those moments where you realise that it is not that you have been perceptive in picking out a diamond that others have missed, but that everyone else has realised their quality, and you just happen to have been the lucky one who got in first.

Pete, unfortunately, was so pleased by his new freedom that he ended up rather well refreshed himself, and with a stream of jokes about hollow legs and being legless, he made the return journey supported by Ollie and Dad and trying to sing. Some of the crowd left for home from the pub, but we still had a hard core to spread blankets and sleeping bags in the living and dining rooms while H and Ollie took one spare room and Dad and Mum the other. Sharon had, as usual, stayed on soft drinks for love of Dave’s love of beer, so we kissed goodnight and I went to our bedroom to put my happy little soldier to bed.

CHAPTER 15
The next morning, I made a valiant effort to outdo my mother’s breakfasts, but even with Dad’s present of ’decent’ black pudding, I was doomed to failure.

Too many people, not enough chairs. Pete walked into the kitchen….

“Don’t know how long I can keep it on, love, a bit sore from last night.”

“Sore in the leg, or in the head?”

“Er… is there any tea in the pot?”

That answered my question. I passed him a glass of cold apple juice.

“Here, this will take the edge off it. I’ll make another pot.”

“Ugh, looks like wee”

“How old are we, Mr Hall?”

He grinned, and I can’t be irritated when he does that. “I’m a student, it’s traditional”

“That reminds me, we need to talk about your studies, or rather after. When we get time, it would be nice to have a chat about what you fancy doing.”

“I’ve already got some ideas about that, love. Do you fancy lunch out somewhere nice? Pop out to Bank?”

“Tell you what, let’s go to Fritham, the Royal Oak, if the weather’s at all reasonable. Now, get plating.”

Pete was stable enough to plate up the breakfasts, but there was still no way he could carry full ones to the table. Mum appeared, looking rather tired, but smiling happily. Even given my own rather unusual circumstances, the thought of my mother making love was an odd one. Parents don’t do that, do they?

Pete’s problem was still showing its face, and it seemed to be tied to a number of specific things. Anxiety was one, not just from things like the work with Ollie, but also from his own self-image, it seemed. Despite all our talks, despite the love I gave him, he still had a little voice telling him that one was either a whole man or no man at all. I worked on that, and it seemed he was getting better as he learnt to stand on what were now becoming his own and plural feet, but when he was in bed, and incomplete, it was always lurking just below the surface.

And then there was me. This was sometimes very painful, but I was not a woman in all senses, and that told. I was changing, I had changed, and that pleased us both. I have joked about morning stubble, but that really was a victory for us, as were my burgeoning breasts. Pete loved them, and paid particular attention to them, which was rather nice for both of us, but I was still an odd chimá¦ra, and his subconscious Straight Bloke saw that and muttered to his libido.

This was something I had been dreading confronting. Pete loved me, he said from childhood, and I loved him. The real problem seemed to be that we are both utterly heterosexual. The more I blossomed as Laura, the easier he found it, the more natural. To be rather crude, when I kissed him down there, or used my hand, he responded rather well and naturally on most occasions, but when I was kissing him, and especially when I was still using those plastic things, he would sometimes slip away from me.

That was so hard on him, and I did not intend that as any form of joke. I knew, and he said he knew, that it was all coming from his hind brain, that there was no ‘fault’ that he should accept blame for, but the savage thing was that because he loved me so much he felt even guiltier. That hurt both of us.

I did what I could. I am naturally an extremely girly girl, and I went to town on those aspects that men like, in things such as underwear, heels, nice materials. At the same time, I did my best to show him how much I loved him back with the little things that are so big, like hand holding and hugs. He was my man, and I was proud of him, proud to be seen with him, pleased beyond words that he was mine.

And the more I saw the pain they gave Pete, the more I hated that ugliness between my legs. I nagged Mary relentlessly, and she kept pushing her calendar in front of me, until one day she surprised me. But that is getting ahead of myself.

After we had cleared the house of guests, Dad drove us out to Fritham. The Oak is a very old-fashioned pub, where beer is served from casks racked behind the bar using tap and spile rather than beer engine. They serve excellent food, but take no modern means of payment, just cash and cheque. There is a huge garden, with tables and wildlife, and it is all rather pretty. Once food had been ordered, Pete began.

“Dad, Mum, Laura and I have been talking about what I should do after college. I’ve got some ideas, but I’d like to run them past you first. I suppose the common thread is teaching.

“I’ve watched both Lor and Dave when they are in full flow, and they both have a real love of their subject, and delight in getting it across to their students. Lor, I watched John in one lecture, and it was like reading a textbook, and then those times you have stood in for Dave I saw the same fire as he has. You really want your students to get it, don’t you?”

I smiled, as I thought I could see where it was going.

“Lor, there’s no way I can get up to your level, I was a fitter in the REME, for my sins, but if could do something like that at a lower level, whether in English, or in mechanical engineering, that would be great. I have a sort of ideal job plan…teaching English and doing a sort of after-school thing with the machinery. The trouble is, I know bugger all about teaching, how the system works, whether I would be allowed to do the after hours thing with just my Army qualifications, all that crap. What do you think?”

Mum had been nodding as he spoke. “You want to give something back, don’t you?”
Pete grinned. “You have read my mind. It’s sort of a reaction to our childhood, both of us lost so much because of abuse, and it would be nice, even in a small way, to help other children get a better start”

Dad said his bit. “If that works out, I may be able to help with the machinery thing. You still have quite a way to go on this course, son, so no chicken-counting, OK?”

That was a very pleasant afternoon indeed. But…back to Mary

She had a calendar, and on it she had arbitrarily marked my first day at her surgery, dressed as Laura, as the start of my life test. That was in early November. It was now early June, and she was ticking off the days. Counting down to my final passing out. Each time I visited, she would have it on prominent display, and then, that day, she dropped her little bombshell.

“Laura, I have been extremely naughty. Can you possibly forgive me?”

When a head doctor says something like that, you have to examine it from all directions. Was she trying to trip me up on something, probing, testing?

“What could you possibly have done, Mary, that I should ever have to forgive you for?”

“Well, you will need to talk to Howard to arrange a few things, but I will be looking to you to arrange a few yourself, such as the interviews and assessments pre-surgery”

My heart rate went silly. There were still months to go, there was no way she could have signed me off already.

“You are probably saying to yourself that I cannot have signed you off already from your life test. I haven’t. I just decided that as the chances are absolutely zero of you ever going back to that oddity I first met, I might sort of set things in motion in advance. I put you on the waiting list months ago, dear. I just stipulated that it had to be after October, and a slot came up this morning for a date in early November, just past your last day of testing.

“All you have to do now is say yes or no”

Howard was officially displeased when I told him, but behind the obligatory management-speak his eyes were twinkling. H was even worse.

“Laura, love, when he’s finished chopping you out your new fanny, do you think you could get him to tighten mine up a bit? Ollie’s starting to get me all stretched”

I saved telling my family till I was home. Peter was ecstatic, both for him and for me, and I had to physically stop him from starting an internet trawl for wedding venues.

“Let’s just get the summer and my op out of the way first, love, there’s a lot that can still happen.”

Mother was apparently unbothered. “How convenient, dear, I was considering gong to Munich for the Christmas Market this year and you should be recovered just in time to travel”

Her face twitched a little, then cracked into a grin and suddenly she was wrapped round me, squealing like a fourteen year old girl.

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/photos/00/98/009830_1d4a9843.jpg The Oak at Fritham

CHAPTER 16
Pete was off for a fortnight in the summer break to the rehab centre at Headley Court near Leatherhead. For the first time in the best part of a year I was sleeping alone for an extended period, and it felt odd.

There was too much room, and it felt cold; on Mum’s suggestion I moved into on of the other rooms, so that it wouldn’t feel so much like he had left me. That worked…not at all, and I ended up moving back to Gosport for the weeks he was away.

This was the assessment time, when they would decide what sort of leg he could use best. His problem was that the amputation was above the knee, so that there were more mechanical and physical difficulties than would have been the case with a lower wound. I felt for him; not only was he without me, and that was not vanity speaking, he was away from the comfort zone that Ollie, Tyler and the others gave him.

I was definitely more weepy than I had been, and it wasn’t just the enforced separation. There was girliness coursing through me, and I just wished it would hurry up and do its job. Mum got so fed up with me mooning around that she dragged me off to a spa in Haslemere for a few days of swimming, massages and other treatments. I had a little moment of inspiration there, as not only were their meals delightful, and the service impeccable, but they also did marriages on site, in a little band stand affair on the edge of a lake at the foot of a great sweep of lawn.. Mum caught me reading their brochure.

“Darling, why do you think I chose this particular place? There is ample accommodation for those who need it, the food is indeed exquisite, and that is a view to treasure. And we may get the BOGOF.”

For those who do not buy their groceries in supermarkets, it stands for “Buy One, Get One Free”, the offer that used to be called “Two for the price of one”.

As opposed to airport shops, and motorway services, of course, where it is usually “One for the price of two”

I digress. “Mother, are you suggesting we do it as a double affair? The logistics….I mean, who would have first pick of the potential bridesmaids?”

I hugged her. “You really love him, don’t you, Mum, it’s not just the wild animal sex then”

I put on my stern face. “Mother, I know you were without him for a considerable period, but it is actually impossible to make up all that time in one weekend”

Up went the eyebrow. “A lady always strives to do her utmost, my dear”

She took a carefully elegant sip of her white wine, which was rather spoilt when she appeared to snort half of it out of her nose in a fit of giggles.

“Darling”, she said as she wiped her face, “I laugh so much more since you came home. You make a mother proud, not just with the way you have coped with such a catalogue of unpleasantness, but how gracefully you have done it. You also delight me with your elegance, I have obviously brought you up as befits a lady. There is one problem, however”

She leant closer to me and lowered her voice. “You really need to organise your underwear drawers better. I can never find what I want”

Was this some odd mother-daughter bonding institution I had missed, the elder borrowing skimpies from the younger for seduction purposes? And not telling her….I would store that admission away for future use.

“Laura, dear, may I make an observation? That style you adopted for your hair was born of necessity. I really think you do suit a much longer style, something softer rather than flirty, perhaps with a little colour to it

“It is just an observation, my dear, but I really think you would benefit from a visit to a proper stylist rather than having Ginny visit.”

She sipped her wine, entirely though her mouth this time, and asked the other question that had clearly been fermenting. “Darling, we will need to begin considering what we will be wearing”

“Mother, no we will not! Without a date, I will have no idea of what I will actually look like”

“Beautiful, as always of course!”

“No, Mother” I whispered, “the final size of my bust…”

Sometimes, flatteringly, she appears to forget.

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My soldier was soon back, with a brand new leg. This was rather interesting; I had sort of assumed that his new limbs would be some variant on a shop dummy idea, a plastic replica of a real leg. This device was like an aircraft undercarriage thingy, all rods and struts, with a foot shape at the end of it. At least, that is what he showed me after I had put him down, as my mother phrased it.

“Love, what are we doing for the Summer?”

Right out with it.

“I fancy some sun, and a bit of luxury, and you could do with getting some swimming in. We could go down to Nice or something”

“Pete Hall, you just want me to get my tits out on the beach!"

“The thought had occurred to me”

Cheeky sod.

“Well, Lor, they do sort of belong to me as well!”

“Pete, if you keep that up I shall stop taking the magic tit-growing medicine. Or perhaps start slipping it into your own cuppa… then you can have some of your very own to play with”

“Not the same at all, love. And I did bring this back for you…”

Thank god Mother was out of the room at that point. She took the hint a little later and went home, and, well, he had been away for two weeks with a lot of men.

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Pete’s idea for a break turned out to be rather a nice one, and with remarkably little fuss we flew out for ten days of sun. It was rather surreal, in the end. I had to use my old passport, and the ticket was in the name John Evans. At the first security check on boarding I handed over my letter from Mary with the boarding card and passport, and apart from a little widening of the eyes we were through. Not bad for a little provincial airport next to the M27. So next to it, in fact, that an aircraft once parked itself on the motorway.

I loved the flight, the difference in view from on high reminding me of how I first came back to life, and being shorter than Pete meant I could legitimately claim the window seat. We had his wheelchair in the hold, but he had insisted on walking to the aircraft. We still took the priority boarding, though.

Pete had picked Gibraltar for our little holiday, and I had another emotional moment on thinking that this was our first proper holiday together, but certainly not our last. There was a Levanter blowing as we flew in, the Rock looming out of mist as we swung round south of it to make our approach from the West.

I had absolutely no problems with entry, the only downside being the rather surprising smokiness of everything. People smoked, everywhere. We took a taxi to the hotel, which was an experience. Scooters and mopeds buzzed and farted everywhere, but nobody seemed to hit anyone, and horns were left unblown

Pete had found a deal for the Rock hotel, which was supposedly the top place, but had a faded charm on the outside that didn’t match the rather smart interior. That was our first problem. As we entered, I looked for the lifts. They were up a flight of stairs. Arse.

To my surprise, Pete just grinned. “Watch this, love”

Step up with good leg, feet (yes feet) together. Step up again…step, together, step, together, my man was using stairs.

Bloody hormones.

We had a room with a balcony looking over the bay to Algeciras, and I was a little surprised when, after we had entered the room and I had flung open the French windows, Pete shut them rather quickly.

“What’s up love?”

He just pointed. There was a bloody great monkey sitting on the flat roof below us. Five minutes later the hairy sod was sat on our balcony.

We had our first meal in the bar, as the sun went down spectacularly over Spain to the West. The staff fussed round Pete, even more after they found out he was ex-forces, and I began to understand why. This place had forces blood soaked into it over hundreds of years, and they had long memories. Pete wasn’t on a seaside holiday in some generic resort, he was n a place that knew what he was and understood.

There are times I realise very clearly why I love him.

CHAPTER 17
All too soon we were back in the UK, and once again I had no problems with entry. My passport went under a little scanner, I was asked to pull my hair back a bit, and that was it. Once my details were sorted, those little dangly details, I would still get a new passport as soon as possible. Mum and Dad collected us at the airport.

“We have news for you, my dears. The York house is now on the market.”

Pete was overjoyed. “When are you moving, Dad?”

“Er, yesterday, son. Roger’s already in the hot seat up there, I just had to make sure he was up to speed before I got out”

“So I assume you’ve got loads of stuff to bring down? Need anything dragging, we’re off till after September.”

“No, that’s OK, son, there are removal firms, but I wouldn’t mind showing the girls the old place before we finally sell it. I was thinking of taking a drive up next week, if you fancy it”

“That would be great, there are some pubs I haven’t seen for a while!”

Men. Beer. I must admit, though, that I did rather fancy a look at the city, reputedly rather lovely. Doing it from a family home would be preferable to having to suffer a luxury hotel, wouldn’t it? I realised that the time in the Lythe Hill spa and Rock Hotel was spoiling me. Back to reality, Laura, you have your own laundry to do now.

A few days later and Mum and I were both bored rigid in the back of the Landrover, and I was idly wondering when I could get out on my bike again before my arse got too fat. Too much good living, too little exercise. Dad pulled off the motorway at last, swinging past Sherburn until we got onto some charming little country roads. This would be good cycling country. The House was by Acaster Malbis, near a river and surrounded by arable land. It was gorgeous, but I did wonder what it was like after harvest and Winter stripped the fields.

It was a serious house, too, an old rectory built in stone with a slate roof. I shuddered to think of its value, but if it was a good indication of how well Dad’s business was doing we were marrying into money. I mean, my father’s old business after the bastard had…died had left Mum rather comfortably off, but this was on a different scale. Besides which, as Dad had the good sense to keep his business running but with someone else’s hand at the tiller, he would continue to be well off.

There was a new range of titanium bikes out….

The house was a little musty, and I wondered how much of our holiday time had been used by the two old lovers to make up for that lost time. I also resolved to check my knicker drawer for any loss or damage; that revelation was still making me chuckle.

Pete being a little worn, we pushed him round to the Ship pub that evening, for a very simple pub meal and some beer for the men. The meal was more than acceptable, and we sat outside on some rickety old picnic tables in the late Summer warmth. I still hadn’t seen the city, yet, but Dad was clearly giving up a great deal by joining Mum. It was one more thing that warmed me, let me realise that he loved her deeply, and once more, in my imagination, I visited my father’s grave.

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The next day, Dad and Pete took us on the shorter form of the grand tour. It was clearly a tourist city, with all the attendant ‘experiences’ and ‘original oldes’, but there was still a soul there, beneath the tackiness. We passed over Lendal Bridge to see some of the old walls, which we obviously couldn’t walk, and continued up Museum Street to the Minster, which was a delight.

I like the cool quiet in old churches, and there were little flashes of Odd John as I saw the logic of the structure. All built by hand and eye. I felt rather inadequate, till I considered that the same eye for a structure such as a flying buttress was also behind more important delights such as the shoes I was then wearing. Delicate grace, arching beauty, what more could a girl hope for?

We took an early lunch in tea rooms in the Shambles, and then Dad took us to what he called his favourite place, the Castle Museum, unusual in containing entire ‘streets’ from various dates, and a large costume collection. Despite my reply to my mother, I was indeed thinking about wedding dresses. November wasn’t that far away, and I had absolutely no intention of making it a long engagement, even if I had fallen for a man who definitely could not run away.

And so back to Hampshire, with some small items from the house and rather a lot of black pudding, and as I felt the extra flesh wobbling on my arse I had an idea. Two days after we were back I put it into practice.

What is the point of living in a National Park full of cycle routes if you don’t ride them? I had spent part of the previous day on the phone to a place in Brockenhurst, a cycle hire and retail centre. They did all sorts of odd things, including a sociable ‘tandem’, a bicycle where the two riders sit side by side, and I had had a moment of inspiration. True to their reputation, they had two at one of the other shops in the chain, and they had one brought over. I put some riding kit in a bag that afternoon and told my man to get driving.

Coming through Lyndhurst from the Totton/Ashurst side is quick, it’s the return that is a sod. We parked naughtily behind The Foresters, and once in the shop I identified myself, which still gave me a thrill, and the manager appeared.

“Hello, Laura, I’m Eric. We have them in, they came this morning. Is this who they are for?”

“Yes, this is my fiancé, Pete, he has some mobility challenges”

Eric was looking at Pete, critically. “Above the knee, mate?”

Pete winced. “Yeah”

“Sorry to hear that, it makes pedals a bit of a non-starter without a really special leg. Have a look over in the workshop”

They did look the part, when he got them out. Two different makes of hand-cranked trike. Pete’s face lit up.

“Laura, you are a bloody genius! This is serious shit!”

Boys, toys. Face shining, he turned to Eric. “Any chance of a test ride on them?”

He laughed. “I rather assumed it was what your lady brought you down here for! Of course, we don’t sell much of the really specialist stuff, so we only get it in for order. See that in the window?”

He pointed to what I recognised as a rather expensive fixed-wheel bike. “Somebody, no longer with us, ordered that one on spec, and it’s been stuck there for two years depreciating the shit out of us. These two are hire items. If they work for you, we will sit down together and look at what is available. Only then will I be ordering anything in”

“Are you going to wait here, love?”

“No, Pete, I’m just off to the pub to use the ladies’ “

When I got back, in my rather nice pink and black top and skort, Pete understood what was going on. Eric provided me with a mountain bike and off we went. The trike was set up for off road use, with mountain-bike style tyres, and as I led Pete past the Balmer Lawn and off the road he seemed to be coping, and indeed as he became more familiar with the gears he was making a reasonable speed. We climbed a little as we came around the back of Holland’s Wood, and then we were deep into the trees, a deer sprinting off as we rounded one of the bends. We paused so Pete could let me know how he was doing, and I saw a grin almost as big as the one he had had at Bovington. That told me everything.

“We’ve got some gates ahead, love, and then quite a fast downhill into the camp site, so don’t go silly”

What a bloody stupid thing to say. He took the hill at full tilt, and only avoided hitting the closed gate at the bottom with a sideways skid that would have pleased a speedway rider. When I arrived, he was dripping with sweat and grinning like a lunatic.

“This is fantastic! So much more fun than the chair! I just need to find the handling limits”

Oh bugger. “I rather think you’re starting to get close to them, and you are too heavy for me to lift, so slow down! Now, there is actually a speed limit on this next bit, plus road humps, so be careful. I want to see how fast you can get her on the main road back to the bike shop, and I can’t do that if you are wrapped round a tree”

Through the camp site, and I followed Pete as he wound it up. Bent forward out of his seat, sweat soaking his hair, by my computer he peaked, on a very slight downhill, at 20mph. There was no way he could sustain that, and he dropped back immediately to a more sedate cruise of around 14 to 15. We turned off just before the level crossing and pulled up outside the shop. Eric looked at Pete, then at me, and smiled.

“That’ll be a sale, then”

A week later we began our proper exploration of our new home. That would keep my bum under control.

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The Summer died in a real conflagration of Forest leaves, and we were both back at college, often riding in together as Pete’s fitness improved and he got used to the traffic. And then it was November. Mary wrote me off….and I found myself lying on a trolley looking at ceiling tiles as my mind fuzzed off with the premed.

They gave me some sort of gas. It smelled green.

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An internet image of a hand-cranked trike http://www.news.appstate.edu/wp-content/uploads/2004/06/0628...

CHAPTER 18
It smelled green, so logically it tasted green when I was sick, and said vomit was green as well, as my empty stomach dredged deep for something to chuck up.

Someone was hammering a piece of hot metal into me. I knew they were down there, with their mallets, because I could feel the banging, which they were timing to my heartbeat. My throat was sore, and my mouth still tasted green. Green and very dry. Someone was quietly snoring. I couldn’t seem to get my eyes to focus for a while, and my head…ouch.

That was how I knew the dwarfs down below were hammering in time with my heartbeat, because I could feel it in my head. Diastole, systouch, diastole, systouch.

My mouth was not only on its own synaesthetic trip, it didn’t want to talk to me. It didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone, actually, as I tried to ask whoever was about for a bloody drink, and tell them to evict the dwarfs.

My head was clearing only slowly, but I realised that the snoring was coming from my mother, in an armchair off to one side. Pete was sitting in his wheelchair, head thrown back and drooling. No stamina. I found a button thingy lying on my blanket, and pressed it Ten minutes or an eternity later, a nurse came in.

“Wawa, peas!

“You can’t drink yet, you’ll just throw it up, but I can give you something to wet your lips. Just a sip”

She held a cup with a straw to my mouth, and when I went to draw a big slug up, she actually pinched the straw shut.

“Now suck on this”

An ice cube. Bless you, girl. She gave Mum a shake, and then Pete, who made a lot of noise when he woke.

“Tea for you too?”

Mum stretched in a very unladylike way. “That would be delightful, my dear. Darling, how do you feel?”

“Whose bloody idea was this?”

“Yours, I believe. Something about matching your body to your soul. At least, that was part of a rather long and incoherent speech you were giving as they wheeled you away.

“Now, the surgeon says it went rather well, so now it’s just the healing process. The nasty bit is over”

Not from where I was lying it wasn’t. The nurse was back with tea, and did something to a drip bottle hanging by the bed, and…oooooooh, that was better. Pete was fully awake now, holding my hand, the one without all the wiry tuby things on it.

“Thank you for all this, love”

The silly man thought I was doing it all for him. That could be useful, save it up as a bargaining point. As the anti-pain stuff did its job, I was not only beginning to wake up, I was starting to think again. That old image of a viewpoint came back to me, and this was certainly an odd one, given my starting point. Looking down an expanse of white and pale blue hospital blankets, past the swell of my own breasts, to my mother on one side of the bed and the man I was to marry on the other. Well done, at last, John.

An aeon or two later I was allowed my own tea, and I sent the two of them off to find some breakfast or lunch or whatever time of day it was, and the surgeon made his first little visit. Up went my blanket, down went his head, in went his hands.

“Good, good, splendid, I should take a job sewing in a top fashion house, it’s that good!

“My little joke, dear. Now, I’m sure someone as educated as yourself has read every available piece of literature on the healing process, so you will know all about dilation, so I won’t go into all that nastiness. We have a pack you can take with you, a bit like an Ann Summers gift set, with instructions. You were rather well-endowed, and as you still had your clockweights I had plenty to work with. I must admit, the hair removal down there was a superb idea! Where did you get it from?”

“An article in the Guardian, doctor. There was a girl who hadn’t got rd of enough of her short and curlies, and ended up with a patch still growing right at the top of her new vagina. Every time her partner made love to her, he said it was like shagging a brillo pad, so I thought…”

“Excellent, excellent! I like well-read patients, it saves me so much trouble!”

And off he went. I remembered the embarrassment of lying there in that place by Gun Wharf, as they methodically went over a very sensitive part of me. Ouch. I also remembered the other part of that Guardian article, and shuddered.

A girl just like me had had her operation, and as is so often the case found herself alone and lost. So alone, that when the fundamentalist bible-bashers came round, she was swallowed up. They educated ‘him’, to realise that their deity didn’t make mistakes, and as Burns put it, “A man’s a man, for aa’ that”, and ‘he’ was a man despite everything, ’for aa’ that”

Men get married, to women, so they had found ‘him’ a suitable young lady from among the faithful, and post-nuptials she had quite reasonably complained that her husband shouldn’t come with breasts and a vagina. So ‘he’ went back to hospital and had ‘his’ femininity irrevocably destroyed, only to come to her senses a short time later.
There are articles I occasionally find that make me cry, and after laughing out loud (and wincing) at brillo-pad-girl, I had wept, at the story and at the picture of a woman who had utterly lost any chance of being complete.

That left me thinking, about several things. I was so lucky in my support, so utterly blessed, I could almost forget the wasted years courtesy of my father. Almost. But now I had taken a step so huge it frightened me. Was this the right thing to do?

I knew the answer as soon as my mind asked the question.

Mary popped round that afternoon (I had finally adjusted my clock) and after the usual pleasantries, she got down to it.

“You’re going through the ‘is this right?’ stage now, aren’t you?”

I laughed, which was stupid ,as of course it hurt. “You know me so well, Mary!”

“Well, I should do, shouldn’t I? And that question is inevitable. This is such a huge step that cold feet will be there before as well as after. It’s why we insist on such a long process before doing anything as radical as surgery”

“Yes, but you effectively signed me off early”

She laughed, which obviously didn’t hurt. “Was I wrong, then?”

I kept mine to a grin. “No. I have, as you know, just been working through that question, and I am absolutely certain this was right.”

She turned a little serious. “Laura, there are certain stages you will go through, one of which will involve some potentially serious depressive episodes. It doesn’t mean you are wrong, it doesn’t mean you have made a mistake, it’s just a glorified bout of nerves. Just remember, always, that you have your family around you, and that I am on the phone. And always, always bear in mind when you have those moments of self doubt that most women like you have to do this on their own. You have support beyond price; use it, rely on it and rejoice in it”

There were other visitors, over the next few days, including a waddling Jane, who had the ultrasound picture with her.

“It’s twins, Lor!”

I tried not to laugh, as that conversation with my mother came back, but in the end I had to.

“What’s tickling you. Laura?”

“It’s like when you went shopping, Jane, you always looked for the BOGOF!”

That set her off, and then she grimaced. “Er, Laura, do you have any spare knickers? I’ve sort of wet myself”

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An eternity later, they pulled half a bedsheet from inside me, along with the catheter, and I was free to move around. I am not going to go into any more intimate details here. You are either familiar with the processes or you are not, and if not you have no need for the details.

A little later we were back at our bungalow in Woodlands, and a relay team of home helps started, including both Tyler and Ollie, which was very useful. My first moment of angst came as I looked in the bedroom mirror naked. Still a boyish figure, despite the breasts. Was this illusion meant to be?

The door opened behind me, and Pete walked in. He held me from behind, and looked at my reflection over my shoulder. I felt him stiffening against my naked bottom, and my doubts were answered.

That’ll be a sale, then.

That's all, folks

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