Alienation
by Bryony Marsh

In the back yard, Molly whined and I went to see what had upset her. When I opened the door, she ran through my legs, dashing inside to seek the comfort of her basket.

A small grey alien with huge, placid eyes stepped out of the shadows. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I still haven’t learned how to reassure canines.”

“Rielk! I…” I made a made a bubbling sound in my throat, as best I could. He’d taught me it long ago, telling me it meant something like ‘In my home, the traveller is welcome in peace.’

He replied with a liquid trill that rose and fell: Good health and prosperity to the gracious host.

I stepped aside, holding the door open for him.

“Helen!” I called, giddy with excitement. “Guess who showed up!”

She came to my side, smiling broadly. “After all these years! Rielk… where have you been? You didn’t go home, surely?”

“Not home,” he said, his immobile features somehow conveying anguish. “Long story, actually.”

She did the steepled-finger gesture, or as near as a human can manage. “Welcome,” she said gravely. “Won’t you come and have a drink?”

I remembered my duties as host. “You’ll have your usual London dry gin, I assume?”

“Would you have any… rosemary?” Rielk asked, almost reverently.

“We always keep a supply of rosemary,” Helen said. “Just in case you should stop by.”

Rosemary is like catnip to Rielk’s people. It doesn’t seem to have a narcotic effect, but they really like it.

Helen poured a glass of the strong spirit, rolling a sprig of the herb vigorously between her palms before dropping it into the drink.

I still had half a beer. Helen had been drinking mint tea, but it seemed she’d decided the occasion warranted something stronger, fetching a Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I knew better than to offer a seat: our visitor’s knees didn’t work in quite the same way as our own and he could stand indefinitely.

“Looking good, Rielk,” I said, unable to think of anything more appropriate. “How long’s it been… fourteen years?”

“I should warn you that I’m a fugitive,” he said gravely.

“Same old, same old,” Helen said with a smile.

Rielk seemed agitated, which was unusual. He stalked around the room, finishing up by the bookcase. “You’re still studying flying saucers and little green men, then,” he said.

“I prefer to think of it as studying the people who believe in flying saucers and little green men,” Helen said, a trifle defensively.

Rielk took down a book and leafed through it. As always, it was disconcerting to see how fast he could read and it made me feel more than a little inferior: he could absorb a typical book, not merely committing it to memory but also thinking through the implications that it raised, in three to five minutes.

Part-way through the book, he puffed out his cheeks in way that I knew signified tremendous mirth.

He passed the book to me, one slender finger marking the place that he wanted me to examine. I had time to register that the book was ‘The Price of the Stars’ by Carol Donaldson, but he gave me no time to read.

“The energy requirement for an interstellar probe would likely bankrupt even an advanced civilisation,” he quoted, as if to explain the joke. “What does this writer think space is made of, exactly?”

“She probably thinks of it as a near-perfect vacuum,” Helen said, with the tone of one inviting our visitor to prove otherwise.

“Quaint,” was all that Rielk said. Next, he studied the photographs on the mantelpiece. “Still there are just two of you? I had hoped to find the foundation of a mighty clan!”

“No, it’s… still just the two of us,” I said.

Helen reached for my hand. I turned to see her regarding me carefully – perhaps a little sorrowfully.

“We’re trying to save the planet, Rielk,” she protested. “We’ve been busy –”

“I’m aware of your work,” our visitor said. “Six patents in the area of clean energy, now? You’ve done well.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And we’ve done it all on a not-for-profit basis, just like we promised.”

He bowed, to signify agreement. “I knew you’d do extraordinary things.”

He’d never revealed the means by which he could judge a person’s character and potential so accurately, but I don’t think he ever made mistakes in such matters. He’d first revealed himself to us when he’d needed our help. We hadn’t betrayed him to the government, and later he’d shown up again, in time to cure Helen’s cancer and leave her better-than-new. The trust that we’d shared since then transcended the species boundary.

“Even so,” he said, “I thought you’d find time to start a family.”

Helen snorted. She was always kind to me, but I’d had to accept the truth a long time ago: she was the brains of the outfit. We were both registered as partners in Infinergy LLG, but my dogged lab work could only test and validate her far more brilliant ideas. It was Helen who was on the cusp of demonstrating how to transmit electricity over great distances without losses, with a stack of cheap ceramic discs.

“C’mon, Rielk,” she said, “you know how things are: nobody would’a taken us seriously if I was pregnant. It’s still a man’s world: they’d all’ve assumed I was worrying about grazed knees and runny noses and pinning shitty drawings on the refrigerator. No thank you!”

I allowed myself a very small sigh. Helen glanced at me and I decided it wasn’t the time to raise the matter again. Better to change the subject, I decided:

“Why’ve you been gone so very long?”

“I ran into some… difficulties,” Rielk said, apparently embarrassed. He took a sip of his drink and gave one of his rare, side-to-side blinks. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said.

“Fourteen years,” Helen prompted. “What sort of difficulties?”

“I got captured,” Rielk said.

I stared at him, appalled to think what our countrymen might have done. “How’d it happen?”

“I was having trouble with my engine,” he began. “At the time, I assumed it was a simple malfunction, although subsequent events caused me to question that. Perhaps there was some kind of beam that interfered with the normal running of the engine: I don’t know.”

“Then what?” we both demanded.

It was strange how the immobile features of our friend could still convey a scowl, as he continued his story:

“I opened the engine compartment and tried to diagnose the fault, only to find myself caught in a dazzling beam of light, coming from high above.”

It was a classic abduction scenario, we both knew.

“Were you in a scout ship?”

“No,” Rielk clarified. “Volkswagen camper.”

“Oh,” I said. “So… that’s unusual.”

“The bad guys were in a helicopter. There wasn’t much vegetation around, so I decided that running away was pointless. Besides, they might’ve had snipers.”

I grimaced. “You allowed them to capture you, then.”

He bowed his head. “Indeed. They took me off to Area Fifty.”

“Not Area Fifty-one?”

He puffed out his cheeks. “Please: that’s just for the tourists.”

“Is it?” Helen was frowning.

“Yes! Classic misdirection: close to the truth, but not quite – and if I understand your culture, odd numbers are always more sinister.”

I considered this. “Are they?”

Rielk took another sip of his drink. “Sure! From ‘unlucky thirteen’ to ‘the thirty-nine steps’… odd numbers are always spooky. Hence Area Fifty-one. All the heavy lifting gets done at Area Fifty – as I was to discover.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. What did they do?”

“Nothing good,” he said, swallowing hard.

“I’m so sorry –” Helen began.

“It was bad science,” Rielk said, too loudly. “That’s what I can’t forgive: if you find yourself face-to-face with a representative of a starfaring species for the first time, wouldn’t that be something you’d want to put your best people on? Approach it with care; get it right?”

“Sure,” I said. “So what did they –”

“The interrogation was amateurish at best,” Rielk said. “I endured it for a long time, but I could see no end in sight and none of the people who were brought to see me seemed trustworthy, so I decided to play dead.”

“What do you mean?” Helen asked.

“I slowed my metabolism to a rate that would have been undetectable: just two or three heartbeats a month. In that state, they could no longer question me – but they went straight to dissection instead. It was monstrous! Barbaric!”

Horrified, I stared at him. “They cut you, without anaesthetic?”

“Never mind that,” Rielk spat. “Who the hell performs experiments without establishing a control group?”

“I… never really thought about that,” I had to admit.

“Absolute imbeciles to a man,” Rielk gave his assessment of the scientific establishment. “Paranoid, primitive primates! What about my inalienable alien rights, eh?”

“I’m… not sure you have any,” Helen said. “I mean, you should – but I don’t think that’s in the Constitution.”

“But you escaped,” I pointed out, wanting him to offer a happy ending to the episode. “Surely you used your superior mental powers on them and escaped?”

Rielk sounded tired. “Well… yes and no.”

I topped up his glass and Helen crumbled more rosemary into it. After another sip, our visitor continued his tale:

“I slipped away. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you? There I was, spreadeagled on the operating table with this bespectacled oaf trying to excise my thirdbladder with a scalpel – and I mean a literal sharp piece of metal: no lasers in sight – so I dropped the meat body.”

I frowned. “You did what?”

“I discorporated. As your philosophers worked out, right around the time they started doing interesting things with mud bricks, the body is just a vessel – one that you’ll set aside at least once in your life.”

Rielk had never managed to cultivate a human sense of proportion. Perhaps it was unreasonable to expect that of him, but for all his proficiency with our language, he never seemed to understand how the statements he made would be received. He could say something about how pollen stains your clothes with the air of one revealing the secrets of the universe… or, as now, he could confirm the existence of the afterlife as if merely discussing yesterday’s weather.

“You don’t look like a ghost to me,” Helen objected.

He swirled his drink, inhaling its vapours through the two tiny slits that serve him in place of a nose. “Ah, your point is valid! I picked up a replacement body. I knew there was an old scoutship embedded in a coal seam somewhere in Kentucky. It took me quite a few tries to find it, you understand, what with my having no physical form with which to construct some kind of detector, but there it was! Those older ships always carried a spare body: I slipped into it and warmed it up.”

“Welcome back, then,” I said.

He said nothing.

“Ten out of ten for escaping,” Helen said, “and they won’t be looking for you.”

“Yeah,” he said, staring into his drink.

“What… what’s the problem?” I asked him.

“It’s this,” he said, gesturing. “It’s better than nothing, of course, but this isn’t me. I’m seventy-four light years from home with no possibility of rescue for decades, and I’m stuck in… this.”

Helen and I exchanged a glance. She was smart enough to say nothing, but I wasn’t.

“You literally look identical,” I told him.

“What?” he demanded. “I don’t! This body is female!”

Helen made a face. “Sorry,” she said, “but to us, you’re… the same as always. You’re Rielk: a dear friend.”

The alien paced up and down. “I don’t like this,” he (perhaps she) said at last.

“Does it really have to be a problem?” I asked.

He (she) drained his (her) glass. “No,” Rielk said, in a voice brimming with insincerely. “It’s fine. Really.”

Helen looked contrite. “Is there anything we can do?” she asked.

“Can I stay for a few days?” the alien asked, almost fearfully.

“We’d be delighted,” I said. “For as long as you like.”

Helen nodded, setting down her beer. “I’ll make you up a bed in the guest room,” she said.

“Harbouring a fugitive alien,” Rielk warned. “Are you certain?”

“You’re family,” she insisted. “Of course you can stay.” She left the room, to fetch some towels and the like.

“How – in fact why – does one embed a starship in a coal seam?” I asked.

“I don’t suppose it was a coal seam when they landed,” he said. “Probably more of a swamp.”

I whistled. “You guys certainly play a long game.”

He made the hand gesture that I knew to be the equivalent of a human shrug. “That was before my time,” he said – though I thought he did so with the air of one who felt the need to clarify the point.

“So,” I said. “You can move from one body to another at will? That’s a neat trick.”

“It’s not that much more complex than moving all your files onto a new computer,” Rielk said. “Of course, not all computers are created equal,” he added, bitterly.

“I’m sorry, old friend,” I said. “I truly had no idea –”

“Perhaps it’s good for the soul,” he mused. “Walk a mile in another person’s shoes, sort of thing. Not that I wear shoes.”

I grinned. Helen and I always struggled to follow the looping, tessellating thought patterns of our alien friend, but he (or she, now) never seemed in any way put out by our stumbling contributions to the conversation. Perhaps he (she) wasn’t just super-smart but super-wise, too.

“Actually,” he (she) said, “that gives me an idea. I wonder…”

I raised an eyebrow. Perhaps just to showcase one of the few things that I can do, but which remains impossible to Rielk.

“Let’s wait for Helen to come back,” the alien said.

“Won’t you give me a hint?” I asked.

“Your language contains many wonderful idioms,” Rielk said. “One that has always been intriguing, to me, is… ‘misery loves company’.”

I regarded him carefully. “I’m not miserable,” I said.

“No?” He (she – that was going to take some getting used to) looked at me calmly, with all the patience of a species that builds spacecraft to last through geological time.

Helen came back into the room. “That’s all set for you,” she said.

“You needn’t have adorned the washroom with small blocks of surfactants on my account,” Rielk said.

Helen frowned. “How –”

“It’s a distinctive smell,” the alien explained. “Quite pleasant, actually.”

“Try it,” Helen invited.

Rielk rocked back on his (no: her) heels. “While I’m female, I should embrace such things, is that it?”

Helen smiled broadly, but said nothing.

“About that,” the alien said, “an idea has occurred to me.”

“What’s that?” Helen demanded.

Rielk regarded us with those serious, dark eyes that never let you know quite where they’re looking. “Please, have a seat,” he invited.

Helen sat.

“Helen, you want to do great things in humanity’s scientific domain,” Rielk said. “Paul wants to raise a family. I can perceive a way that means neither outcome has to preclude the other.”

“I really don’t see –” Helen began

I saw, or thought I did. “Wait, don’t do anything rash,” I begged.

There was a roaring sound in my ears and I think I blacked out for a moment, or did something similar. I feared that I might have slumped from my chair onto the floor, but when my vision cleared I saw that I had only drooped a little way and then caught myself.

But I saw this from outside: I saw all of myself, my mouth gaping open in shock as I stared across the room, at me. Me in Helen’s clothes; Helen’s body.

Rielk held up a placatory hand. “Try it for a year or two,” he said. “Unlike me, you can always swap back if you hate it. Meanwhile, Helen can be Paul and do ‘alpha male’ things in the boardroom – and Paul can he Helen and can pop out some babies.”

I stared at him, not trusting myself to speak. Rielk had saved Helen’s life, once, when I thought I was certain to lose her. Now it seemed that he was offering us a chance to have a family and I didn’t know what to say.

His (her) face was as immobile as ever, but I could sense the benevolent smile, just the same.

“You and I are gonna have to see if being a female has its compensations,” the alien told me.

---

2,800 words © Bryony Marsh, 2023

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Carbon
by Bryony Marsh

Nkechi Molebatsi was mortified. Her one chance to make a good impression and she’d squandered it! Not that it was her fault – or not as far as she could tell, anyway. Still, you couldn’t succeed in a new job if you started a half-day late, brought to work by the police.

She tried to concentrate fully upon the recording that she was transcribing, but within minutes a man had arrived at her station. Dressed in an expensive suit, he had to be one of the executives.

She removed her headphones and stood. “Dumela, Rra.”

“Oh,” he said with a smile. “You didn’t have to get up! I just came to say hello.”

Since she had already greeted him with “Hello, Sir,” she didn’t know quite how to reply. She gave an awkward little bob. “Thank you.”

“I’m Azuel Sibanda,” he said. “Welcome to National Reliant Bank.”

She thought she’d seen his name on the organisation chart, though she couldn’t remember what his role was. Too many introductions and new faces to take in all at once. “Thank you,” she said again, feeling foolish.

“You have everything you need? Settling in alright?”

“Everyone has been very kind,” she said. Most have been polite enough to not to mention the shame of my being brought to work by the Police Service, she thought.

“I couldn’t help but notice…” Mr Sibanda frowned as if unsure quite how to phrase his question. “Were you in some kind of accident this morning?”

She shook her head. “I was robbed, Sir.”

“Robbed? On your way here today?”

“Overnight, Sir. At least, I think so.”

“How terrible! And yet, how good to see that the police were able to assist you so thoroughly.”

“They were very kind, Sir.”

“What happened, exactly?”

She looked down, fiddling with the identity card that she wore around her neck. “Sir, I woke this morning feeling… not exactly terrible, but very confused. I was in a strange room… without my clothes.”

He looked at her in alarm – as well he might in a nation where more than twenty percent of the population were living with HIV/AIDS. “Were you, ah… is there any possibility…”

Nkechi squirmed, sensing the unspoken question that hung in the air between them. When she’d put on some of the clothes she’d found – clothes for a man much larger than her – and made her unsteady way downstairs to find a telephone, the police had made the same assumption: that she’d been the victim of a date rape drug, probably slipped to her on the final stage of her journey from Francistown. “The… police,” she spoke haltingly, “took me to hospital. I’ve undergone a thorough medical examination. I… remain as I ought to be.”

He frowned. “Why are you here? I mean, surely… you should be resting! My colleagues would understand if you delayed your start for a few days.” From the way he scowled, it seemed that his colleagues (and particularly Mrs Letsholo who was in charge of the secretarial pool) would do well to understand any such need.

She shook her head. “No, Sir. It’s better to be busy.”

“Have you spoken to your family?” he asked.

“There’s nobody,” she said, her face clouding. “Nobody close.”

“So you’re living… where?”

“Sir, I’m newly-arrived in the city. I… don’t have a place yet. I had intended to take a room at a guest house in Tlokweng.”

His eyes grew wide with surprise. “I’m alarmed to think that a young woman who’s travelled alone would put in a day’s work with no plans for where she might be staying tonight. Also, from what you said, I assume you have no luggage?”

She looked away, feeling foolish. “I don’t, Rra.”

“Money?”

“I have money, Sir.” There had been a fat roll of banknotes in the room where she had awoken: finding herself without clothes, documents or personal effects of any kind, she’d taken it. She knew it was wrong, of course, but whatever had been done to her was equally wrong. At first, she been reluctant to leave a small fortune sitting there when she left the room. Later, it was useful because the hand-me-down clothes the police had given her were hardly suitable for her first day at work: the nice policewoman who had been helping her had made a detour for a very quick shopping trip.

“Funny sort of robbery,” the executive mused. “Well, that’s fortunate. Good. Now stop work! Use the computer and make some personal calls to arrange accommodation if you wish… but no more work today. If… and yes, I say if you’re able to report for work tomorrow morning, well and good.”

“Sir, I can’t possi–”

“Yes you can. I’ll go and explain things to Mrs Letsholo. Goodbye, Miss…” he looked down at her badge; perhaps her cleavage as well, “Miss Molebatsi.”

He walked away, already calling out to Mrs Letsholo, who shot her a suspicious look.

+++

Walther Livingston played to win. To him, penetration testing was more than a job: it was like a sport, a military operation and a game of chess all rolled into one. There were rules… but there weren’t many. There were strategies, tricks of the trade, tools and subterfuges. He had invented more than a few of them personally.

He employed one of his favourite ones right from the outset, by stealing a march on the opposition. As soon as Armada Holdings had engaged him, he’d headed for Botswana. By the time his apparently innocent question, “When would you like the penetration test to commence?” was sent by e-mail, he’d already entered the country. He did so by road from South Africa, so as to conceal his movements. A multiple entry visa and some artfully smudged passport stamps would defeat any casual inspection.

He paid cash for a used van of the kind that the Botswana Telecommunications Corporation used. He’d brought some decals with him and he applied them to the vehicle, being careful not to dislodge the patina that the vehicle had acquired in its former life. The result was surprisingly convincing.

He met up with Davis, a local fellow whom he’d worked with before. Reliable and sober, Davis would play the role of workmate. He also provided an introduction: Mosegi was a youngster, but he seemed sensible. Walther gave them each a contract, making them official employees of ‘Red Team Services’ – which should help if they ran into any difficulties with law enforcement, since it would prove they were conducting a penetration test rather than simply thieving.

Davis drove to National Reliant Bank, Walther sitting in the passenger seat with a cap pulled down low. He preferred not to introduce himself to the security guard if it could be avoided, since he might want to play a different role later on. They had no papers, but Davis claimed he’d just had a radio message to attend as soon as they’d finished another job.

“I don’t have you on the list,” the guard told him.

Walther pulled his cap right down over his face and reclined in the passenger seat, projecting an aura of indifference. After all, telecom staff would be paid for a day’s work whatever happened.

“I’ll go, then,” Davis said. “Just understand that it might be a week or more before we can come again. We’ve got a big job to do at the airport.”

“Wait,” the guard said, going inside his little hut and reaching for a telephone. He spoke, listened, spoke again… the conversation lasted about a minute before he slid a window open so he could speak to Davis. “Who asked you to come?”

Davis shrugged. “On your side? No idea. My dispatcher said you were having problems with noise on the phone lines and slow internet. We’d just finished a job on New Lobatse Road, so they sent us over – but if everything’s fine, I’ll call it in and we can be on our way.”

The guard spoke on his telephone again.

When he concluded the call, he raised the barrier. “Park anywhere except under the awning. Report to reception at the main entrance.”

Davis drove onto the site. He chose an area that was out of the way and straddled two parking spaces, as if to give access to the van’s side doors. In reality they had no intention of opening the van, since this would reveal that it didn’t have any equipment inside, other than a couple of toolboxes.

“Good job, Davis,” Walther told him. “That’s step one. Now let’s see who meets us at reception.”

A helicopter clattered overhead and they watched as it came in for a landing on the roof of the bank. “Funny how they go to so much trouble to mine diamonds,” Davis said. “Then they bring them here and bury them again, in a vault far below ground.”

Walther laughed. “You’ll never get rich if you bet against the fundamental stupidity of the human species. Let’s go.”

The attractive young woman who sat at the front desk seemed to have been chosen for her looks rather than her brains. A visitor might have been impressed by her appearance, but her behaviour represented another strike against National Reliant Bank: it seemed that they considered security to be guaranteed by the outer ‘crust’ of perimeter wire and the man at the gatehouse.

“You’re the telecoms people?” she asked.

Their work clothes were nondescript, but they each wore a lanyard with an ID card that looked official. Like Walther always said, you laminate anything and it becomes ‘official’.

Davis regarded the visitor sign-in sheet. “Who should we say we’re visiting?”

The receptionist frowned. “Oh, er… just leave that part blank.”

“Right.” He wrote something indecipherable in the visitors’ book.

They were in.

Davis toured the floor with a clipboard, occasionally making a note of the numbers shown on the telephone sockets. This was irrelevant, but he sketched a map of the floor as he went, adding arcane annotations. If anyone had looked, his notes would have been assumed to be something to do with the work of a telephone engineer, but in reality he was noting the positions of security cameras, motion sensors and other security features. Nobody stopped him – in fact, somebody even held a door open for him, allowing him access to the next floor. After a little while, he went back to the door and admitted Walther.

Everywhere he went, Walther played the role of a telephone engineer trying to sniff out a line fault.

“Excuse me,” he asked one pretty girl. “Have you been having any difficulty with your telephone?”

She frowned. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Ah, well that’s something. On some extensions there’s a lot of feedback. Nothing here?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“And this is extension…”

“Three zero one seven.”

He made a note on his clipboard. “Ah, fine. Well in that case, I only need about two minutes…”

In this way, Walther achieved several things. Firstly, he planted the idea that ‘some people are having trouble with their telephone’. Soon everyone knew that there was a problem, even though nobody had actually experienced it. The non-existent fault established the idea that the telecom engineers ‘belonged there’ and that they were doing important work. Secondly, it persuaded people to leave their desks for a few minutes, since few wanted to continue their work with a stranger lying on the floor under their desk. (Using their telephone extension number, Walther made a note of all the staff who walked away from their computer without locking it: this would form a part of his penetration report.) More importantly, while ‘working’ under the desk he was able to unplug the keyboards of some staff and route the cable through a key-logger device. Usernames, passwords and whatever text they entered would be stored until he returned to collect the devices.

By the time the pair left the area where most of the staff were located, it didn’t have many secrets left.

It was like taking candy from a baby.

+++

“What do my colleagues have you doing today, Miss Molebatsi?”

It was Azuel Sibanda, the executive who seemed to have a gift for spoiling her concentration. Sure enough, she discovered that she had been about to pay a thousand pula to a supplier, instead of paying for a thousand lengths of metal bar.

“Hello, Rra,” she said, setting the work aside. “Today I’m cross-checking delivery notes, purchase orders and invoices for materials ordered at the Orapa mine site.”

He looked at the untidy stack of pink flimsies impaled upon a spike, each of which she would review before filing in date order. “Fun! Can you take a break?”

She locked her computer screen and picked up her notepad. “What can I help you with, Sir?”

“Nothing,” he said, slightly flustered. “I meant… take an actual break. Come for a walk? Or have a cup of tea? Do you drink tea?”

She felt something akin to panic. No doubt Mrs Letsholo was looking over at them already, resentful that she couldn’t chase away the executive the way she put the mail boy or the IT workers to flight if they attempted to ‘bother’ her girls. There would be a price to pay for this, Nkechi knew: some particularly dull task that would come her way, or something that would cause her break to be curtailed or taken at the most inconvenient time. Mrs Letsholo wasn’t exactly a bad person, but she seemed predisposed to keep score of a huge range of infractions: scores that she would settle sooner or later. Her first salvo had commenced with “I’m sure you’ll want to make up the time lost on your disastrous first day?” and it showed no sign of letting up.

Mr Sibanda wasn’t heedless of such workplace dynamics, though. “I understand,” he said quietly. “May I use your telephone?”

“Of course, Sir,” she told him.

He was already dialling. “My dear Mrs Letsholo! How are you? Splendid… look, I’m just reviewing some of the irregularities in the materials delivered to Orapa. I need Miss Molebatsi to talk me through her analysis and present in a video conference this afternoon: I’m afraid it’ll mean working through her break. Do you mind?”

Nkechi stared at him in alarm, but he grinned broadly, then spoke into the telephone once more: “Alright. Thank you very much. Goodbye.”

He replaced the handset. “Come to the video conferencing room with me, please.”

Obediently, she followed him.

“Have a seat,” he said once the door was closed. When she was seated, he crossed the room to a drinks trolley. “Coffee? Tea? The rooibos is quite good.”

She blinked. “Nothing for me, thank you, Sir. Now, about this conference… these ‘irregularities’ you want me to analyse?”

He made a face. “Miss Molebatsi, I was merely trying to secure some of your valuable time without getting you in further trouble with Mrs Letsholo.”

And now you’ve got me alone, she thought. “What exactly can I do for you, Sir?”

He matched her careful, formal tone. “I’d like an update on your situation, please. Lost property, accommodation arrangements, how you’re settling in – that kind of thing.”

She raised an eyebrow. “And I suppose you do this for every new worker?”

He shrugged. “It’s a new thing I’m trying.”

“I’m sure,” she said.

He set a little tray in front of her: a cup of steaming red tea with a little sugar bowl and two lemon slices.

She studied this for a moment. “So, there aren’t any irregularities in the materials ordered at the Orapa site?”

“Of course there are,” he said, preparing his own tea. “At least a quarter of the town is made from materials that supposedly form a part of the mine. From time to time I make a show of investigating it, to keep the degree of ‘shrinkage’ down to an acceptable level. I’ll be making just such a call this afternoon: I’d like you to sit in on it.”

“Very good, Sir,” she said, trying to think through the implications of this development.

“First, though, I want to know how you’re getting on.”

“Everyone’s been very kind,” she said automatically.

“Everyone?”

“Yes, Sir. I have no complaints.”

“How very saintly,” he said. “That’s a nice jacket. Did you recover your luggage?”

“No, Sir. It’s new – and thank you.”

“You asked at the airport? The bus station?”

“I tried, Sir. There was no trace of my things.”

In truth, she had asked at both places. Bizarrely, she’d discovered that she couldn’t remember how she’d travelled from Francistown. She had no memory of arranging the trip, boarding a bus or aeroplane… nothing. This gap in her knowledge scared her and she preferred not to think about it. She’d submitted ‘lost luggage’ paperwork at both the bus station and the airport, though she’d been unable to add any details such as flight number: it seemed unlikely that her luggage would find her. She’d gone shopping for more business clothes, then used the rest of the money she had found to pay for a room in a guest house.

“You’ve found somewhere suitable to live, I trust?”

“Quite satisfactory, Sir, thank you.”

“Well,” he said at last, “good.”

“Was there something in particular you wanted to say to me, Sir?”

“Yes. That’s perceptive of you. It’s like this… our security’s going to be tested in the days ahead. Not by robbers – or not as far as we know – but by agents engaged by the parent company. Personally, I think it’s already started. There’ll be strangers looking to gain access not only to the vault, but to information of all kinds.”

She added some lemon to her tea. “So we must all be vigilant, of course.”

He sighed. “You’d think so, but I worry that we’re altogether too set in our ways. I know people are making jokes about my ‘obsession’ with security, but it’s not thieves I fear: it’s that we find ourselves humiliated when our defences are tested. Our role could be downgraded: people don’t seem to realise it would lead to job losses.”

Last in, first out, Nkechi thought, with a sinking feeling. “What can I do, Sir?”

“Just… look out for anything out of the ordinary. You’re a clever young lady: trust your instincts if something doesn’t ring true.”

She frowned. “Wouldn’t it be better to give this responsibility to those more familiar with the operations of the business, so they can spot things that are out of the ordinary? Sir.”

He sipped his tea before shaking his head. “There’s a lot of complacent people here. Recently, I witnessed a senior partner typing his computer password with one finger: q-w-e-r-t-y. When I suggested he change it, he wrote the new one down, to carry in his wallet as a reminder. A series of unwise actions such as that could ultimately lead to the vault itself being raided!”

“Do you think I can prevent such a thing?” Nkechi didn’t relish the idea of pointing out a senior member of staff’s lapse of common sense, if she noticed one.

“You don’t have to tackle such foolishness in person,” Mr Sibanda assured her. “Just report it to me, discreetly.”

Had he just established a pretext to have intimate, secretive discussions with her on a regular basis? She wasn’t so naïve as to let that pass unnoticed. Still, he hadn’t said or done anything inappropriate… other than attracting the wrath of Mrs Letsholo.

She found herself nodding. What else could one do?

“Good,” he said. “I’m also keeping a close eye on new hires such as you, because anybody who started since the idea of testing our security first occurred might be a plant: somebody sent by Armada Holdings to be a man on the inside – or a woman on the inside.”

Her hand flew to her mouth. Was she being accused of being a spy?

He made a dismissive gesture. “Strangely enough, the very noticeable circumstances of your arrival suggest to me that it’s highly unlikely you are an agent of any kind. I doubt anybody who was here to steal our secrets would choose to be quite so conspicuous.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing.

“We’ll find our defences tested, sure enough,” he repeated, then shook himself as if to dispel such gloomy thoughts. “Meanwhile, let’s have a look at all those materials our friends at Orapa have been ordering, shall we?”

She nodded and reached for the conference room’s wireless keyboard and mouse, to sign into the system.“Yes, Rra,” she said.

+++

“The elevators in NRB are from Otis,” Walther explained to Mosegi. “Davis will go back in to work on their imaginary telephone system fault. What he’s really going to do is take one of the elevators out of service. We already changed their speed dial number for Otis Customer Service when we were ‘testing’ the telephone system at reception and in the janitor’s office: it goes to this cell phone. So when it rings, you answer as if you’re a member of staff at Otis, you work through the sequence of questions on this sheet and tell them you’ll send somebody at once.”

“Got it,” Mosegi said.

“Let’s try a rehearsal now,” Walther said. The kid did well in the role, so after that he relaxed. At one point he had to warn him against moving around while they were waiting in the back of the van, but other than that, he was good.

At last, the call came through. They left it three quarters an hour, which was something of a bare minimum for a plausible response time, even for a valued customer.

“Let’s go and be Otis repair men,” Walther said at last. He peered out of the van’s windows, finding nobody nearby, so the pair climbed down and headed into the building. The receptionist didn’t notice that security hadn’t mentioned the arrival of an elevator repair crew at the main gate. Another strike against NRB, Walther thought, though he doubted he would remember all the ways they’d messed up when he wrote his report.

They sauntered in, signed the visitors’ book illegibly and set about investigating what might be wrong with the elevator. (In reality, turning a key by ninety degrees would have restored it to full function, but that wasn’t the purpose of the exercise.)

“I’ll need to get various tools and parts from the van,” Walther told the receptionist. “I expect we’ll be in and out a few times.”

“Okay,” she said, allowing him to keep his visitor badge. He flipped open his laptop and made a note of this latest mistake, appending a photo of the visitor badge to show that he could have made a copy with ease. The neck strap, with lettering in red that said ‘VISITOR’, was a standard type that was available for sale online.

This isn’t proving to be much of a challenge, he thought with contempt. He and Mosegi shuttled between the building and the van a number of times, sometimes singly and sometimes together, until the receptionist was thoroughly accustomed to them going in and out.

Mosegi went out to the van, then returned to report that the elevator would be out of service until some parts could be delivered the following day. He handed both visitor badges back to the receptionist, who thanked him and said “See you tomorrow.” Davis, who had also ‘finished his work for the day’, drove him out of the compound in the fake telecom van.

Nobody realised that Walther was still inside the ‘out of service’ elevator, which was powered down with its doors closed. He lay on the floor using his tool bag as a crude pillow, resting and listening to music. When he heard the office cleaners commence their work he slipped out of the elevator and began to move from room to room. The cleaners weren’t motivated, educated or paid enough to wonder why a maintenance man was there and he took care not to get in their way as they worked.

Meanwhile, he was guided around the building by the sketched map that Davis had produced, so as to avoid all the video cameras. At each motion sensor he climbed on a chair and taped a small piece of paper on the lens, rendering them blind. Next, he collected all the key-loggers that they had previously installed on the company computers.

When the cleaners left the building, he went with them. Act like you belong and people will seldom question you. The yawning security guard probably just assumed he was a shift supervisor for the cleaners.

+++

“Tidying the stationery cupboard,” the young executive murmured. “What a splendid use of your talents.”

He spoke softly and from close by, causing Nkechi to jump and spill a box of green ballpoint pens. “Sorry,” he said. “Miss Molebatsi, I hope you’ll find some time to give me a report on that special project I tasked you with?”

“Uh, yes, Sir. Of course,” she said, flustered. The Sauron-eye of Mrs Letsholo was upon them and both, it seemed, telegraphed guilt.

“It’s good to know that somebody around here’s being vigilant, anyway,” Mr Sibanda growled. “Some other time, Miss Molebatsi.”

That ‘other time’ turned out to be an after-work drink at Capello. The clientele was a mixture of workers having a drink together before making their way home and partygoers embarking on a night out: Nkechi liked the atmosphere, which hinted at the Gaborone she hadn’t had a chance to sample yet. Once she had received her first pay cheque, she promised herself, she’d make more of an effort to sample such things.

“St Louis for me; Tusker for the lady,” Azuel Sibanda set down two glasses, clearly amused by something.

“Uh, have I done something foolish, Sir?”

“Please, not ‘Sir’. We’re not at work now and you must call me Azuel. Perhaps I might be permitted to use your first name also?”

She nodded.

“Nkechi,” he said with a smile, “meaning ‘loyalty’. I like it.”

“Mr Faithful Sibanda,” she countered, “if names mean anything. But you haven’t answered my question.”

He thought back. “Oh – nothing foolish: it’s just that I was surprised you chose a Kenyan lager. You have exotic tastes.”

“Oh,” she said, “I just liked the picture of the little elephant. I don’t think I’ve ever…”

“What?”

She frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever had beer, actually.”

“Really?”

She shrugged. “Not that I recall.” Something was nagging at her, but she couldn’t work out what it was while she needed to pay attention to her companion.

“I hope you like it,” he said.

She took a sip. “It’s quite refreshing,” she said. “Thank you.”

He nodded. “Good. How’s work?”

She considered her answer with care. “Not very challenging,” she said at last. “I suppose I have to walk before I can run, though.”

“Is this your first job?” he asked.

She nodded, feeling silly for suggesting that she was ready for greater things than bringing order to the stationery cupboard: the good-looking executive had to be ten years older and far more experienced.

“I’m sure we’ll have something more interesting for you soon – and in fact, isn’t my own security monitoring project a part of that?”

“Yes, Sir,” she said – which caused him to look disappointed.

“Let’s hear what you’ve observed, then,” he demanded.

“Overall, the working culture is good: the people mesh together very well. There are times when somebody might say ‘can you run a search for me?’ when they haven’t logged in, or they might borrow a piece of equipment without booking it out, but basically everybody seems reliable. There’s no petty theft of the kind that might indicate that some staff are fundamentally untrustworthy; no bullying that might create resentment; no real problems that I’ve detected.”

“Aren’t you even going to complain about Mrs Letsholo?”

She shook her head. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”

He grinned. “But she remains a dog. Ha! But, no… what you’re saying is, everything’s fine?”

She drank some more of the beer. “Yes – or as nearly fine as makes no difference. Some people use the Internet for purposes that aren’t exactly work-related and I’ve noticed one person who usually starts his day by collecting a pen from the stationery cupboard, then takes it home in his shirt pocket. I doubt you’re interested in confronting the gentleman, however.”

“Indeed not: we’re in the diamond business and I think we can spare a few pens. Anything else?”

“The fleet cars appear to have excessive mileage, given their stated usage.”

He pondered this. “How excessive is excessive?”

“Perhaps two or three hundred kilometres a month.”

He shrugged. “That’s nothing. There are always small trips that people don’t log.”

She felt silly for having mentioned it, so she tried something else: “When the water cooler people come to change the bottles, they prop open the emergency exit – which is the kind of thing that’s probably been going on for years, but I doubt it’s an approved practice.”

He nodded, suddenly more serious. “Now that’s more like the kind of thing I’m looking for! Well done: we’ll close that loophole, at least.”

She smiled. “Kaizen.”

He pursed his lips. “Who? What?”

“Something I read in a magazine this morning. A Japanese philosophy of continuous, small improvements coming from everyone, leading to great changes in the long run.”

“Oh, I see,” he said. “How interesting – but right now we’re facing a significant threat and I doubt that small improvements will be enough. Although in regard to our ‘friends’ coming to test our security, I recently did something distinctly unsporting.”

She grinned. “What’s that? If you can tell me.”

He spread his hands. “I’ve suspended all access to the vault. Nobody gets in or out, unless I authorise it and attend personally – and I haven’t approved anything going in or out for weeks. So unless dynamite is considered a legitimate strategy, which I find unlikely, nobody’s going to be able to report that they got inside the vault.”

Nkechi liked how animated he became when he talked about such things. “That’s clever. But presumably diamonds are still being mined, bought and sold. Can you keep this lockdown in place indefinitely?”

“No,” he admitted, “but it can last a few more days. There are security arrangements at each mine, where they’re authorised to hold diamonds up to a certain value. If somebody finds a really big one, that’ll be a nice problem to have! In the meantime, I’m hoping the delay forces the enemy to show their hand. While nobody is getting into the vault, our friends might try to do something foolish, because they can’t wait forever. They must fear that we’ll change our passwords, rotate the staff, notice something is amiss or whatever…”

She reflected upon this. How clever! She raised her glass: “Confusion to the bad guys!”

He joined her in the toast, then turned the conversation to other matters. “So why does a clever girl like you become a secretary?”

She gave a self-deprecating little smile. “It’s a good job, with a great company – and I had to be realistic: I’m an orphan. In an ideal world I might be doing something else, but a year at vocational college was what I could afford.”

Azuel was nothing but sympathetic. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I only ask because it’s clear you’re so much more capable than, well… let’s say because it’s so very clear that you’re highly capable.”

“Thank you,” she said. “If you decide to keep me on after my probation –”

“Oh, we’re keeping you,” Azuel asserted.

“If that’s so,” she went on, “then perhaps in a year or two I can enrol on a part-time degree programme. I might yet secure a management role, one day.”

He grinned. “I believe you might.”

He really was perfect, she decided. Where most people had at the very least a childhood scar or some feature that you tended to focus upon, he looked… perfect. Well groomed, elegant in his mannerisms and expensively dressed. He was simply lovely.

Also way out of her league. Are you single? Really? she wanted to ask – but didn’t dare to. Perhaps the beer was going to her head.

“I might have another task for you soon,” he said.

“What’s that?” she asked, not quite daring to hope that he might suggest something improper.

“I’d better talk to Mrs Letsholo first,” he decided. “May I walk you home?”

He did so. Disappointingly, he was a perfect gentleman.

+++

“Mrs Letsholo, I was wondering if you could help me with something?”

She scowled at the executive, who seemed now to haunt the ground floor. “Let me guess –”

“The dinner at the Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry,” he said, perhaps more loudly than was necessary. “I was hoping you’d agree to be my ‘plus one’ for the night.”

“I most certainly will not,” she said, clutching a ring binder protectively to her bosom. “Your suggestion is highly irregular.”

“Ah, then I shall have to find some other employee with whom to share the invitation,” he announced, “for as you know, I lead a celibate, respectable and indeed monk-like existence.”

“Miss Molebatsi,” the harridan called, ensuring that everybody in the vicinity could hear. “Mister Sibanda wants to take you out to a ministerial dinner. Will you be needing an overtime claim form?”

“No, Mma,” Nkechi whispered when she had approached the pair. “Thank you.”

The older woman sighed. “Just tell him ‘yes’ and then perhaps we can get some work done around here.” She glared at all the staff who were watching and listening.

Regarding the pair, Nkechi sensed that the enmity they displayed was just for show: there was actually a complex friendship there, wrapped up in a kind of game that neither had ever acknowledged. “I’m afraid I must decline,” she said. “I don’t have anything suitable to wear – but thank you for thinking of me.

Mrs Letsholo held up her hand. “Nonsense. Rachida? Qwara? You’re both good at this sort of thing: will you help?”

“Yes, Mma,” the two secretaries chorused, knowing it was wise to agree with Mrs Letsholo when she phrased things like that.

+++

Two nights later, Nkechi was at Qwara’s house with Rachida, who handed her a garment bag.

“It’s a dress I wore as a bridesmaid some years ago,” she explained. “We’ll have to make some alterations because of your ridiculously thin waist, but I think it’ll look nice.”

Mrs Letsholo had wisely enlisted the help of two married women, on the basis that they ought to be less jealous that the new girl was getting so much attention from the gorgeous Mr Sibanda.

If they start sticking pins in me, I’ll know she miscalculated, Nkechi thought. “You don’t mind altering it?”

“I’m never going to fit in that again,” Rachida said. “Not after three children. Pop it on and see if you like it.”

Nkechi did so, enjoying the feeling as it slithered into place. It was made from silk, in light blue: the blue of the national flag. “Oh, wow,” she said. “I never felt anything like this before.”

Qwara frowned. “What, never?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think so…”

The two women fussed over her, with the whole process being watched by one of Qwara’s daughters who peeped out from beneath a table, curious but too shy to put in an appearance.

For twenty minutes she was made to stand while the dress was tugged this way and that, marked and pinned. The three gossiped about work at the bank, Nkechi learning a few things and suspecting that in some respects they were either speculating wildly or pulling her leg. On the subject of Azuel Sibanda they warned her not to expect too much: a number of the girls at the bank had tried to catch that particular fish before her and all had been gently but firmly disabused of the notion that they might be the future Mrs Sibanda.

“To be honest, it’s a relief to hear that,” she told them. “I find it very difficult to concentrate when he pesters me at work.”

“Like you haven’t been fighting boys off with a stick for the last five years or so,” Rachida joked.

Nkechi frowned. “Uh, not that I recall… or not until I came here to the city, anyway.”

Qwara shook her head in disbelief.

Three quarters of an hour of work with shears and a sewing machine followed, after which Nkechi had to try the dress on again. She found it harder to work her way into it, but the effort was rewarded: it fitted closely, showing off her lithe figure.

She thanked them both and they laughed to see how excited she was. She promised to tell them what took place – within reason.

+++

Azuel arrived at her rooming house, bringing flowers.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, astonished. She couldn’t remember ever having been given flowers, and certainly nothing like these. The African flame lily made a magnificent centrepiece to a breathtaking arrangement.

“As are you,” her date murmured. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave them behind, but I wanted you to have them.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll put them in my room. Give me a moment.”

He nodded. “There’s no hurry.”

When she came back, he took her hand and led her to the car.

“You know Nelson, I believe?”

Nkechi didn’t know him, but clearly he was one of the company drivers. “Good evening,” she said.

“Good evening, Mma,” he said, opening the door and inviting her into the car.

Azuel joined her. “I don’t normally merit a driver,” he explained, “but Nelson is also something of a bodyguard. He knows karate, among other things.”

Nelson started the engine and pulled away.

“Do we need a bodyguard?” Nkechi whispered.

“Ordinarily, you and I would have little to fear on the streets of our city, but I’m afraid it’s mandatory when we’re out with something like this.” He held out a jewel case and opened the lid, to reveal a diamond necklace. The single large jewel seemed somehow to gather all the light in the vicinity, to sparkle playfully.

“My God,” Nkechi breathed, “what are you doing? That must be worth a fortune!”

He nodded. “It’s traditional that NRB show off some of their wares at functions like these.”

“Really? I mean, no, I can’t – it’s too precious.”

“You can and you must. You’re representing the bank tonight.”

She gave a nervous little shake of her head, but didn’t object further when he took the necklace from its case and fastened it around her neck. It nestled against her, to bounce as her heart thudded.

She frowned. “Does this mean you opened the vault?”

He was amused by the way it seemed that she couldn’t set thoughts of work aside. “No,” he said. “One of the directors has been keeping this little old thing in her office safe since its last outing. I hope to keep the lockdown on the vault going for a few days yet, if I can.”

She nodded abstractedly. “So what do I need to know for tonight?”

“I can’t tell you much about the minister as I’ve never met him. I knew his predecessor, but she moved up to the Finance Ministry last year. Our host was previously minister for Infrastructure and Housing Development, if that’s any use.”

“Alright. I don’t imagine I’ll need to say much to him, anyway.”

“Looking as you do? I think you’ll find that all kinds of people will want to talk with you.”

+++

In this, he was right – though by no means could all approaches be described as friendly.

“Here’s my friend Mr Sibanda, custodian of the nation’s other treasure,” said the man who was was placed opposite when they were seated.

“Miss Nkechi Molebatsi, allow me to present Mr Adegoke Okoye, who works for the Minister of Land Management, Water and Sanitation,” Azuel said, putting emphasis on the last word as if to imply that the gentleman was personally responsible for sewage.

She regarded the gentleman: stylishly bald, with a look of mischief about him. She kept it simple. “Hello, Sir.”

“Don’t let Mr Sibanda alarm you, my dear: we’re good friends.”

“You’re not blessed with terribly many friends if you need to count me among them,” Azuel teased.

Okoye smiled sardonically. “Are you courting at last?” he asked. “Or is Miss Molebatsi another of your employees?”

“Water!” Nkechi blurted: the first thing that occurred as she cast about for a way to interrupt the confrontation. “Can I offer you some water?” She lifted the carafe.

“Uh, thank you,” he said.

She sensed Azuel’s eyes upon her as she reached out and poured. Perhaps he was worried that she was about to ‘accidentally’ spill the whole thing in the lap of his foe, but she was trying to be nice.

“Water,” he raised the glass to study its contents. “The real treasure: thirsty people can’t drink diamonds.”

“To my mind, the real treasure is the people themselves,” Nkechi said. “A healthy, well-educated population has to be prized above all.”

“Well said,” the woman on the other side of Azuel put in. She was from the South African High Commission, working in a role that was something to do with the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. “Your mineral wealth is a gift, but a finite one. It needs to be invested wisely.”

“This is exactly why we’re investing in infrastructure,” Okoye explained. “A pipe network to bring water across the desert, all the way from the Zambesi. Say what you like – as I’m sure you will – but at least the water is an asset that flows. What do your diamonds do, but moulder in their vault? A fine way to destroy value!”

Acutely aware of the purely ornamental and ridiculously expensive diamond that she wore, Nkechi was minded to agree with him: she guessed its sale might have funded all the operations of a high school for a year or more. Still, she felt the need to defend her companion.

“I respect your position on the need for prudent investments,” she said, “but I see our primary role as one of ensuring the security of the nation’s precious assets – a service that would still be required even if there were no diamonds yet to be mined.”

“One day, there won’t be,” he said, darkly. “My friend here can restructure, refinance and reorganise as much as he likes, but he won’t escape that simple fact.”

Azuel rolled his eyes. It was clear than an old argument was being revisited. “Existing as a corporate entity rather than a branch of government has allowed us to borrow money at market rates and make investments of our own, with an eye to our future.”

“I wish you every success,” the other said, “for the sake of us all.” He seemed anything but reassured.

Azuel was uncharacteristically sombre and it seemed that the exchange had spoiled his evening. Between courses, Nkechi laid a placatory hand atop his, which seemed to improve his spirits a little. The lady from the South African High Commission chattered brightly about a recent trip to Lesotho and Nkechi did her best to keep the flow of conversation going.

After the somewhat awkward dinner, their host took the podium and gave a short speech in which he emphasised the importance of international trade. Azuel took it as a vindication and he was smiling broadly by the time they left the table. A band began to play and he steered her towards the dance floor.

Nkechi was alarmed: “I’ve never danced before,” she hissed.

“Perhaps this is a time for doing new things,” he murmured, unrelenting.

It didn’t seem that anybody was expecting ‘proper’ dancing with distinct steps, so they were able to blend in well enough, moving gently to and fro to what Nkechi assumed must be a waltz.

“Thank you,” Azuel whispered. “I’m sorry: I shouldn’t have allowed that fool to upset me. You did well – and you kept me from being too rude.”

She laughed softly. “Happy to be of service. Will you sign my overtime form now, Sir?”

“I’m hoping you’ll put in a few more hours yet,” he replied.

She looked up at him. “I’m afraid I can’t stay. I have to be safely at home by midnight, or I’ll turn into a pumpkin.”

His chest shook with suppressed laughter. “Not even the scullery maid, but the pumpkin? What kind of Cinderella are you?”

She gave him a sad smile. “I’m working on a tight budget. Also, I hear that the man who serves as night porter at my lodgings can be difficult with girls who come back late.”

“We’ll see about that,” the executive growled.

She shook her head. “Imagine what Mrs Letsholo will say If I so much as yawn at work tomorrow. No… it’s been lovely but I think I need my bed.”

“I’m just being greedy,” he said with a sad smile, “and since Nelson will probably shoot you if you attempt to run away as the clock strikes twelve, I suggest we should leave together. Shall we?”

She looked around the place one last time, to drink in the elegance of it all, but caught sight of Adegoke Okoye, the Water and Sanitation man, looking at her as if he might try to cut in, or try to claim the next dance.

“Let’s go,” she said.

They gave brief thanks to their host, then Azuel summoned his driver: they weren’t about to stand on a street corner and wait for the car – not with that diamond on display.

When he arrived, Nkechi noticed how the driver scanned the street before inviting them both to enter the car. She thought she detected the slight bulge of a concealed holster beneath his uniform jacket, which meant that Azuel hadn’t entirely been joking. She didn’t want the diamond around her neck any more – not in a world where such things were known to attract robbers.

“Time to go back to being a pumpkin,” she muttered, reaching to the back of her neck to find the clasp of the necklace.

“I’ll take care of it,” Azuel said, leaning close for this purpose. He smelled of sandalwood and she discovered that she loved his touch; his close attention.

She clung to him for a moment, impeding the task he was trying to perform but enjoying their closeness. “Thank you,” she said, “and put it somewhere safe – please.”

He chuckled. “I will. Nelson and I will place it in the night safe just as soon as we’ve taken care of the most precious item – by which I mean you, Cinderella. Tomorrow morning, I’ll order the main vault opened so I can get it properly under lock and key. Not that we use keys, exactly, but you get the idea.”

“Thank you for a wonderful evening,” she said.

“Without you, it wouldn’t have been one,” he told her. “Do you know, I think you look better without the diamond. There is such a thing as gilding the lily.”

She shook her head, embarrassed, but when the motion ceased he was close and it appeared that he might kiss her. She glanced forward, expecting to see Nelson watching them in the rear view mirror, but he seemed preoccupied with the task of driving. Boldly, she moved to cover the distance that remained between them to deliver a small, soft kiss.

She couldn’t remember ever having kissed somebody like that before and she found herself astonished by the surge of emotions that she felt. Was she falling in love? That was going to be difficult: she’d only been in the job a few weeks. What would people think of her? She gave him a terrified look and he nodded sympathetically.

He held her close, but didn’t try to kiss her again. All too soon, Nelson had pulled up to the kerb outside her guest house. There were things that hadn’t been said; kisses that might have been exchanged – but this wasn’t the time.

Nelson stayed with the car – with the diamond, Nkechi was amused to note. Azuel walked her up the cracked path to the front door, which hadn’t been bolted. She turned to him, unsure quite how to say goodbye.

He bent down to give her another little kiss. “Sleep well, Nkechi – and thank you.”

She toyed with his hand. “Good night, Azuel. This has been wonderful.”

“Until next time?”

She smiled. “Yes – next time!”

He gave a little bow and she let herself in, skipping up the stairs to her room. All those old films in which lovestruck girls sang about their feelings didn’t seem quite so silly now. She disrobed, hung up her one good dress, then cleansed and moisturised while softly singing and humming a half-remembered song from the balcony scene in West Side Story.

It was all well and good insisting on an early night, she thought as she lay in bed – but how was a girl meant to sleep with so much to think about?

+++

Nkechi arrived at work early, hoping to forestall some of the gossip by demonstrating that she wasn’t suffering from the effects of a late night out, nor anything more scandalous. She found it difficult to settle down and work, but Mrs Letsholo set her the task of transcribing a recorded conference call. This isolated her enough to prevent everyone trying to engage her in conversation all morning. At break time she gave a summary of events at the reception to Rachida and Qwara.

“He danced with you? Then what?” Rachida demanded to know more.

Haltingly, Nkechi tried to explain something of her impressions and her feelings.

Qwara nodded approvingly. “You were right to insist on being taken home. He’ll want to spend more evenings with you, I’m sure.”

Rachida giggled. “So, he’s a good kisser, right?”

“I have no basis for comparison,” Nkechi whispered, deliberately choosing to be evasive.

“None?” Rachida demanded. “Were you at a convent school or something?”

It became apparent that others were listening in, so Qwara kindly changed the subject, discussing the worsening drought conditions instead.

Shortly before lunchtime, even with her headphones in place, Nkechi could sense that the mood around her had changed. People were tense: she sat back from her computer screen, removed the headphones and glanced around.

“It’s some kind of crisis meeting,” Qwara told her. “It’s never good when all the partners come in at once and there’s nothing in the diary. They’re in the boardroom now.”

“I’m sure we’ll know soon enough,” Mrs Letsholo told them all. “For now, you all have jobs to be doing. Let’s not be seen gossiping.”

At lunch, nobody quizzed Nkechi about her ‘date’ with the handsome executive: that was old news. Instead, they speculated about the meeting that had caused all the senior staff to gather in the boardroom, where they had been joined by a high-ranking officer of the Police Service. The off-duty security staff had been called in as well, some reporting to management while others conducted a sweep of the building.

Nobody was getting any productive work done by mid-afternoon, when Nkechi saw Azuel for the first time that day.

She went to him, concerned. “Are you alright?”

He gave her a tired, lopsided little smile. “Hello. I’m sorry – I should have come to thank you for last night. All this, it’s… much as I feared. Not a complete disaster, though.”

She took his hand. “Can you tell me? Can I help?”

He considered for a moment before answering. “Basically, we’ve been outfoxed by the people who were sent to test us, but they didn’t get past all our defences. There’s some confusion on the other side about a missing team member. It’s, uh, a long story. Do you want some tea?”

She looked to Mrs Letsholo, who made an exasperated gesture. Azuel looked suitably apologetic and at last the older woman rolled her eyes and pointed as if to say “Go on, then.”

Azuel led her upstairs, to a place where refreshments had been set out, just outside the boardroom. Nkechi was nervous to think that she might be found drinking tea by any executive who might emerge, but Azuel insisted that it was acceptable.

“We can talk here,” he explained. “So here’s what we know: earlier today the Police Service questioned two fellows who’d been seen watching the bank from a parked car. It seems they’d been doing the same thing from various locations for a few days.”

“The people who were sent to test our security,” Nkechi said.

“Precisely – or some of them, at least. At first, the police assumed they were planning a robbery, but they had paperwork that showed they were acting for a South African company called ‘Red Team Services’. They had maps of the site, including detailed plans of each floor of the main building; keys to various pieces of machinery; fake badges that had allowed them to gain access on multiple occasions, posing as telephone and elevator repair men, delivery drivers and so on.”

Nkechi frowned. “They’ve already been inside?”

“Yes. We’ve seen photographic evidence that they roamed all over the building.”

“But not the vault, surely?”

He grinned. “It appears my lockdown of the vault may have derailed their plans. Perhaps it forced them to take chances and led to their being apprehended this morning.”

A security guard arrived, clearly wanting to give a report but not with Nkechi present.

“I have no concerns over what Miss Molebatsi might overhear,” Azuel said. “Let me have your update.”

The security guard looked grim. “There’s small pieces of paper taped over most of the PIR detectors. The police are taking them away for fingerprints. There’s evidence of infiltration all over the building –”

“Such as?”

“Er –” the guard gave a nervous little cough. “For example, there’s a handwritten note on the side of Mr Mompati’s computer that reads ‘Ryan Kumba Brown is great goalkeeper but he serves less well as a password’. We found… evidence that somebody used the elevator hoist room as something of a base of operations, probably camping in there for a day or two.”

“Evidence?”

“Food, drink – and the consequences of food and drink, if you follow my meaning.”

Azuel had his face in his hands. “How long ago?”

The guard wrinkled his nose. “A few weeks ago, judging by the state of things.”

“Aren’t we supposed to check places like that every few days?” Azuel demanded. “Never mind: is that document for me? I’ll present it to the Board.”

Clearly grateful that he hadn’t been hauled over the coals, the guard departed.

“I’m so sorry –” Nkechi began.

“Nothing about this is your fault,” Azuel said firmly. “I asked you to consider our security arrangements, but it seems that our ‘friends’ had already been and gone.”

“Been and gone, yes. But what was that about a missing team member?”

Azuel shrugged. “I have no idea. One of their number probably received a better offer. Or maybe he got drunk and didn’t come back to work. It’s not our problem.”

“And the vault is secure? You’re certain?”

“It’s still locked up tight,” he said. “Nobody’s been in or out for weeks.”

“Nobody in… or out,” Nkechi said, with a growing sense of dread. What had that man from Water and Sanitation said? “Thirsty people can’t drink diamonds.”

Azuel looked at her in horror. “You don’t think…”

She swallowed. “Has anybody actually checked the vault?”

He shook his head. “To unlock it requires credentials from three executives. Everyone’s been in the meeting since they arrived! I’ll have to… right: let’s do that.”

He snatched the door open and strode into the boardroom.

“Mr Sibanda,” a woman protested with considerable irritation, “you agreed to let us conduct our review without interruption. What is the meaning of this?”

“I apologise, Madam Director, but this might be an emergency. It’s the vault.”

“What about the vault?” she demanded.

“We need to check it, Mma. At once.”

Somebody else spoke: an old man. “You think this is about more than passwords and tampering with the telephone system?”

“Rra, I think it would be a mistake not to complete a full search of the premises, in the light of recent events.”

“What makes you think –” somebody began, but his question was lost in the sound of chairs being pushed back and people rising. It was a general exodus: more than a dozen people heading out of the boardroom, down to the ground floor and from there to pack the narrow stairway that led down to the main vault.

Azuel clasped Nkechi’s hand as he passed and she was hauled along with them.

+++

Some weeks earlier, Walther had been bored. He’d sequestered himself in the elevator hoist room, where he spent the bank’s working hours sleeping or watching the cricket on his iPhone. He received regular updates from Davis, but these indicated no change in the guards’ posture: they hadn’t been spooked and they weren’t hunting him.

At night, he could roam the building at will, retreating or hiding out when the guards made their regular sweeps, which didn’t involve much beyond testing that various doors were locked. Gradually, with great care, he’d extended the depth to which the bank’s building and systems were penetrated. He’d performed a simple under-the-door attack to get into the server room, where he’d taped a ‘Red Team Services’ business card inside the casing of each piece of electrical equipment; then he’d retreated to his elevator hoist room to write up this latest piece of damning evidence against NRB.

Next, he’d opened a box of sweetener that he found in the break room, tipped some away and replaced it with salt. He added a little note that read ‘On this occasion, none of your staff have been poisoned – with best wishes from Red Team Services’, sealed the carton again and placed it back on the shelf. Such petty pranks didn’t amuse him, but he was killing time: waiting until he could gain access to the vault.

The first barrier was a pair of glass doors, leading to a lobby that was manned during the day. He could have interfered with the badge reader, but already he’d recognised a mechanism that would open the doors automatically when a customer was leaving the area. It was a simple matter to insert the nozzle of a can of ‘Dust Off’ between the two doors: held upside-down so as to spray out cold propellant, it spoofed the infra-red detector, which obligingly opened the doors for him.

Now inside the lobby, Walther knew he was far less likely to be interrupted by a guard patrol. The next barrier had a combination keypad – but the enclosure had been left with the factory-fitted ‘A126’ key: they usually were. Walther always carried an A126 key. With the access control box open it was simple to bridge between two pins on the circuit board with a paperclip. The door solenoid fired and Walther had passed another barrier. Stairs led down, deep into the bedrock beneath the bank.

The next task would be a lengthy one but Walther had plenty of time, hidden away from the guards. Just outside the vault door was an access panel of a kind that he recognised. He opened it up and made two modifications. First, he piggybacked a ‘sniffer’ on the card reader mechanism so that whatever credentials were supplied by card would be cloned. Next, he installed a pinhole camera, to cover the keypad: whatever numeric combination was used in conjunction with a particular card, he’d be able to replicate it.

He tidied up the area where he’d been working and tiptoed his way back up the stairs, to hide in the lobby until the regular guard patrol had gone past. Funny how human beings always slip into a routine, he thought.

He then retreated to his hoist room hideout to await developments.

+++

The next day, there was a routine visit to the vault. Walther didn’t know it, but he’d only just completed his work in time: this was the last time the facility was opened before Azuel Sibanda decided to suspend access, as a precaution. The equipment that Walther had installed worked perfectly, recording everything he needed to make an unauthorised visit – a crowning achievement to demonstrate that NRB’s security was hopelessly outdated.

Walther retraced his steps down to the vault. When he was close, he connected wirelessly to the new equipment that he had added to the access control machinery, finding that it now held all the information he needed to breach the vault.

“Candy from a baby,” he muttered, initiating the process.

Lights came on as he eased the huge, cylindrical door aside on its smooth bearings. He wondered if the circuit that caused the lights to come on might also be sounding a silent alarm, somewhere, but it didn’t really matter: even if he was apprehended now, he could claim victory because he might have brought twenty litres of gasoline with him, or a bomb. Diamonds burned just as well as coal, or so he’d been told.

Squinting against the brilliant light, Walther regarded the mass of shallow drawers that made up one wall of the vault: each would contain a king’s ransom in cut diamonds, he knew. There were cabinets for valuable documents and bulky cassettes for data backups as well, but what particularly drew his eye was a single, large diamond on a pedestal.

It was pure theatre, of course, to display a single gem in brilliant lighting like that. Visiting VIPs would be impressed; persuaded to entrust their valuables to the vault, perhaps. It was likely that the data was more valuable, or the documents. He ought to photograph a couple of pages, just to prove that he’d gone that deep, but… that diamond!

In something close to reverence, he approached it, fascinated by the rainbow of internal refractions that it displayed. How smooth the crystalline faces were! He wanted to touch it; to feel its weight and the coolness of it. A stone, after all…

Walther hadn’t decided exactly what he was going to do within the vault to make clear that it had been penetrated. At times, while he’d been waiting in the hoist room, he’d imagined himself taking a shit on the floor – this constituting feedback on some of the most lax, generic security arrangements he’d ever seen. Or maybe he should leave a handwritten note, or just take photographs?

Now, he knew what he wanted to do: he’d take this diamond. He’d return it, of course – via the parent company – but for now, he wanted it. And if he was going to do that, fingerprints didn’t matter. He removed a glove and reached for the sparkling gemstone.

Something strange happened as soon as it was in his hand. He felt its cool hardness, just long enough to pick it up – and then it disappeared. Not quite instantly, but it melted in his hand as rapidly as an ice cube on a hot stove.

There was no heat and nothing dripped or ran down his arm, but the diamond melted and he got the impression that it was being absorbed into his skin.

Horrified, he tried to hurl it away, but by the time he initiated the movement, it was gone completely.

He regarded his hand, trying to understand what he had just witnessed. Was his arm feeling numb? Or was that his imagination? He couldn’t decide.

He was sweating, though he doubted it could be because he was nervous. He’d performed penetration tests that were far riskier and more arduous than this one, but he found himself blinking away sweat and mopping at his brow.

To hell with this, he decided. They’ve set some kind of trap. Like maybe a hallucinogenic gas, or some kind of contact poison on that fake gemstone. Perhaps I’ve been given a massive dose of LSD, or something like it.

His tool roll, left on the floor just inside vault door, would have to serve as his calling-card: he didn’t trust himself to carry it anyway. Distances seemed to telescope in and out as he peered about him and he pressed himself against the wall so as to avoid falling down. After a minute or two he managed to drag himself back through the vault door, leaning his weight on it until it bumped closed and he heard the mechanism locking.

He half-crawled his way back up the stairs, to hide in the lobby while he called Davis. “We’re done,” he said, “but I’ve got to get out, right away.”

Davis was quick to understand. “You need a distraction? I could do an Uncle Henry at the main gate in twenty minutes. How’s that?”

“Can you make it fifteen?”

“On my way. What’s happened?”

Walther was struggling to focus. “I don’t feel well. Like, poisoned or something.”

“Alright. Hang in there!” Davis ended the call.

Walther gimmicked the emergency exit with a piece of insulating tape, such that the alarm wouldn’t sound when he pressed the bar to open the door. He left the building on the far side from the main gate, using the last of his strength to climb the fence when he heard the commotion begin: Davis playing the part of a drunk to distract the guards and occupy all their attention for a minute or two while he demanded that they call him a taxi, and so on.

Since he’d made a call that might later be placed as having come from the vicinity of the bank, Walther left his phone in the road, where it would soon be either stolen or crushed by a passing vehicle. Then he stumbled away from the scene, struggling with double vision but managing to locate the particularly disreputable rooming house where he was staying.

Probably just got to sweat this out, he told himself, drinking some water and then crawling into bed. I’ll feel better in the morning.

+++

Everyone was crowded into the little corridor outside the vault, the last to arrive still on the stairs.

“Open the vault,” somebody called, clearly accustomed to giving orders.

“Yes, Rra,” Azuel said, threading his way to the front and towing Nkechi with him. He flourished a keycard: “I’ll need two others to swipe their cards and enter their passcodes, of course.”

This was done and the locking mechanism was heard to retract. Azuel swung the ponderous metal door aside, according him the first glimpse of the vault’s contents – to find a discarded glove, a workman’s tool roll and a pedestal made conspicuous by the absence of one large diamond.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered.

+++

Two hours had passed. The icy fingers of terror had receded, just a little, once it became clear that this had been the result of a penetration test and not an outright robbery. Only a single diamond was missing, not the far greater wealth that existed elsewhere in the vault.

The executives had gone back to the boardroom, though once again they excluded Azuel from their deliberations because they were discussing his recent performance. For his part, Azuel sat outside, waiting to discover his fate. Nkechi stayed with him, never thinking to return to the secretarial pool.

Time wore on and the working day ended.

At last, the executives all filed out of the boardroom. A few of them nodded politely to Azuel as they passed, so it seemed that he wasn’t completely in disgrace.

At last, only one of the partners remained behind. This was Ms Gorata Phiri, semi-retired but the holder of a considerable block of voting shares. She was, it seemed to Nkechi, a woman of vast experience who had probably heard every excuse and seen every trick. Not a person to take lightly, for all that she looked like a friendly grandmother.

“This is the preliminary report from the penetration testers,” Ms Phiri said, holding it away from her as if it stank. “It’s incomplete, but what there is of it sets out a litany of foolish mistakes and warnings that went unheeded.”

Azuel bowed his head. “Yes, Mma.”

“You misunderstand, Mr Sibanda. I’ve seen the emails in which you told everybody to adopt a secure password – and I know about your efforts to improve our security in other ways.”

“I failed,” Azuel said. “The vault was breached.”

“You tried,” she countered. “Believe me, on a day when I’ve been shown fifty or more examples of failure, your own efforts were like a breath of fresh air. Today I learned that one of my dear colleagues uses his desktop computer to put money on horse races – and uses the same password for his banking duties.”

Azuel didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.

“There are going to be some changes around here.”

“Yes, Mma.”

She nodded reflectively. “I want you to take charge of those changes.”

Azuel was astounded to find himself rewarded with greater responsibility on such a dark day, but it seemed that Ms Phiri had already secured the agreement of the Board.

She smiled, then continued: “Now, I’d like to discuss something with your young lady. I know you’ve spent most of the day waiting out there, my dear Mr Sibanda, but I’ll ask you to wait a few minutes more.”

He glanced at Nkechi, apology and surprise both showing on his face. “Of course, Mma.”

Ms Phiri beckoned. Nervously, Nkechi went inside.

When the door had closed, the older woman smiled. “You’re a rare beauty,” she said.

“I, er… thank you, Mma,” Nkechi stammered.

“Flawless,” she said, as if amused by some joke she didn’t choose to share. “And you’ve worked here for just three weeks or so. Is that right?”

“Yes, Mma. It’s my first job. I hope my work has been satisfactory.”

The older woman shrugged. “I’m sure it has. Now, come sit with me – and have a look at this.”

She produced a velvet bag with a drawstring. Nkechi guessed at once that it must contain a diamond, but even so she was astonished by the large, brilliant cut stone that the Director showed her. She positioned it atop the bag, twisting it this way and that until Nkechi could see her reflection in a large, flat surface.

“Funny things, diamonds,” she said.

Nkechi was distracted by the complex internal reflections within the gemstone, though she tried to be polite. “Funny, Mma?”

“We’re not in the pearl business, Miss Molebatsi.”

“No, Madam Director.”

“Very strange things, pearls. They start out as something that doesn’t belong. It gets glossed over, to make it less irritating. You know about pearls?”

“Almost nothing, I’m afraid.”

“Not to worry. My point is, without an unwelcome piece of grit, there can be no pearl. The imperfection is the seed – whereas a diamond can be flawless.”

“Uh, yes, Mma.”

“A flawless crystalline structure, I mean. Consider this one, for instance.”

Nkechi swallowed hard, struggling to speak as she looked into the near-infinite depths of the jewel.

“My late husband had an interesting theory,” Ms Phiri said, quietly. “He thought that the diamonds were somehow alive. A carbon-based life form, he called them.”

“Mma?”

She gestured wildly. “You should see the interplay of light when you allow it to fall on a roomful of diamonds! He used to tell me that we had a symbiotic relationship with them: we release them from the depths of the Earth, cut them and polish them… and they make us rich.”

Wondering if the Director might be teetering on the brink of senile dementia, Nkechi thought it would be polite to agree with her. “I suppose they do, Mma.”

“Poor Azuel thinks he closed the door after the horse had bolted, but he’s mistaken. I hope you can console him.”

“Mistaken, Mma?”

She laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Consider: if diamonds are in some sense alive… what might they want?”

Nkechi was entirely confused by the direction that the conversation had taken. “Madam… excuse me, but ‘want’? What could a diamond want?”

Ms Phiri reached out to the gem, rotating it gently. “I like to imagine them having something like a conversation. One catches a beam of light, refracts it, splits it and sends it on to yet another…”

It was becoming hard for Nkechi to see her reflection amid the rainbow hues being scattered by the diamond. “Perhaps they want the diamond that disappeared to be returned to them?”

“Don’t you know what happened to it?” Ms Phiri prompted. “Look again.”

Blinking madly, Nkechi peered into the diamond, no longer seeing her own reflection but that of somebody else. Ms Phiri turned the gem first one way and then the other, the effect being something like that achieved by adjusting the dial on an old-fashioned radio. Tuning in on a distant station… or a different life.

The life it showed was that of Walther Livingston, professional penetration tester. He was of middle years, with a little bit of a paunch and an unremarkable sort of face that allowed him to masquerade as a delivery man, elevator repair technician or whatever the job required.

As she spied upon him, Nkechi acquired the impression that he was a man who enjoyed his work but who had few people with whom to share the joy of barriers overcome and secrets exposed. He had no family; no love life. He was good at his job and he enjoyed it the way another might take delight in finishing a crossword puzzle, but it was a largely solitary pursuit.

“Who is he?” she whispered.

“That’s the man who broke into the vault, of course,” Ms Phiri told her. “Touch the diamond: twist it a fraction and you should be able to see what happened.

Nkechi followed her instructions, quickly getting a sense of how to make the diamond reveal such a thing. She watched as Walther removed his glove and reached out to pick up the diamond in the vault; watched it disappear and saw the effect that this had upon him. She watched him leave the vault and escape from the site, stumbling away into the night and abandoning his phone. She saw him burst into the room he had rented, to drink straight from the washbasin’s cold tap before crawling into bed – in a room that looked very familiar to Nkechi, though she hadn’t spent long there.

In shock, she looked away from the view of the man, now shivering and sweating his way through the night. Instead, she looked at Ms Phiri, who gave a sad smile.

“Now I think you understand.”

Nkechi was aghast. “That man… he… he’s me?”

The older woman caught her hands, exerting a steadying influence. “I’d say that you’re him – made flawless.”

Nkechi shook her head. “But that’s impossible!”

“To us, yes. But who knows what diamonds can do? It seems that the diamonds didn’t want a man who intruded upon them and threatened to disrupt their gathering in the vault. They didn’t want him: they wanted you.”

Nkechi found it a struggle to ignore the sparkling light from the huge diamond in front of her. “Why would they want me?” she asked.

“You’ve already proved yourself to be intelligent, hard-working and dedicated to the Bank. Perhaps they have plans for you.”

“But I’m not real…” Nkechi was floundering, unable to trust her own thoughts.

“This has happened before,” Ms Phiri told her. “It’s not as sinister as you think! Notice how you can look upon either Walther or Nkechi, reflected in the depths of the gem?”

Nkechi frowned, peering into the stone again. “Yes, Mma?”

“You get to decide who you want to be. If you choose to be the man who broke into the vault, you’ll develop another fever and when you awake, the diamond he touched will have been expelled from your body. His body. We get our diamond, he gets a three-week gap in his memory and we defeated the penetration test.”

“Madam Director, what else can I be?”

“You can be Nkechi Molebatsi, a secretary at National Reliant Bank – although I suspect you won’t remain a secretary. Look.” She spun the diamond and it sparkled with a series of images: Nkechi behind the wheel of a car; giving a presentation; cutting into a wedding cake with Azuel by her side; holding hands with a small child as he took his first steps; at a graduation ceremony…

Nkechi gasped.

“Predestination is horrible,” Ms Phiri said, “but don’t worry: these impressions will fade once we put the diamond away. I take it you’ve made your choice?”

“I… can’t,” Nkechi said. “I can’t do this. I can’t deceive Azuel.”

“Your integrity does you credit,” the Director said. “There’s something you don’t know, however.”

“Mma?”

“Some years ago, there was a manager working here. He had debts as a result of some poor decision-making in his personal life. Perhaps he thought he could eradicate those debts through the theft of a single, large diamond – and he managed it, too.”

Nkechi frowned. “Are you saying –”

“He grasped a diamond, just as Walther Livingston did. He, too, was transformed.”

“Azuel?”

Ms Phiri smiled broadly. “He’s a fine-looking young man, isn’t he? Also trustworthy and hard-working. Flawless, one might say.”

Nkechi considered this. “Does he know about me?”

“He doesn’t even know about his own past. He chose not to remember – just as you can, although I’d appreciate it if you managed to keep hold of the skills that Walther Livington had.”

“Skills, Mma?”

“He had an uncanny ability to find the gaps in our defences, that one. Perhaps, in due course, we can persuade you to take on a security role within the bank.”

“I’m astonished,” Nkechi shook her head in wonder. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you have a very forgiving nature, Madam Director.”

“I believe I’ve lived long enough to develop a deep understanding of things,” Ms Phiri said with a smile. “One the one hand, there’s the raw material – and on the other, there’s the conditions that shape it. One deposit of carbon remains amorphous while another becomes graphite and a few turn into diamonds. When you find a diamond, it needs the right setting.”

“So I’m to remain as Nkechi Molebatsi,” the younger woman said. It wasn’t a question.

“I think so. Remember what I said, though: try to retain the knowledge of Walther Livingston.”

“But how –”

The Director swept the large diamond back into its velvet bag, closing the drawstring.

Nkechi blinked, momentarily confused.

Ms Phiri smiled warmly. “I think you chose well.”

“Mma?”

“What are your thoughts on our security arrangements?”

Nkechi frowned, sorting through thoughts that seemed somehow alien. “Uh, Madam Director, the server room needs a better door, but even when it’s replaced there’s a problem: all the data cables run within a suspended ceiling. Anybody could tap into those cables and we’d never know it.”

“I see.”

“Also the access to the roof platform is far from secure. Somebody could use that as a point of entry and –”

“Alright,” Ms Phiri laughed. “Thank you, dear. Please put together a memo and we’ll set up a meeting to establish a prioritised list of our shortcomings.”

“Yes, Madam Director.”

“How do you feel about… other matters? Personal matters.”

Nkechi pondered this question, struggling to formulate an answer “I… have the strangest impression. I think I’ve been… sort of daydreaming about my future.”

Ms Phiri nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with having dreams. Personally, I’m impressed by your level of ambition. There aren’t many people who could finish an MBA dissertation with a young child at home and another on the way.”

Nkechi just scratched her head.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” the Director said. “When the time comes, perhaps you’ll find that you can organise your working and home life into distinct facets.”

“Mma,” Nkechi objected, “what about the missing diamond? It must have been worth a fortune.”

The Director had a twinkle in her eye as she replied. “They’re far more common than most people think. That’s why we have to store so very many of them in the vault, or the price would collapse overnight. Don’t worry: I think we can spare a diamond or two.

“Now, let’s not leave that nice Mr Sibanda waiting outside a moment longer. We should go out for dinner – or do you lovebirds want to be alone?”

- ENDS -

13,500 words © Bryony Marsh, 2022

Thanks for reading ‘Carbon’: I hope you enjoyed it! Reviews are always appreciated and if you want more Bryony Marsh in your life you can find news, views and other authorbabble at https://bryonymarsh.wordpress.com/

If you’d like to put something in my ‘tips jar’, I have a collection of books for sale on Amazon. You might like the romance of ‘My Constant Moon’ or the adventure of ‘Egyptology’; the kink of ‘Schooled’ or the hard sci-fi of ‘In Armour Clad’. As always, Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read for free.

 
Caught Out

He was running away from home – if you could still call it home.

Shawn’s mother had remarried when he was twelve. The result hadn’t been an out-and-out battle for Lorraine Dyson’s affections, but son and new husband had never exactly warmed to each other. Then came the news that Lorraine was terminally ill.

Cancer.

She died just eight months later. In the aftermath, both stepfather and son felt trapped. The watchful, almost resentful silence that existed between the two survivors never quite erupted into hot words, but simmered along in the form of mutual incomprehension. The reluctant stepfather’s occasional, half-hearted forays into parenting all but ended when he discovered that Shawn had kept so many of his mother’s things.

Not all of them the right things: jewelry, books, photos… but a large collection of items, including many of her clothes.

One day he came home early and found Shawn dressed in Lorraine’s things and wearing her makeup.

Shawn was shocked and ashamed – of course. He felt the awkwardness that would suffuse any young boy, not entirely comfortable with the gender role that fate has dealt him, when his foray into crossdressing was discovered by a family member.

The effect was magnified, though, because the person who had stumbled into his secret world was still half a stranger – and his sole guardian as well. The shame increased still further because he wasn’t merely dressed as a girl, but dressed as the dead wife of the person who discovered him.

And he had her eyes! He really did conjure up something of his departed mother.

For Shawn, when his stepfather turned and abruptly left the house, there was only one answer: he would have to go.

Having no idea what his stepfather’s eventual reaction would be, nor how long it would be before he returned, Shawn hurriedly threw some items into a rucksack. Leaving the house for what he assumed must be the last time, he chose to wear a denim jacket that had previously belonged to his mother.

Some hours later he was shivering beneath a bridge as he watched a train being shunted together. He’d seen videos on YouTube about freight hopping; catching out; riding from city to city with a load of cargo. Something about it resonated – and it fit his budget, which was as near to zero as made no difference.

The denim jacket wasn’t enough to keep out the cold and damp, but it offered comfort of another kind.

He was still wearing a pair of his mother’s panties, as well.

At last there came a hiss of air, indicating that the brakes were released and the train was about to move.

Shawn left the safety of the shadows, heading down to the track for a closer look at the cars. He didn’t know enough to identify a “ride” from a distance, so he had to use the next minute or two to find something suitable.

The steady drizzle ensured that no railway worker stayed out longer than they had to. Nobody walked the length of the train, nor stayed to watch closely as it began to move.

Shawn ran from one car to the next, looking for a place to ride. Most of the cars carried intermodal containers. This didn’t necessarily rule them out in itself, but upon closer inspection they were all the “suicide” type – lacking a floor where you could lie down, out of sight, to enjoy a free ride without having to worry about falling under the train.

Some experienced freight hoppers would “ride suicide” for a short journey, but Shawn wanted a place where he could lay out his bedroll and sleep. He wanted to stay on board until he was a long, long way south.

He wished there were ‘grainers’ on the train: from the videos he’d seen, grainers commonly had a space within their welded steel structure that was perfect for hiding out –but it seemed that no cereal crops were grown nearby.

A boxcar, then?

No – if he’d wanted to ride in a boxcar he would have needed to select it while it was stationary. Then he could have gone through the complicated process of breaking the seal and getting the sliding door open… and wedging it open, too. There were stories about hoboes who’d been trapped inside a boxcar when the door slid shut: invariably they’d died of thirst by the time they were found.

The intermodals were rolling past, gradually picking up speed. Shining a flashlight from beneath to inspect each one, Shawn found nothing but suicides. He knew that there were some tank cars at the very end of the train: one of those might offer a place to sit but by the time they reached his position they’d be moving much too fast for him to climb aboard.

If you can’t count the bolts on the wheel, the train’s moving too fast to board – that was the rule. One of many pieces of hobo wisdom that YouTube had imparted.

What then? If he couldn’t catch out, he’d have to go back home to face his stepfather again. To face questions that he would find it impossible to answer.

What to do? What to do?
He almost abandoned the attempt, reasoning that he’d missed his chance. In any case, he rationalized, he badly needed a piss.

That, though, was the fear.

He’d never done anything like this. There was the fear of being caught trespassing, plus the frightening noise and motion from the immense freight train. Passenger trains were tame in comparison – and were normally seen from platform level. This rust-fringed, graffiti-clad machine was a monster!

Already it was moving too fast to board safely. Shawn wondered if he could face a night of rough camping, in the hope of having better luck with the next train.

Out of the darkness there loomed a railcar of a different shape. Just one: a gondola, amid the seemingly endless procession of containers. There was no opportunity to appraise the vehicle, beyond ascertaining that it had the one feature without which a freight hop would be impossible: a ladder.

Shawn turned and ran back the way he had come – unable to match the speed of the train, but doing what he could to reduce the disparity. When the ladder came past, he reached out: snagged it with both hands and hung on with all the strength he could muster. Somehow, he got a foot on the bottom rung, laughing out loud like some kind of lunatic. It had been a close call: if he hadn’t managed that last frantic heave he could easily have fallen beneath the wheels.

But there he was, on the ladder.

Holy balls, he thought to himself: I’ve done it. I’ve caught out!

He began to climb, but was stopped almost at once: the rucksack that he’d slung over one shoulder was caught on something. He couldn’t see what the problem was and brute force didn’t solve it.

The gondola would soon pass the prefab building where train crews loafed between jobs. The area around it was well illuminated and Shawn feared that he would be seen if he was still clinging to the ladder. It would be a simple matter to make a radio call, to stop the train and search for the freeloader.

He slipped the remaining strap off his shoulder, supporting the whole unwieldy mass with one hand. He lowered it a little, in the hope that whatever had snagged might come free, but it didn’t work. Then came a fearful lurch as the gondola’s wheels found some imperfection in the track. His feet lost their grip on rain-slick rungs of the ladder. One of them found the rung below, although only after a sharp blow to his shin. He swung precariously… and abandoned his grip on the rucksack.

Able to use both hands again, he managed the climb. He reached the lip of the gondola and just in time, he swung himself over, dropping down into the filthy interior so that he was hidden from view. The lights of the crew station shone briefly through a row of slots in the side of the gondola before Shawn was swept off into darkness, the train still accelerating.

From the elation of having caught out to disaster in perhaps five seconds.

His rucksack was gone.

There hadn’t been much in it and still less of it would have been of any real use to him: in abandoning his old life he had sought to keep as much of his mother as he could.

Even so, there’s a good deal of difference between not having much and having nothing at all. Shawn had been traveling light – the only sensible strategy for a freight hop – but now he had nothing. A single set of clothes; twenty dollars concealed inside his left sock; a pocketknife; a flashlight; some nickels and dimes.

Even if this reversal of fortune had made him want to abandon the adventure, the train was still picking up speed and the lights of the town were far behind. If he bailed now and broke an ankle… no chance.

So: he was staying.

+++

A more experienced freight hopper would have discovered where the train was headed. Some guys used a radio scanner, or had learned to make sense of freight timetables. Some hoboes would simply ask the train crew where they were headed: not all rail employees begrudged them a ride.

Shawn didn’t know the eventual destination of his ride, other than the fact that it had started out going southbound. If there had been anybody to ask him where he was headed, he would probably have answered “Away from here.”

Sometimes, wanderlust is enough of a purpose in itself, although the journey that one imagines is probably a lot more glamorous than the reality.

Belatedly, Shawn remembered that a lot of freight hoppers used earplugs. The screeching when the train encountered even the gentlest curve was maddening, as was the shuddering series of booms and thuds each time the train changed its speed and the couplings stretched and compressed, like a concertina.

Worst of all, it was cold.

The drizzle turned to sleet sometime in the night. Shawn scrunched himself into the smallest shape he could manage, trying to shield himself from the worst of the wind behind the lip of the gondola, but the vortices of cold air were relentless. A new strategy was needed.

Examining the load within the car, he thought that he might be more comfortable if sheltering under some of the plastic sheeting that covered the cargo. It would be almost as good as having a tent: just cut a slit and wriggle underneath.

In the dark and with the grime that covered everything, he never saw the ‘biohazard’ symbol on the thick plastic sheeting – and even if he had, what other choice did he have, except perhaps to freeze to death?

He slit the plastic, lifted a flap of it and squeezed inside. He shivered for a while, but at last he found that he was retaining enough of his body heat. He relaxed, some. He was lying on some kind of soft grey powder, finding that it made a surprisingly good mattress.

It was well after midnight, but Shawn had no idea of the time. He didn’t own a watch and he’d deliberately left his cellphone behind. It was hidden between the seat cushions on a crosstown bus, to confuse anyone that might be looking for him. Runaways who bring their cellphone along don’t tend to remain at liberty for long.

Whatever time it was, Shawn was tired. Despite the noise and his anxiety, he surrendered to sleep.

+++

Concentrated bisformyl trihydroxy isopropyl methylnaphthalene is a curious substance. In an economy governed by market forces and with any sort of legislation against hazardous materials it shouldn’t exist… but somebody had produced some.

Perhaps it was a byproduct, or the result of a mistake. For whatever reason, there was a railcar load of the hazardous material… and Shawn had bedded down in it.

It coated much of his skin as he wormed his way inside, seeking to shelter from the cold. He breathed it in, too. As he slept, it permeated his cells – and then it really got to work.

His body changed. Flesh became gelatinous; bones softened. They all but dissolved and the whole mess was only kept from flowing away by a fibrous outer layer that formed as the aggressive biological reaction took place. Within, his body fluoresced – although there was nobody to see it.

If the process had been interrupted, it might have been interpreted as an attempt to dispose of a body with some kind of solvent. Almost everything that had been Shawn was liquefied. Chemical and biological processes interacted in ways only vaguely understood by the best geneticists who study fetal development.

Shawn was dead, of course. Nobody could have survived that assault… but a human body is nothing if not a collection of building materials and instructions for life.

When the bisformyl trihydroxy isopropyl methylnaphthalene had nothing left with which to react, an extraordinary process of reintegration began.

In the morning, the train stopped. For six hours it languished in a siding until two unit trains had passed. There was another hitchhiker further back, but though he climbed down and wandered around for a while, he didn’t come close to where Shawn’s body lay.

Nobody climbed aboard the gondola, so the body was still undiscovered when the southward journey resumed.

Another night passed. Sometime during the afternoon, the train pulled into the Union Pacific yard in Alexandria, Louisiana.

+++

They called him a ‘Yard Bull’: a special agent of the railroad police. For more than a century, Greg Thompson and his ancestors had been playing cat-and-mouse with the bums who rode the rails. In the Great Depression the railroad police had only been able to keep things safe and orderly by administering a beating to anybody they caught – and some of his colleagues still thought along similar lines. Hoboes vandalized railroad property, interfered with cargoes and (of course) they risked their own dumb necks in the process. Thompson chased them away. He warned them off. Sometimes he brought them in. Trespassing could easily get a hobo two weeks in the Rapides Parish County Jail.

The yard in Alexandria was rare in that it had a decent suite of infrared cameras. Few places had anything like them and the low level of investment that the railways were seeing suggested that it would be a long, long time before they became the norm.

Thompson was chewing the fat with two engineers that he knew when they all saw the bright blob appear on the monitor. Somebody was moving around, out in the yard. The thermal camera didn’t allow any detail to be seen, but from the way he was staggering and using the cars for support, the trespasser had to be high.

Thompson heaved himself up, muttering a curse. He went out to catch the trespasser.

What he found surprised him. It wasn’t one of the usual denizens of the freight yard: the derelicts, the punk kids or the drug addicts. Instead, he found a young girl.

When the beam of his torch fell upon her she was lapping at the rainwater that had collected on the top of an old fifty-five gallon drum. She was as bald as an egg and she wore a faded denim jacket. She was covered with dust, too: something like flour.

She stopped drinking at once, alerted by the light. She turned towards him, blinking comically but otherwise regarding him passively. He saw now that she wore a tee, its graphic declaring allegiance to some band he didn’t recognize, plus some panties but nothing else on her legs. She was barefoot, too.

Thompson’s usual yard bull persona, his half of the endless dance between authority and trespassers, deserted him.

He angled the flashlight away, so it wouldn’t cause her discomfort.

“You okay, sweetie?” he asked.

She just stared.

Rape victim, he surmised.

Moving slowly, he pulled the walkie-talkie from his belt. He raised the engineers in the control room.

“You seeing anybody else on the cameras?” he demanded.

“Ahh… nope,” came the reply. “I see you… and you’re right on top of the trespasser. Can’t you see him?”

“Her,” said Thompson. “I found her. But you keep watching and let me know if anybody else is moving out here, okay?”

“Okay, Greg,” came the reply.

“I think you should come with me now,” Thompson told the girl, as gently as he could.

She didn’t move.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She said nothing.

He had to take her hand and lead her away. She didn’t flinch when he touched her, which surprised him, but he decided it was probably a good sign.

He had to guide her, moving slowly because she was barefoot. She didn’t give any indication that she understood him, but neither did she object. She moved unsteadily and he guessed that she must be drugged. When they reached his cruiser he wrapped a space blanket about her. She accepted this, but didn’t seem to have the sense to keep the flimsy sheet in place. She didn’t obey when he asked her to sit in the car, but neither did she resist when he eased her gently into a seat.

He drove her to the precinct, where he could have simply handed her over for processing but he stayed awhile. Although the state troopers were efficient enough and they acknowledged him as a fellow professional, there was the usual slight disconnect between their interests and his own. He suspected that the girl would simply be put in a cell until morning, when it might be hoped that whatever drug was affecting her had left her system. They’d discover her name and send her home.

For an overworked police department with bigger problems to manage, perhaps this approach was inevitable. It didn’t exactly live up to their motto of “Courtesy, Loyalty, Service” but when your resources were stretched thin it was sometimes all you could do just to keep a lid on things.

Thompson led the girl toward an interview room. From what he had already seen, he suspected that the “interview” would be a waste of time… but better than simply locking her up, perhaps.

In the corridor he saw a friendly face: that of Trooper Caitlyn Brown.

“Kate!” he beamed, “Got a minute?”

The state trooper regarded the girl, who was looking around the place as if she’d never seen anything like it before. Still barefoot, with the space blanket wrapped around her.

“Sure, Greg. Who’s this?”

“We’re not sure,” he replied.

“Oh.”

Caitlyn Brown had seen a lot of nasty things in five years of police work. Already her imagination was at work – and she didn’t like any of the possibilities that suggested themselves.

“Okay, honey,” she said to the girl, who stared at her mutely. “Let’s go have a sit down, shall we?”

They brought her some clothes – disposable, papery garments. The girl didn’t seem to know how to put them on and Caitlyn had to dress her as one would a toddler. Thompson took the denim jacket and went through the pockets. The garment was filthy inside and out, the dust suggesting that she must have been riding with a load of flour, gypsum or something. There was a flashlight in one pocket, but nothing to indicate the girl’s identity.

They brought her a glass of water. Though she held it clumsily, she drank it straight down. They brought her another and she did the same. A third remained untouched, though.

Neither of them could get a word out of the strange girl; no real reaction of any kind, in fact.

They called for a medic to examine her and when the doctor arrived, he went through the standard process of sample collection. He, too, assumed she might be a rape victim and in such cases there was no time to be lost. In his examination he found nothing to suggest that this was the case, although her demeanor troubled him. He took blood samples for analysis and declared that she belonged in the Rapides Regional Medical Center. He called for an ambulance and she was transferred, to be kept under observation.

+++

Thompson went back to the yard and poked around, but found nothing to explain the arrival of the strange girl. He could never have searched every railcar in time and he didn’t look in the single gondola at all. The train was being broken up, but before it moved Thompson had time to search inside the distributed power units. One of them had clearly been used by a hobo at some point in the recent past: some bottles of water had been consumed and the john had been used – none too hygienically. On the deck, beneath the engineer’s chair, he found toenail clippings. They were the large, hard, horn-like toenails of an old man, though: probably nothing to do with the mystery girl. Just another goddamned hobo taking a free ride at Uncle Pete’s expense.

Thompson went to speak with the engineers, but they’d seen nothing.

Engineers, in Thompson’s opinion, seldom did. He knew that some of them turned a blind eye to their hitchhikers, but this case might be more serious. He explained this, but still the railroad staff had nothing to tell him.

The next day, he went to the Regional Medical Center, to find that Caitlyn was there ahead of him.

“How’s our Jane Doe?” he asked.

She showed him into the room and they found the girl sleeping. There was a saline drip in place, but no other evidence of medical intervention.

“They say she’s recovering from dehydration,” Caitlyn explained. “Physically, there’s nothing else wrong with her.”

“Hmm,” Thompson considered this. “And… mentally?”

“I’d say she’s showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder – but I’m not an expert.”

“Has she said anything?”

“Nope. They’re not even sure she can speak.”

Thompson scratched at the stubble on his chin. He wished he had cleaned up, some. He liked Caitlyn.

“What do you think happened to her?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” she spread her hands. “Hey – here’s the doc.”

Thompson hadn’t met the doctor before, but he was impressed by her manner. She seemed to understand at once what he needed from her, if he was to solve the mystery that the girl represented.

“She really is a Jane Doe,” Doctor Anna Walker began. “There are fillings in two of her teeth and she recently cut her foot on something, but other than that there are no injuries at all – and that means no clues to her earlier life.”

Thompson was processing this, but the doctor mistook his ‘thinking’ face for one of incomprehension. She tried to spell it out for the flatfoot.

“A person’s body always shows signs of what he or she does with it. Sports can give you telltale injuries, or influence your musculature if you keep at them. Diet, habits, posture… even the way you hold a pen leaves a mark, eventually. This girl, though: she’s never even developed freckles.”

“So she’s been kept a prisoner?” Caitlyn suggested. “A modern-day Kaspar Hauser?”

“Maybe. But if so, she hasn’t been restrained and she hasn’t been raped. Her hymen’s intact.”

“Well that’s something, I guess.” Thompson had never raised children of his own, but if he had, he wouldn’t want any daughter of his to fall victim to one of the predators that you heard about.

“Yes. And one other thing…”

“Go on?”

“If she’s in any way traumatized, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. If there are unpleasant memories to suppress, she’s locked them away more thoroughly than most people ever do.”

“So she’s going to be like this for some time, then?” Caitlyn wondered how long the girl could remain in the hospital, with no name and nobody picking up the tab.

“How old would you say she is?” Thompson asked.

“It’s not easy to say. With that baby-soft skin, plus the way she never animates her face much… she’s going to seem younger than she really is. Also she’s very skinny – although not classically malnourished. So if I guess at fourteen, that could be plus or minus two years. Maybe more.”

Thompson sighed. He knew she might have been brought into the Yard from just about anywhere.

“Nobody’s listed a girl matching her description as missing,” Caitlyn put in. “Or not unless she’s been missing for years.”

Thompson shook his head. He knew that a girl as docile and compliant as this one couldn’t have been on the loose even for days, without something bad happening to her.

“At the very least she’d have picked up some bumps and scrapes if she’d been living on the streets,” he said, thinking out loud.

“I don’t suppose some other hospital might be missing a coma patient…?” Caitlyn ventured.

The doctor shook her head. “Not a chance. And in any event, a long-term hospital patient would show scarring from the insertion of cannulae, or other procedures. Even if she didn’t get bedsores.”

“So she’s not a runaway, she’s not an abductee and she’s not escaped from a hospital,” Thompson summarized. “What does that leave?”

“I have no idea,” the doctor replied.

+++

Thompson and Brown got a coffee. They continued to speculate about their Jane Doe.

“What age would she have had those teeth filled?” Caitlyn wondered.

“Hmm. Some time after she turned eight years old, I guess. Adult teeth, plus time to decay… so she’d have to be at least eight.”

“Older than that, unless she didn’t brush.”

Thompson grunted agreement.

“Okay,” he said next, “so who’s this dentist that does work on a girl who’s never been outside, in her whole life?”

“I get you,” Caitlyn replied. “He’s making house calls?”

“Seems unlikely.”

“Alright,” Caitlyn rubbed at her face, thinking hard. “Forget the dentist. What else have we got?”

“Denim jacket,” Thompson said. “Thrift store item, maybe? It’s old.”

“So were her panties,” Caitlyn said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. No teenage girl would wear that style. Plus they were too big for her – and when they were new she would have been, like, six years old.”

Thompson was impressed. He hadn’t given the panties a thought… but this was work for a detective, not a yard bull and a state trooper.

A shame, then, that no detective was particularly interested.

Jane Doe hadn’t been injured in any way; she hadn’t committed a crime, beyond trespassing; she hadn’t appealed to them for help; nobody was missing her. There was no case here – aside from the obvious mystery of a girl who didn’t belong.

“Fingerprints?” Thompson suggested, half-heartedly.

“We’re running a search, of course,” Caitlyn shrugged, “but she doesn’t match anything… or not yet. The results will take a while.”

Caitlyn considered the last donut bite on the plate between them.

“Do you think we could justify a DNA test?” she asked.

Unless there was some grisly murder on railway property, Thompson would never be able to persuade his bosses to pay for DNA profiling. Even now, they thought he was following up on the theft of some electronic goods that had been lifted from an intermodal container the week before. As far as they were concerned, the Jane Doe mystery had ended as soon as he was certain she hadn’t damaged railroad property.

Caitlyn thought she could slip the DNA sample into the workflow, next time there was a batch to be analyzed. They had the doctor swab the girl’s cheek, but by then the bisformyl trihydroxy isopropyl methylnaphthalene had long since completed its work.

When they got the profile back from the lab, they entered it into CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System – and got no hits at all.

“What does that mean?” Thompson demanded. He was going out on a limb, because he wasn’t a detective and he couldn’t really have justified his continued involvement in the case: it was no longer a matter concerning the railroad, after all. His chief thought he was out looking for a vandal who liked to take pot shots at crossing signage with a .22 rifle…

Fortunately, Thompson had Caitlyn on his side and she had been able to butter up the overworked technician, some.

“I have no idea what this means,” she said. “I don’t think it’s normal, though.”

They bought Doctor Walker some coffee and showed her the information.

“There’s got to be some mistake,” she said, looking through the printouts.

“What is it?” Caitlyn demanded.

“I’m no geneticist,” Doctor Walker warned them, “but… you know that humans have twenty-three chromosomes… right?”

“Right,” Caitlyn confirmed – though she was rapidly approaching the sum total of her knowledge in this area.

“There are twenty-three,” Thompson pointed out, looking at the printout again.

Each one was there, a little dark shape in a numbered box.

“Yes,” Doctor Walker said, “but broadly speaking, we should see twenty-three pairs.”

In the final box, just a single shape was visible.

“Give me a minute?”

She used her smartphone to search for the information she wanted.

“Okay, so it’s rare, but not unknown. We call it Turner syndrome – but it’s normally accompanied by a host of problems that our girl isn’t manifesting. Except –“

“What?” they both demanded.

“Unless it’s Ring-X Turner syndrome,” the doctor sighed. “That’s associated with a high probability of mental retardation.”

“I don’t accept that,” Thompson said, quietly.

He’d often been disappointed by humanity in the course of his job, but this was different: he felt crushed and suffocated. This latest piece of misfortune, heaped upon everything else that the mystery girl appeared to have suffered, was almost too much to bear.

“So that’s why she never speaks?” Caitlyn asked.

“We’re just speculating at this stage,” the doctor pointed out.

“Does this serve to explain how she came to be in a train yard, though?” Caitlyn dragged her thoughts back to police matters. “On her own… late at night?”

“Some people can’t cope,” Doctor Walker shrugged. “They do everything they can, for years… and then something snaps. Or their own health deteriorates. Her family probably abandoned her in town.”

“So she’ll be a ward of the court,” Thompson said grimly.

“Let’s find her a good foster family,” Caitlyn suggested.

“The best!” he agreed.

+++

Nobody contested their efforts to place the girl with the Wilsons. When she was discharged from the hospital, she would go to live with them.

Doctor Walker was pleased to be able to report some progress, too: during her stay in the hospital, Jane Doe had learned to control her bowels and also to feed herself with a spoon. She could now make two distinct sounds and the speech therapist thought she would be able to learn more.

“I may have to revise her prognosis,” the doctor smiled. “I thought she must be slow, but she picks things up very quickly.”

“So she’s not retarded?” Thompson demanded.

“Uh… she’s years behind, but she’s learning fast. It’s as if she were a blank slate – although medical opinion on how the human brain works doesn’t normally allow for such rapid learning in anybody once they’re old enough to walk.”

“Do me a favor?” the yard bull asked.

“What?”

“Don’t go telling your colleagues. I don’t want her… experimented on. She needs to be a normal kid for a while.”

Doctor Walker smiled as she signed the discharge. She never did reveal that their Jane Doe was in any way exceptional.

+++

Thompson had been invited to Caitlyn’s apartment, for pasta.

The case was cold – all but closed. She had highways to patrol; he had a freight yard to police. They seldom ran into each other in a professional capacity, but they tried to share any thoughts that they had, at least once a week.

They had a more thorough DNA printout, now. Neither of them knew enough to interpret it, but it was clearly chaotic. Whole chunks of her DNA were misplaced, transposed like a patchwork.

Thompson speculated while she poured him some wine. (He didn’t actually like red wine, but he didn’t like to say.)

“Call me crazy, but… could she be a clone?”

“A clone with dentistry,” Caitlyn pointed out. “Sorry, but… are there clones living among us now? For what purpose?”

“Experimentation,” he said. Because ambiguity can go where rationality fears to tread.

“So… what? You grow a clone with crazy DNA, but choose not to try teaching her anything. You feed her candy, then take her to the dentist… then abandon her in a freight yard when the experiment is over.”

Thompson recoiled.

“Ouch. Okay, what’s your hypothesis?”

Caitlyn wanted to salve his ego, so she made certain that her own suggestion was no less outlandish than his had been:

“Alien hybrid.”

“What?”

“She’s an alien hybrid. Human… alien… kind of thing.”

“Do you watch those kinds of movies, Trooper Brown?”

“Nuh-uh,” she replied, “but I do read those kinds of books.”

She indicated her bookcases. Liatorp, from Ikea: stuffed full of paperbacks from the ‘golden age’ of science fiction.

Thompson blinked.

“Okay, so what story are we in?”

“It’s not exactly The Body Snatchers – the pod people have all the memories and the scars of their victims – but lately I sometimes find myself wondering if Jane is a pod person. Or something like one.”

“Hey! Be nice!”

“You’re forgetting her unblemished skin and her complete fearlessness. Also the fact that she had no hair whatsoever on the day I met her, although it appears to have grown normally ever since. I’m telling you, she was as new as a day.”

“…Which is impossible,” Thompson countered.

Caitlyn grinned. “I’m just saying that until we know otherwise, we might do well to treat her right: just in case she’s the ambassador for some star-faring species.”

“Who’d you get that from?” Thompson demanded. “Robert Heinlein?”

“It’s… more of a Walter Stone Tevis thing, I think. Although I’m still hoping for a happy ending.”

“You and me both,” Thompson agreed, raising his glass.

Red wine wasn’t so bad after all.

+++

The Wilsons called their new charge “dear” for a week or so, but they knew that sooner or later she would need a name.

Caitlyn had never liked the repeated references to ‘Jane Doe’: that had seemed defeatist, somehow. When she suggested that they should all call the mystery girl Anthea, nobody had objected.

She didn’t tell them that it was the name of the alien planet in The Man Who Fell to Earth. Three months passed before Thompson got around to reading the copy she had loaned him – and by the time he understood her little joke it was too late to raise an objection.

+++

Although Thompson would be on duty later in the evening, their shift patterns had worked to produce what was almost a shared day off. They called the Wilsons to make sure that it was a good time and then drove over to visit Anthea.

She was playing on the lawn at the back of the house. She was covered in sunblock, but a few freckles had colonized her nose and cheeks all the same. She was, perhaps, filling out a little bit. Her face remained as serene and inscrutable as before, though.

“We come in peace,” Thompson muttered, but Caitlyn elbowed him in the ribs.

Anthea looked up, smiling.

“I’m playing with Dolly and Teddy!” she exclaimed. “Will you play?”

The speed with which her vocabulary had expanded was astonishing. Doctor Walker had warned them both that people who had to re-learn speech in later life never quite mastered the skill, but already Anthea sounded like a typical four year-old.

“We’d love to play,” Caitlyn said. They both sat down on the grass with her. It was teatime and Teddy was thirsty.

+++

Each time they visited her, they were astonished at how far she had gone to make up for lost time.

The Wilsons home-schooled Anthea. They reasoned that she was far too large for elementary school – and later they felt that she would have been held back by the slow pace of a normal classroom: the girl absorbed information like an energetic, delightful sponge.

Anthea loved playing with Riley, Caitlyn and Thompson’s daughter. They’d married almost two years after Anthea had come into their lives, and Riley had turned up before another year had passed. (Since they didn’t know Anthea’s true date of birth, they celebrated the date of her arrival instead.)

Now two years old, Riley clearly adored Anthea.

The Wilsons had hosted their share of mixed up kids over the years. They’d feared that Anthea would be their greatest challenge but as it turned out, she was an angel – if you could overlook her physical stature and just let her be a kid. She more than repaid their kindness and patience, bringing them more happiness than they could express.

Anthea was really good with children – and always fascinated by them. As she matured, her own ‘childhood’ remained a recent memory and she could always devise the best games. She said that she wanted to work in daycare, one day. Thompson suspected that she would be capable of a much more demanding job, but what the hell? It made her happy.

When Caitlyn suggested that one day Anthea might have children of her own, her eyes went wide, like saucers. It simply hadn’t occurred to her… yet here she was on the threshold of adulthood.

They guessed she was nineteen. Give or take.

She was a little below middling height, but very pretty. If she had but known it, she looked just like her lost and forgotten mother, Lorraine. Officers Thompson and Brown never had solved their most important case, though, so nobody would ever make that comparison.

She still had the denim jacket that she had been wearing when he found her. She felt a deep sense of attachment to it, although she couldn’t have said why. She didn’t wear it often because it had become quite fragile.

When she did, it brought a lump to Thompson’s throat. It made him appreciate Riley’s simple, safe childhood that much more. Once again, he swore to himself that he would keep his little girl safe.

That evening, Caitlyn smiled as they drove away from the Wilsons’ place.

“She turned out okay,” she said.

“She sure did,” Thompson agreed. “But I wish I knew what the hell happened to her.”

“When you have eliminated the impossible…” Caitlyn began. (It was one of her favorite quotes.)

“Whatever remains, however improbable…” Thompson took up the refrain.

“Must be aliens,” said Caitlyn.

“…”

It happened from time to time: Thompson was lost for words.

+++

All the cars on the US railroad network use Automatic Car Identification (ACI) – basically a glorified radio frequency identifier. Each time the ACI box passes a trackside sensor, it reports its whereabouts and this is evaluated by the master scheduling system.

The computer compares the identifier of the car against the schedule and makes any adjustments necessary, to get the car to its destination as efficiently as possible.

With one notable exception.

Some time back, a programmer was bribed to introduce what they call an “undocumented feature”. Whenever a certain range of digits is reported by the ACI, it corrupts the schedule, causing a data underflow that basically says “not here: send this car on to the next place in the list.”

Shawn’s gondola has been riding the rails for years, now. They even fitted it with a new axle last year – and then sent it out again. And all because a crook in a failing chemical company thought it would offer a cheap way to dodge his waste disposal obligations.

The bag of concentrated bisformyl trihydroxy isopropyl methylnaphthalene that Shawn slit open has been ruined by contamination and by the rain, but there are others in that gondola… and where one railcar exploits this system, perhaps there are others as well – all of them Flying Dutchmen, routing endlessly back and forth, all over the continent.

You never know where you’re going to end up, when you catch out.
 

+++

Author’s note:

Freight hopping is dangerous: please don’t attempt it unless you understand what you’re doing.

Bisformyl trihydroxy isopropyl methylnaphthalene is a real substance, although its real-world effect is somewhat diluted from that described in my story: it has been tested as a male oral contraceptive in China, though.

Most of my stories are free, like this one, but if you particularly enjoyed it, please consider putting something in my tips jar by purchasing one of my books on Amazon? (Or read for free with Kindle Unlimited...)

+++

Caught Out Copyright © 2015 Bryony Marsh

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Robert climbed wearily up the stairs from the basement, where he had stowed his bike. He was looking forward to a long, hot bath.

“Hi, Robert! Have you heard about the meteor shower tonight?”

“Er, no ...?” Robert found it hard to speak in anything but monosyllables when his beautiful neighbour spoke to him. Caught in the hallway they shared, just back from a long ride and clad in damp lycra, he was even more self-conscious than usual.

“I thought you might like to come up and watch with me, on the terrace?”

“Well, I...” Robert cast about for some excuse to use that wouldn’t make him seem too rude. She pouted.

“Come on!” she lightly punched his shoulder. “We’ve shared this place for two years or more and I hardly know you. I’m almost certain you haven’t got a girlfriend in there,” (she indicated the door to Robert’s flat) “So why not come up and have a glass of wine or two? After you’ve changed, of course. I promise I won’t bite!”

Robert found no good reason to refuse. Or at least, none beyond the fact that he was already fantasizing about his neighbour on a regular basis and might struggle to keep from acting like a lovestruck puppy if he didn’t maintain some degree of separation between them.

“What time...?” he asked weakly. She smiled.

“The meteors are already starting to appear, but it’ll be better once it’s completely dark. Just come up when you’re ready!”

“Okay. Sounds good!” Somehow he managed to smile at her without combusting on the spot.

“Lovely!” She bounded away, back upstairs, leaving him with the impression that she’d been listening out for him and had come downstairs purely to speak with him. Wow.

Inside his flat, he closed and locked the door. “Oh crap,” he said aloud, experimentally. It didn’t seem to help much. Janet – professor Janet MacDonald – was interested in him? Now?

Okay, he thought: this is what I wanted. Isn’t it?

No time for that bath, now: he’d have to make do with a quick shower. How long would it take to get the nail varnish off his toes? He didn’t know. But just in case he ‘got lucky’ (the signs were there, but this was confusing) he’d better remove it. Too bad he couldn’t do anything about his shaved legs, other than maybe tell her “Hey - great: I’ll see you in three or four months?”

“Shit.” Why now? he thought.

Because the meteor shower is happening now? Well... maybe. Never mind, he thought: she probably won’t want to get inside my pants on a first date. Perhaps this isn’t a date! But, God... I hope it is. I think.

Janet was so far out of his league, it was comical. It was unthinkable! Yes, he decided: he must be mistaken. To hell with it, he thought. I won’t make a fool out of myself – and to make sure I play it cool, I’ll leave my toenails painted. I’ll just have a drink, have a look at the sky and get out as soon as I can.

Robert hurried to and fro, putting a quick skim of polish on his shoes and finding his best shirt. It had been concealed behind his new dress: the one he had left on display so as to provide motivation. A gorgeous vintage-style tea dress in wine-coloured stressed satin, it hung on the door to the kitchen, positioned as if to save him from himself whenever his thoughts turned to food. The dress was the reason for his current strict regime of cycling and dieting.

Involuntarily, his fingertips strayed over the lace detailing at the hem and his pulse quickened.

Damn it! I wish I could wear that for my date, he thought. Why can’t I look pretty for her? I’d love to be able to look pretty for somebody.

Life was not fair, Robert Carlisle decided, although perhaps it was a bit better this evening than usual. He cast about for a bottle to take and found something that looked plausible. One of the few pieces of knowledge for which he would have thanked his father: the plainer the label, the more expensive the wine.

Time to go upstairs.

+++

Janet’s home was spread over the two upper levels of the building and included the rooftop terrace she had spoken of. Admiring the Edinburgh skyline in silhouette, Robert was impressed.

“Wow. What a view!”

“Yes, it’s quite something, isn’t it?” Janet already had a bottle of wine on the go, so she poured him a glass of that. She’d made appreciative noises over his offering, but he didn’t know whether she was just being a good hostess.

With a view like that, this place must have cost at least a million, he thought. It must be more than twice as big as my flat. I suppose it’s true about her making a fortune from that invention. Then he stopped thinking anything so mundane, as he saw his first meteor of the evening, and then another. In reds, oranges and yellows, they broke up, lighting up the sky like the best firework display in history. It was jaw-dropping.

They enjoyed the spectacle in silence for a long time. Then she moved closer and kissed him.

He started babbling about how a meteor shower precedes the major events in John Wyndham’s ‘The Day of the Triffids’.

“Maybe we should have, you know, watched with just one eye, in case we wake up tomorrow and discover that we’ve been blinded! I always told myself that’s what one ought to do. Just in case. Too late now, I suppose.”

Janet waited for his babbling to slow. At least he was talking to her, now.

“I can assure you, in my professional capacity,” she told him gravely, “that there are no such things as triffids.”

“Well I didn’t think there was such a thing as meteor showers like this!” he replied, gesturing. She had to kiss him again.

“Drink up,” she told him: and then poured him another glass.

He began to suspect that he was going to need it.

The kisses were good. In fact, they were pretty damn amazing. Robert felt himself being swept off his feet by her confidence, the wine, the amazing pyrotechnics above...

Get a grip, he told himself. She can’t be interested: not really.

He knew that Janet was an older woman, although you wouldn’t have believed it to look at her. From brief hallway conversations on various subjects during two years, he knew she had to be at least forty, to his mere twenty-nine. She had spoken of watching the Moscow Olympics on TV as a child; going on a ‘Ban the Bomb’ march; where she was when she learned that John Lennon had been killed. He felt like a child in her presence. She was almost impossibly clever: preeminent in some branch of physics that he couldn’t have named and the inventor of neosapphire – the miracle material that he understood was used in the manufacture of the new solar panels that covered the rooftops of half the world. One day, giving in to his infatuation, he’d looked her up on Wikipedia and learned that if she got even the tiniest bit of royalties from the solar panels that she had invented, she might be the wealthiest person in Edinburgh.

And yet... she was kissing him?

Robert was a junior manager in a call centre, a small cog in a financing business that was American-owned, nowadays. He’d started off as a ‘cubicle rat’ shortly after graduating, thinking the job was just going to pay the bills until he found something better, but there weren’t many jobs that demanded a degree in medieval art history. The interest in art remained just a hobby and the stop-gap became a career, of sorts. He’d moved up the ladder a little... and that was that.

Janet stopped kissing and interrupted his ruminations.

“Just in case we wake up and find that we’ve been struck blind, Day of the Triffids style, do you want to stay here tonight?”

“I’m... not sure,” he answered, huskily.

Maybe it’ll be dark enough that she won’t see my toes? He wondered. Maybe I can just dive into bed? Maybe I can keep my socks on? Maybe she’s tipsy enough not to notice? But what about the legs... the legs... God damn it, why did I have to shave my legs?

Robert had been shaving his legs ever since he’d been able to afford to live alone. He seldom slept in anything but a nightdress and didn’t even own any male sleepwear. For the first time in years, he felt that his femme life was impacting badly upon his ‘real’ life, rather than being a source of comfort.

Maybe I can convince her it’s a cycling thing: I could say I need hairless legs, or there’s a lot of unpleasant chafing. But of course that doesn’t explain the toenails. God damn it, why didn’t I remove the nail varnish?

“You look nervous,” she said.

“Well,” he mumbled, “Yes.”

“I thought the kissing was going pretty well,” Janet grumbled.

“Mmm. But I need to go.” Robert tried to extricate himself, gently.

“You really don’t.”

“I... need to go. Can I see you later?”

“You can see me now. If you like.” Janet smiled a sad smile.

“I’m... wow. Um. Thank you,” Robert floundered, “But I must go.”

“Are you wearing lingerie?”

“What!” Robert was horrified.

“I said, are you wearing lingerie?”

“No,” Robert replied in a small voice.

“Oh. Sorry,” Janet placed a hand on his forearm. “I just thought perhaps that was why you were reluctant to, you know, stay... and get undressed. And if that seems like a really weird thing to ask you out of the blue, it’s just that I recognise the branding on some of the cardboard boxes that the postman leaves in the hallway. I order from Figleaves myself, sometimes...”

Robert just blinked. His heart was pounding so hard, he could hear it.

“I’m not wearing lingerie,” he said at last, weakly. It wasn’t much of a denial, but would have to serve.

“Oh. Well I am,” she replied. “I’ll just have to be fabulous enough for both of us, won’t I? In fact, I rather hoped to get your opinion on this little number...”

She started undoing the buttons on her blouse. It was Robert’s undoing as well. He was helpless in the hands of this mature, self-assured and apparently accepting woman. They left the terrace, bound for her bedroom, while the shooting stars rained down.

In the space of perhaps three minutes, Robert Carlisle went from feeling like the luckiest man in the world, to fearing he was the world’s worst lover.

“Never mind, sweetie,” she said. “You don’t have to get it right first time. In fact, you don’t have to get it right in the first ten times, as long as you promise me you’ll keep on trying.”

He could have wept. Seeing this, she pulled him in for a kiss. Afterwards, she spoke: “You got a little bit too excited, I think. How long has it been?”

Robert had to think. “Seven years? No, eight.” That dreadful, misguided attempt to conform in his final year of university. It hadn’t been a happy time.

“What? Seriously?” Janet hugged him. “Baby, I’m surprised you lasted as long as you did. That’s quite a dry spell.”

He mumbled something apologetic.

“Hey! Don’t you dare go to sleep!” She snuggled in close, trying another tactic: “Tell me about the packages.”

“The what?”

“The lingerie, in the post.”

“Oh. You don’t mind?” Robert still couldn’t quite believe it.

“I don’t mind, sweetie.”

“Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that I’m a transvestite.”

“Woo... three syllables!” She nipped at his earlobe. “Careful: you might set a new personal record for communication.”

“I’ve never been able to talk.” He shrugged. “Not really talk to anybody.”

“What a waste! You’re cute! You’ve got a sweet face, you always smell clean and you have the best pedicure I’ve seen in a long time...”

“Oh, you noticed those?” Robert blushed, for about the hundredth time.

“Uh-huh. I think you’re cute little toes look lovely.” She kissed his neck. “Did you do them yourself?”

“Of course!”

She shuffled down the bed, flinging the duvet aside. She inspected them closely in the half-light. “Gorgeous job. You can do mine sometime, if you like.”

“I’d love to.”

She kissed each toe, methodically, then slowly worked her way back up his his body, running her tongue up his left leg as she did so. Then she licked her way up his torso, until finally she lay atop him.

“Nice and smooth,” she commented.

“Er... you too,” he replied.

“What, you thought I might have a hairy chest?” she laughed – then moved so that her breasts hung down and nuzzled against his face and a nipple found its way to his mouth.

“Mngn,” he said, sucking. It seemed like an adequate sort of denial, considering the feelings his tongue was provoking.

“You never did give me your expert opinion on my underwear,” she complained presently, lazily plucking the nipple from his mouth, obliging him to speak.

“God, you were fantastic. What brand was it?”

Her bra was in the bed, where it had been discarded in the heat of the moment. She reached for it and showed him the label. “Aubade,” she said. It was a gorgeous half-cup design, in pink, with darker embroidery and a delicate bow nestled between the cups.

She laid it on his chest, positioned as if he were the one wearing the bra.

“I couldn’t really afford anything like this,” Robert lamented. Caught up in this strange night of revelations, he didn’t notice how quickly he’d gone from concealing everything, to having virtually no secrets at all.

“It’s beautiful,” he said as she traced the edges of each cup on his chest.

“So are you, sweetie,” she said. Then her eyes widened as she felt herself nudged by his erection. “Mister Carlisle, I do believe you’re getting ready for round two!”

Round two was better, and round three, sometime during the night, was better still.

+++

Robert woke with a start, not quite knowing where he was.

He regarded the sleeping Janet almost fearfully. What was etiquette for the morning after, he wondered. Would she regret what had happened? Would she want him gone? Would they share an awkward breakfast?

He needn’t have worried. Moments later she stretched luxuriously, like a cat, and regarded him with a smug impression.

“We should have done that a long time ago,” she observed.

“Hmm. Better late than never?”

“Yes. Thank you. Give me a minute and I’ll get some coffee on.”

It was chilly in the rest of the flat as they’d left the terrace doors open all night. She found him a robe, and another for herself. The promised coffee was made and she defrosted some croissants as well.

“What do you want to do today?”

“I hadn’t really thought,” he replied.

“It’s Sunday. Where do you normally go on a Sunday? I never see you around the place.”

Robert hesitated, then told her: “I like to spend Sundays ‘en femme’. My last chance before another shitty week begins. You seldom saw me on Sunday because I generally stay inside, dressed.”

“I love how you say ‘dressed’ – it sounds as if everybody else is naked.”

Robert conceded the point. “It is a bit ridiculous, I suppose.”

“So what do you do, confined to your rooms?”

“Read magazines. Cook dinner. Pamper myself. I don’t know: just stuff.”

“I see! I’ve not got a lot on either,” she pressed, “so can I spend the day with my new girlfriend?”

Robert pondered the practicalities of this. It would take him at least an hour and a half to transform himself. He was a perfectionist and he was never very happy with his look. To have to reveal his femme self to Janet, so soon: not easy!

She sensed his discomfort. “Would you let me help you get ready? I’m a dab hand with a kohl pencil...”

Robert wondered if he wanted to allow somebody into his hideaway: his most secret place... but this wasn’t ‘somebody’... it was Janet. The woman he’d had a secret fascination for: who had invited him to spend the night and who wasn’t repelled by the thought of him in lingerie. She wanted to spend the day with him. Or rather, with his femme self. That mad, passionate night didn’t have to be a one-off! Wow. She wants me.

“What do I call you, when you’re ‘dressed’, sweetie? Roberta? Bobbie? Oooh... Bobbi with an ‘i’?”

“Alice.”

“Really?”

“Yes. As in ‘Through the Looking Glass’.”

Janet smirked.

“So, you don’t like my name?”

“I think it’s adorable, but you don’t fuck like an Alice.”

“You never know with us quiet, bookish types,” he said. “We have the element of surprise on our side.”

They agreed to spend the day together, starting with a trip downstairs to transform Robert into Alice. Janet admired the tea dress and said she’d love to see him in it sometime soon, but it was a bit much for slobbing around the flat in. Robert ran a deep bath (made deeper still when Janet joined him) but he shooed her out so that he could shave. Asking permission, she went through to the bedroom and picked out some underwear for him.

“My God, lover...” she called out. “It’s like every day is a special day for you!”

“How do you mean?”

“Suspender belts, corsets... don’t you ever just wear a teeshirt bra and cotton panties?”

“Not really,” he confessed. “My ‘Alice time’ is limited, so I like to be aware of what I’m wearing. I don’t really go for comfort.”

She put her head around the bathroom door. “So, do you want to be uncomfortable today, baby?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Yum!” she replied, deciding upon the lemon-coloured corset that she had found.

Robert completed his lengthy shaving routine, dried off, moisturised and joined Janet in the bedroom. He was in a daze.

I still can’t believe she actually wants me to look like this! He thought.

It seemed that she did, though. Janet had picked out a taupe box pleat skirt for him to wear, and a blouse that closely matched the corset. He didn’t recognise it.

“This? I ran upstairs to fetch it. It should fit you and I think you’ll look delicious.”

“You don’t think the skirt is too short?” Robert fretted, “I’ve never actually worn it.”

“It’ll show off your cute legs, silly!” Janet insisted that they try it.

With some trepidation, Robert started dressing. The panties that matched the corset were simple enough and he found that he felt less self-conscious once he was wearing something. The corset came next.

“Oooh, can I help? I’ve always wanted to do this!” Janet heaved on the laces with gusto – something that Robert hadn’t been able to do when dressing alone.

“Have you never...” Robert found himself short of breath and had to try again. He needed to learn to breathe properly in the corset. “Have you never worn one?”

“No. What’s it like?”

“It’s amazing. It affects every little movement. It forces me to think about my posture. You said we were going to slob around, but nobody can be a slob in a tight corset.”

“You look adorable,” Janet prompted. “Let’s see you with the stockings on.”

Robert complied: then had to fight her off. “Not yet! I’m not dressed! If you want to meet Alice, you need to be patient.”

Reluctantly, Janet waited.

Robert finished dressing and sat at his dressing table. Janet watched in fascination as his painstakingly-applied makeup altered his appearance. She helped when invited.

“Bloody hell,” she complained, “Now I feel under-dressed...”

Robert completed his makeup, put on a necklace and then opened a cabinet to reveal three wigs, each resting on stands. He chose the brunette that most closely matched his own colouring, hoping this would seem more natural to Janet.

He placed it on his head, fussed with it for a minute and turned to her, anxiously.

“Hi, Alice,” she said.

“Hi,” he replied.

“Alice, I have to ask...”

“What is it?” He hated the awkwardness between them.

“Am I allowed to kiss you, when you’re... Alice?”

“Do you want to?” He smiled a shy, hopeful smile.

“Yes. May I?”

He shrugged; nodded. She kissed him: it started out as a brief, tender kiss but she had to prolong it when she tasted his lipstick. Her tongue invaded his mouth.

“Don’t you dare mess up my makeup!” he objected. “You saw how long it took!”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let you keep it on for a while, but God: you’re hard to resist.”

They read together on the sofa, she frequently stroking him and interrupting his thoughts with whispers of how pretty he looked. After a while she fetched some nail care products and worked upon his hands. She filed the nails slowly and carefully, teasing him with remarks about how nice those nails would feel scratching down her back. She left them short but beautifully tidy, then added a coat of ridge filler.

“If I stop now, you won’t have to remove anything for work tomorrow,” she suggested.

“Okay,” he sighed.

“Or I could give them a clear gloss – but it might be a bit noticeable.”

“Better not.”

She applied just the matte layer. “At least this way you’ll still have some on. You can think of me when you’re at work tomorrow.” She winked.

“I doubt I’ll be thinking about much else, to be honest.”

He made lunch: a light meal that seemed appropriate, given the constriction of his waist. Afterward Janet cleared away the dishes, then pushed him down on the sofa and climbed on top of him.

“Sorry Alice,” she said, “but if I have to think about you in that corset for one more second, while not being allowed to play with you, I’m going to go crazy!”

“Mmnf,” He said, kissed into submission. A questing hand found its way under his skirt and tugged his panties down far enough that his erection sprang free...

+++

In the week that followed he doubted that he achieved anything worthwhile at work. He slipped into daydreams about Janet and the games they shared; couldn’t wait for the working day to end. Returning to his flat, he didn’t attempt to transform himself completely, but would shower and put on clean clothes: lingerie beneath a shirt and trousers. Then he’d go upstairs, or invite her down to his place and they would share a meal, spend some quality time together... and go to bed. Robert thought the sex was astonishingly good, although he still had a tendency to a little too excited. He got into the habit of attending to her needs before his own, just to be sure.

At last it was Friday night, which meant it didn’t matter if they stayed up late. Janet demanded a visit from Alice and prepared a meal while Robert fussed over his transformation.

Robert, in his Alice persona, climbed the stairs to her front door and found it ajar. Delicious smells greeted him and he realised he was starving! He gave a knock, just to be polite, and went on in.

“Alice!” Janet hugged him. “I’ve missed you.”

She pulled out a chair and Robert sat. “Dinner’s ready... just give me a minute...”

The food was good, but the company was better. Robert was entranced. He tried his best to project natural, feminine table manners and was rewarded with encouraging smiles from Janet. He took smaller bites than he might have, and little sips of wine. He ate less than he might have liked, but it seemed appropriate. (Also, it got him one step closer to that tea dress hanging on his kitchen door...)

He enjoyed the girl talk he shared with Janet and sensed that she did too. He still couldn’t quite believe it – didn’t understand why this gorgeous woman wanted to indulge in his fantasy games – but apparently she did, so he didn’t protest.

They didn’t have a dessert – just an espresso, on the terrace. “No meteors tonight, but the view is better, I think,” Janet teased. Then she took him to bed and did her best to fuck his brains out.

When he woke it was early, but he found Janet had left the bed. He padded through to the living room, where she was watching television with the sound turned right down. There had been an earthquake in Quito and the news channels were showing nothing else. It looked to have been a bad one: collapsing buildings and fires were bad enough, but there had been mudslides too. Whole, sprawling suburbs seemed to have been wiped away. With depressing regularity, newscasters reported revised death tolls that mounted steadily and soon passed twenty thousand. It was obvious the number would go a lot higher in the days to come.

They both cried. The images were too upsetting to do otherwise, but despite the newness of their relationship Robert felt comfortable crying with her.

“Urgh! This is too depressing,” Janet exclaimed at last. “You want to go back to bed?”

Robert shrugged. “Okay.”

“Well, don’t force yourself,” she exclaimed, then brightened: “Hey – I’ve got a present for you!”

The gift box she handed him was from Rigby and Peller. It contained a beautiful underwear set: bra, briefs and suspender belt in bottle-green silk. She handed him some stockings to complete the set.

“Try ’em on?”

“Oh, this must have cost a fortune,” Robert breathed.

“You’re damn right it did, missy,” she grinned. “It’s kind of incumbent upon you to put out now, to show your appreciation.”

“Alright,” said Robert, feeling the familiar fluttering of butterflies that accompanied his most intense dressing experiences. “But I don’t have a gift for you,” he said sadly.

“You can be my present,” she said, simply. “Now, shall we?”

+++

Janet came in with a mug of coffee. Still in his bra, suspender belt and stockings, Robert sleepily sat up in bed and accepted the drink.

“Sweetie, I need to tell you about my research.”

Robert arranged some pillows behind him and sipped his coffee. “Do you think I’ll be able to understand you?”

“Don’t fret. I’ll say it in words of one... thing.”

“Eh?”

“Well, I was going to say ‘syllable’,” Janet dissolved in laughter.

“Er?”

“It’s you. You always used to talk to me in such dreadful, stunted sentences!”

“Sorry,” Robert said. After a moment he grinned.

“Don’t you dare!”

“What?” He couldn’t stop smiling.

“Stop playing the strong silent type, twinkletoes!”

He blushed. “I was so tongue-tied. I was nuts about you!”

“You were? But you’re over it now?”

“Am! I am nuts about you!”

“Well okay then. Now are you going to listen nicely?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Oooh, I like that. Hold that thought. No, wait: don’t distract me...”

Janet settled herself on the foot of the bed, cross-legged and facing him. He was about to make some quip about hoping that her students didn’t get one-to-one instruction such as this, but he sensed that this wasn’t a time for jokes.

“You don’t need to understand anything about quantum states, superposition, string theory, subatomic particles or anything else – or you won’t need to if you’ll just take my word for it that I studied all those things and had a breakthrough.”

“Okay...?” Robert sipped his coffee again. It seemed best just to let her talk.

“Basically, a few years ago, some people I work with found something odd in the way that matter and energy tend to organise themselves. In layman’s terms, we found the blueprint for the universe.”

“What does it say?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean... what was on the blueprint?”

“Oh. Well... anything you like.”

“What does that mean?”

“Good question. It means one can make changes to the substructure of the universe.”

“What kind of changes?”

“Well... anything, really. Of course, that sounds incredibly risky. A person who edited the universe would have to take precautions to make sure they didn’t switch off the sun, or something.”

“Ow!” Robert had spilled hot coffee on his thigh.

“Sorry, sweetie. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“But... switch off the sun!”

“Yes. Or change the gravitational constant, such that stars never formed out of gas clouds, or give photons mass so that they cause space-time ripples. Or make oxygen a solid, or something equally silly.”

“That...” Robert tried to think through the implications. “That sounds like the ultimate weapon.”

“Creepy that you thought of it as a weapon first, darling,” she chastised. “But yes: it’s dangerous. So I decided that the ability to tinker with the substructure of the universe couldn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.”

Robert gestured for her to continue. God, she’s sexy when she talks about science, he realised.

“So I changed the universe. Edited, I call it. I edited the universe to be one where what we called the energy state law means that only one universe editing machine can exist at a time. Think of it as taking the ‘phone off the hook. Nobody else can call, because the line is busy.”

“So, what are you telling me?” Robert laughed, “That you saved the universe?”

She watched him, alertly. “Yes and no. I’m telling you that I control the universe.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I’d better get used to doing as you say, then,” said Robert playfully. “Not that I minded before, but now I know you’re in charge of the universe and everything...”

“Stop it, honey: this is serious.”

He subsided, chastised. She certainly made him feel as though she was in charge of his universe... but this wasn’t the time to tell her. He waited.

“Alright. So you understand that I have the only known device that can read and write the ground-rules for the physical universe.”

“What about the others on the project?” Robert objected, “You said there were others.”

“Good question: give that boy a coconut! I was the first to understand exactly what we had the power to do, so I was able to lock them out. The rest of the team were busy with a relatively basic experiment to do with predicting when the atoms in a caesium sample would decay. Radioactive decay, that is. It was good science, but I’d already seen hints of where we might go and I knew that somebody might make the same intuitive leap that I had, so I went ahead and did my first edit. You could say that I ‘encrypted’ the universe via the energy state law, meaning that no future edits would be possible, except by me.”

Robert frowned. “Weren’t the others upset?”

“No. They just live in a universe where editing is impossible and the early results with caesium decay could be put down to a calibration error.”

“Leaving you with a way to edit the universe.”

“Yes. I’m not much of a team player, to be honest.”

“So, what did you do? Assuming this is all true. I’m pretty sure it isn’t April the first today and I’m crazy about you, so let’s say I believe you...”

“I brought some of the equipment home and set it up. I designed in some safety settings and I got editing.”

“What did you edit?” Robert pressed.

“Oh, a little tweak here, another one there. Mostly I tried things, learned from them and then changed everything right back again. I learned a lot about how small changes to reality can produce unexpected outcomes.”

“Like what?”

“I wondered if we might get more out of clean energy if hydrogen had a better specific impulse, so I tweaked it a bit. Then I peeked out into the local universe and discovered that the Germans had overrun Europe.”

“The Nazis! Christ...”

“No, they weren’t Nazis... some other flavour of nationalistic Germans – and it was all over by 1934.”

“So you’re a time traveller as well?”

“Only in the same sense that you are: one day at a time, forwards – with an interest in what the history books say. No, I just saw the aftermath. It was a different universe. The cars ran cleaner and the politics of Europe were a good deal different, but it was still the same old world, more or less. I set things back to our tried-and-true universe and that was the end of that.”

“This is so weird.”

Janet worked her way closer, until she was straddling him and set down his coffee mug.

“Weird but good, though, right?”

“Um. Good. Yes,” he decided. “Weird but good.”

“So are you.”

“Don’t distract me,” he objected, as she began to grind her pelvis against him, experimentally. “You just told me the craziest story ever and you want to leave it at that?”

“No, you’re right. I just... find it hard to resist you, in those stockings. Sorry sweetie,” she paused. “Put your knickers on. Let’s go edit the universe!”

“What?”

“I need you to come with me, into my mad scientist’s lair, sort of thing.” She left he bed and flung him a robe. “Come on!”

“Okay,” he said, hurrying after her.

There wasn’t much space in the office where she had set up her machinery. Hoses and bundles of wires snaked their way across the floor, running into a machine that looked a little bit like a washing machine with its casing removed.

“Get yourself one of the chairs from the bedroom if you want,” she said.

He did so.

“Is that, you know... it?” he asked, indicating the strange machine.

“Yes, it’s mostly just a helium cooling unit, but inside is what we call a quantum foam generator.”

“Please, don’t expect me to understand any of this.”

“Okay, sweetie. You don’t need to understand. You don’t even need to watch – but I didn’t want to leave you outside because if you’re more than about seven metres from the quantum foam generator, you’ll change when the universe changes. I might lose you!”

“Please be careful!”

“Always. But this is important. Would you like to help?”

“Sure, if I can.”

“Okay. This computer here? It’s bog-standard. Use it like you would any other computer. Browse the Internet.”

“Okay. What am I looking for?”

“You never know. News, stock prices, fashions, celebrity gossip, geography? Anything that seems out of the ordinary. I’ve set up that machine with masses of subscriptions to news feeds, so you might find that it tries to bring things to your attention in a pop-up. If so, look at them and decide if I need to know.”

“Well... I’ll try!”

She was already intent on a computer screen of her own, displaying what seemed to be a spreadsheet of some kind. She appeared to be adding new pages, interlinked and with horrifically complicated formulae.

Robert turned to his task. Ten minutes later: “I think I found something!”

“That’s interesting, sweetheart,” Janet smiled when she looked up, “but I haven’t started editing yet. I’m still planning.”

“Oh. I thought, maybe... get this: the Astronomer Royal says that the meteor shower seen over northern Europe was unprecedented, perhaps in all recorded history.”

“Ah,” Janet patted his stocking-clad knee. “You’re not just a pretty face, are you?”

“Did I find something significant?”

“Well, yes. You correctly identified an example of the kind of thing you’re supposed to be looking for and telling me about. Did it come from one of the pop-up windows?”

“Yes.”

“Well... you caught me. You found my fingerprints on the universe. I engineered the meteor shower thing,” Janet admitted.

“You what?”

“I made it happen,” she shrugged. “Edited the universe to move a gaggle of minor asteroids onto a vector where they were bound to strike our atmosphere and give us a show. That computer you’re using is inside the bubble, so anything it archives remains stable, whereas any information you get from the Internet is from the new reality: the universe in which there was a spectacular meteor shower last week.”

Robert was staring at her, wide-eyed.

“Hey, it brought us together, didn’t it?” Janet was unapologetic.

“Yes, but... bombarding the Earth with asteroids! Just for us?”

“Alright, maybe it was a bit extreme, but I really like you and I was getting tired of waiting for you to notice me.”

“Oh, I noticed you. I just didn’t have the nerve to speak to you. But... asteroids, Janet?”

“Oh alright! Give me a moment.” Janet called up some different files on her computer, copied something and pasted it into the big spreadsheet.

“Hold on to your... adorable silk bra,” she said, and winked as she threw a switch.

The ‘washing machine’ device hummed; there was a hiss and frost formed on some of the pipework that connected the machine to a bank of gas cylinders.

“There,” she said. “The edit of the universe that produced the meteor shower has been reverted.”

“You mean, it never happened?” Robert pondered. “But I still remember it.”

“Of course you do, angel cakes,” Janet replied, in a tone that she might once have reserved for a first-year student who claimed that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. “You’re within seven metres of the generator. Remember what I told you?”

“So... I remember it and you remember it, but nobody else does?”

“That’s right. I’d been hoping to undo that edit, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because the meteor shower may have distracted drivers, or caused people to fall off ladders, or something. Undoing the edit means I don’t have any such accidents on my conscience.”

“So it never happened?”

“It only ever happened for us.”

“That’s... astonishing.” He stroked her cheek.

“And that’s how it’s done. More or less.”

“Okay. What do the numbers mean?”

“All kinds of things. That one is Planck’s constant.” She ignored his look of incomprehension and flipped to another page. “This one is the upper wavelength at which light is visible to the human eye. This one is called the Rydberg constant, detailing the highest inverse photon wavelength that can be emitted from the hydrogen atom. This one...” (she searched briefly and found something amid another table of numbers) “...is the temperature at which water reaches its maximum density. In my early days with the machine I did a lot of nerdy things where I experimented with physical fundamentals. Rather childish, really.”

She paused. “You don’t need to know all this, do you?”

“No. But let’s see if I understand: this is like a set of rules,” he hazarded, “so you rewrite the rulebook and then impose the rules on the universe?”

“A nice analogy, except that many of them aren’t hard-and-fast rules like the ones I showed you. They might be probabilities, tendencies, likelihoods... and once you’re at the quantum level, you can’t just roll the dice and see the outcome, because all outcomes exist simultaneously.”

“They do?”

“Yes. So we just tweak something and from the superposition of states we just choose the outcome that looks like it serves best.”

“We.” He smiled at her fondly.

“Alright,” she conceded. “I do.”

“And... what serves us – you – best, today?”

“Today,” she raised an eyebrow, “we’re editing the universe into one where the Quito earthquake never happened, my little one.”

“Holy shit. Can you do that?”

“I think so. It won’t be easy, but I think we can manage it.”

“And if we can’t?”

“If we try an edit and you start reading magazine articles about care and feeding of your pterodactyl, or if strawberries suddenly become poisonous or something, we’ll just undo the edit and try again.”

It took five tries before Janet pronounced herself satisfied. The trouble with earthquakes, as they learned together, was that they need to happen. Short of altering the arrangement of tectonic plates that made up the Earth’s crust, there were always going to be earthquakes along the faultline that Quito sat atop. When they edited the universe into one where an earthquake had happened a hundred years earlier, the death toll was far lower, but there were a lot of “missing ancestors” and people who had never lived because they had lost an ancestor in the earlier quake. Equally, preventing the earthquake simply meant that a larger one would happen at some point in the future. Janet called all such intervention “playing God” and would not permit herself to accept any such edit.

She was like a woman possessed, driven by her need to achieve the goal she had set herself. Robert did what he could to help, which wasn’t much, in between edits, until he had an idea: why not change the nature of the earthquake, such that it was preceded by a lengthy series of foreshocks? This wasn’t terribly likely, but neither was it impossible and as such it was possible to locate such an outcome from within the foam of probability.

Quito was still largely in ruins at the end of their efforts, but the big earthquake hit only after almost a week of quakes that steadily increased in magnitude. This had given the government time to put plans in place and many people had fled the area of their own accord. Neighbouring countries had mobilised to help and relatively few people died: perhaps five percent of the previous total. It was still a tragedy, but Robert and Janet knew at last that they had they had done some good. Near the city centre the 16th-century Iglesia y Monasterio de San Francisco survived almost untouched, which was attributed to a previously unknown quirk of the local geology, plus solid colonial construction. Almost as an afterthought, Robert had suggested that Janet should pluck this possibility out of the foam of alternatives: as the lovers watched the news in the days to come they saw the old complex became a centrepiece in the relief effort. People called it the ‘Miracle of Quito’ and it gave them hope.

“Nice work, sweet-cakes,” said Janet, full of approval. “You have an artistic touch.”

“I still can’t believe it,” said Robert. “We were like comic-book heroes, or something.”

“Only without the tights,” Janet grinned.

“Speak for yourself! I was in stockings,” Robert reminded her.

“Just how I like you,” she replied.

+++

When he thought about Janet and her control of a godlike power, Robert couldn’t help thinking that she seemed surprisingly ordinary. She was beautiful, but she acted as though she didn’t know it. She was also quite vulnerable, constantly fretting that Robert might be unhappy and might suddenly decide to leave her. His repeated assurances to the contrary did little to help.

Another of Janet’s qualities that made her an unlikely deity was her sense of right and wrong. She remained uncorrupted by the obvious power of the Machine and she agonised over edits that affected the lives of others. One obvious exception suggested itself: the solar panels that she had invented. Robert asked her about them.

“The whole neosapphire thing?” She made a face, as if to dismiss it as nothing of significance. “I was trying for a clean energy source: solar panels that grew naturally as crystals. I edited the universe to permit a new crystalline form of aluminium oxide – a cheap and abundant material. Under the new rules of the universe it’s very simple to give aluminium oxide a nudge and convince it to form neosapphire. That’s conductive, so when a photon hits a lump of the stuff, electrons in the valence band become excited, it generates free electricity – but unlike previous forms of photovoltaic cell, it’s not fragile and it doesn’t require complicated manufacture, so the world gets cheap, clean electricity.”

“Not so cheap if you hold the patent, though?” Robert ventured, hoping not to cause offence.

“Perhaps not, but the thing was... I did the edit and then sat back and waited for somebody to “discover” what great solar cells you could make... and nobody did. I waited almost a year and nothing happened. The solar energy crowd was pursuing ever-higher efficiencies with exotic materials but nobody was looking for a cheap, low-cost substitute. In the end I got the University’s technology spinoff team involved. It looked like they were going to spend years doing small-scale experiments, so I showed them how to dope aluminium oxide so it forms naturally into neosapphire wafers, ready for use. I let the University to handle the intellectual property, but they insisted that I had to take a share. I didn’t expect neosapphire to take off as quickly as it did, but I’m very pleased with the result. Even where unlicensed neosapphire is being made and we’re not getting royalties... at least it’s generating clean power.”

“You saved the planet!” Robert exclaimed.

“I wouldn’t say it’s saved,” she frowned “but it’s a little bit better.”

“And you made a fortune.”

“Well, I don’t really need to work anymore – but I don’t always act in self-interest.” The beautiful professor paused, but ultimately decided to divulge a secret: “You know that business about female mosquitoes becoming resistant to malaria? That’s down to me.”

“But you’re a physicist!”

“Yes. I didn’t attempt to genetically engineer the mosquito. To do that, I’d have needed a lifetime to master biology and epidemiology. Instead, I edited the universe into one where female mosquitoes don’t carry malaria and I caught a few samples...”

Robert frowned. “Why just the female mosquitoes?”

“Male mosquitoes don’t feed on blood, silly: they only like plant nectar.”

“Ah, well of course! The sugar-and-spice male of the species,” Robert laughed, “and the blood-sucking evil female!”

“Have a care who you mock, dearest,” the professor cautioned with a grin: “I’ll turn you into a toad.”

“So you fetched mosquitoes over from a different universe and released them in ours?”

“Yes. Although you make that sound simple. I had edit into a world where mosquitoes don’t carry malaria, travel to Africa, catch a batch mozzies – using my own skin as bait – box them up, smuggle them back into the UK, edit the universe back to normal while they were in the Machine room, travel back to Africa, release the mozzies and then come home. And it didn’t work, the first time I tried, so I had to do it all again.”

“But you’re making inroads into malaria, now?” Robert was astonished. “People have been trying to achieve that for decades!”

Janet shrugged. “My girls seem to be doing well,” she said. “They’re gradually replacing the old variety.”

“You are unbelievable,” Robert said. “And on behalf of the people of planet Earth, I would like to offer you a backrub, to show our appreciation.”

“Make it a massage, sweetie,” she replied, “and you’ve got a deal.”

+++

“Do I recall that it’s your birthday next weekend?” Janet asked.

“Yes. Saturday.”

“I know just what I’d like to give you – if you agree.

“What’s that?”

“Breasts.”

“I have breast forms. I can go and fetch them, if you like.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t mean I’d buy you falsies, however good they might be. I mean the real thing.”

“How?” Robert looked apologetic as well as uncomfortable. “I don’t want surgery... oh, you’re talking about editing me!”

“Something like that. If you agree, I’m going to have to snoop into a lot of quantum foam, I reckon, but with any luck we could have some fun on Saturday.”

Robert was silent for a little while. Then: “If you change me... will I still love you?”

Janet all but crushed him with her embrace. “I love you too!” she exclaimed, covering him with kisses.

Eventually she addressed his question. “Honey, the last thing I want is a universe where you don’t love me. If I produce that, I’ll undo the edit.”

Robert was intrigued, but a little bit afraid. “It seems like a lot of trouble to go to,” he objected weakly. “You could just, I don’t know... buy me some underwear, or something.”

“You’d like that, would you?” Janet grinned. “Alright, my pretty little Alice gets some lingerie... as well.”

It took Janet far longer to give Robert breasts than she would have imagined. At the weekend she was only able to give him an ‘IOU’. They celebrated anyway, with a homemade cake. It was a soggy disaster in the middle and Robert was cheered tremendously to discover something that Janet wasn’t good at. They shared a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and then she handed him a giftwrapped box. The nightdress inside was exquisite, and Janet explained that she had chosen this rather than a bra and panties because she was still hoping for a breakthrough on “Operation Boob Job” which might alter his size.

It was almost three weeks later when that breakthrough came and she shook him awake excitedly, to share the news.

“I was an idiot,” she said, “I didn’t understand at all! I’ve just discovered a fundamental property of space!”

“Slow down!” Robert blinked sleepily. “What have you done?”

“I’ve discovered that space isn’t a single thing at all, but a collection of different things.”

“Okay...?”

“It’s brilliant!”

“Okay...?”

“I should have seen it, but I didn’t think! I was just like one of those poor old astronomers in ancient times that thought the Earth must be the centre of the universe!”

“What have you found?”

“An edit only affects a localized area. It doesn’t extend to infinity!”

“Okay. So...?”

“So space is composed of bubbles of reality – each with its own rules. When I said I was editing the universe, I was actually only editing the rules inside one bubble!”

“You’re sexy when you get excited like this,” Robert observed, deciding his part in the conversation wasn’t really working and all but giving up on the science lesson.

“Thank you. And I love you seeing you in my pyjamas. But listen: I found out how big the bubble is, or wants to be.”

“Wants to be?”

“Like a soap bubble. Soap bubbles are lazy: they automatically seek the most efficient way to be. If you’re a soap bubble, you want to be a sphere. And the universe or rather its local bubble of rules also seeks the most efficient way to exist.”

Robert sighed, accepting that there was chance of getting back to sleep.

“Okay. And that means...?”

“That means when we do an edit in the quantum foam, the universe does the rest, making everything make sense. And the local universe is lazy, like a soap bubble. It doesn’t change anything if it doesn’t have to and it accommodates change where necessary. Laziness is easiest, so inertia prevails.”

Robert stared up at the ceiling. Will she stop if I kiss her? Probably not. He waved for her to continue.

“The beauty of the universe is clear to me now: each bubble is probably anchored around a massive object, such as a star. Certainly, our bubble is concentric with the solar system. And in between each star, in the physical universe, you find...?”

“Badgers.”

Janet looked at him sternly.

“Jam?”

She hit him with a pillow.

“In between stars you just get vacuum, which is the safest, easiest way to handle the problem of intersections or tradeoffs between reality bubbles. I can’t prove it yet, but quite possibly each star system has the potential to have its own version of reality, with different local rules.”

“So you never were editing the universe,” Robert said warily.

“No,” she admitted. “Only everything inside the orbit of Neptune, or thereabouts.”

“Which means...?”

“It means I finally worked out why the little project I was working on fizzled every time. No matter how hard I poked and prodded the quantum foam, I never did manage to see a universe that gave me what I wanted.”

Robert had no idea what she was talking about. “So... why did it fizzle?”

“I think it was the Pioneer plaques.”

“The what?”

“Remember those American space probes in the 1970s that showed a naked man and woman on them, in case aliens should someday find them?”

“Oh, okay. Those. So?”

“When I tried my edit, the quantum foam always collapsed, as a result of a discrepancy – reality on the outside of the bubble that challenged the reality within. It meant the lazy reality bubble couldn’t form a comfortable shape that accommodated the changes I was trying to establish. Instead, it was making these weird, elongated bubbles that stretched out into deep space. It was only when I was trying to work out what was special about two apparently random patches of space that I discovered what they were: the locations of Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. That allowed me to understand what was going on with the bubbles.”

“But what,” Robert yawned mightily, “was wrong with the Pioneer Plaques?”

“The plaques show what a typical man and woman look like – and they don’t show breasts on the man.”

“What? Yes they do. I remember the design.”

“And the man had breasts?”

“Of course! Everybody has breasts!”

“Then it worked,” said Janet.

She started to unbutton Robert’s pyjamas, to reveal his breasts.

“Oh, wow... yum,” she said, beginning to nuzzle him.

Robert stopped her. “Sorry but... what are you saying? I’ve always had breasts. Or at least, they started appearing when I was around twelve, like everybody’s.”

“Sure, honey,” said Janet. “Believe what you want.” She caught a nipple between her teeth.

Robert sighed a happy sigh. He lay back, until –

“Stop!”

He pushed her away and sat up, refastening the pyjama top. He looked at her in horror.

“I’m an edit,” he stated, simply.

“Everything’s an edit,” Janet replied.

“You changed me!” It was an accusation.

“We agreed,” Janet began to explain – then realised this wasn’t true: not in this universe. “It was for your birthday,” she explained, lamely.

“But,” Robert felt betrayed. “I’m me.” English just didn’t have the words to describe how he felt. He didn’t exactly feel violated, because he knew he’d always been this way. Yet with just as much certainty, he knew that she had changed him and the world around him.

“Do you still love me?” she asked.

“I still love you,” he conceded.

“Are you still a transvestite?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“How does that work out? I mean, doesn’t everybody wear bras where you come from?”

“There are different fashions,” Robert shrugged. “A man’s halter is usually designed for firm support and flattening. It doesn’t show off cleavage. I like the feminine ones. Plus of course, a man’s breasts are usually smaller, so I use a bit of padding when I’m dressing.”

“Can I look at your breasts again?”

“No.”

“You can look at mine,” Janet offered.

“Fucking hell: you changed me!” Robert spat. “How dare you?”

“What feels different?” Janet asked.

“Nothing at all...” Robert wavered. “But you changed me.”

“Sweetie, I do believe we’re having our first row,” Janet said, sadly.

They argued back and forth for a long time; both cried. They discussed possibilities, although Janet wisely avoided suggesting she might edit Robert back to ‘normal’. As far as he was concerned, he was ‘normal’, though if Janet was to be believed, his view of normal didn’t feature in the bog-standard universe.

Eventually they had to agree that life was unfair, even if you had a machine that allowed reality to be reconfigured. Like all lovers, their thoughts turned to reconciliation of a more physical nature.

“I think we should get naked now,” Janet proposed.

“Okay,” said Robert. “If you’re the lover I remember.” He started to undress.

Janet admired Robert’s chest, stroking experimentally. His nipples weren’t as large as hers, but they were larger than she remembered them. They filled out a little as a result of her touch.

“I’m still mad at you,” said Robert.

“Okay, just give me a second,” said Janet, leaning in and suckling at his left breast.

“I’m still... mad...” Robert gasped.

“Uh-huh,” mumbled Janet. “It’s all my fault. Sorry baby.” She switched to his right breast.

“You make me feel so good,” Robert muttered.

Janet straddled him and kept on licking and sucking. “Does it always feel this good?” she asked.

“Always... fantastic,” Robert confessed, frantically trying to undo Janet’s blouse so he could do some licking and sucking of his own.

“It’s the first time, for me,” Janet said.

“Huh?” Robert didn’t understand.

“You never had these before today,” Janet said, tweaking his nipples, “so I’m enjoying them for the first time.”

“This is so weird.”

“Maybe. To me you’re a slightly different you, and to you I’m a slightly different me,” Janet frowned. “Also, I worked really hard to give you these and I’ve just made the scientific discovery of the century – not that I’ll ever be able to tell anybody – so I’m caught between celebrating and needing a consolation fuck. And here we are, together... and your body is getting me really hot!”

Robert wasn’t quite satisfied.

“Does this mean there’s a mass of alternate universes out there and that I’ve traded places with another self?”

Janet shook her head. “There are only two universes: the stable ‘bubble’ that exists in the immediate vicinity of the Machine and everything outside it. An edit makes a direct change, not a copy. If you could understand the science, cutie-pie, I could prove to you that I am the only Janet there is. But since I don’t want to wait twelve years or more while you go and study quantum physics, I suggest you shut up and screw me. Now!”

Robert obliged.

Later, they went out for a walk. Robert concealed a balconette bra beneath a black sweater. Its support made him a little bit bustier than the other men they passed, but not enough to be noticeable. Janet kept kissing and nuzzling him. She looked like the cat that got the cream.

“So much eye-candy!” she exclaimed. A jogger passed them, his halter not quite doing enough to suppress a rhythmic jiggle that Janet felt compelled to stare at. A builder tugged at a strap before bending to pick up a bag of tools. The Barrista that made their coffee at Artisan Roast looked nice... Robert elbowed Janet in the ribs.

“Try not to behave like a yokel. You’re in my universe now, Janet!”

“It’s a lovely universe,” Janet answered. “But drink up and let’s get back. This is getting me really horny!”

They had more fantastic sex. Robert, always preferring a passive role, was pleased to find that he didn’t have to do anything much at all: simply letting Janet play with his breasts was enough to drive her wild. She found sex with their breasts pressing together amazing; she said all kinds of appreciative things. Robert, coming from a universe where men’s breasts were commonplace, was delighted to accept her compliments. She made him feel special.

Although she didn’t want to go through another argument, Janet knew that sooner or later she was going to have to face up to a problem. They were in her office-turned-laboratory and Robert was comparing the information held on her computer with that from the world outside. Robert learned that the vestigial male breast was not the norm elsewhere - or at least, not in what Janet called the ‘bog-standard universe’. Men still had nipples, he found, but that was all.

“There’s a problem, honey,” Janet began.

“What is it?” Robert looked up, apprehensively.

Janet pointed at a graph she had plotted. It showed a bulbous shape, somewhat like a flattened teardrop. “This is the current shape of the bubble.”

“Our reality bubble?”

“Yes. It’s been distorted by the existence of those two Pioneer plaques. It’s actually under quite a lot of strain.”

Robert scratched his chin. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“You’re right. I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning,” Janet said, “we’re doing nasty things to the fabric of spacetime, and we’re heading into unknown territory.”

“And bubbles under stress...” Robert swallowed. “They tend to pop, right?”

“Maybe.” Janet stroked his face and regarded him with sad eyes. “I’m going to have to revert the edit.”

“But... what happens to me?” Robert yelped. “I don’t want to disappear back into a universe that doesn’t exist!” More quietly, he went on: “It sounds like dying. It scares me.”

“So stay here with me, inside the stable bubble around the Machine. You won’t change when the universe changes, if you’re close to the Machine.”

Robert regarded her. “Can I stay?”

“Of course! I’d rather you did. Love you, sweetie.”

“I love you too. But this is so weird.”

“I know, honey. I’ve got a lot to apologise for, but right now I want to revert the universe, while you’re safe in here. Is that alright?”

Robert understood that this meant he would be living in a world where men were flat-chested. He shuddered. “Do it,” he said at last.

She threw the switch and the Machine hummed.

“Done,” she replied and they left the office.

Robert turned on the TV and flipped through the channels, looking at the typical men in his new reality. “So: now I’m a freak,” he said bleakly, folding an arm defensively over his breasts.

“You’re beautiful. You’re just not of this Earth.”

“You won’t be ashamed to be seen with me?”

“No. To be honest, by the criteria of the bog-standard universe, you look kind of androgynous. You might get called ‘miss’ once in a while... but I suppose a tranny might like that.”

“Hmm.” Robert really didn’t know how he felt about that. Cross that bridge when I come to it, he thought.

Slipping behind Janet, he began to massage her shoulders. “You say you did this as a birthday present for me?”

“That was the idea, yes.”

“And yet it seems to me that you get all the benefit.”

She stiffened, and he went on: “Okay, I’ve got vestigial breasts... but as far as my memories are concerned, I’ve had them since I entered my teens and they’re nothing special: everybody had them where I came from. You’re nuts about them, but to me they’re just ordinary.”

“So what are you saying?” Janet asked anxiously.

“Worst birthday present ever, darling!” Robert exclaimed. “You edit the rules of the local universe to get me breasts and you’re the one who ends up enjoying them.”

“You’re not really mad at me, are you?” Janet asked in a small voice.

“No,” he sighed. “Just... God, Janet: you might be a brilliant physicist but you still have a lot to learn about human beings.”

Robert returned to work. Same job, same people... he began to feel that his initial sense of having been thrust into the wrong universe was an over-reaction. He concealed his bust with a flesh-toned elastic bandage and started wearing sweaters. So far, so good, he thought, although he wondered how he would get by in the summer.

Janet was determined to address the issue of the failed birthday present somehow. A few days later she was ready.

“I have a late birthday present for you,” she announced.

“As long as it isn’t a nose job,” Robert warned her.

“I think you’ll like this. First we have to visit the Machine,” Janet led him by the hand, “... and then we’re going out.”

She had already done all her calculations and quickly performed the edit. The machine hummed.

“Done!” she said. Let’s go out!

“What’s different?” has asked.

“It’s a surprise, cutie-pie.”

They made their way to the city centre. It was raining hard: as they hurried along in raincoats they didn’t attract any stares. It was the first time Robert had been out without concealing his breasts with a bandage.

“Almost there,” Janet said breathlessly. “God, I love the way your boobs bounce...”

Their destination was the Scottish National Gallery. She bought a guidebook and turned to the index, but she wouldn’t let him know what she sought. Finally, she was satisfied.

“This way!” she led him through the maze of rooms and stopped outside a doorway.

“Trust me?” she asked.

“Not even a little bit,” he replied with a grin. “Why?”

“Close your eyes.”

He did so. “Ah, yes... minimalist art appreciation. Why didn’t I think of this?”

“Don’t try and be funny,” she told him, grabbing his elbow. “Come with me.”

After perhaps thirty steps, she stopped.

“Alright, art-boy,” she said. “Don’t read the panel. I challenge you: open your eyes and tell me what you see.”

It was just one painting among many in the room. Nobody else was paying it any attention at all, but Robert was intrigued.

“Oil on canvas... international gothic style. Call it early 15th century. A Madonna and Child, obviously. Lots of gold leaf, some lapis... about three feet by two...” Robert’s voice tailed off. He got as close as the cord barrier would permit him, staring intently.

Janet watched his face, pleased to see him so interested, but also making sure his eyes didn’t stray to the panel that identified the work.

He examined the painting for several minutes, without a word.

“I’ve never seen it before in my life!” he exclaimed.

“That was kind of the point,” said Janet. “But you’re forgetting my challenge. Who painted it?”

“Oh. Not fair: an expert would spend weeks doing analyses before giving you an answer!”

“Perhaps. Now show me how clever you can be.”

Robert turned back to the painting and searched it again. Several minutes passed. There was faux-arabic lettering embossed in the gold of the Madonna’s halo. That was familiar... wasn’t it?

“I know what I want to say, but it’s impossible. But then, is anything impossible, if you’ve got a Machine like yours?”

“Come on then,” she prompted. “Who’s the artist?”

Robert paused, reluctant to make a fool of himself. Finally: “Gentile da Fabriano...?”

“Well done!”

“Seriously?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, reading from the guidebook: “Madonna with Child, 1425, from the Palazzo dei Notai.”

“Oh, wow,” said Robert. “But this was lost, centuries ago!”

“Happy birthday, sweetie. And I am very impressed. You really are not just a pretty face, are you?”

They went for a coffee, Robert still excitedly babbling about the find. He was so excited by the ‘lost’ piece of art that if anybody thought his bust looked unusual, he didn’t notice their reaction. Not that the world of art appreciation was one in which he was likely to get any trouble from homophobic thugs.

“I was trying to work out a way to actually give it to you,” Janet said as she sipped her coffee, “but that was much more improbable.”

“Give it to me?”

“Yes, you know: edit a universe where it turned up in a car boot sale so I could buy it for you, or where some eccentric had bought it and put it in our attic, two centuries ago. You’d have to sift through an awful lot of possibilities before you found one of those universes though. It was complicated enough finding one where it went to our National Gallery – in most of the ones where it survived at all, I found it ended up in Washington.”

Robert looked around him, thoughtfully. “So all this is an edit...”

“Everything’s an edit, sweetie. Since my solar panels, the day we helped with the earthquake and so on. But there’s nothing particularly wrong in this universe as far as I can tell, so I’m intending to leave the edit in place.”

“Thank you,” said Robert. “It’s a beautiful and thoughtful birthday present.” He considered for a moment and then added: “If you’d given it to me, I’d have donated it to the gallery anyway.”

“Yeah, I know. But at least I’d have got to see you unwrap it. You’re a good man, Robert Carlisle.”

He was surprised. “You never call me Robert!”

“I don’t suppose I do, very often. Problem?”

“I’ve always wondered if it was deliberate.”

“Um,” she bit her lip (which made him want to do the same) “Yes, I think so.”

“May I ask why?”

“I think you’ll have noticed that I’m a bit of a girlie girl?”

“A girlie girl?” Robert had a fleeting image of ‘girlie girl’ meaning some vacuous airhead who dotted each ‘i’ with a little heart and drove a tiny pink convertible with a small herd of fluffy animals on the dashboard. The ‘daddy’s little princess’ type. He thought of Janet and her work as a physicist.

“I really don’t follow.”

Janet tried again. “I mean, I’m not attracted by male attributes, in general.

“Oh. Right. Yes.”

“But I am attracted to you. Especially now I know you’re smart as well as cute.”

“Smart is the new cute,” Robert opined. He straightened in his chair, drawing attention to his bust and running one hand slowly over his right breast with a look of feigned innocence. “What do you think? Maybe I should get some glasses by Yves Saint Laurent for the brainiac look.”

“Right, missy,” declared Janet, slamming down her coffee cup. “You and me: shopping, now!”

“Romance is dead!” Robert replied, eyes heavenward – but he hurried out of the museum café with her, just the same.

She really liked him in the glasses. They were barely back inside the flat when she threw herself at him. She tugged his jeans down, made him sit, and straddled him. Within moments, he was inside her.

“Aw, honey,” she moaned, “You’re man enough for me and then some. And so pretty! Oh, fuck, so pretty!”

They came together.

+++

It was a Wednesday morning.

“I need to go to work,” said Robert, reluctantly.

“Well, only if you want to,” she replied.

“Yeah, it’s a pain,” he said, “but I quite like being able to pay the mortgage. And eating: eating is something of a hobby of mine.”

“I’ll take care of it – if you want,” she said cautiously.

“Actually, I think I need to be productive.”

“Okay, honey. But let me know if you change your mind.” She kissed him and reluctantly let him leave the bed.

After he had showered and dried off, she helped to wrap the elasticated bandage around his chest.

“What will you do today?” he asked.

“Science!” she replied. “A sabbatical isn’t a holiday: it’s a period of leave that’s meant for study. I’ve got to review some papers and I should really be getting to grips with my book – although I’m finding it hard to write about physics now that I know it’s all contrived.”

“I suppose they’ll overlook a lot of writer’s block, after the way you shared the benefits from neosapphire with them.”

“Well, maybe. And if one of my rivals makes a major breakthrough I can always do an edit that changes the rules and makes them look like a fraud.”

“You’d make such a good criminal mastermind,” Robert said, kissing her. “It’s really very sexy.”

“Hmm... tempting. I’ll miss you today.” She thought for a second and then offered him a pair of her panties. “Wear these for me today?”

“Love to,” he replied, and slid them into place.

There had been a time when Robert had kept a pair of her panties and also some old, laddered tights. He’d found them when a refuse sack split open, by the rubbish bins at the back door. Feeling guilty, but unable to resist, he had stolen them. (Could you steal what had been discarded?) He had much nicer intimates of his own, but the thought that these items had been worn by his beautiful neighbour was intoxicating. Now she was giving him her panties, with a kiss? And they were making love most nights? Robert suspected that they had already hit upon the perfect universe. He had secretly disposed of the old items that had once been such a fetish for him, in case she should happen to find them.

Work was dull, as it usually was, but Janet telephoned Robert and teased him about what he was wearing. That brightened his day up, especially when she told him that she wanted to see Alice that night.

He made excuses, left early and transformed himself for the command performance. The sex that night was wild, and inventive.

+++

Robert felt as though he hadn’t slept at all. He was exhausted and kept pressing the snooze function on his alarm.

“I need to go and shave,” he said, banishing all thoughts of being Alice.

“Well, you could keep on shaving night and day,” she replied. “Or I could help you with that.”

“Help how?”

“We could do an edit: change reality to one where nobody has facial hair...”

“We can’t do that!” he yelped. “What about Lenin? Abraham Lincoln? King Neptune? Papa Smurf...?”

“No, silly! I’d send you out for a walk and change reality temporarily, to a universe where men have no facial hair... then have you back by the Machine while I switch everything back. You’ll be the only male who doesn’t get the revert, just like with your boobs. You’d be nice and smooth, indefinitely.”

“Sounds... wrong. What’s the risk?”

“The risk is that a lack of facial hair causes some dreadful, unforeseen calamity and I have to reverse the edit, to restore normality. That’s it: no risk, basically.”

“What if I want to grow a beard, later?”

“You?” she raised an eyebrow.

“Okay. Fair point. Are you serious about this?”

“Yes, sweetie. I like to do things for you.”

“Alright. You do your sums: I’m off to work.

Although he wanted to keep busy, he was really struggling with work. It had never meant anything much to him, beyond being a means to pay the bills. Most of the people who worked there seemed to feel the same way, but it was doubly difficult for a manager to insist on rules and targets that he found increasingly unimportant. His experience with the new/old painting by Gentile da Fabriano had reinforced his passion for medieval art, and it had given him confidence in his abilities. Several times since the edit, he had spent his lunch break at the Gallery, often just looking at the painting. ‘His’ painting: his birthday present.

Eventually, his repeated visits attracted attention.

“She’s quite something, isn’t she?” The voice came from behind, startling him. He turned.

“I’m sorry, did I make you jump?” The speaker was a tall woman in her fifties.

Robert had to admit that he had been woolgathering. “It’s simply beautiful,” he said, “and we’re lucky to have it today.”

“You’re right there,” the woman agreed. “She’s had a long and difficult journey down the years. It’s nice to meet somebody who appreciates her. I’m Margaret Frasier.” She held out her hand.

“Robert Carlisle,” he responded.

“You prefer her to the Hugo van der Goes? Few do...” she indicated the set of altarpiece panels at the end of the room.

“Very fine, as architectural salvage goes,” Robert quipped. “I mean no disrespect, but I would have to see the van der Goes in situ, before the Collegiate Chapel was demolished. And preferably with the missing centre panel in place.”

Margaret (“call me Maggie...”) was impressed.

“You really know your religious art,” she complimented.

“Yes, well... it’s a passion of mine,” he replied.

They often spoke after that. Robert spent his lunch break in the Gallery more often than not and they toured the whole of the Medieval collection together. Despite her compliments on his knowledge, he learned a lot.

When Janet asked him about his day, he often enthused about his meetings with Maggie, rather than talking about work.

“Have a care, sweetie,” Janet cautioned. “I might get jealous.”

“No!” Robert protested. “She’s a much older woman!”

“And so am I,” Janet replied. “Haven’t you ever thought that I look good for my age?”

“I certainly think you look good,” Robert told her, “but I don’t know your age. Nor would I presume to ask.”

“Such a gentleman!” She replied, with palpable irony as she hooked a finger under his bra strap.

“Perhaps I should explain. I stole my good looks from a universe where medicine is tremendously advanced: once I’d edited that universe into place and snooped on it to make sure it was safe, I went out into the world... and found that I was considered horribly disfigured.”

She placed a finger on his lips: she wasn’t fishing for compliments and wanted to finish her story.

“After the edit I emerged from the Machine room and in mere days of wandering around in that other Edinburgh I was strongly encouraged to go under the knife. Well, I say ‘knife’ but some of it was done with lasers. Beauty is virtually mandatory in that universe and everybody except me was highly standardised. They thought I was a very strange genetic throwback or something, and they wanted to give me all kinds of therapies. Some I consented to and some I didn’t.”

Robert snapped at her finger with his teeth and she withdrew it. “How did you pay for it all?” he asked.

“Didn’t have to: equal access to medicine was a fundamental human right in that universe. There was a single world government and it directed a lot of its efforts towards healthcare. You might think that a world without war or poverty is desirable, but it was a crushingly authoritarian place with very limited individual freedom of expression. You really wouldn’t want to live there! Not that I ever intended to permanently edit our universe into that one, but during the month I stayed there I let them sort out my crow’s feet and assorted bags and wrinkles. They also changed my blood, cleaned some gunk out of my kidneys and so on. I was told that one of my therapies inhibited senescence, which means the cells in my body will last longer. People aged much more slowly in the medical universe, as a result of all the intervention. I reckon my treatments may have turned the clock back by as much as ten years. When I’d had enough, I popped back inside the bubble of the control room. Safely insulated, I edited things back to the world that we know, which means I keep the freebie facelift but also get to live in a world where eating meat is still legal.”

Robert stared closely at her face. “You don’t look like somebody who’s had cosmetic surgery,” he ventured.

“Good!” she replied. “Kiss me.”

He obliged. Then: “Why did you tell me all that?”

“Sweetie, I’m just trying to explain to you that although I’m obviously a frumpy old bluestocking, there’s no need to start doing the maths where you say ‘When I’m fifty, she’ll be old enough for a free bus pass...’ These old bones will probably age better than yours.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Also, I’ve kept the settings for that universe on ‘speed dial’ ever since, so we can pop over there if one of us gets ill.”

“Wow.”

“Yes. Keep it in mind,” she said as she unfastened his bra and started to play with his nipples. “You never know what you might need...”

+++

Robert watched TV advertisements for gents’ razors and thought the idea of shaving one’s face sounded absolutely wretched. To have to scrape away at wiry bristles that threatened to obscure the face and that made men look like animals... he hated the very idea. He had to look at quite a few pictures of men with beards before he could convince himself that a bearded man wasn’t actually threatening.

Robert felt entirely comfortable with his own, baby-smooth skin, because (from his perspective) he’d always had it. Janet, on the other hand, adored it. She lavished endless kisses on his face and neck and kept telling him how pretty he was.

That it turned Janet on was a good thing, but as before, it made Robert feel as if he didn’t quite belong to this particular universe. There was a gnawing sense that he was artificial: a kind of paranoia... but it faded after a while. Nobody had ever seen the old Robert with any beard growth, so they didn’t notice the substitution. He was accepted.

Janet said it gave them more time for lovemaking. She certainly didn’t stint in that aspect of their relationship.

“Did you make my face more feminine?” he asked, at breakfast.

“You’re still the same old you!” she tried to reassure him.

“But did you?”

“Maybe the littlest bit,” she confessed. “But it was a side-effect of getting rid of the bristles.”

Robert was very glad he didn’t have a bristly chin, so he let it go.

“Let me do your legs next?” Janet asked.

“That’s what’s so good about you,” Robert grumbled. “You love me for who I am.”

She managed to talk him into it, anyway. After all, what use was leg hair that he’d been getting rid of on a regular basis? He was also persuaded to take a trip to what Janet called the ‘Medical Universe’, to slow the rate at which he aged. But who wouldn’t want that?

Robert arranged a leave of absence from his job “for family reasons” and they edited the Medical Universe into place.

“Expect stares,” Janet warned him: “In this universe, we’re ugly, lumpen people.”

“Have you ever thought about getting a job as a tour guide?” Robert joked. “You’re really selling the idea of this place to me!” He went out anyway, discovering that she was right. To him, this world was a vain and shallow place that valued nothing so much as conformity. Their medicine was very advanced, though, and they hastened to ‘correct’ his defects, including what they considered to be premature ageing. They improved the longevity of his cells and reversed the effects of time upon his hairline, which was just beginning to recede. Janet said his follicles would now last until he was at least a hundred.

“You should grow your hair, sweetie – then I can brush it and style it with you!”

Robert said he’d think about it.

+++

Back in the ‘normal’ universe after a couple of weeks, Robert returned to work, but he wasn’t happy there. Another manager had overseen Robert’s team during his absence and clearly felt that the team ought to be a part of his little ‘empire’ within the business. He was overbearing and had a tendency to intimidate people. Robert came to loathe every minute that they had to spend together. He didn’t like the changes that Callum was making, but “no” didn’t seem to be a word that the other man understood. Robert also suspected that he was prone to being pushed around because he didn’t look like the archetypal ‘alpha male’.

“You know what?” Robert said one night. “Fuck it all. If he wants to play mind games and score points off people all the time, he can have the place. There’s more to life!”

“Well said, sweetie! We won’t starve. I can’t bear to see you miserable all the time. Give it up, if you want. Do something else – anything else!” Janet held him tightly and kissed him.”

He handed in his notice. He had a drink with everybody at the end of his final day, but they were a little taken aback to learn that he had no new job to go to. They found it a bit insulting, really, when he told them that he had no idea what he might do next, but that he simply wanted to quit... but there it was. He’d never wanted to work as a call centre manager (who did?) and he’d grown increasingly uncomfortable there.

Janet made him feel better as she always did: with compliments and with her body. She encouraged him to take a few days off and maybe indulge in some ‘Alice time’ before he worried about finding work. This Robert attempted, but after a few days of inactivity he resumed his regular persona and went for a walk, soon finding himself at the Gallery.

Maggie was surprised to see him outside of his usual lunch hour. Robert felt compelled to explain (to his shame) that he wasn’t working.

“We have some vacancies!” she exclaimed. “Have a look on our website – and if you see something you like the look of, list me as a referee.” She handed him a business card.

“Alright, I will,” he decided. “Thanks Maggie!”

They weren’t advertising for a medieval art specialist – few ever did – but Maggie assured him that if he applied for a position, his specialty would still be seen as a valuable addition. He put in an application for the position of archivist and was pleased to be invited for interview. The pay was lousy, but at least he’d be doing something he cared about. Maggie met him beforehand and coached him on what to expect. She wouldn’t be on the interviewing panel, she said, but she knew the kind of things they were looking for in a candidate.

The interview panel consisted of a representative of the trustees, an elderly art historian, the manager of the archives and a staff member from Human Resources.

They grilled him on a number of subjects, asking his opinion of recent developments at other museums, and technical questions about preservation versus restoration. Somehow, they got into a discussion about museum security. Robert didn’t think it was going very well, but as he had been advised he tried to stay away from the subject of his own specialism and speak in more general terms, until –

“What do you think of the frescoes in Nerezi?” the elderly art historian barked.

“Um,” Robert was momentarily taken aback. “To be honest, I’ve never been to Macedonia, so I’ve only seen reproductions.”

“Yes, yes... but do you have an opinion?”

“They’re aesthetically pleasing. They’re commonly described as being of the anti-naturalistic style but while that’s accurate it’s misleading, in my opinion. They’re symbolic, but they’re not abstract. There’s a sense of realism that really signposts the way to the early Renaissance – although perhaps that’s parallel evolution rather than actual influence. We’d have to ask Giotto if he ever went to Macedonia.”

The old historian grunted and didn’t pursue that line of questioning any further. Robert really didn’t know what to make of it at all. When their questions drew to a close, he asked a few of his own (nothing too controversial), thanked them for their time and made to leave.

The lady from Human Resources (Jean something) hastened to follow him and asked for a word in private. They spoke in the corridor.

“Mister, er, yes. Carlisle. If I may...?”

“Yes?”

“I can’t help but notice. That is, er,” she looked uncomfortable, “Are you in transition?”

Were the edits so obvious now? Robert felt embarrassed for her – and for himself.

“Well,” he said at length. “I’m... complicated.”

“I want to assure you that we don’t discriminate against transgender people and that it won’t impact upon the panel’s decision. If you’re selected, we’ll try to make every reasonable adjustment, to meet your needs.”

Robert didn’t really know what to say to all that, so he simply thanked her again and wandered away in a daze.

That question about the frescoes was a bit below the belt, he thought. Oh well – I just hope that in this universe, they’re the same as the ones I knew. Which universe is this now, anyway? I lose track...

+++

Three days later Robert answered a telephone call and found that he was being offered the job. He bounded up the stairs to share the good news with Janet.

“I hope you didn’t just edit the universe into one where I got the job?”

“You got the job? Honey, that’s wonderful! And no, you did that all on your own.” She hugged him.

“Yeah.”

“You don’t sound very happy.”

“Oh I’m happy enough. It’s just...”

Robert thought for a while. “The lady from Personnel, or H.R. or whatever you call it now: she thinks I’m a transgender.

“You are transgender, darling!”

“Yes, but... she knows.”

“So?”

“She said they’d ‘make every reasonable adjustment’ – whatever that means.”

“It probably means they’re going to keep you locked away in the archives, where you can’t frighten visiting schoolchildren,” Janet said melodramatically, laughing.

“Janet!”

“Their loss if they do, darling. You’re cute! And have I mentioned I really like seeing you midweek without your boobs all squashed out of shape.”

“You have no idea how uncomfortable that was,” he said.

“Those puppies are too nice to be hidden away,” Janet frowned. “Think about taking them up on their offer? We could buy you some work outfits. Oooh... and you could wear those sexy YSLs.”

“But I don’t need glasses!”

“No, but they make me just want to gobble you up, sweetie!” She made as if to bite him.

“So... I’ll wear them for you – but not at work.”

“Hmm... but I don’t hear you objecting to the rest of the girlie experience.”

“Well I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s terrifying. But it’s also the chance of a lifetime. But mostly terrifying.”

“When do they want you to start the new job?”

“The week after next.”

“That’s loads of time!” Janet was delighted. “How exciting: we can buy you some new things and get you ready for your debut as Alice. If you want.”

This was incredibly tempting for Robert. To have no more secrets: to be able to show the world who he felt he was. To be able to dress stylishly for work, rather than putting on a defensive shell of male conformity in which he could take no pride. To make an effort over his appearance and then to go out into the world rather than hiding away. Maybe to be complimented, sometime...

“I’ll do it,” he blurted. “But will you help me?”

“Of course I’ll help you.” Janet fussed with his hair, speculatively. “What would you like me to do?”

“You know... help me. With the Machine. I don’t want to look like a freak.” Robert’s perfectionism meant he was very hard on himself if he thought he was ‘unconvincing’.

“Honey, you don’t look like a freak.” Janet kissed him.

“You’re biased,” Robert fretted. “You’re bound to say nice things about me. But... these shoulders!”

“What’s wrong with your shoulders?”

“They’re too broad.”

“Okay, darling. I’ll edit the universe so you can have a narrower shoulders.” She rolled her eyes. “Honestly, some girls... so vain!”

“Well, um... while you’re at it... just... more convincing in general. Please.”

Janet bit her lip. “Are you asking me to give you a much more girlie body? You, who made such a fuss about ‘being an edit’, even though everything is?”

“I think I am,” Robert replied. He shrugged. “In for a penny, in for a pound, sort of thing. Would you? Please? Just let me try working as Alice and see how it goes?”

“Alright, sweet-cakes,” said Janet. “But this...” (she laid a hand on the crotch of her lover’s skinny jeans and felt him begin to harden) “... this stays. I like my little man too much to edit him away.”

Robert grinned. “Your little man likes you too.”

“Come to bed?” Janet asked.

“A sabbatical is not a holiday,” Robert told her sternly. “Are you quite sure you shouldn’t be working?”

“Well I’ve got a busy schedule but I think I can... fit you in,” Janet said wickedly. “Let’s celebrate.”

They opened a bottle of champagne and each took a glass to bed. Janet would take a mouthful of the frantically fizzing liquid and then suck one of her lover’s nipples into her mouth as well, while the bubbles tickled. Robert tried to return the favour, but it wasn’t an easy trick to master. He vowed to keep on practicing.

+++

Robert called Jean from H.R. and they met to discuss his needs. He explained that he was hoping to work in his ‘Alice’ persona and she assured him that all their documents would reflect this. The Criminal Record Bureau check would be conducted in his male name, of course, but otherwise, as far as everybody at the Gallery was concerned, he would be known as Alice Carlisle. Jean seemed acutely embarrassed when they reached the subject of lavatory etiquette, but Robert said he would be happy to use the solitary disabled facility, to avoid any awkwardness among his fellow staff.

Was Robert anticipating any need for leave of a medical nature? No, he said: he didn’t anticipate any surgical procedures. He smiled as he thought about the edits that Janet was performing on his behalf. He felt the same as ever, but intellectually he knew he was being transformed. Jean seemed more comfortable with him at this meeting, too. Was it because he was already more convincing in his chosen gender role? He had no way to be sure.

After he spoke with Jean, he had to track down Maggie. As he thanked her for all her help, he explained that Robert Carlisle wouldn’t be starting work, but Alice would.

“The more the merrier,” was Maggie’s response. “Welcome to the team!”

He wasn’t quite sure whether she meant the museum staff, or womenfolk in general... and decided this was intentional. Maggie always was clever with words. He looked forward to working with her.

+++

Janet was nudging him slowly, almost imperceptibly, towards a more feminine frame. She’d learned that he reacted better to small, frequent changes and she consulted him on each edit. He’d be sent away from the Machine, she’d perform the edit and when he returned to the stable bubble of reality, she’d undo the edit. Only he would retain the characteristics of the universe in which he had been.

They used a camera to track his progress and Robert couldn’t believe how much he’d changed from the man he saw in the earlier photos. He was shorter, more slender and with much more delicate features. He loved the way he looked!

“I’m going to have to stop now,” Janet said. “You’re supposed to be in transition and the people at the Gallery won’t recognise you if I go any further. Also, I’ll end up turning you into a complete fucktoy.”

“Your fucktoy,” he replied, in a sexy contralto.

“Good girl,” said Janet: “My fucktoy. Shall we play?”

+++

Alice Carlisle began her first day at the new job. For once, she was dressed for comfort and practicality, rather than being in any of her more formidable lingerie. Nothing fitted her new form, except what she and Janet had bought recently. Janet decreed that a new job demanded new clothes anyway, so they treated it as an excuse to go shopping together.

Alice arrived at the Gallery in a shirtwaist dress and matching jacket, in burgundy. Her shoes were a present from Janet and probably cost more than she earned in her first week or two. And yes – she wore the YSLs.

Work went well. Some of the guys gave her more attention than she was entirely comfortable with, but that soon ceased. Word had got round, it seemed. That suited Alice just fine: she was Janet’s girl.

+++

They were married on May 2nd of the following year, amid the ruins of Urquhart castle. Two of Alice’s colleagues from the Gallery served as her bridesmaids; likewise Janet had two of hers from the University. It was a unique ceremony, they agreed, but perhaps every bride feels this on her special day, if all goes to plan.

Strictly speaking, Janet needn’t have edited the universe to be one where gay marriages had passed into law, since ‘Robert Carlisle’ was listed as a male – and still was one, where it counted. “But why shouldn’t alternative couples be happy together?” Janet had asked. She made the edit. While not strictly necessary in their circumstances, it simplified the linguistics of married life: both Janet and Alice described the other as her wife.

They considered selling Alice’s ground floor flat, but they didn’t really need the money and they valued their privacy, so they converted the whole thing into a townhouse and Alice’s old living room became a library filled with books: art on one side and physics on the other.

Here they lounged together, one rainy weekend, occupying opposite ends of the sofa with their legs entwined.

Alice looked up from her book. “I’m so lucky to have met you,” she said.

“I’m the lucky one. But we have to make our own luck, I suppose,” Janet replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, to be honest, all this happened by accident. But no regrets, eh?”

Alice’s beautiful eyes narrowed. “What did you do? Have you been tinkering with reality again?”

“Again?” Janet shook her head. “I’m talking about a long time ago. As ever, I was trying to make the world a better place.”

“You couldn’t make it much better than this, darling,” Alice replied. “But tell me: what did you do?”

“I think it all started when I decided to save the orang-utan. Or perhaps when I edited the western lowland gorilla back from the brink.”

“Really?” Alice frowned. “They’re not critically endangered.”

“Well, the orang was newly-extinct in the bog-standard universe.”

“What? There must be thousands of the furry beasties,” Alice objected.

“Yes, but not in my world. They were gone! So I wanted to fix that. And then there was the infant flu epidemic; then the leak at the power station in Flamanville...” Janet shook her head in exasperation.

“You were doing your comic-book hero thing, again,” Alice observed.

“Yes, I suppose so. And in those days, I didn’t know as much about the business of editing as I do now. I made a lot of quick fixes to reality and some quirks crept in. By the time I noticed them, it was all too mixed up to just do a revert and try again.”

“Specifically, what did you do?”

Janet looked guiltily at her wife. “In the bog-standard universe, there was no such thing as transgender. Males were males and did male things. Females were females, et cetera.”

Alice regarded her for a long moment. “I already know I’m an edit, I suppose,” she said quietly. “I just didn’t realise it went that deep.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry, darling. I didn’t know for a long time – I mean, it’s not something you go looking for, if you’ve never heard of such a thing. I just didn’t know, until the changes were several edits deep.”

“But when you found out, you could have edited things back to the way they were...?” Alice felt glad that she hadn’t, but she had to ask.

“I suppose I could have,” Janet admitted. “Not easy to unpick all those tendencies and probabilities. Plus there was another factor.”

“What?”

“It really turned me on. I found that I was fascinated by the idea of having a lover who wore lingerie and made himself look pretty for me. Then you moved into the building and I was intrigued: pretty soon I was convinced that you were ‘dressing’ in secret and I entertained all kinds of kinky fantasies about you.”

“I had a few fantasies about you too,” Alice replied, fluttering her eyelashes.

“It’s funny,” Janet observed. “Albert Einstein claimed that ‘God does not play dice’, but the more I learn about the vagaries of reality at the quantum foam level, the more I think it’s all just a huge gamble.”

“It’s really disturbing to find that one of your fundamental, defining characteristics isn’t original,” Alice shivered.

“Certainly,” Janet said. “But look me in the eye and tell me you don’t like the way you are and the way you feel. I think we gambled and won.”

“Well of course I feel like that now,” Alice said. “But I would, wouldn’t I? What if none of this had ever happened. Do you think we’d be together?”

“I hope so. You were a lovely person – even before you became so nice to look at. But I’d be old and wrinkly, if the bog-standard universe was all there was.”

“Oh, there is that, perhaps. But I love you for more than just your looks,” Alice countered.

“Same. Now stop this miserable introspection! Any more of it and I’ll turn you into a toad. Or maybe just make you into a bimbo, so you stop caring about all this and just want to screw me.”

“You take your fantasies too literally,” Alice protested. “Honestly, just because you control the universe doesn’t mean you have to tinker with it to get what you want.”

“No. I suppose not.”

“Seriously. You only have to ask. I’d do anything for you, Janet.”

“Meaning...?”

“A bimbo, you want?” Alice fluttered her eyelashes again.

“It’s really not necessary...” Janet began.

“I don’t mind pretending for a bit,” Alice interrupted. “Exactly how slutty?”

“Um. Very slutty.” Janet blushed.

“Coming right up. Just give me a few minutes to change,” Alice said. She stood and kissed her wife. “Think dirty thoughts while I’m away – and be ready to tell me exactly what to do...”

---

© Bryony Marsh 2014

If you enjoyed my story, why not have a look at my blog, Sugar and Spiiice?

If you really enjoy my stories, please consider putting something in my tips jar by purchasing a copy of my TG novella, My Constant Moon, on Amazon.

From the Top
by Bryony Marsh

“James, what are you doing here?”

The boy gave a guilty start that spoke volumes: he was caught and there was no point in lying.

“I’m doing my Physics homework, Sir,” he said.

Simon Owens sighed. “What I mean is, why are you lurking in the library when you’re supposed to be in class?”

The boy showed the work he’d been doing. “I’m not being lazy, I just… couldn’t face it.”

“We all have to do things we don’t want to,” Mr Owens told him, trying to inject some kindness. “We don’t get to pick and choose – not until you’re on your GCSEs, and even then you don’t get to sit lessons out.”

“It was only music,” James said.

“Yeah? I hear it’s your best subject,” Mr Owens said. “Probably not a good idea to antagonise the teacher most likely to give you an ‘A’, wouldn’t you say?”

James looked uncomfortable. “It’ll either be singing or it’ll be some awful improvisation task. You don’t understand: it causes me physical pain.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, but you don’t get to skip lessons just because you feel you’re too good for them. There are rules, young man.”

The boy looked miserable, but he nodded.

“Have you skipped any other classes?”

“No, Sir.”

“Alright. Well, since all you’d achieve by going down there now would be to disrupt the last five minutes of the lesson, I want you to stay here – but you’ve got to see Mister Thompson during break and apologise. Will you do that?”

“I’m down for a violin lesson with him at lunchtime, Sir: can I do it then?”

“Alright – and this is the last time you skip a lesson, understood? What if there was a fire?”

“If there was a fire, I’d walk out of that doo–”

“If there was a fire and you couldn’t be accounted for, some brave firefighter would risk his or her life to look for you in a burning building. D’you get it? It’s not all about you, James.”

“Sorry, Sir.”

“Right. What have you got next?”

“Chemistry, Sir.”

“Do you have any objection to sharing Chemistry lessons with your classmates?”

“No, Sir,” James said.

“Good. I’ll be checking your attendance.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Lunchtime music lessons were just forty minutes long. You had to eat with the First Years and then dash down to the music block. Even if everything went perfectly, you’d barely got started before it was time to pack up again.

This time, though, James had more than enough time – even allowing for the apology he had to give for skipping the music lesson.

It ought to have upset Mr Thompson, but the other thing that James did upset him far more.

“You’re returning the violin?”

“I no longer need it, Sir.”

“You’ve bought one of your own?”

“No, Sir, I just won’t be playing it any more; I’ve finished.”

“Finished?”

He put the violin on the table, along with a tub of rosin, the sheet music and several CDs. It wasn’t an argument, it wasn’t a protest – he was simply reporting the end of his studies in the same way that another student might have declared that they’d finished doing a painting, or finished reading ‘Of Mice and Men’.

Mr Thompson had been through this before – with the clarinet, the piano and the guitar. If this was like those other times then James intended never to touch the instrument again.

“You were getting very good,” he said, carefully.

“Yeah, it was fun,” the boy said.

Mr Thompson tried not to show his annoyance. “Was? What changed?”

James just shrugged. “Finished.”

“I can find you some more challenging music, if that’s the problem,” Mr Thompson said, searching through the tatty piles of sheet music.

He offered something to James, who refused it.

“I can’t read music,” he said.

“You still can’t read music?”

The boy looked miserable. “Sorry, Sir. I get the idea. I mean, I understand: it’s a code. I could decipher it, but I can’t do it when I’m playing.”

Agitated, Mr Thompson rubbed at his face. “Do you ever wonder why not?”

James shrugged. “Because the map isn’t the territory, Sir.”

“Hm, interesting… but I’ve seen you read music!”

The boy shook his head. “I always pretended. I don’t use sheet music.”

Mr Thompson was unimpressed. “Lots of people put off learning to read music. That’s why you see letters pencilled in on the score, but in the long run it’s more efficient to just learn –”

“I’m an auditory learner, Sir,” James said.

“Still a learner, though. So tell me: are you planning on toying with another instrument?”

The barb was set quite deliberately, but James didn’t notice it.

“Dunno, Sir. Although…”

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking: wondering what it might be like to play the cello.”

“Have you indeed? You’d find it a lot different to playing the violin.”

“That’s fine,” James said. “I’ve finished with the violin.”

“You don’t want to see how far you can go with it?”

The boy frowned. “How do you mean?”

Mr Thompson was getting annoyed. “It seems to me that every time you encounter something you can’t play, you declare that you’re ‘finished’, instead of trying to overcome the obstacle. Learning, in other words.”

“I didn’t encounter an ‘obstacle’,” the infuriating boy said.

“What, so you’re just bored of it? Because you can play anything? Come on!”

James just shrugged.

“Alright, stop: wait. Let me find something…” Mr Thompson turned to the computer and launched a web browser. The film he showed featured Itzhak Perlman playing the theme from ‘Schindler’s List’.

Sullenly, James watched it.

“What d’you think of that?” Mr Thompson demanded as the movie clip came to an end.

“It was good,” James said.

“Good?” the teacher demanded.

James shrugged. “I liked it.”

“I suppose you can do better?” Mr Thompson goaded him.

“Play better than that? On the violin? No, Sir.”

“Ah,” Thompson said, “so there’s –”

“I’ve finished playing violin, Sir.”

Mr Thompson took a deep breath before he spoke: “Prove it.”

“What, Sir?”

“Prove you can play the violin like that. If you’re even half as good, I’ll accept that you’re beyond anything I can teach you – and I’ll let you swap it for a cello, if you must.”

“One last time, then,” James said.

His face became an expressionless mask as he reached for the case and unsnapped the clasps. He brought out the violin and the bow, tucked the chinrest in place and looked at his teacher.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Mr Thompson said.

Note-for-note, James reproduced what he’d just heard. From start to finish, every motion copied the master violinist that he’d watched and listened to once.

The sad music always had an effect on Mr Thompson – it was one of his favourite performances – but hearing it this way was far worse: this was a farewell performance from the most gifted pupil he’d ever had. A boy who’d already given up playing several instruments. It was like a bad joke! What did the kids call it? Trolling: James Dawson was trolling him. Just showing what he was capable of and quite maliciously refusing to do it ever again.

He cleared his throat as the music came to an end. There were things he wanted to ask, like “How can you do that?” but he already knew that James couldn’t tell him. He was James Dawson and this was what James Dawson did.

He’d accepted the apology for the same reason: James couldn’t stand to hear any piece of music performed inexpertly and the music classes were torture for him. Plus it wasn’t as if you could accuse him of poor performance!

“We’re almost out of time,” Mr Thomson said. “I’ll have a cello here for you to try next time.”

“Thanks, Sir,” James said, happier now. He put the violin and bow back in their case, then reached for his coat.

Mr Thompson didn’t speak again. He was trying to hold onto the memory of that exquisite performance, delivered at a distance of five feet from an audience of one, unrecorded and never to be heard again.

He sighed.

Trolling. Definitely trolling.

“D’you have any trouble with James Dawson?” he asked, later on.

They were in the snug at the White Hart, numbing the pain. Nigel was feeding a handful of pound coins into a slot machine and explaining to anybody who’d listen that it was all a question of probabilities. (Some Maths teachers are never exactly off duty.) Tony had gone to the bar with Rose and John had gone to the toilet. Only Sally heard the question, therefore – although that suited him. He didn’t want to admit to everyone that James Dawson was getting to him, but with Sally, he could admit that he doubted his abilities as a teacher and it wouldn’t go any further.

She pondered the question. “No,” she said, after a sip of wine. “He’s away with the fairies sometimes, but to be honest, he’s pretty much invisible: one of the polite, clean ones that hands good homework in on time and doesn’t get into fights. Why?”

“He’s winding me up,” Thompson said. “Music is a discipline where you ought to put in hours of practice, right? Hours and hours –”

She nodded sympathetically. “He won’t practise?”

“He won’t even come to lessons. I don’t mean the one-to-ones: he skips class because he says he hates them so much they make him want to scream.”

“I wish Janice Cook would skip a few of mine,” Sally said, grinning.

Thompson shook his head. “Listen: yesterday, he handed his violin back. He says he’s finished with it.”

Sally nodded. “And he was good, right? The one that got away…”

Thompson hesitated, still haunted by the performance he’d heard. “I challenged him to prove himself. He said he doesn’t read music, so I played him this film clip: a real masterpiece. If you were a musician yourself, you’d appreciate that you were watching a professional at the pinnacle of his career…”

“And?”

Thompson swallowed. “So he picks up the violin, for the last time. I know that, because he’s given up instruments before. The guitar; the clarinet; the piano; he was spectacular with all of them, but he just… stopped. There isn’t a reward, an appeal or a punishment I can devise that’ll change his mind. He gets good at an instrument – I mean effortlessly perfect – and then he abandons it.”

Rose and Tony came back from the bar, with more drinks: Sally wasn’t distracted, though, which was nice.

“So he played for you?”

“Who’s this?” asked Tony.

“James Dawson,” she explained.

“Is he any good?” Rose asked.

Thompson spread his hands. “He played the most achingly perfect piece of music that I’ve ever heard. Every little accent; every vibrato. Three and a half minutes of music, note-for-note. Absolute genius: and he’d only heard it once.”

“Right, I’m having him in the show,” Rose declared.

Thompson shook his head. “I wish – but he won’t do it.”

“He won’t play in front of an audience?”

“I doubt he’ll ever touch a violin again,” Thompson said. “He’s done this before.”

Sally held his gaze. “And he’s really that good?”

Thompson nodded. “He can’t even read music. He just listens, remembers and plays it all back. Perfectly.”

“Savant syndrome,” said Rose.

Tony grinned. “What? He’s like an idiot savant? Well, he’s halfway there…”

James aimed with great care. It took a fair bit of pissing about to make an exploding airgun pellet and he didn’t want to waste one with a miss.

He’d invented them himself: you held a drill bit in your fingers and twisted it to enlarge the pellet’s cavity. You put in a few flakes from the head of a red match – enough to ensure that it detonated when squashed – then topped everything up with a fine powder made from brown matches, sealed in with a dab of epoxy. They made a very satisfying little crack when they hit a hard surface, as now. Steve just about jumped out of his skin, spilling his drink.

“Fuck’s sake, Jimbo!” he yelled – which seemed to indicate that he was impressed.

Alex laughed. “Gimme a go!”

James loved these afternoons in the woods with his friends. They’d leave their phones behind and mess around the old-fashioned way, making dens and tree houses. They were, perhaps, a little bit too old for some of the games that they still enjoyed and knew better than to seem too enthusiastic about. You weren’t supposed to like hide-and-seek at fourteen, but they still had fun, wrapping it up in a layer of boisterous humour.

They threw their empty drinks cans in the pond, then took turns to shoot holes in them until they sank, like ragged enemy ironclads. Alex’s was the last to sink, but at last he admitted that he’d stuffed it full of twigs.

“If you filled it with scraps of polystyrene, maybe I could make an incendiary pellet,” James mused.

“Bollocks,” said Steve.

“If you pack a pellet with red match heads and leave the tail end open, you get a tracer effect,” James said.

“I don’t believe you,” Alex said.

“It’s true,” James insisted. “If you lie on your back and shoot upwards, at night, you can see ’em speeding away. If one stopped inside a wad of polystyrene, it might set it on fire…”

Steve grinned. “You’re a nutter, you know that?”

“Pyromaniac,” Alex said.

Smiling, James accepted both compliments.

A little later on, with the ammunition supply exhausted, James said he needed to go home. In truth, he was uncomfortable because the other two were talking about trespassing on the railway. There was an ‘island’ of wild woodland between two railway tracks that fascinated them, but James didn’t want to take that particular risk.

He gestured at the air pistol. “I’ve got to be back before my mum, so I can get that hidden.”

This, the others accepted.

In reality, James had hours to spare. His mother was making her regular weekly visit to Aunt Sheila, who lived in sheltered housing. That meant she wouldn’t be back for hours, which was perfect.

James stashed the airgun in its usual hiding place and went for a quick shower. When he emerged from the bathroom, he had a towel around his head and another one wrapped high around his body, girly-style.

In a box that was hidden deep under his bed, behind a stack of blankets that nobody ever used, was his stash of girl’s clothing. Not exactly stolen: each piece had been intercepted from the bin or chosen with care and removed from a bag that was destined for the charity shop. His collection was therefore a little bit tatty, but every item was a treasured possession.

His regular clothes came and went as he grew out of them or wore them out, but most of his sister’s things were still to be grown into. He adored each little piece of lace edging; loved how Lycra held him tightly. The cool smoothness of the fabrics; the shapes that made him feel grown up and sophisticated. Also the way they made your heart go thud in your throat, better than the scariest fairground ride.

Sometimes, if he woke in the night and he was certain that Mum was fast asleep, he’d wear a bra and knickers under his pyjamas, feeling special and secretive.

Somehow, he’d instinctively known not to tell anybody. He knew it was wrong… and it was the best he ever felt. Once he realised that, he’d begun collecting. He loved Ellen, the older sister who was at university now. He knew she’d probably be grossed out to know that he had her old things. It wasn’t meant to be creepy, or a betrayal; it was just what a teenage boy had to do when the world had decreed that it was wrong for him to wear a bra and knickers, a pair of tights or a skirt.

Some days, lingerie was enough. (Lingerie… what a wonderful word!) On this occasion, though, he decided he’d do things properly. From among the small stash of clothing, he chose Ellen’s old school uniform. The style hadn’t changed since she’d worn it, so within a few minutes James was dressed a lot like the girls in his class. He imagined himself being friends with Hazel Smith, Michelle Nolan and Sofia Kollárová; talking about stuff, hanging out.

It would have been wonderful, he thought.

He kept the towel on his head for a while, because it allowed him to pretend that his hair was longer. Sometimes he experimented with makeup – mostly odds and ends that his mother or sister were throwing out – but the results were usually disappointing.

Instead, on this occasion he just finished dressing as a girl from Southcott School, then settled down at his desk and did his Geography homework.

He wouldn’t have done Maths as Penny – that was his name, when he was dressed – but some subjects were somehow more innately feminine than others, he felt. Penny took care to present her work with care, drawing graphs with the aid of a French curve to plot the data smoothly, adding neat lettering and using colours: the best girl that never was.

James was more than a little bit in love with Miss Sally Leighton, his Geography teacher. That was okay, because lots of the guys fancied her. She was young, she had a nice bum – and a lovely smile. You were more-or-less required to say you’d like to ‘do it’ with Miss Leighton, because it proved you weren’t gay – and certainly James was attracted to her… but it was complicated because he also wanted to be her.

Which was a load of bollocks, of course – but he could do good work for her and earn one of those beautiful smiles, at least. Perhaps Penelope Dawson could manifest herself better as time went on. James would learn how to do makeup; earn some money and buy nice clothes; find the courage he needed to confess his needs…

One day.

When he’d finished Geography, he did the assigned reading for English, then took a break, just enjoying the chance to spend some time as Penny. As the time approached half past six, he had to put her away again. He threw on some jeans and a t-shirt, then went downstairs and peeled some potatoes.

When his mother got home soon after, she kissed the top of his head and told him he was a lovely son – which hurt just a little bit, but he knew she meant well.

True to his word, Mr Thompson had produced a cello in time for his most frustrating pupil’s next lesson. Having brought it out of storage, he checked it over and tuned it… but that didn’t stop James from making a couple of minute adjustments. He never needed a tuning fork, of course.

He’d been attentive enough as he was told how to sit and hold the instrument, and Mr Thompson had managed to give him a few pointers about the differences in bowing technique. He seemed happy – and pleased with the lustre of the highly polished wood; it was a beautiful cello.

He played a scale, wincing at each imperfection, but never making the same mistake twice. He experimented, to discover the range of notes that each string offered him, and you could see him filing the information away. He accepted some pointers about finger placement, and nodded his thanks as the notes became clearer.

After twenty minutes or so of playing individual notes, quite suddenly he was playing music. Thompson recognised it as ‘Le Cygne’ from ‘The Carnival of the Animals’ by Camille Saint-Saëns.

The slow melody was delivered with James Dawson’s usual heart-wrenching perfection; a beautifully emotional piece quite at odds with his blank-faced concentration. He played for a couple of minutes, before breaking off in the middle.

Thompson could have sworn at the kid. “Why’d you stop?”

James blinked. “That’s all I heard, Sir. It was on in Mum’s car – Classic FM, I think it was – but we arrived home before the tune finished, so that’s all I got.

“That’s the only time you heard it?”

“Yes, Sir. What is it?”

“It’s called ‘The Swan’. I can find a recording of it if you give me a minute.”

James nodded. “Thank you! It’s been bugging me, not knowing how it finishes.”

Thompson managed to find a decent recording and he played it for the boy, who thanked him again for solving the mystery – but he didn’t immediately reach for the cello and play the piece.

Instead, he set it aside with care and stood.

Thompson was a proud man. He wouldn’t beg, but he had to ask: “So, is this your new musical interest?”

James considered he instrument for perhaps two seconds. “Oh, no way. Too much to carry, Sir. Thanks, anyway, though.”

“I see. Can I interest you in a triangle? Piccolo?”

The sarcasm was lost on the boy. “Flute, maybe.”

At last, Thompson allowed himself a sigh. “You really are infuriating at times, Dawson. You know that?”

“Sorry, Sir.”

“Appropriate choice of music, really,” Thompson said, angrily, “because everything’s a swansong with you, isn’t it?”

“Sir?”

“Everything’s always ending. It breaks my heart to know that each piece of music you play, you close the book on it forever. You don’t learn it: you finish it. It’s a bloody waste!”

“Are you okay, Sir?”

“No I’m not! You’re making a mockery of my profession, you know that?”

James looked a little bit frightened. “Er…”

“D’you want to hear my opinion?” Thompson demanded.

James just nodded.

“Your sister was a far better musician than you.”

That got his attention. James Dawson stared at his teacher in confusion.

“She was, though,” Thompson ploughed on, recklessly. “She had to work for it – and she did. She put the hours in. She earned her proficiency, and she valued it: treated the whole thing with respect.”

“I taught her,” James said.

“What?”

“The clarinet. I showed her how to do it. Helped her, every night. For years.”

Thompson scowled. “You were, what? Seven? I don’t believe you.”

James looked uncomfortable. “I had to,” he said. “The music was… I needed to fix it.”

“You taught Ellen to play the clarinet?”

James nodded.

Wordlessly, they regarded each other for a time.

Thompson shook himself. “She’s still a better musician than you.”

James looked hurt, but he didn’t protest.

“She got all her certificates,” Thompson pointed out. “She never turned up saying she’d ‘finished’. She never refused to perform a piece on the grounds that she’d done it before. She never switched to a completely different instrument right before a grading. She was in the orchestra! She –”

“I can’t be in the orchestra, Sir,” James said. “They make mistakes.”

“And you never do. Of course.”

“No, Sir. Sorry, Sir.”

Thompson glanced at the clock: it was almost time to finish, anyway. He took the cello and returned it to its case, closing the clasps with bitter finality.

“You have a gift,” he said, “you know that. But your sister understood better than you. Music itself is a gift and it’s meant to be shared, not hoarded. If you’re going to be a musician, sooner or later you have to perform. Not to satisfy you, but to delight an audience. Ellen was a team player, in the orchestra. You, you’re good, but you’re arrogant. I can’t even say you’re a prima donna, because at least they’d perform. You kill music. You take it in, and don’t feel it but instead you copy it and once you’ve done that, it’s dead to you, isn’t it?”

James looked as if he might cry. “Uh…”

Thompson sniffed. “I can’t do anything for you, James. God knows, I’ve tried. I can’t help you any further.”

“Sir.” James stumbled from the music room.

“Are you alright, sweetheart?”

James hadn’t told his mother that he wasn’t a musician any more. Better if she didn’t notice until the end of term, since the lessons had all been paid for – plus the hire of the violin. It was money they couldn’t afford to waste, but at least there’d be no new fees to pay in the future.

Still, it left him feeling aimless; disjointed. Everyone should have one thing at school that they can feel good about, and James was struggling to reinvent himself. Also, all the music he heard was clogging up his head: he couldn’t lay it to rest by understanding it in the usual way, so it all just sort of built up.

“A penny for ’em,” she prompted.

He jolted at the mention of ‘penny’, but then he brooded some more.

At last: “Is Ellen better at music than me?”

His mother looked at him strangely. “You know she isn’t.”

James pondered this. “Mister Thompson said she was.”

“Oh,” his mother said, carefully. “I see.”

“You do?” James looked hurt.

“I think I can see his point,” she said. “Girls are… pleasers. They like to do as they’re told – whereas boys, much as I love you, are a bit more challenging. I imagine you annoy Mister Thompson quite a bit. At parents’ evenings, he’s always complaining that you won’t perform for an audience…”

“Yeah, I can’t do that.”

She stroked his hair. “Why not, my love?”

James shrugged. “They always want you to rehearse, or do multiple performances. It kills it.”

His mum laughed softly. “Most people need to rehearse, darling. I’m sorry it’s boring for you.”

“It’s not boring,” he said, “it’s just…”

“What?”

“Uh, what was that you said? ‘Pleasers’?”

She frowned. “I don’t mean you’re allowed to be obnoxious, just because you’re a boy.”

He stared at his mother for a long time, deep in thought – but he didn’t share anything further.

“Thanks, Mum,” he said, giving her a squeeze.

James tried to think things through. It wasn’t easy when there was so much music playing in his head. The ‘Prince of Denmark’s March’ by Jeremiah Clarke might normally be described as a trumpet voluntary, but for James it was anything but: he felt an urgent need to play it – just to get it out of his head.

Great, he thought, I’m gonna need to get hold of a damned trumpet. But what would Penny do?

Boys brooded. They hid their fears and they told their best friends to fuck off, with a chuckle. James was good at it: he’d had to be, because that was how he concealed his secret; how he sustained his double life.

Not a double life, in fact, because ‘double’ suggested that both facets were expressed equally and that just wasn’t true. For all that he loved her, James kept Penny hidden in a box under the bed. He didn’t allow her to manifest herself: no friends and no social interactions at all. Even Mum and Ellen didn’t know about her.

“Girls are pleasers,” Mum had said. James was getting decent grades in the Geography homework that Penny did in his place. Better than the Computing and Physics that he always worked on as himself. So maybe girls were just better? James wished…

Nah, that’s bollocks: you don’t get to choose.

It rankled that Mr Thompson had said Ellen was better than him. It wasn’t fair; wasn’t true – except that when he thought about it, he couldn’t deny that she’d done far more to entertain people. She’d been more popular at school than he’d ever be. He’d always quite liked the idea of being thought ‘troubled, but brilliant’, but now he felt that he’d made a terrible mistake, alienating the one person who’d been able to see his potential.

With a sigh, he got ready for bed. He decided that it was a night when he needed to be Penny, at least to the extent of dressing in some of Ellen’s old things; releasing his alter ego from her hiding place, though it was always a hassle to have to hand-wash those clothes in secret – and drying them was particularly fraught with danger.

Even so, he found it such a relief to spend some time as Penny, and he slept well.

The next time he went to the woods with Steve and Alex, it wasn’t as good. There were some slightly older boys there and it changed the experience completely. The newcomers had cigarettes, which was bad enough because they considered smoking to be an essential rite of passage, but they also worked mischief with their lighters. Formerly lauded as a pyromaniac, James was now a ‘little baby’ because he argued against setting fire to a tree.

In a rain-sodden cardboard box, near the lane where people dumped old mattresses and the like, they found a small stash of pornographic magazines. All the boys tried to act worldly and merely amused, but were secretly fascinated by the images, each more explicit than the one before as they peeled apart the wet pages and passed them around.

Initially envious of the sexy lingerie that the model displayed, James noted that no amount of mascara could conceal the lack of enthusiasm in her eyes. He felt ashamed, guessing what Ellen – or indeed, Penny – would have said about him skulking in the woods and looking at porn.

“Fuck me, look at this!” one of the older boys said as he tore off a page to reveal the one beneath. A full-page image showed the model, now squatting in her high heels and using her fingers to spread apart the lips of her pussy for the camera and thus for half a dozen boys in a wood.

James was fascinated to get such a view of womanhood, so much more vivid than the simple line drawings in his biology textbook. It wasn’t the lust or sense of devilment that drove the other boys, but a fleeting appraisal of what he might have been equipped with. It looked neater; nicer than what he was accustomed to.

“I bet she’s had an orgasm,” one of the boys opined, trying to sound knowledgeable.

“She’s had what?” James asked, wondering if it was some kind of medical procedure.

The boy stated to explain his theory but James stood, uneasy at having seen something so private. What if they were discussing Ellen this way?

“Gotta go, guys,” he muttered, though he’d laboriously worked his way through the manufacture of no fewer than thirty exploding airgun pellets the night before.

“Why?” Steve demanded.

“Just… remembered something I ain’t done,” he bluffed. “I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”

“Alright,” Steve said, distractedly, gazing at a pair of breasts that were dripping with baked beans, a slight frown on his face.

“See ya,” Alex said.

“Maybe he’s queer,” one of the older boys said, before he was out of earshot.

He pretended not to hear.

Thompson stayed late, fixing loose pages back where they belonged in his sorely abused music books. Sally Leighton was also on the premises, doing some marking up in her classroom. It was a task that could have been done just as easily at home, but the two of them were killing time. By unspoken agreement, they were waiting until all the others had left. They didn’t want everyone knowing their business: for the first time they were going out for a drink as a twosome, rather than in a group. They both felt that it might be the start of something, although it was early days.

Sally arrived at the music block, shaking raindrops from her coat. It was a horrible night and she wondered if the weather was going to put a dampener on their evening.

“You ready?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, “just give me a minute.”

He set aside the books he’d repaired and began to check that all the windows were fastened, and the bars as well. Musical instruments were valuable and a break-in could be a disaster.

Sally understood what he was doing and she went to the opposite side of the room to perform the same checks.

A small figure in an outsized coat appeared in the doorway, dripping wet. When he threw back the hood, the anxious face of James Dawson was revealed.

“Mister Thompson,” he said, “I came to apologise.”

He glanced at Sally – Miss Leighton – finding her a complicating factor that he hadn’t anticipated, but he liked the Geography teacher. In fact, weren’t these the two people he most wanted to please?

“I was hoping…” he said, trailing off.

“Hoping for what?” Thompson prompted him.

“Can we start again? Like, from the top?”

Thompson glanced at Sally. It was late; they weren’t obliged to remain there hours after the end of classes, no matter how troubled the kids might be, but Sally flashed him a smile. It seemed she didn’t mind if this ate into the time for their putative date.

You had to be very careful in the teaching profession. There was no way that Thompson would have had a lone pupil come to him after hours, but if Sally was prepared to act as a kind of chaperone, a witness that nothing untoward had taken place…

“Won’t your mum be wondering where you are, James?” Sally asked.

The boy glanced at the clock. “She’s expecting me home by seven-thirty,” he said.

Thompson was annoyed. He noted that he hadn’t actually received the promised apology, but perhaps that was just awkwardness on the boy’s part. Kids are kids, he reminded himself. They make mistakes. So:

“What did you want, James?”

The boy squirmed. “Could I have the violin back, please, Sir?”

Thompson smiled. “You’re not finished with it, after all?”

James swallowed nervously. “I’d like to start again – and do it properly this time.”

The violin was still there: Thompson returned it to him and the boy clutched it like a shipwrecked mariner clinging to driftwood.

There was an awkward pause.

“Was there something else?” Thompson asked.

“I’ll need some sheet music, please,” James said.

The teacher gestured. “Take your pick.”

He was surprised when James went all the way to the left-hand end, where the simplest books for beginners could be found.

“I’d like to try this one, if that’s alright, Sir?”

Thompson saw that he’d chosen a collection of loose, dog-eared sheets: ‘Scarborough Fair’. He was surprised, because it was such a basic piece.

“Sure,” he said.

It seemed that there was a misunderstanding: Thompson had intended only for the boy to borrow the music, but James meant to play it there and then. He placed it on a music stand, then turned to get the violin out of its case.

Thompson shot Sally an apologetic look, but she gave a little shake of her head. She’d heard about the astonishingly talented musician and she wanted to know what he was capable of.

“You’re intending to play with your coat on?” Thompson asked, amused. “Gonna do some busking?”

Frowning, James paused. It seemed that he was making his mind up about something, but at last he set down the instrument.

When he removed his coat, it revealed full school uniform – but not his uniform. The school trousers were shown to be girls’ ones, with a short zip and a single pocket. Beneath the blouse, the lines of a bra could be seen clearly, and it seemed he’d added a little bit of padding to the cups.

Thompson frowned. “Is this some sort of j–”

Sally put a hand on his arm, silencing him.

“Huh,” she said, “that’s… a surprise.”

“Yeah,” said Thompson, still looking baffled.

James looked from one to the other, fearful but also defiant.

“Is this something we should expect to see more of?” Sally asked.

“Um, I dunno, Miss,” James said. “I… not really… I’ve only got one blouse, and no shoes, and the necker’s got the wrong house stripes, and all my tights have holes in ’em, and –”

“It’s alright,” she said, gently. “It was very brave of you to, um, to show us.”

Silence stretched, until Thompson ended it:

“You were going to play, I think?”

James gave a nervous little nod. He warmed up by playing a scale, rather hesitantly. He paused and made a minute adjustment to one of the fine tuners, then played the scale again.

Haltingly, he spoke to his teacher: “I want to do it properly. Not copying somebody else’s interpretation and stealing all their accents, but learning to do it for real. Learning from you, I mean, if that’s okay. I’ll do anything you say, if you can help me to turn these little black blobs and lines into… music.”

He was almost in tears, they could tell.

“From the top, then,” Thompson said, forcing a smile.

Haltingly, as if he’d been playing the violin for only a term or two, James played the first two pages of ‘Scarborough Fair’, his usual blank expression replaced with one of intense concentration as he glared at the sheet music, wherein the music lay trapped behind bars.

Since he wasn’t copying somebody else’s performance from memory, he didn’t know how to articulate the piece. Where he’d previously taken improvised trills, turns, mords and double stops from other performers, he got no help at all from the stark black symbols on the pages.

God help me, I’ve broken James Dawson, Thompson thought, appalled. He glanced at Sally, who he thought must be reevaluating his stories about the brilliant, maddening prodigy before them.

James played a bum note and stopped, scrunching up his face against the tears that started to flow.

Sally brought him a tissue, while Thompson chose his words with care:

“That came from a new place, I think.”

Not trusting himself to speak, James nodded.

“Good. We can build on that – and clearly, you can read music. Well done.”

“Also, you chose one my my favourite tunes,” Sally said. “I liked it – but I have a question.”

James sniffed. “Yes, Miss?”

“You’re not, uh… look: I’m a feminist, right? Because I have to be. So I’m trying to understand why Mister Thompson says James Dawson is the best musician he’s ever taught, but… but when James Dawson is…”

“Penny,” James said. “Penny Dawson.”

“Hi, Penny,” she said.

“Hi.”

“I just, uh… this better not be a ‘girls aren’t as good’ sort of thing. That would be… I’d like to think you can still be brilliant when you’ve got your bra on.”

James nodded, deep in thought.

“The thing is,” he said, “I’ve been stealing other people’s performances: other people’s ideas. Like Mister Thompson told me, I haven’t been doing it properly. Learning. I need to be less of a fake.”

“You’re not a fake,” she said.

James radiated misery as he looked at her; then his face went blank as he brought up the violin and launched into Bach’s Partita for Violin, Solo Number One in B Minor. It was a performance that Hilary Hahn had given in 2018, note-for-note.

Sally blinked in astonishment at the transformation; Thompson just listened with his head bowed and his fingertips pressed together.

James stopped in the middle of a bar, leaving the piece somehow hanging over them.

Thompson winced: the kid enjoyed trolling him that way, it seemed.

“Why’d you stop?” he demanded.

“I thought I’d made my point, Sir,” the boy said. “It’s fake, Miss: I stole that.”

“Alright, Penny,” Miss Leighton said. “Perhaps you’d prefer to play ‘Scarborough Fair’ again?”

It was getting late and he knew he was imposing on their free time, but James wanted to please them both. Not with music copied and reproduced, because that was what computers were for. It was like how grown-ups always seemed to appreciate a handmade gift, however wobbly it might be around the edges; he wanted to give them music that was his own.

He brought up the violin again, trying to still his shaking hands. He looked questioningly at his teacher, who gestured for him to begin – which he did, despite the tears that rolled down his face.

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

Nobody else knew about Penny. It was a shame that he couldn’t hang out with the girls – but would they have accepted him? He doubted it. Also, there’d be a shitstorm of epic proportions if all his friends thought he was gay. The inventor of the exploding airgun pellet – the boy who’d stuffed a potato up the exhaust pipe on the headmaster’s Range Rover, no less – couldn’t be thought of as a sissy.

So he’d cloak himself in a boyish disguise. (God knows, they’re simple enough to emulate, he thought.) Sometimes it was fun to be one of the guys, he had to admit… but secretly, he’d always have Penny to help him. He’d follow in Ellen’s footsteps, joining the orchestra and practising every day. He’d make Mister Thompson proud, and none of his classmates would ever know that James Dawson was a girl.

Not where it showed…

…but where it counted.

6,850 Words (c) Bryony Marsh, 2024 – all rights reserved

For most girls, a suicide attempt isn’t a sincere attempt to do yourself in: it’s more of a cry for help. I wasn’t a drama queen, though: I was playing for keeps.

In the suicide stakes, I’d acquired an unfair advantage: schizophrenia.

I’m not saying that the voices in my head told me to do it: even when I was having a bad spell and it was hardest to separate fact from fiction, suicide isn’t something impulsive. It requires too much care and attention.

I waited for a foggy morning, for my cycle ride to the Erskine Bridge. Note: not a ride ‘over the bridge’, but onto it. A one-way trip. You’ve got to love our Scotch mist: at certain times of year it’s all but guaranteed, and that reduced the chances of anybody seeing me at the railing, and coming to talk me out of it.

To a schizophrenic, other people are exhausting. It would have been horrendous to have to deal with somebody who said “I don’t think you should kill yourself”, because why should one care what another person thinks? People, as I had learned, never understood just how thoroughly disinterested I was in them and their needs and wants, their thoughts or impressions. No matter how sincere you are about self-destruction, people just can’t respect that.

The bridge: I imagine that the place was a less handy suicide spot back when they collected tolls from cars. There’s hardly ever any staff about now, and that means a girl can loiter in the middle of the span without any fuss.

They added a ‘suicide barrier’ a few years ago, which is to say a multi-million pound fence. Hence the bike: prop it against the railings and it’s almost as good as a stepladder. To be schizophrenic doesn’t mean one is stupid: checking the weather forecast for a foggy morning, slipping out of the family home, travelling to Erskine, and then counting lamp posts in the fog, so as to be sure of being right over the middle of the River Clyde… even crazy people can think hard.

It all worked perfectly. I had a rucksack with some stones in it, and when I stood on the bike I was able to fasten it to the top of the barrier, by the straps. No sense in trying to climb over a fence while you’re weighed down with stones: they were for later, to make sure that I drowned if hitting the water didn’t kill me right away. Standing on the bike’s saddle, it was a pretty easy climb up onto the top of the barrier, where I sat as I transferred the stones into my coat pockets. And with that, I was finished: I mean, I had nothing left to do, for the rest of my life.

The rest of my life could be as little as three seconds, I thought with a smile. Something like that, I guessed. I couldn’t see the river below, or I would have used the time-honoured and highly scientific method of seeing how long it took a droplet of spittle to fall.

I was just about ready to go, when the fog thinned and I discovered that I wasn’t alone. Sitting atop the fence, in a pose that mirrored my own, was a boy. He smiled, and shrugged apologetically.

He spoke first.

“Nice trick with the bike.”

“Thanks,” I said, cautiously. I was trying to decide if he was real, or not. That’s the trouble with schizophrenia: you never know if you’re talking to a real person, or just a passing hallucination.

Above all, I was feeling my way through this baffling and complex conversation. Only those who have been right to the brink of suicide will understand the etiquette of the situation: even though you’re fully intending to die a horrible death within minutes, the fear of embarrassment is as real as ever. In fact it’s greater, because you need a sense of rightness or you can’t go though with it. Suicide is a bit like sex, I have decided: if you’re put off by some errant thought or interruption, it becomes impossible to reach the climax.

This encounter threatened to end in frustration. What were we supposed to do now? Toss a coin to decide who went first? Both hurl ourselves off on a count of three? Not for the first time, I cursed my schizophrenia for the way it makes it so difficult to understand other people.

“So, you’re a jumper, then?” I asked, bluntly.

“No,” he replied, firmly.

“Huh?” That monosyllable was all I could manage, but it seemed to express my incredulity. After all, if you weren’t trying to top yourself, why sit on a suicide prevention barrier?

“I come here a lot,” he said.

“Oh, well that’s just great,” I spat. “You’re one of those people who pisses about with it but never has the balls to go for it? Well you needn’t think I’m waiting in line while you hold things up!”

As I have said, schizophrenia makes it hard to relate to people. Being diplomatic is one of the many things of which I am seldom capable.

Could I just heave myself off into space? I’d only have seconds in which to worry about the messiness (leaving a witness behind is an unwelcome loose end) and the possibility that I’d misjudged the situation… then, oblivion.

It remained a possibility.

Cars continued to pierce our bubble of fog, shooting through in a second or so, as if the drivers were intent on a suicide attempt of their own. Despite this, I expected it was only a matter of time before somebody noticed the two people sitting atop the barrier, and made a telephone call that would summon the police.

“You misunderstand,” he seemed offended. (But since he was quite possibly a figment of my imagination, fuck him. He can be offended all he wants, I thought.)

He tugged back his sleeves, and held his arms out, so I could see his wrists. They were horribly scarred: in fact, I didn’t think that anybody could have survived the multiple, deep cuts that I saw there.

Did this simplify matters, by proving that the boy was a figment of my imagination? Perhaps. Presumably, one isn’t obliged to worry about the feelings of imaginary people – and judging by the responses of some of the many doctors that I have been seen by, interacting with them at all is positively discouraged.

I looked away from the boy, and out into the fog. I tried to ignore him. Perhaps he was disappointed that his horrible wrist wounds hadn’t got a reaction out of me… and perhaps he was all in my head and I should stop thinking about him, and concentrate on my preparations. Goodbye, cruel world, and all that.

“Do you want to tell me why you’re going to die this morning?” he asked.

That, I could do. Reviewing the sequence of events that had led me here was a part of my preparations anyway.

“I was doing well,” I said. “I was happy. I did well at school, and got the place I wanted at university. I was going to be an architect, I thought. Then I started hearing voices. There was this… whispering. Not always, but it grew to be a problem. There were always suggestions of things I should do, or shouldn’t do. Warnings of danger, some of them maybe true, but mostly imagined. Then I started seeing people differently. They had… this cloud around them that showed what they were secretly doing and thinking, and what they might become. It became hard to trust anybody.”

I realised I had ceased looking out into the fog, and was making eye contact with the boy. That was unusual: it’s something that I normally struggle to do. (Why I could achieve eye contact with this intruder, I didn’t know.)

“Do you see a cloud around me?” he asked.

“No. At least… not a proper one. It’s weird. Stop it. Do you want to hear my story, or not?”

“Okay,” he conceded.

“What started as a diagnosis of stress brought on by my exams quite quickly turned into an assessment that I was a crazy person. Schizophrenia, they said. That explained why I was having hallucinations, but it didn’t offer any kind of cure. There isn’t one. There are drugs that control some of the urges, and make you slow and stupid and make you gain weight until you look like a fucking blimp… but they don’t actually cure the condition. Nobody can.”

“So, they put you on the drugs?” he prompted.

“Shut up,” I said angrily. “I haven’t finished. Worse than the hallucinations are the delusions. You believe stupid, impossible things. I won’t embarrass myself by telling you some of the things that I simultaneously know to be true, and know to be impossible. That’s bad enough, but the worst thing for me is the way my brain doesn’t work as well as it used to.”

He waited, and I remembered that I’d told him to shut up. It seemed that this hallucination was an obedient one, at least. At length, it occurred to me that the boy was at least theoretically a separate person, and didn’t have access to my thoughts and memories, and therefore didn’t know what I meant about my brain.

“I don’t organise my thoughts well anymore,” I sought to explain. “I lose the thread of my thoughts, and I can’t do anything complicated. I can’t understand architecture: it’s just gone. All those exams I passed, and the skills I learned: they’re beyond my grasp, now. I haven’t exactly forgotten, but I’m incapable of thinking through anything more complicated than paying the right money for a can of Coke and a packet of crisps.”

“So, you decided to take the drop,” he smiled sadly.

“Wouldn’t you?” I retorted.

“I can’t criticise you for something that I already did,” he said.

That was when I finally realised that I was talking to a corpse. His skin wasn’t merely the classic Scottish pale: he was actually drained of blood.

Had he somehow shuffled closer to me, without my noticing? Perhaps. It didn’t really matter: if he came too close, I could still drop myself off the side. Maybe it would actually be easier that way.

“What happens after you die?” I asked him, although this was probably stupid: you don’t learn much by talking to your own subconscious.

“You get to stop worrying about things,” he said – which wasn’t much of an answer.

I tried again. “If you’re already dead, why are you here?”

“I come here a lot,” he said, again.

“Why?”

“Do you remember those two young lassies who died here, together?” he asked. “They held hands, and jumped. Maybe three years back.”

“I remember,” I said. They’d both been abused by their priest, or something. One of them thought she was pregnant. A nasty business.

“It always used to upset me, to see a young girl end her life. I’d think to myself, she’s got so much… why throw it away?”

As somebody who is fundamentally incapable of caring about the feelings of others (hey: blame it on the brain disorder) I am still able to recognise bullshit when I hear it – and am more likely to draw attention to it, because I don’t know when to keep quiet.

“You obviously don’t know what those girls were going through,” I said.

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said, “but…”

He shrugged, helplessly.

“What?” I demanded.

It was his turn to look away, staring out into the fog.

“It still seemed like a terrible waste,” he muttered. “I can’t help thinking that whatever trouble they felt that they were in, suicide wasn’t the solution.”

“Says the guy who cut his wrists,” I pointed out.

“Call me crazy,” he said. “Tell me that I can’t possibly know… but I believe that if I’d been born as a female, I’d be happy. I’d still be alive.”

“Oh sure,” I said, sarcastically. “Sugar and spice and all things nice: how could a girl possibly be unhappy?”

“I don’t mean that,” he sighed. “I just… think it’s a terrible waste. I wanted just one thing, for as long as I can remember, and that was to be a girl. I never wanted this body. I didn’t want to be a rich girl, a popular girl, or a pretty girl. Just any girl. And instead, I got… this.”

“So you’re – uh, you were – a girl in a boy’s body? Isn’t that something that can be treated?” I felt that I was claiming some kind of moral high ground here, since schizophrenia can’t be cured.

“Oh, sure… there is a kind of treatment, starting with a lot of meetings with psychiatrists, who you have to satisfy that you’re sincere, and this isn’t just a phase you’re going through. There are endless questions, and tests… and all the while, the clock is ticking. I mean, you’re going through puberty and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it. They could, but they won’t help. They put all these barriers in place. For your safety, they say: and meanwhile, your voice breaks, and you start needing to shave. You become less and less genuine, while they make you wait for referrals and consultations.”

I harbour this opinion that the mind is somehow more important than the body. That it’s the seat of the soul, and the personality. That’s why acquiring schizophrenia was so hard on me: it looked set to destroy everything I thought I was. To merely have a body that one doesn’t like seems tame, by comparison. I don’t like my thighs… but they’re not the reason I was about to jump into the Clyde.

“So, they didn’t help you?” I asked. Trying to be polite. Sometimes I felt like one of those… what do you call those computer programs? Emulators. That’s it: emulators. It was as if I knew what I ought to do, but did it with far greater difficulty than ‘normal’ people. My consciousness simply didn’t run properly on my faulty human hardware… but if I made a real effort, I could get by. Sort of.

“Even at its best, the kind of help you can get wouldn’t be great. I mean, to have a series of painful surgeries and take a cocktail of drugs that shorten your life expectancy, all to make you into a crude semblance of a woman? It’s a pretty shitty solution, quite frankly… and yet they guard it like it’s the philosopher’s stone, or something. Bunch of bastards.”

“What happened?” I emulated.

“I had another one of the endless meetings with a consultant, and he refused to give me something to delay the changes that puberty was forcing on me. He said we’d examine things again in six months. Six months!”

“So, you cut your wrists,” I guessed.

“Yup. Went home, and took the guard off my dad’s bench saw. The thing is, if you use a knife it’s hard to swap over and do the second wrist, because you lose so much strength. Also, a knife wound can be closed, if they find you in time. My way was messy, but it was neat in the sense that it was final, if you see what I mean.”

I nodded. In the same way that he had complimented me on my forethought in using the bike to scale the barrier, I recognised and respected the businesslike way in which he had ended his life. We understood each other in a way that few others could.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I think we’re out of time.”

The fog was illuminated by blue flashes, coming from the Dunbartonshire side.

“Police,” I grimaced. Although you would think that it’s hard to stop a person from committing suicide when all she has to do is lean forwards, or buck her hips, and she’s off into the abyss… I knew that the arrival of a copper was likely to fuck things up. They have a way of talking to you that undermines your determination. I know this. Besides which, a good suicide should be a private and deeply personal thing: not something done on a timescale that is forced by an audience.

The car was going slowly, which meant they had to be looking for us, I thought.

“Fuck,” I said. I thought about taking the drop. I took a deep breath, and tensed, but when I looked to the boy for reassurance, he shook his head.

“I wouldn’t,” he said.

“Fuck!” I said again.

The police car slowed to a halt. The driver left powerful lights strobing, to alert other drivers to its presence. It gave our fog bubble a weird, frantic disco effect. Despite this I heard no other cars. Perhaps they had closed the bridge to traffic?

A copper got out of the car, but made a show of not approaching too close.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Callum.”

To look in his direction required an uncomfortable twist of the neck, so after an initial glance, I didn’t bother. I may have mentioned that schizophrenics aren’t very good at relating to people.

I looked at the boy, who smiled sadly. What did that mean?

“Would you mind telling me your name?” the policeman asked.

I raised my eyes heavenward, but saw only fog.

“I’m Ellen,” I said, “and this is…?”

I raised an eyebrow at the boy.

“He can’t see me,” he shrugged, apologetically.

“He can’t see you?” I felt betrayed. It seemed that my companion, upon whom half of the scrutiny of the law ought to have been focused, was deserting me in my time of need.

“Are you just a fucking figment of my imagination? Shit!” I exclaimed.

“Well I was real,” the boy said. “Honestly, I was. But I died.”

At the same time, the policeman was saying something about how he was indeed real, and would like to talk to me. I held up a hand, in the hope of silencing him. I was talking to the boy.

“So how is it that I can see you?” I demanded.

“I imagine that you can see me because you’re on the brink,” he said.

That made a kind of sense.

“What is your name, anyway?” I asked.

“Call me Jasmine,” he said.

I blinked, and pulled a face. Schizophrenics don’t generally know when to be polite.

“Please,” the boy begged, “call me Jasmine. It’s who I wanted to be.”

I considered this, carefully. Was he having a laugh at my expense? If so, I couldn’t see it.

“Okay, Jasmine,” I said at last. “You realise that this policeman’s going to think I’m a fucking nutcase, talking to an imaginary friend.”

“You are a fucking nutcase, Ellen. You told me so. But I’m glad to have met you.” The boy smiled shyly, and I thought I saw something of Jasmine – his inner self – in that smile.

The policeman was saying something again.

“I’m really sorry for trespassing or whatever the fuck you’ve come to tell me off for,” I told him, “but do you mind? This is a private conversation.”

I turned back to the boy, Jasmine. I found that I could see through him. Ghostly. Which is fair enough, if you think about it.

“Why are you fading?” I asked. He was becoming less substantial, in the same way that the fog boils away to nothing when the sun comes up.

“Probably because you’re leaving the brink,” Jasmine said. “You’re not jumping today.”

“Oh, fuck!” I cursed the ghost as he faded away. Had he tricked me? Kept me talking until the police showed up? Or was that just my paranoia at play? Schizophrenics do a great line in paranoia, always assuming that every little setback is part of a grand conspiracy to keep them down. Through emulation, I try to figure out which of the bad thoughts are real, and which are the product of my illness. The latter should be ignored… when I’m strong enough.

Jasmine had gone.

I executed a neat about-face, so that I faced the carriageway. It would still be simple enough to lean backwards and drop to my death, if this policeman proved to be a dick.

“Okay, Callum, was it?”

“Yes.”

“Jasmine says I’m not jumping today,” I sought to reassure him.

“That’s good,” he said. “Do you want a cup of tea, or something?”

“I could murder a cigarette,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, and turned to speak to his colleague in the police car, who passed him a pack, and a lighter. Callum lit two cigarettes, and approached slowly, reaching up to pass me one.

I smoked it right down to the filter, enjoying the familiar feelings that it evoked.

“You’re a fucking bullshitter, Callum,” I said.

“How’s that?” he asked.

“You’ve barely touched that cig, and you’ve just about gone green,” I laughed.

He conceded that he’d been caught out, and stubbed his cigarette out on the crash barrier.

“You really don’t want to start on that habit,” I told him, “those things will kill you.”

I think we both appreciated the humour of a person who’d been about to end her life giving health advice to one of her elders. As I laughed I felt almost real.

“Why are you sitting up there?” Callum asked gently.

“I’m ill,” I said, as if to excuse myself. “My brain’s turning to mush, and there’s nothing that can be done to help. I don’t want to be less than I used to be, so I decided to be nothing at all.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Callum sounded genuine.

The cloud that I saw around him suggested that he was a decent man. One who would be quite badly affected if he witnessed my suicide. Maybe he’d need counselling, and all that shit: I knew too much about talking therapies, and felt that I ought to spare him that. My suicide was supposed to be a private, quiet business after all: there was no sense turning it into a performance. There was always tomorrow, or the day after…

“I think I’ll get down now,” I told him.

It was simple enough to jump down – just as it would have been simple to drop on the other side of the barrier. What I’d forgotten was all the stones in my pockets: I came down like a meteor.

“Oh, sod it all,” I moaned, having landed badly. I’d done some damage to my ankles, for sure.

“Let’s get you into the car,” Callum said, and helped me as I limped painfully.

It wasn’t until we were underway that I realised I’d left my bike behind.

A bike is a wonderful thing for a crazy person like me. Although there was a time when I had learned how to drive, I can’t do that anymore. I’d be quite anxious behind the wheel, in case I swerved to avoid some hallucination or other, and ploughed into an innocent bystander: no, a car was no longer an option. A bike, though, allows some mobility while the only real risk is to myself. Also, it has the advantage of allowing one to move faster than a pedestrian, while navigating spaces where a car can’t go. That combination meant I could get away from well-meaning but stifling parents, who would otherwise try to keep an eye on me.

All that is great until you leave your bike on the middle of a bridge, where it will almost certainly be stolen before you can retrieve it.

“Callum, can you ask somebody to look after my bike?” I asked… but it seemed that Callum was a different person when he was in the car, with his colleague.

“Leave it with me,” was all he said.

His colleague drove – fast, but competently – to Dalmuir, where they took me into the police station. The promised cup of tea was provided, while I gave them name, address, and all that jazz.

“No biscuits?” I grumbled.

“I’ll fetch chocolate hobnobs if you promise you’ll never try to mess about on the bridge again,” Callum offered.

“For biscuits? Jesus. No deal.” I frowned. A few minutes of biscuit-related satisfaction, at the cost of a lifetime of… being alive? No thanks.

“How are the ankles feeling?” he changed the subject.

“Fucked up,” I said.

“Let me get you an ice pack,” he said. It was a poor alternative to being brought chocolate biscuits, but at least it didn’t come with strings attached… and it proved to be quite soothing.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked, presently.

“No,” the Duty Sergeant told me. “But I’d like you to wait here until your parents arrive. They’re on their way.”

“Oh, that’s just great,” I moaned.

“Also, we’ve sent a van to collect your bike,” he said.

“Really? Thanks!” I beamed. Maybe they weren’t complete bastards.

I realised, with regret, that the desk sergeant was due to die a few months hence, in a shark attack not far from Cape Town. Then I thought that maybe this was one of my delusions, because it wasn’t normal to know a person’s fate in advance. Emulate, I told myself: emulate…

I suppressed all thoughts of warning the desk sergeant of his doom, because such behaviour wouldn’t be normal. It would represent a part of a… what was it? A psychotic episode. It would earn me some time in hospital, no doubt. That was to be avoided, if possible.

When my parents showed up, there was an unfamiliar man with them.

“This is Doctor Moore,” my mother made the introduction.

“He wants to get you diagnosed as crazy so he can keep you locked away, and rape you,” somebody whispered in my ear.

There was nobody there, of course.

“Shut up,” I muttered.

Doctor Moore raised an eyebrow.

“Hello, Doctor Moore,” I said, shaking his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

Emulate, emulate…

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’ve hurt my ankles,” I said, postponing the inevitable.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t be on your feet,” he said, kindly. The cloud that swirled around him was a storm of knives, but nobody could see it except me – and if I revealed that I could see his evil aura, I’d just look crazier, and fall further into his clutches.

I sat in the chair he indicated. He sat opposite, and my mother and father were left to find seats of their own.

Everybody in the room was subservient to the Doctor, I realised.

“The police say that you were sitting on top of the guardrail on the Erskine Bridge this morning,” Doctor Moore said, casually.

I wanted to blurt out, “they’re lying!” That would be kind of stupid, though. Even when you know that all these authority figures are conspiring against you, it doesn’t do you much good to demonstrate that you’re aware of the game that’s being played. That just earns you some time in a padded cell, probably.

“I was,” I said.

“Why was that?” he asked.

“Why not?” I countered.

“It’s dangerous,” he said. “That’s why there’s such a high barrier.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Are you having a difficult time at the moment?” he asked.

“No more than usual,” I said, innocently.

“Hmm,” he appeared to ponder. “I’ve been talking with your mother and father, and we think a change of scene might do you some good.”

On the face of it, this is probably a good idea: I’ve never found my parents to be particularly helpful where my mental illness is concerned. But… that cloud of knives. Scalpels, in fact. Doctor Moore was an evil man: quite possibly already arranging the shark attack on the Desk Sergeant…

Damn it, I was losing my grip on reality again. It had been an eventful morning.

“I’d like you to come and stay at a place called MacKinnon House for a little while,” Doctor Moore projected professional calm and confidence, but I could see through his lies, even if nobody else could.

“What’s MacKinnon House?” I asked.

“It’s a residential facility, not far away, with a ward for young people like you.”

“Like me.” I made this a challenge, but Doctor Moore didn’t rise to it.

It seemed that my mother and father had already agreed to this plan on the way here, and although nobody actually said as much, it was clear that I wasn’t entitled to an opinion. Those who attempt to throw themselves off bridges are not considered to know what’s best for them.

I was driven to Balornock, just north of Glasgow. My mother and father seemed uncomfortable, having finally committed me to a loony bin, and they made their excuses as soon as decently possible. They said they’d “go home and fetch my things,” which served to underline the indecent haste with which they’d bundled me off.

And that was that. Days of beige corridors, sunny dayrooms, pointless activities such as crocheting squares for a quilt, old magazines, and boring television. The barriers with which they fenced us in were largely pharmaceutical, rather than physical, and that’s a horrific thing for somebody who once tried hard at exams and placed great value on intelligence.

I decided, as countless crazy people have before me, that my medicine wasn’t good for me: that it was the cause and not the cure. Whenever possible I would pretend to take my medication, but actually spit it out again.

At first I simply flushed it away, but when it became apparent that there was no clear end in sight for this incarceration, and as the delusions became more intense, I decided once again that it was time to kill myself. An overdose seemed the logical way, so I began hoarding my medicine.

If nothing else, this will demonstrate if they’ve been giving me placebos, I thought, grimly. (How many sugar pills would one need in order to commit suicide, anyway?)

Dry-swallowing forty pills wasn’t fun, and it was made more complicated by the fact that most of them had already been in my mouth before being secretly spat out, and hidden under my mattress. Thus, their coatings were gone, and they tasted vile.

As I swallowed the last one, Jasmine reappeared. The unhappy, dead boy was sitting in the chair where my mother had sometimes sat through visits while I was too drugged up to get out of bed.

“Oh,” I said, “not you again! Have you come to talk me out of this latest suicide attempt?”

“Well… kind of,” Jasmine admitted.

“I don’t even know if you can kill yourself with antipsychotics,” I said. “I suppose we’ll see.”

“I hope you don’t just fuck your kidneys up, or bring on a stroke or something,” Jasmine said. “You’d really learn something about poor quality of life then, wouldn’t you?”

“I swear, Jasmine: next time I’m going to use a shotgun,” I said. “One barrel for you, and one for me. Nice and quick.”

“Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to crowd you.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“Because you’re on the brink,” he said.

“Then you can kill yourself with an overdose of Amisulpride!” I exclaimed.

“So it would seem,” he said, sadly. “Or maybe it’ll just make you really sick. The point is that you’re trying to kill yourself again.”

“What’s that to you?” I demanded.

“It makes me sad,” he said.

I got a flash of inspiration: an insight into how normal people think, perhaps. Those who achieve empathy without emulation.

“It’s the whole sex change thing, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Crudely put, but: yes,” he agreed. “I only ever wanted one thing, and that was to be a girl. You’ve already got that, but you’re determined to throw it away. To stop being. To make yourself into garbage, so they have to put you into the ground, or dispose of you by cremation. Can’t you see how wasteful that is?”

“A body is nothing but a liability when you can’t trust your senses and your thoughts,” I tried to explain.

“If you can’t trust your thoughts, how do you know that attempting suicide tonight was a good idea?” he asked.

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” I moaned. “These could be my last few minutes of consciousness, and you want to spend them discussing the finer points of Cartesian doubt?”

“Of what?” Jasmine was nonplussed.

“17th century French philosopher, René Descartes. Look him up some time. Or, I dunno: ask him. You’re dead: he’s dead. You’d get along famously,” I smirked. “Descartes came up with a method of skeptical inquiry that begins with what you know to be true.”

“Uh, what do you know to be true?” he asked.

“That I’m getting worse,” I said. “That I don’t like my thoughts becoming all jumbled. That nobody has ever come up with a real cure for schizophrenia. That I’ve been hoarding pills, but sooner or later the staff were bound to discover them, or move me to another room. That forty times the normal daily dose of anything ought to be enough to finish me.”

“You really don’t sound like a crazy person,” he said.

“And you don’t look much like a girl called Jasmine,” I countered.

“That’s why I killed myself,” he said, brutally.

“Then why won’t you just fuck off and grant me the same privilege?” I begged.

“I wanted to ask you for something,” he said, tentatively – almost fearfully.

“What?”

“Your body,” he said at last. “If you’re done with it… I mean really: if this is the end for you. Could I take it?”

“Take it? Where?”

“I mean, have it.” he said. “Use it. Live in it. If you’re done.”

I frowned. “That’s really weird, Jasmine.”

“I know.”

“How is it even possible?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I think it might be why I’m still here. A second chance, sort of thing.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re at least as fucking weird as I am. And you want to become me? You’re insane.”

“That makes two of us,” he grinned.

“First of all, what will my family think, the next time they come to visit me and find some fucking stranger? They’ve had a hard enough time coping with my illness,” I objected. Fleetingly, I felt real sympathy for them. It’s hard to care about people when you’re a schitzy-bitch, and I was proud to have remembered their feelings at this moment.

“Are they going to react any better if the next time they see you, it’s to identify your body for the Sheriff’s office?”

Jasmine had a point there. I was being selfish again. Inevitably.

“Okay, second problem: if you take over my life, you’ll be stuck in the funny farm. It’s no picnic, being here, you know. Surrounded by crazy people – and doctors who’re trying to kill you…”

I paused and shook my head. “Uh, forget that. It’s the ’phrenia talking. Nobody is going to kill you. But you will be a prisoner, and it’s a dreary existence.”

“I lived fifteen years, imprisoned in the wrong body. To be imprisoned in a hospital would be far less of a confinement, believe me.”

“Fifteen years? Jesus, you’re just a kid!” I was appalled.

“Oh, great,” he said, “get all ethical on me, like the shrinks did. Tell me I can’t possibly know what I want, because I’m a child.”

“I never said…” I began, but he went on:

“I’m dead, Ellen. There’s no longer any question of whether or not I’m able to choose what happens to me.”

“What’s it like, being dead?” I asked.

“You get to choose,” he said, surprising me with his frankness. “Some people choose God, and they get their wish, or something like it. Many choose oblivion, and they get that. Some people think they deserve to be tormented, and it happens. Rebirth, purgatory… it’s all possible, somehow.”

“So…” I had to ask, “what did you choose?”

“You remember the first time we met, when we talked about the two girls who jumped off the bridge together?”

“Sure,” I said, “I remember.”

“That had only just happened a few days before, when I had that last appointment with a specialist, forcing me to take my own life. When I died and I was offered my choice I thought of them, and I decided to stay in the world. To haunt it, you might say. I thought I might be able to help somebody to understand the gift that they were throwing away. I’ve been talking to jumpers on the Erskine bridge for three years now: probably a hundred of them. Some still jump; others don’t.”

“But now you want to come back? In my body?” My head swam, and I struggled to remember what I’d been about to say.

“Only if you’re done with it. For certain – and if you’ll let me.”

“I…” I felt terribly hot, and I realised I had double vision. “I think… the overdose…”

“Stick your finger down your throat!” Jasmine said urgently.

I did so, and it caused me to vomit. Up came the horrible stew that MacKinnon House always served on Wednesdays, and the semi-digested tablets. I didn’t feel much better.

“A lot of that garbage will have entered your bloodstream by now,” Jasmine reckoned.

“Good,” I smiled grimly. “It looks like I’m finished here, then.”

“Is this what you want?” Jasmine asked.

“It’s messy,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the smell from the puddle of vomit on my bed, and on the floor. “But I think it’s worked. I think I’m dying.”

“You’re certainly very fucked up,” Jasmine said, looking at me intently. “I have to ask: can I have your body, when you leave it?”

When he put it that way, it sounded like the right thing to do. Back in university, I’d carried a donor card – and what was this, if not organ donation on a larger scale?

“Fine,” I mumbled, as my breathing became ragged. “It’s all yours. I hope it works out better for you than it did for me, Jasmine.”

I lost consciousness.

+++

My part had ended. A short while later I learned that Jasmine had told the truth about the afterlife: you get to choose.

Surprisingly, for somebody who had craved release for so long, I chose to stay behind – at least for a while. I needed to be sure that I hadn’t left too much of a mess. I was beyond the veil, but I watched.

My body survived the overdose. I’d stopped breathing, and when the medical staff found me I think they attempted resuscitation as something of a formality. Surely, they must have thought that brain death would have occurred in the unknown period during which I hadn’t been breathing… but they tried, and Ellen surprised them by coming back from the brink. Only it wasn’t me: it was Jasmine.

I watched the whole process, and found it a deeply humbling experience. Freed from the chemical imbalances of my sick brain, I saw the medics for what they were: professionals who cared tremendously, and who gave their best. Nobody had a hallucinatory cloud about them anymore, and I didn’t seem prone to my old delusions.

I’d warned Jasmine about being incarcerated, and sure enough they kept her under close supervision: suicide watch. She didn’t care, though: she was freed at last from the confines of the male body she had hated so much. She smiled all the time – and I don’t think it was just the Seroquel they had her on. She was genuinely happy. When permitted, she engaged cheerfully with all the shit that I’d hated, like art therapy. (When you’ve trained to work as an architect, making paper flowers is kind of demeaning…)

Astoundingly, she quit smoking. Most schizophrenics smoke like chimneys, and the medical staff tolerate this because the side-effects of nicotine withdrawal complicate their care. Still, the new me simply never lit up a cigarette. Within a few weeks, her fingernails looked better, and then her hair, and her skin.

I hated the bitch.

I’m kidding. I was really pleased for her – and delighted to see how she made my parents so much happier than I had been capable of, in recent years.

“How are you, Ellen?” My father asked at the beginning of one visit.

“I’m fine. I’m going to be fine,” she replied, “but if you don’t mind, I’d prefer not to be called Ellen. I’m… Jasmine.”

He looked pained. More craziness from the daughter that he’d been told was doing so much better? He’d been forced to learn a great deal about schizophrenia, and he knew that despite the medical name it doesn’t actually mean that a sufferer necessarily has multiple personalities… but now Ellen’s posture, her mannerisms and facial expressions seemed different. And she wanted to be called Jasmine?

My mother was more businesslike. With the endless tolerance that she’d always tried to show me, she quickly made the requested adjustment. After all, what was in a name?

“They say you’re doing well, Jasmine,” she said. “Would you like to come home soon?”

“I’d like that,” Jasmine said, with a beatific smile.

Going home, I thought. Really going home. Yes.

Jasmine was doing a better job of being me than I had for years.

“Good luck, Jasmine. God bless you,” I said, although nobody could hear me. I took one last look at the three of them, and said: “I’m done here.”

And with that, I surged upwards like a homesick angel.

And perhaps that’s what I was, at last.

---

© Bryony Marsh 2015

If you enjoyed my story, why not have a look at my blog, Sugar and Spiiice?

If you really enjoy my stories, please consider buying a copy of my novella, My Constant Moon, on Amazon.

Sidelined by Bryony Marsh
Reposted from my blog, Sugar and Spiiice

It had been a long walk and the temperature had dropped. The lights of the Wolds Bed and Breakfast served as a fuzzy, haloed beacon as I made my way up the slope.

“We hoped the lights on the front of the house would help you find your way,” Helen said as she threw the switch to shut them off. “Missed the last train, did you?”

“No,” I said. “I wanted to walk. I got some great photos as the train pulled out and then I walked back along the footpath.”

Helen glanced at my muddy boots.

“Uh, sorry,” I said, and set about taking them off.

“Nasty bloody night to be out,” a man said, emerging from the kitchen.

“Have you met Dave?” Helen asked. “He’s my hubby.”

I shook my head. “Hello Dave.”

“Fancy a pint?” he offered.

I frowned at this, not relishing the idea of going back out into the cold. The pub had to be half a mile away…

Perhaps he understood my hesitation, because he pointed to the corner, where I hadn’t noticed that there was a tiny bar. “Black Sheep? Wold Top? Or I’ve got a selection of ales from Great Newsome, in bottles.”

I smiled. “I’m tempted.”

“Go on, humour him,” Helen said. “He always wanted to run a pub, not a B and B…”

I left my muddy boots by the door and felt the rough flagstones underfoot as I crossed the room. “Pint of whatever you recommend, Dave. Please.”

He smiled broadly. “Let’s start you off with a Wold Top, then,” he said. “In fact, I might join you.”

This, it seemed, was how he hoped to spend the evening.

“So what did you think of our little railway?” Helen asked, as Dave poured her a glass of wine.

“It’s a real gem,” I said. “It’s amazing that the line survived, when so many others didn’t.”

“It wouldn’t survive without the volunteers,” Dave said. “And the tourists, like yourself.”

“Well I had a great day,” I decided, feeling better about the whole business as I warmed up. “There were plenty of other passengers, too.”

“It’s less of a draw on weekdays, when they’re running one of those… what d’you call em? Diesels, anyway.”

I didn’t want to seem too much of a railway nerd, so I decided not to start talking about diesel multiple units, though I was prepared to defend them as a legitimate part of a heritage railway operation.

I cast about for some other topic of conversation. “Was there some sort of event on today?”

Dave looked at me blankly. “Event?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw this woman in vintage costume. I assumed she must be involved with the steam railway. This was when I was walking back. I wanted to ask her about it, but when I got a bit closer, she’d gone – which was odd. She was standing –”

“On the steps of the signal box at Meadow Gates?” Helen suggested.

“That’s right,” I said. “Does she do it often?”

My hosts exchanged a glance.

“You could say that,” Dave said, at last.

Even as a railway buff, engrossed in my favourite subject, I could tell that I’d said something wrong. It was impossible not to pick up on the change in the atmosphere in that little room.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s… just one of life’s little mysteries,” Dave said. “Please – everyone who volunteers on the railway would prefer it if you remembered the line and the trains, and not some silly piece of local folklore.”

I took a sip of my beer. “Malton and Driffield Junction’s a lovely railway,” I said. “I’m here for the choo choo, not the woo woo.”

“Nice one,” Dave said.

It seemed that Helen didn’t want to follow Dave’s suggestion, however. “What was she wearing?” she asked.

I floundered, this being outside my area of expertise. “I’d have to call it… Edwardian clothing. A full-length dress with a high collar. She wore a bonnet, too.”

“What was she doing?”

“Just… sort of leaning over the railing and looking up the line, as if she was expecting a train to come by – although of course, the last one was long gone.”

Helen nodded. “She does that.”

“So… it’s some local enthusiast, right? Living history sort of thing? I mean, obviously…”

“Yeah,” Dave said. “Got to be, hasn’t it? Obviously.”

Helen glowered at him. “Don’t be rude!”

“Funny how she’d disappeared by the time I got closer, though,” I said. “I mean, it’s not like there’s any houses nearby.”

“She does that, too,” Helen said again. “She always did.”

“She… runs away?”

Helen glanced at Dave, who was looking cross.

“This better not end up like that time I had to serve breakfast to eight ‘paranormal investigators’ while they tried to interview me,” he muttered.

“There’s only one of me and I promise not to interview you,” I said, intrigued.

He looked at his wife and sighed. “Fine! Go ahead and tell your ghost story: I can see there’s no stopping you.”

Helen paused and glanced between us – clearly for dramatic effect.

“It was a dark and stormy night,” she began.

Dave rolled his eyes.

“Alright,” she said. “It wasn’t really – although there was a storm. But that comes later.”

I shrugged. “I’m listening. Does this story have trains in it?”

“Loads.”

I drank some more beer. “I like it already.”

“The disappearing woman who stands on the steps of the Meadow Gates signal box isn’t a new phenomenon. It dates back to the thirties – only she wasn’t always a ghost, if that’s truly what she is – and she isn’t actually a woman. Or wasn’t.”

Helen was confusing me and the best I could do was to seize upon one thing that she had said. “Not a woman?”

She shook her head. “She was a man: a signalman called William Jackson. The way I heard it, he used to dress himself up as a woman and then wave as the trains went by.”

I frowned. “Really?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Really.”

When I didn’t say anything she went on: “Some men like it. The clothes, I mean. Bill Jackson must have felt that the job was ideal, because Meadow Gates is miles from anywhere and if the line was clear, the trains would be passing at speed.”

A fresh pint had appeared in front of me, Dave giving a little bow as I acknowledged this.

“So there never was a woman working there?”

Helen smiled. “No – but ‘Daisy’ was something of a sweetheart to the railway staff who passed by.”

“Daisy?” I queried.

“That was the name that William Jackson gave. If anybody asked about the woman who was seen outside his signal box, I mean. He said she was his sister and that she used to bring him sandwiches.”

I considered this. “So you’re suggesting that’s who I saw? A crossdressing ghost from the nineteen thirties.”

She was toying with her wineglass. “I haven’t finished. It’s a sad story,” she said. “Shall I go on?”

“Please do,” I said. “What happened?”

“You’ve been to the engine shed?” she asked. “Seen the tail fin from that German bomber, and the photos?”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw them.”

She nodded. “That’s what happened: the German aeroplane came. They were lost, you see.”

“KGR one hundred,” Dave said. “They weren’t lost: they were pathfinders. Probably following the railway line.”

Helen looked irritated. “Either way, the weather was getting worse. For whatever reason, they came down out of the clouds and crashed in the meadow: carved a deep furrow parallel to the railway line, taking out several telegraph poles.”

“And this William Jackson was manning the signal box?”

She smiled. “It seems that Daisy Jackson was on duty, if you catch my drift? Daisy flew into action, dragging two injured Germans clear of the wreckage before they could burn to death, having also ensured that no trains were allowed to move on that stretch of the line, in case the plane’s bomb load should go off.”

I grinned. “That’s quite a story to tell the grandchildren. Bit awkward for William, though, I expect.”

“Awkward for everyone concerned,” Helen said. “If Bill had been in his usual clobber, they’d have given him a medal – but he was still dressed as Daisy when the police arrived on the scene, so they had to throw the book at him.”

“I bet,” I said, imagining how much more prudish things must have been in the forties.

She stared into her wine. “Bill lost his job when they found out that he was the railway’s sweetheart – and that meant he wasn’t in a reserved occupation, so they sent him off to war. You can see his name on the war memorial in Driffield.”

“He died,” I said – which was rather stupid, since it wouldn’t be much of a ghost story if nobody had died.

“He died in Italy in forty-three,” she said, “but Daisy… Daisy’s still around. Just sometimes.”

---

1,500 words © Bryony Marsh, 2024

They came from outer space!
They wanted our women!
Well, almost…

Sissygeddon
by Bryony Marsh

“I need information!” the President bellowed for perhaps the twentieth time.

There was very little that his staff could tell him, however. After its initial, dramatic ‘de-cloaking’ seven thousand feet above the White House, the vast alien spacecraft had done nothing.

“Reports are still coming in,” Chet Grossweiner said, again. He was Acting Secretary for Homeland Security: the President had fired another one just last week and the replacement had yet to be put in place. What a time to be covering the job, with it all hitting the fan!

“What sort of reports?”

“Well, mostly reports of nothing unusual,” Grossweiner said, squirming.

“Imbecile,” the president muttered, and turned away. Perhaps somebody else had a better idea.

The Chief of Staff, Norbert Sackrider, was channel-surfing. Say what you like about Air Force One: the old girl had subscriptions to all the best feeds. Incongruously, amid more news channels than you could shake an intern at, there was a Portuguese bukkake channel called ‘Spuuurt!’ Legend had it that this dated back to an administration sometime in the 1970s, but nobody had bothered to cancel it.

Sackrider flicked past Russia Today (something about the export of tractor parts) and on to 9News from Australia (where it seemed everyone was getting over-excited about something called “ball tampering”). He wanted to linger and find out what this might be, but there were more important things afoot. Next up was Al Jazeera World, where a newscaster was showing shaky footage of a city street, shaded by the monstrous alien spacecraft hovering above it. People were running.

“Wait!” the President commanded. “What’s that towel-head saying?”

He had Sackrider turn up the volume and everyone listened. It only took a few seconds before they understood that the newscaster was reporting on the Washington UFO – not a new arrival.

“In some ways that’s a good thing, Mister President,” a tall man in Air Force uniform said.

The President turned on him. He didn’t like surprises (and was, in consequence, not having a good day). He didn’t like being spoken to by people he hadn’t been briefed on: they tended to make him feel (and all too often, look) stupid. And why the fuck would one of the crew of Air Force One presume to offer an opinion? But then, he noted, this one had a fancier uniform than most, so maybe…?

“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.

“Major General Edward Grallenpoe, Sir!” the man snapped himself to attention.

This served to annoy the President further, since he was sure the man’s ramrod precision made him look short, poorly-dressed and generally out of shape in comparison.

“In what way could this be said to be a good thing?” he demanded. “I’ve got a motherfucking alien battleship the size of Rhode Island hovering over the White House lawn, and that’s a good thing?”

“Sir,” the airman was determined to explain himself, despite the withering scorn from his Commander-in-Chief, “it’s a feather in our cap that we got the aliens. It seems they came to visit us – not the Chinese, or the Russians.”

The President chewed this over. He began to look for an angle – and he started to feel just a little bit better about the situation. For the first time since that desperate, headlong ‘tactical withdrawal’ where he had been bundled aboard a chopper by his security detail and hauled out to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, he was thinking like a statesman again. A petty, small-minded, vindictive, under-educated and cowardly statesman, to be sure… but such was the type that appealed to the modern voter, who didn’t think that their leader ought to be anybody better than the “man in the street” – whoever that was.

“Hmm,” he spoke at last, “you may have a point there!”

But how best to play this? On the plus side, nobody could act all pissy if he decided to use nukes: it was his own territory, after all. But people weren’t going to remember him as the great and bestest president of all time if Washington got crushed beneath the flaming hulk of a monstrous alien ship and he irradiated half the continent. Voters were bound to remember that kind of thing, and even when you were in your second term that kind of thing didn’t poll at all well.

At last, he remembered his voters.

“Wait!” he said. “What about the conspiracy nuts? Surely they’ve noticed the enormous ship hovering above Washington?”

Dr Heinrich Winkel decided that this was his big chance to show his stuff. A political analyst with a PhD in media and its manipulation, Winkel had come to the White House for a job interview. He’d been swept up in the chaos of the evacuation and while nobody present knew who he was, everybody assumed that somebody else knew why he was there. Since he didn’t have bug eyes and green skin, he’d been herded on board Air Force One with all the other hangers-on who had managed to gouge or claw their way onto a helicopter when the White House was abandoned.

“The conspiracy believer segment is super-happy,” Winkel explained. “We injected a story that the cloaking device failed on one of the machines that we use to convert swamp gas into chemtrails. They’re more than satisfied: we won’t have any trouble from the ‘truthers’ for a year or more – although I’d stay off Facebook for a while, if I were you.”

“And the National Rifle and Heavy Ordinance Association?” the President asked next.

Winkel made a few stabs at the screen of his smartphone, and smiled.

“They’re buying bottled water, ammunition and such. Should give the economy quite a boost in the south: they love having something to fret about.”

“Young mothers?” he asked next.

“Looking to the establishment for strong leadership,” Winkel reassured him.

“Hipsters?”

“Congratulating themselves, saying they knew there had to be aliens all along,” Winkel reported after a single swipe. His confidence was growing.

“Veterans?”

“Grumbling that their games of Canasta are being disrupted, at the older end of the spectrum,” Winkel shrugged.

“Catholics?”

Now Winkel smiled.

“In for a shock,” he said.

The President nodded, his face appearing thoughtful – although an appearance was probably all it was. He was not a man given to thoughtfulness. In any event, he next turned to his Chief of Staff.

“Who’s the nerd?” he asked.

The nerd heard the whisper. (They probably heard it all the way to the flight deck.) The nerd was satisfied: he’d made a positive impression, he decided.

+++

They were flying toward Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida, for no particular reason other than that it had the obvious advantage of being a long, long way from Washington.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. The United States of America was supposed to set the agenda, not to find itself reacting to somebody else’s plans. America farted and the world inhaled: thus it had been for the best part of a century. Not since Pearl Harbour had an entire administration been caught with its collective dick in the poodle to this extent.

Anxious and self-conscious, the scratch team of people who had happened to be in Air Force One’s conference room with the President strove to look useful.

“Who the fuck are these aliens, and what do they want?”

The President’s question may have been phrased inelegantly, but much the same thing was being asked all over the world.

Soon, those aboard Air Force One were to find out.

There was a shimmer in the air, like an intense heat haze. Those in the conference room instinctively moved away from this strange effect, pressing themselves against the bulkhead.

Within the shimmering air, two forms faded into view: humanoids with bright red skin. Each wore nothing but a gold kilt, a jewelled belt and sandals. They stood at least seven feet tall and they sported ripped, masculine musculature of the kind that only a full-time narcissist can attain, even with steroidal assistance.

The aliens, it seemed, never did anything by halves.

The newcomers felt that their looks were nothing unusual: they had simply chosen the bodies that they inhabited to suit the atmosphere and gravity of Earth – although if you were going to choose your body, they had reasoned, you might as well look impressive.

The two aliens grinned smugly. It seemed that they had mastered human body language.

Three agents of the President’s security detail charged into the compartment, guns blazing. They were equipped with special subsonic ammunition that couldn’t puncture the skin of the aircraft, and thus felt that they were at liberty to hose down anything that moved, as long as they didn’t hit their Commander-in-Chief. Fortunately, the aliens were so distinctive that on this occasion none of the agents felt the need to shoot any of the other, merely human occupants.

Hollow-point rounds thudded into the aliens, each punching a neat circular wound in their red skin and leaving an exit wound that you could have placed a cantaloupe in – although this would be a strange and distinctly unhygienic thing to do with a melon of any kind.

Strange and unhygienic, the two aliens still stood as they dripped gore and bone fragments. Their facial expressions suggested contempt, rather than outrage or pain. One of them attempted to speak, although he couldn’t be heard above the gunfire.

At last, the agents paused to reload.

“As I was saying…” the alien resumed – but a fresh bullet struck him, this one shattering his jaw.

Again, the two aliens endured a hail of bullets, their impassivity perhaps more confusing and frightening than any counterattack might have been. When the gunfire died away the one that had spoken didn’t have much of a face left, but somehow he managed to convey disappointment, even boredom.

Now we’re in for a shellacking, thought Sackrider.

How do you kill something that doesn’t fear bullets? Grallenpoe wondered.

Oh, Jesus, I’ve got a kidney in my lap! the President thought. Jesus!

In this, he was quite wrong. The wayward organ that the fortunes of war had torn from an alien’s body and deposited wetly in the lap of the President was, in fact, an indecently large testicle.

A great deal of alien gore had splashed on Robin Woodcock, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury. In part, this may have been because there was so much more of Robin Woodcock upon which to splash alien entrails: he had at least twice as much skin as the next person in the compartment.

To the blood and brains on his ill-fitting suit, the horrified fatty now added splashes of vomit.

The alien who had spoken gestured with his remaining hand, and everything was restored. Their bodies were whole again; the walls were no longer spattered with gore; business suits and uniforms were clean; the ammunition was back in the agents’ guns.

The Secretary of the Treasury was momentarily surprised to find himself pristine – and then vomited again. This was the kind of thing that he did: he had always been a kind of lightning rod for human misery, which was the main reason why the President liked to keep him close – although not too close.

Hauling himself up from the undignified position where he had slumped against the wall, the President rounded angrily on his security detail.

“Hold your fire Goddamnit!”

Reluctantly, the agents secured their weapons.

“Shall we start over?” The alien was grinning smugly again.

“Who are you?” the President demanded.

This was meant to show that he was taking control, but once the words were out he knew that they sounded feeble. It was difficult to play the alpha male in the presence of these supernaturally powerful, confident beings.

“You may call me Bilgamach and this is my brother Arjenwoop,” the alien shrugged as if the question was foolish.

“Where have you come from?” Grallenpoe demanded.

It was clearly a breach of protocol to join the discussion in this way: the President shot Grallenpoe an angry look, not least because he’d been about to ask the same thing. Not that it mattered: all this was information that the alien had intended to give, before the fools with guns had burst in and made a fuss.

“We come from another star,” the one called Bilgamach intoned.

“Although we are also using Uranus as a base,” Arjenwoop added.

Someone snickered.

This distraction, coming from among his staff, seemed to derail the President’s train of thought. Eventually, he managed: “And what are your intentions?”

“We want your women!” the aliens said in unison.

There came a gasp from the corner of the conference room, where Annette Kirton cowered. She’d been spattered with alien stomach contents a short while before and while no trace of the foulness remained, the memory lingered. She hadn’t fully surrendered to the horror, but she felt that a screaming fit was still a distinct option.

Now the aliens turned as one, regarding her with a gaze that was ruthless and predatory.

“Meh,” they both said, after several seconds.

Ms Kirton habitually dressed in a frumpy manner, as did many of women who worked in proximity to the President. His eye and sometimes his hands were known to wander: few of the girls enjoyed the experience and still fewer were prepared to endure it when it became clear that the First Lady was no lady when it came to those she saw as rivals.

“You call that a woman‽” Arjenwoop exclaimed.

Among those in the compartment, even the ones who lacked any knowledge of typography could hear the interrobang – and had to concede that its use was valid.

The President winced. He enjoyed a good interrobang but he’d never expected to be on the receiving end of one: that wasn’t the way he rolled.

“How dare you!”

Annette Kirton was the Deputy Director of Strategic Communications – a role that was particularly difficult in an administration that demonstrated daily what can happen when a dumb person is allowed access to a smartphone. Right now, though, she was a petite parcel of outrage.

Arjenwoop gestured and a tool that looked rather like a hairdryer appeared in his hand. This emitted a pale green beam as he pointed it at the resentful woman, wafting it up and down. In the light of the beam, Ms Kirton had no secrets at all: her skeleton, internal organs, blood vessels, skin and underwear all became visible at once, all somehow translucent while retaining their natural colours.

Everyone present stared at the unfortunate woman.

“What are these things supposed to be?”

Bilgamach, it seemed, was either confused or repulsed by Ms Kirton’s pantyhose.

“Such neglect,” Arjenwoop wailed. “Such dereliction! Why is the creature permitted to wear this… thing… in place of garters and stockings?”

“Seamed stockings!” Bilgamach said, dreamily.

“With Cuban heels!” his brother added, apparently in rapture.

“Corsetry!” Bilgamach exclaimed. “Waist cinchers!”

“Girdles…” Arjenwoop moaned reverently. He tugged at the golden material of his kilt, apparently uncomfortable. There was a noticeable swelling beneath: not a full erection, but certainly the beginnings of one.

“Frills…” Bilgamach whispered.

“Lace…” his brother said, mournfully.

Their attention was drawn back to the here-and-now. Arjenwoop switched off the pale green beam and the tool vanished, restoring to Annette Kirton some semblance of privacy – although all present now knew that she had a tattoo of Curious George the cartoon monkey on her thigh. What George appeared to be curious about, he really had no right to investigate.

“We are not interested in this… travesty,” the alien said. “Where are the real women?”

“The… what?”

Not for the first time, the President wished that Vlad were present. Vlad was smart, and really generous: he might come from a pissant country that was about three quarters tundra, but he understood diplomacy.

Proper diplomacy: Vlad knew that anybody who could thrive in the American political system was basically a businessman. That he would want to find an upside, for himself personally, in any deal that might be struck. Vlad always took care of things: for some reason it seemed that he enjoyed details, so the President was happy to let him take care of all the details… as long as he always got a little on the upside.

What would Vlad do?

The aliens were speaking again: any wishful thinking about letting the Russians figure everything out had to be shelved.

“We think, perhaps, you are… holding out on us,” said Arjenwoop.

“What? No!” The President was horrified. “Take a look around the ’plane. Take any women you want!”

Several people looked horrified, but this was the President in full ‘save my ass’ mode. The staff had seen this before, when any of them might be sacrificed to ensure that the President himself wasn’t impeached or compromised.

“There is no woman worthy of the name on your vessel,” Bilgamach said.

Chet Grossweiner was surprised to hear this pronouncement as there was a hot little blonde from CBS News in the press corps that he’d been trying to bang for days. For some bizarre reason, the little slut hadn’t yet succumbed to his charms…

“There’s no hot women on the plane?” Grossweiner demanded, incredulously. His personal philosophy of “any port in a storm” had led him to berth his battleship in a few questionable havens over the years, but in general he thought that anything in lipstick was probably worth a try.

“We have scanned the entire vessel,” Arjenwoop said. “Where are these women, then?”

The two aliens looked puzzled. They conferred for a moment, in voices somehow reminiscent of the farting of an octopus.

Bilgamach gestured and a gadget like an electric shaver appeared in his hand. He muttered into it: more octopus-fart sounds could be heard.

“Women,” the gadget said. “Women.”

Another gesture and in his other hand he held something that might have been a screwdriver. This he jammed it into the side of the first gadget, twisting this way and that.

“Chicas. Dames. Fillies. Concubines. Mares. Bitches. Wives.”

The alien kept on twisting, and grunting into the box.

Grallenpoe edged closer to where the President stood.

“How about a little germ warfare, Sir?” he whispered.

“How’s that?”

“We could, you know… slip them an unclean woman, or two. The skankiest girls we can find!”

“Uh… why?”

“It sounds like they want to get pretty close to our women. We should let our invisible allies get to work on them…”

“Invisible allies? What’s that supposed to mean? The French?”

“No Sir! Bacteria. Viruses. The aliens may have no defence against our diseases. Even a sneeze could be lethal, in time.”

The President could see it now: all they had to do was give the aliens what they wanted, then wait until they succumbed to gonorrhoea. He could send a team up to their ship and get his hands on all their technology.

“Grallenpoe, you’re a genius!”

“It’s not my idea, Sir,” the Air Force officer explained. “It was H.G. Wells.”

“Huh. Well you tell Wells from me that if his idea works, I’ll give him a fucking knighthood!”

“Uh, thank you, Sir. But Wells is dead.”

“Already? These bastards have a lot to pay for, Grallenpoe,” the President whispered. “We will avenge him!”

“Uh… yes, Sir,” the Air Force man replied, deciding that he really didn’t have the energy to set this particular misunderstanding straight – or not right now, anyway.

The alien’s squawk box was still translating: “Better halves. Doxies. Sluts. Ladies. Girls. Girls. Sweethearts. Girls. Hot patooties. Cumdumpsters.”

Bilgamach gave up in disgust, crushing the gadget in one huge fist.

He looked apologetically at the other alien, who shrugged.

“That,” he growled, indicating Ms Kirton, “is not a woman!”

Ms Kirton looked ready to disagree – possibly quite forcefully – so the President had his security detail arrest her.

At least they were good for something. The not necessarily unfortunate Ms Kirton was carried off, forward to the security station.

“I’m sorry you don’t like our women,” the President began. He was somewhat distracted by their rudeness as it seemed they were barely listening to him. Perhaps this had something to do with the flight of small flying saucers that launched from their mothership, dashing this way and that in the skies above Washington.

In just a few minutes, both aliens were grinning triumphantly.

“You thought you could keep a hot piece like this for yourself, did you?” Arjenwoop demanded.

Where he pointed, the air began to shimmer – and within, something strange faded into view.

It was a nightmarish creature – or perhaps a nightmarish machine. It looked as if somebody had given the job of designing a forklift to H.R. Giger (or possibly H.P. Lovecraft) along with a big hit of LSD and the instruction that the thing had to be made entirely from the body parts of a giant squid.

Its large, slug-like body sucked at the floor, leaving a sticky trail as it advanced. Dull, unintelligent eyes (five of them) adorned the structure, demonstrating that the apparition was both vehicle and crew, in one. It had two many-suckered tentacles upon which it balanced its load, these wrapping up and around to hold fast its cargo.

A cargo that was human.

A cargo that gibbered helplessly, driven all but insane in a nightmare of alien abduction.

“What, then, do you call that?” The alien demanded.

A man who had seen some of the worst horrors of Falujah, Kabul and a Black Friday sale at Target, Major General Ed Grallenpoe was less easily shocked than the others in the compartment. He was the first to come to terms with the new arrival, and thus the best equipped to answer the alien’s question.

He regarded the pitiful creature, mewling to itself and apparently unable to comprehend that it was back among its own kind.

It was a man, although perhaps not one that wished to be described as such. This was a man who wore all the items of lingerie that Arjenwoop and Bilgamach had listed. He was in a dishevelled state, with only one stiletto still in place, and rents in his expensive, seamed stockings. A bruise was beginning to show, despite the heavy makeup on his face, and he was panting breathlessly against the constriction of his corset.

One might reasonably assume that the poor fellow had been fighting for his life against some kind of alien squid-forklift monster.

“I’d call that some kind of Goddamned faggot,” Grallenpoe said, at last.

“Good! Yes! Bring us more of these ‘Goddamned faggots’!” the creature demanded.

Robin Woodcock and the President conferred, briefly.

“Do they add much to the economy?”

“I would imagine they buy a lot of plus-size shoes and the like,” Woodcock speculated. “Feather boas. Butt-plugs, maybe.”

“Are those imported?” the President demanded.

“Almost certainly,” the Secretary of the Treasury replied.

“OK, so they’ve got no real value to us?”

“I think it depends who they are,” Dr Winkel joined the conversation. “I mean… they walk among us, right?”

The President scowled.

“Are you kidding me? I’ve never seen a person who looked like that on Wall Street, or in our great armed forces…”

“Oh no, Sir,” Winkel sought to explain. “I imagine that they dress this way in private, Sir – or perhaps only in secretive gatherings.”

Grallenpoe had also joined the conversation and he looked at him, hard.

“You seem to know a lot about it,” he observed, archly.

“Oh, no, General,” Winkel hastened to correct him, “I’m merely speculating.”

Grallenpoe turned to the alien instead.

“You do understand that this is not a woman, don’t you? This faggot has man-parts, tucked away.”

“Indeed,” the alien beamed, “but it is most feminine! And what the people of Earth call ‘man parts’ are hardly worthy of such a name! Your species has a most dainty organ that does not detract from the femininity whatsoever!”

Grallenpoe looked ready to raise an objection, but the President interrupted.

“How many do you want?” he asked.

“Two,” said Arjenwoop.

“Hundred!” amended Bilgamach.

“Thousand!” Arjenwoop put in.

“Two hundred thousand?” Grossweiner was aghast.

“Per year,” said Bilgamach.

“What are you going to do with them all?” The Acting Secretary for Homeland Security felt very insecure indeed.

“The nights are… cold on Uranus,” Arjenwoop not-quite-explained.

“And long,” his brother added, with a shrug.

“Two hundred thousand…” the President appeared to be thinking it over.

“Sir, you can’t possibly condone this!” Norbert Sackrider often despaired when he thought of the President’s legacy, but seldom more than now. “You don’t want to be remembered as the first President since Jefferson Davis to endorse the notion of people as property!”

The President was hazy on the whole ‘American History’ thing. Back in the day, he’d spent most of that class trying to get a glimpse of Penny Bunn’s panties: an endeavour that had ultimately been successful. It was surprising what you could achieve with a small mirror and a wad of bubblegum. Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection and physics beats history, every time.

So who the fuck was Jefferson Davis? The President couldn’t remember seeing a portrait of him anywhere in the White House. Maybe he was one of those old geezers in a faded oil painting from the days before photography? Fuck that. Who cared?

“Whatever,” the President decreed.

“Let us begin,” Arjenwoop said.

He gestured and at once a blob of pink material appeared in his hand. It was about the size of an apple, but very soft. It clung stickily to his hand, but he flicked it deftly toward the pitiful transvestite in their midst. The blob struck with a sickly squelch, expanding on impact and continuing to spread over his body.

Where the pink material touched clothing and body hair these sloughed away, leaving nothing but a mess of fibres on the deck. Not a single gram of the pink material was lost: the blob stayed in one piece even as it spread to encompass the victim, who gasped and squirmed.

The faggot seemed particularly dismayed when his false breasts were released from a shredding, dissolving bustier: one after the other they plopped onto the floor, partially dissolved by contact with the pink goo.

The onlookers acquired the distinct impression that the pink material had penetrated the sissy’s anus, although by that point the victim was unable either to confirm or deny this as it had invaded his mouth as well.

When the process came to an end, the victim was encased in a pink, shiny second skin that covered everything below his nose and ears.
It wasn’t merely a coating of the skin, however, but a fetish garment. It was somewhat like a space suit, if anybody had ever made a space suit from shiny latex, with ballet boots and a tutu. One might also question the usefulness of an astronaut whose stride was hobbled by a series of straps running from the thighs to the knees – and whose arms were bound neatly behind his back in a monoglove.

Where a space suit would have been surmounted by a helmet, this ensemble featured only a posture collar and gag. The pink, rubbery cock that stuffed the helpless sissy’s mouth was only somewhat realistic, being rather large and having a scrotal sack that featured no less than four testicles.

(The aliens had heard of always going one better… and had decided to go one better.)

The victim was picked up by the weird, tentacled ‘forklift’ and positioned upright. It would have been all but impossible for him to get to his feet unaided.

“Not a bad start, Arjenwoop,” his brother commented. “But do you mind if…?”

“Be my guest,” the other alien grinned.

Bilgamach gestured, producing from thin air a short, fat rod that (in a more primitive culture) might have been a flashlight. Given what had just taken place, the President thought it might be a dildo.

It was a flashlight, of sorts: it emitted a cone of blue light and made a humming sound. Bilgamach played the light hither and yon over the glistening pink surface of his captive and where the light lingered, the masculine characteristics of the sissy melted away.

The ‘forklift’ twirled the sissy around, unbidden but clearly doing exactly what Bilgamach wanted. Those present could see the pink-clad body change where the beam played.

Bilgamach was a brutal, kinky Michelangelo sculpting an angel – or perhaps a succubus – from a humble block of stone. The sissy’s frantically wiggling fingers became more slender; his arms lost muscle and his waist was reduced to ‘Jessica Rabbit’ proportions. His body became shorter; his legs longer.

His new breasts were a marked improvement on the pair that lay, half dissolved, on the carpet.

When at last Bilgamach paused, several witnesses found that they had to fight the urge to applaud.

It was only a pause, however. Next, the alien focused the beam on the sissy’s head. Features softened; bones rearranged themselves and the whole became far more feminine. The lips, already stretched to accommodate the gag upon which they were sucking became plump, and glistened.

There was a psychological change in the victim as well. Some internal changes that those watching could only speculate about seemed to make the sissy calmer; more accepting of the violations that had been wrought upon him. His eyes still conveyed fear, but it was the rightful, non-specific fear of a submissive in the presence of her master… overlaid with more than a little lust.

Grossweiner, in particular, felt very conflicted. Although he would never dare to admit it, he was aroused by what he saw.

Several in the compartment snapped a photo on their smartphones at this point.

Winkel, deciding that his instincts had served him particularly well all day, immediately uploaded a picture to Instagasm. It was a well composed photo, framing the President and the strangely-clad victim together. He gave it the hashtag “Spaceforce”, and in the days to come it would cause quite a stir – among admirers and detractors of the President alike.

Sackrider’s picture was more closely focused on the victim. It was for personal consumption only: he felt a powerful urge to slip away and join the “half a mile high club”, although he wouldn’t have wanted to examine his motives too closely.

Ed Grallenpoe cleared his throat, but the Alien held up a hand before he could speak.

“We’re not finished yet,” he said. “It would be a shame to waste all that absorbed masculinity…”

He switched on the tool once again, although now it hummed in a higher pitch and the cone of light that it projected – from the other end, this time – was red.

This time he pointed the beam only at the sissy’s crotch.

The tight pink material bulged, leaving nothing to the imagination. The sissy’s penis took on enormous proportions, coming only partially erect but growing far larger than a human penis had any business being. The glans, in particular, now swelled beyond the size of a satsuma and the coiled length of the monster was perhaps twelve inches.

The sissy’s pretty eyelashes wafted as he swooned, suffering the effects of a sudden loss of blood pressure – it being diverted to his newly-augmented organ.

Bilgamach clicked off the tool.

“I don’t want to make it into a large one,” he explained. “It’s best left at this small size, for aesthetic reasons, but her sexual appetite will be greatly improved now.”

“Wh…?” said the President.

“Hnh…?” said Grossweiner.

“Small?” said Woodcock, biting his lip.

“There’s no point making them hot if they don’t have the stamina to match,” Arjenwoop sought to explain.

Bilgamach nodded.

“We know that human males need time to recover after coitus, and that maintaining even a tiny erection can prove difficult. This one will never disappoint us. She is… augmented.”

“That’s… interesting,” said Grallenpoe, transfixed.

“Yes,” the President mused. He had endured a certain amount of what he called Trouble with the Department of Home Affairs in recent months. Then and there, he decided that no price was too great for the American people to pay, if it would give him an impressively proportioned and wholly reliable Lyndon Baines Johnson.

“Tell me,” he said, “Would you gentlemen consider… a trading arrangement?”

The aliens both grinned, needing no great experience in the use of humanoid bodies to recognise such naked avarice.

“Such as?” they asked, together.

It was time to strike a deal. There would be critics, of course: there were always some people on the fringes who thought that they knew better… but the President knew how to create doubt; how to play factions off against one another; how to wade through the horse apples and come up with the gravy.

No doubt Vlad would have secured a better deal, but so what? Vlad wasn’t here. The aliens hadn’t chosen to visit Vlad’s B-list nation.

“I’m thinking that we have a product you’re basically interested in,” he began, “but that we ought to customise it, to ensure your complete satisfaction.”

“What does that mean?”

The President spread his small hands, trying to look reasonable.

“I’m sure you’re busy people. You’re like me: you don’t have the time to oversee all the minor details of day-to-day operations. So how about we procure your supply of these… faggots… and get them ready for you?”

“Ready for us?” Arjenwoop queried.

“Yes, you know… transformed, just they way you want them.”

“But I like transforming them,” Bilgamach objected.

“At the same time,” the President cut in, in some desperation, “I’m proposing a broad range of stimulus for associated industries: companies that make the finest lingerie. Waspies… fishnets!”

“Frilly panties; long-line vintage bras,” Grallenpoe suggested, seeing that his President was floundering.

“Crotchless bodystockings!” Sackrider exclaimed.

The aliens’ pupils had become dilated and they were breathing hard.

“Oh, I like the sound of that… stimulus,” Arjenwoop admitted.

“Locking wet-look spandex bodyshapers with zip access to the sexy bits!” Grossweiner belatedly tried to join the discussion.

All eyes turned to him.

“Sensory deprivation hoods with a pony bit?” he hazarded. “Leather hobble skirts with spanking panels?”

“You are one fucked up sonofabitch,” Grallenpoe opined.

“Yes!” Bilgamach agreed. “We like him.”

“He’s in charge of all off-world exports,” the President said.

The details were worked out quite quickly. The President had always exhibited the attention span of a whelk on cocaine so his staff knew that any arrangements must be completed at once.

When it became clear that the aliens were agreeing to the idea that the President would be given a supply of the wonderful rods that could transform a person, he was happy. Everything else was just details, for his underlings to wrangle over. He longed to play with one of those doohickeys. The First Lady would be in for a surprise… or maybe her sister would.

The President thought that he had done very well, buying time as well as finding a way to deflect the aliens from targeting anything that was actually important. This was statesmanship at its finest!

He would start with the prison system, he decided. Who could possibly object to a policy that saw worthless jailbirds transformed into jailbait?

Nobody that mattered, that was for sure.

He might have trouble with some of the more opinionated women of the USA… but then he’d always felt that the whole “votes for women” thing was ready for an overhaul – unless they proved that they were able to vote the right way.

The President could see it now: he would invoke memories of the happier, simpler times when the United States had nothing much to worry about, back before Sputnik. Year-on-year economic growth and a chicken in every pot. Black and white movies at the drive-in. Blacks and whites segregated, too. A time when nobody had ever heard of that ridiculous “global warming” conspiracy theory.

The Korean War: that had been fun, hadn’t it? Vietnam was a less comfortable conflict for him to contemplate, as that brought with it whispers about how he’d dodged the draft… which was ridiculous because wasn’t dodging the draft precisely what rich kids were supposed to do?

So forget Vietnam, but a fresh Korean War might be neat. He’d liberate the North – and make them all into sissy slaves. Especially the fat one he’d met: the one who apparently didn’t understand even the fundamentals of diplomacy. He’d turn that one into a man-whore personally.

The aliens would understand, he was sure. Practically every line that they spoke came out of a 1950s movie, anyway. Good times!

Perhaps he didn’t need to infect these visitors with an STD after all, he decided – although it had been a neat idea. Belatedly, he remembered where he’d heard of it before: thoughts of old sci-fi movies had brought it back to him.

“The War of the Worlds!” he ejaculated.

No doubt this Wells fellow that Grallenpoe had been bleating about had simply seen the same movie: it wasn’t his idea at all: it was Hollywood!

“Huh?” several people said at once. It was never clear quite what would happen next, when the President blurted. Even the most experienced of his staffers hadn’t gotten used to it.

Resurfacing from his reverie, the President tried to look as if he knew what the fuck he was doing. If the aliens misunderstood him, they might interpret ‘The War of the Worlds’ as a declaration of intent.

“Er, I’m thinking,” he improvised, “it doesn’t have to be like in that film, The War of the Worlds!”

“Oh, I couldn’t watch that,” Bilgamach lamented. “Ever since somebody pointed out how Tom Cruise has this weird central tooth thing going on, I just can’t enjoy his movies anymore.”

“I know, right?” said Chet Grossweiner, now on familiar territory.

It had been a tense moment, but the danger was past.

At last, the deal was done. For the aliens, though, there was one last sticking point. It seemed that one Goddamned faggot, however sexy, did not represent a sufficient show of good faith.

This, the President understood. Two aliens had negotiated, and each (like himself) must be looking for a person angle in all this. They couldn’t be expected to share, so a second sissy had to be located. But where might one be found? It was early afternoon on the western seaboard and few sissies were likely to be dolled up – according to the nerd’s analysis, anyway.

“I’ll do it!”

That was Robin Woodcock. He surprised even himself, when he spoke… but his own reaction to the transformation of the sissy in their midst had been more complex than that of the other human males.

The others had looked upon the creature with nothing but lust, whereas the Secretary of the Treasury had found that in his case the quite understandable lust was blended with more than a little envy.

He’d never been sexy. For as long as he could remember, he’d been a bumbling fatty and the butt of just about every joke. All his life, he had been miserable; had felt inadequate; had found solace in food. He’d watched the aliens sculpt their captive into an object of desire… and now, he realised, he wanted to undergo the same process.

“Are you insane?” The President could think of almost nothing worse.

“But… Sir! You’ll need a man on the inside,” Woodcock improvised. “I… I’ll find a way to get messages to you…”

“No, you won’t” Bilgamach said, almost gently. “I’ll change your loyalties forever.”

Woodcock swallowed nervously, but said nothing.

“Still want to come?” Bilgamach asked.

“Yes, please,” the Secretary of the Treasury answered, in a small voice.

The blob of material that Bilgamach conjured this time was lilac. He didn’t flick it at the Secretary of the Treasury, but held it out, inviting the man to take it.

Hesitantly, he did, and the soft material engulfed his hand before crawling up his arm, presently spreading to cover his whole body.

Again, fibers were strewn on the deck as clothing dissolved. In less than two minutes, the man was smooth and naked save for that shiny pinkish-purplish covering. This costume was a little different to the other, with a hint of a skater dress about it. There were textured features in the rubbery material that looked a little like the straps of garters.

“Oh, bravo!” said Arjenwoop, clearly delighted. “Now, my turn to sculpt!”

Again, the blue cone of light played upon the body of a human male, dissolving and reshaping it. Those present learned that Bilgamach, for all his artistry, was a mere beginner compared to his brother. Either than, or Robin Woodcock, Jr. had a body that particularly leant itself to feminization.

The resulting creature was magnificent: never again would anybody refer to him as “Round Robin”, although he retained just enough wobble in his breasts and his ass to be very interesting indeed.

When the beam was directed at his head, the result was a stunning beauty who would have delighted any TV network or film studio – although they might have a hard time explaining some of her more unusual characteristics. The new sissy had her tool augmented, just as the other had been… and then had to have her hands strapped behind her back because she couldn’t stop stroking it.

A look into the vacant, lust-consumed face of this latest victim revealed that there was no real likelihood of her conducting any espionage on behalf of the people of Earth.

Also, the United States of America was going to need a new Secretary of the Treasury.

+++

At last, the deal was done. The President shook hands (mystifying the aliens) and then they departed, along with their nightmare forklift and their two sissy toys.

The President sat down at last, toying with one of the transforming tools. Per the agreement, the aliens had left a hundred and eleven of them.

“That went about as well as could be expected,” the President smiled.

“You think so?” Grossweiner, Director of Off-World Exports asked.

The President felt nothing but relief: initially he had been trying to figure out how to build a wall around the Earth and make the aliens pay for it. This was much better.

Even so, his remaining staff were concerned.

“But, Sir! Two hundred thousand! Every year!” said Dr Winkel.

(The President was thinking seriously about making him the Secretary of the Treasury. After all, he was a nerd and that job was kind of nerdy, right?)

“I didn’t say they’d all be Americans,” the President explained. “We can make this a NATO matter. Europe is full of sissies that we can export! And if that doesn’t work out, all we need to do is start another war.”

And that was how it began, with the United States exhibiting a new posture on the world stage as expeditionary conquerors of all who stood against them, seizing any opportunity to declare war… and to transform those that they defeated.

Canada threw in the towel, once they saw what happened to Mexico. Greater North America was ruled by a cabal of men, all of whom were ridiculously well endowed with stolen masculinity. They satisfied their enormous appetites among the prisoners that they took as nation after nation fell to their onslaught – all pretence of democracy abandoned.

This was Sissygeddon: the end of the world, or as near as made no difference.

There was some consternation when the aliens didn’t return after a year, to take their first two hundred thousand slaves in tribute. Then somebody pointed out that the aliens may have meant a year on Uranus – which is some eighty-four Earth years long. Thus, the Greater North American Empire had procured the slaves far too soon.

Upon discovering this, they ought to have reconsidered their strategy, perhaps… but that would have harmed the economy. The American fetish lingerie industry was a world-leader, and nothing could be allowed to interfere with that.

For the first time in his life, the President had set up a business that didn’t go bankrupt. And besides, he liked having a harem of sissy slaves about the White House.

The newly-enhanced Department of Home Affairs took a lot of attending to.

+++

Far, far away, Arjenwoop asked his brother a question:

“Do you think we should actually go back and collect all the chicas in tribute, next year?”

“We’d better get on with our chores,” Bilgamach said, “or I doubt Mom will let us use the ship.”

- ENDS -

7,420 words © Bryony Marsh, 2019

Reviewer comments are always appreciated.

If you have enjoyed my stories, please consider putting something in my tips jar by purchasing one of my books on Amazon: ‘My Constant Moon’ and ‘In Armour Clad’ are available now. (Or read for free with Kindle Unlimited and I’ll still get some royalties.)

It was the summer of 1987 and I was sixteen – almost seventeen. Scrawny in those days and usually displaying at least a couple of grazes from a skateboarding mishap. The wounds might have been more important than the boarding skills: badges of honor that even an uncoordinated kid could acquire.

My summer holiday that year began with a little bit of a disappointment, when mom and dad said that they were going on a holiday to Europe. From the outset they left me in no doubt that they were planning a trip that was just for two: a second honeymoon in fact.

So, could I be trusted to look after the house for four weeks?

No. This came just a few days after my buddies and I had been busted for under-age drinking. Nothing major, but we’d been experimenting with a purloined bottle of Jack Daniels and I was brought home by the police: no real harm done but in my parents’ eyes this suggested that I’d be hosting a wild party before their ’plane touched down in Paris.

What would I do, then?

“No problem,” they assured me. It seemed that my aunt Ashley had offered to host me, on her ranch in Arizona.

We saw aunt Ashley once or twice a year. I liked her: she’d married my mom’s kid brother, Frank... but Frank had died in an auto wreck and I barely remembered him. To a teenage boy with a typical teenager’s acute awareness of the opposite sex, aunt Ashley was... intriguing. She could be sharp and forceful, but this demeanor seemed to suit her angular good looks and it was hard to resent her. To be honest, I’d had a crush on her for years.

A summer spent on her ranch in Arizona? I could do a lot worse. The arrangements were made and soon I was on a Southwest Airlines flight to Tucson.

Aunt Ashley would be waiting for me in the arrivals hall, I knew. Southwest had some kind of computer mix-up that day and a lot of passengers were complaining about missing luggage items. I was relieved when I recognized my case: I hauled it off the belt and headed for the exit.

Aunt Ashley gave me a welcoming hug, which was nice. Perhaps too nice.

“I was starting to wonder if you’d missed the flight,” she scolded.

“It’s crazy back there,” I explained. “Hundreds of people have lost their luggage!”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, “but you have everything?”

“Sure,” I said, “let’s go.”

Aunt Ashley led me out to the parking lot where she’d left a pickup. She threw my case into the back and motioned for me to take a seat in the cab. Soon we were driving east, away from the city.

When I look back on that summer there’s a dreamlike quality to my memories. Even the light, back then, seemed different: a diffuse, buttery yellow. When I wasn’t sneaking glances at my aunt’s legs I enjoyed watching the scenery, so very different from Oklahoma City.

The ranch was on the edge of the Saguaro National Park. Aunt Ashley explained that she only spent holidays there, mostly splitting her time between Albuquerque and Tucson.

“Staying on the ranch makes for a fun adventure,” she explained, “but I’d get lonely if I tried to do it yearlong.”

She fiddled with the radio, but it was the old AM type and we couldn’t get a good signal. Music sounded nasty so she opted to listen to the news. The Iran-Iraq war was still grinding on and at that time it looked as if the US might be drawn into it.

“Urgh,” she said, switching off the radio. “Too depressing!”

We made smalltalk. At one point I was interrogated about school (going okay) and girlfriends (none) but for the most part my aunt was content to rattle along in silence.

Presently we turned off the highway and bounced along a road that felt as if it hadn’t seen a repair crew since the Works Progress Administration.

“We don’t get much traffic out this way,” aunt Ashley explained. “Nobody’s going to pay to fix the road – and the big trucks going to and from the mine just ride over the ruts.”

“The mine?” I asked.

“Oh, did I never tell you about the mine?” Aunt Ashley smiled. “It’s the reason I was able to keep the ranch. We – Frank and I, that is – had an approach from a company that wanted to mine on our land, if it was suitable. They did a mineral survey up on Broken Hill, but that’s as far as things had gone when Frank died. Turns out the ranch is sitting on a rich copper deposit: now they do the mining and I collect a check every month. With Frank gone I couldn’t have kept up the ranch all on my own, but thanks to the mine I’ve been able to keep the land that I love, plus a few animals, just for old times’ sake.”

I started to wonder how much fun I’d be able to have, miles from anywhere on a ranch that was all but mothballed.

“Not far now,” she flashed me a reassuring smile. It was lovely: the kind that could kindle all kinds of fantasies in the teenage mind.

I have to admit that it looked like a great place for a holiday: the Rincon Mountains made a beautiful backdrop and the land wasn’t as arid as I’d expected. There were a few horses corralled near the house, with pasture beyond. The house itself was small and a little bit run down, but hardly a ruin. There were also outbuildings of various shapes, sizes and functions.

From one of them, a man came out to greet us.

“Jed,” aunt Ashley introduced us. “You remember I told you about Jordan? We’ll be staying here together.”

“Jordan,” he greeted me. He took my hand in his own immense paw, and pumped it. His callused skin was lumpy, like the plates on an armadillo: I felt puny in comparison.

He turned his attention back to my aunt. “I’ve stocked up like you asked and everything’s fine. Star’s still on daily antibiotics and shouldn’t be ridden for at least a week, yet. Oh – Laura came by earlier with a bundle of bed linen and towels. Also an apple pie. It’s all inside.”

“That’s great, Jed,” my aunt said. “Do you want to stay for dinner?”

“Thanks, but I’ll hit the road...” the burly ranch hand seemed a little uncomfortable. “We’ve got a fair ways to go: I told Emily we’d make Nogales tonight.”

As he spoke, he glanced at his truck and it was clear that he wanted to get gone. Aunt Ashley apologized for our late arrival and then didn’t detain him further.

“Jed’s great with the animals,” she explained. “He does a good job, looking after the place for weeks on end, but he doesn’t like to share. He’s long overdue for a holiday so we agreed that I’d spell him for a month. Give me a hand with these cases?”

She lowered the tailgate, but right away we saw that something was amiss.

In the pickup bed was an auxiliary fuel tank: a squat cylinder on welded brackets that could hold an extra twenty gallons of gas. Not right now, though: at some point during our rough ride a hose had pulled off, causing the contents of the tank to slosh all over the pickup’s bed.

“That’s... weird,” she mused, not so much angry as confused. She sniffed, and made a face.

“What is, aunt Ashley?” I asked.

“One of the cases has been completely soaked with gas, but the other has only a couple splashes on it.”

Mine had escaped the deluge, but hers was soaked. It reeked and as we lifted it down it squelched and the gas oozed out of it.

She wrinkled her nose in disgust. When she opened the case we discovered that virtually everything inside was ruined. In addition to the terrible smell, the gasoline had made the colors in all her clothes run.

“I hope your insurance...” I began.

“That’s so fucked up!”

Aunt Ashley surprised me with her language, but I understood that it was going to be a major nuisance, replacing all those clothes – even if the damage would be paid for.

“There’s no point stinking out the house with that,” she declared, kicked the case and stalked off towards the house.

I followed in her wake, dragging my own case.

“You’ve got some clothes here already, right?” I asked.

“I... guess,” she said. “Maybe a few.”

She looked dubious.

She showed me around the house. There were two bedrooms on the upper floor, and they’d both been aired. Presumably by ‘Laura’, whoever she was. I couldn’t imagine Jed paying attention to details like that.

Of the two rooms, one was slightly smaller and very girly in nature. There was a poster of a unicorn wading in a forest pool and beneath this were masses of soft toys such as teddy bears.

Aunt Ashley looked in the wardrobe and pulled open a couple drawers. Her search revealed some clothing and she picked it over, regarding everything critically. Sighing, she selected a few pairs of panties and a T-shirt. It read ‘Hello Kitty’ and this was the first time I heard of that particular brand.

She held the tee up against herself, and looked in the mirror. “At least I’ll have something to sleep in,” she grumbled. “I’ll make some space and you can use this room.”

“Why don’t I take the other one?” I asked – which was kind of rude because I was her guest, but it seemed to make more sense that I should have the completely empty room, which (I have to admit) had the added advantage of not featuring unicorns and teddy bears.

Aunt Ashley regarded me sullenly. I think I detected a pout, even. “Okay,” she said, after a moment. Reluctantly, she shrugged. “Makes sense, I suppose.”

I hauled my case upstairs and into the more manly of the two rooms. Then we went downstairs and I was taken to meet the horses.

Aunt Ashley called to them and they wandered over to see us. Bobbo was a ridiculously fat little pony, while Star was an American Quarter Horse, long retired from racing but still impressive. Next I was introduced to Chief: I was told that he would probably be the best choice for me.

“He’s a gelding,” Aunt Ashley explained.

“What’s that?” I asked, assuming it was some breed I didn’t know.

“It means he’s been... you know... castrated,” she explained, making scissoring motions with her fingers. Did I detect a mischievous glint in her eye as she enjoyed my discomfort?

“It’s something that’s done to a lot of males: gives them a better nature. In fact, in the heat, a gelding is generally sweeter than a mare.” She patted Chief’s muzzle and talked softly to him. “Yeah, Chiefy: you’re so nice now. I’m sorry we took your balls, but you’re so sweet! Aw...”

She kissed the horse on the nose. I was a bit grossed out, thinking about the bacteria that might thrive on a sweaty horse muzzle, and Aunt Ashley giggled.

“He’s my favorite,” she mouthed – as if the others might overhear and resent this.

She led the way over to a separate paddock and a fourth horse ambled over to see us. “Speaking of mares, this is Patch. She’s a Peruvian Paso, and she’s probably worth more than my truck. I’ve had her artificially inseminated recently and I’m hoping that she’s going to be a mamma. Hi Patchie, darlin’!”

It was getting late and I’d travelled a long way so we had no intention of riding that evening. Aunt Ashley spent an hour showing me some of things that had to be done to care for the animals and then we went back to the house. She looked through the refrigerator and was pleased to find that it really was well stocked. We started preparing food.

On the back of the kitchen door hung an apron, old-fashioned and frilly.

“You should wear this,” she said. “Protect your clothes.”

“You’re the one that’s short of clothes,” I countered.

“Point,” she conceded, reluctantly, and donned the apron. We cooked some kind of elaborate chicken dish with peppers: I don’t remember what it was called.

“Your mom told me about your little misdemeanor with the Jack Daniels,” my aunt said, presently. “If you promise not to be an asshole, you can have a beer – but just one.”

“Thanks, aunt Ashley,” I said.

“Ugh, that makes me sound like I’m about seventy!” she protested.

“Sorry,” I said. “What should –”

“When it’s just the two of us, how about I answer to Ash?” she offered.

“That’s... lovely. I mean great!” No doubt I was blushing furiously. She grinned: a wolfish grin that could make a guy feel a little bit nervous.

The food was good. At home we didn’t often cook from fresh ingredients but despite the additional work it was a real treat. I said as much, and aunt Ashley beamed.

“No TV dinners in my house,” she said. “By the end of your holiday, I reckon you’ll be quite the cook!”

We had some apple pie and then I was surprised to be told that it was almost time to turn in.

“Life on the ranch starts at sunrise,” aunt Ashley chided. “You won’t be a night owl tomorrow, after a full day of fresh air and exercise!”

I had a book that I wanted to finish so I didn’t object. She said I could use the bathroom first so I had a pee, washed my face and brushed my teeth. I decided I’d make more of an effort in the morning.

When I emerged I found aunt Ashley waiting in the corridor. She’d changed for bed, wearing the ‘Hello Kitty’ tee and not a whole lot else. Some panties, I guess. I tried not to ogle her... and failed. In that casual state she looked a lot younger: she could almost have been one of the girls from school.

“Hello... Kitty,” I joked. Trying to make light of the fact that I’d been checking her out.

Her cheeks dimpled prettily as she smiled. She looked a little self-conscious, but also pleased to know that I liked what I saw. Perhaps it felt good to know she still had what it takes to interest a teenage boy.

“Are you gonna let me in the bathroom?” she asked when I didn’t move.

“Uh, sorry,” I said.

I tried to move aside, but we both went the same way: her left, my right. When we dodged back the other way, we collided. I felt the soft pressure of her breasts against me.

“I... sorry aunt, er. Sorry, Ash. Excuse me!”

“Barn dance is Thursday,” she joked – but didn’t back off right away.

Something that neither of us quite dared to acknowledge hung in the air, as thick and as tense as a summer thunderstorm – and if you knew aunt Ashley, you’d know that she always had to up the ante.

“You too growed up to give your poor old auntie Ash a goodnight kiss?” she challenged.

Puckering up, but not quite moving my lips all the way into contact seemed the safest thing to do. This had several advantages for me: primarily that I could write it off as a joke if she proved to have been kidding! Also, I didn’t have to speak, and it left her to choose exactly what kind of kiss it was to be – if any.

Instead of offering her cheek, she kissed me softly but purposefully on the lips.

“Minty!” she exclaimed, and her mischievous grin was back. She pressed me to one side: my mind was awhirl and I didn’t resist at all. She eased past me, slowly. I’m quite sure that she rubbed herself against me far more than was necessary.

“‘Night night, honey,” she said, closing the bathroom door and then bolting it.

I stood for a moment, trying to understand exactly what had just happened. I decided that the best thing to do was to play it cool, since she was probably only teasing me. I took myself off to bed where I lay awake for a long time, my mind racing.

The next morning, after I had showered, I went downstairs. I saw aunt Ashley coming across the yard, still in her ‘Hello Kitty’ teeshirt.

“Had to fix the generator,” she explained. “Glad you’re up – the horses will be waiting for us.”

“You fixed the generator, in...?” I let the question tail off to nothing. Much as I liked seeing her in her T-shirt and panties, it seemed a little bizarre.

“Who’s gonna see?” she giggled. “Our nearest neighbor is more than three miles away and the horses don’t care!”

Is she doing this on purpose? I wondered. Is she deliberately teasing me? Maybe she’s just flirting with me for laughs.

I decided that the best course of action was probably to rub one out, that night. She made me horny, but there were ways to take care of business. If she carried on teasing me like this, I knew I’d have to make sure that I didn’t become too needy.

Meanwhile, there was a whole day ahead. I got started on a bowl of cereal but Ash insisted that I should have bacon and eggs as well. “I can’t have you going all faint on me, after a long, hard morning in the saddle!”

Effortlessly seductive, she could make any line sound like something from a porn film.

I tried to change the subject, complimenting her on the scrambled egg.

“You like?” she asked. “That’s good, because I have a favor to ask.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“We’re about the same size,” she said. “Can I borrow some clothes? I need to wash my one remaining outfit – then I can wear it when I go into town tomorrow to get something new.”

“You don’t want to get some new clothes today?”

“It’s Sunday, silly,” she said.

“Uh, okay, what do you need?” I wondered.

“T-shirt? Pair of jeans? Only I feel about twelve in this tee.”

“Sure,” I said. “Help yourself.”

“Thanks honey,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek.

It was going to be a long day.

When breakfast was complete we got ready to ride.

“Jeans aren’t ideal because of the seams,” aunt Ashley explained, “but thanks for the loan. Maybe I’ll get us both get some jodhpurs when we’re in town.”

She rocked in my loose-fitting jeans. The thought of that sweet, tight ass and... everything else... in my jeans was incredibly seductive. I promised myself that I’d never throw out that pair: they’d always be my favorite.

As promised, we spent the full day on the ranch. Pretty soon I was mounted on Chief, trotting and cantering as she directed. I’d only ridden a few times before, in childhood, but I felt safe on the big gelding’s back. Ash rode Patch, which she assured me was fine: mares can be ridden until the third trimester, when their foal puts on its final growth spurt.

We headed out, up into the hills. Aunt Ashley said we were checking the condition of the fences, but it was in reality a flimsy excuse to ride out for a picnic.

“How am I doing?” I asked as I rode.

“Not too bad, but he’s clearly the one in charge,” my aunt observed.

“How do you mean?”

“See how he grabs a snack whenever we pass some vegetation? He wouldn’t dare behave like that if I was riding him.”

“I don’t mind it,” I objected. “He’s doing all the work, after all.”

“And you’re a pushover,” she giggled.

I scowled. I tried to rein Chief in a bit but my aunt was right: I was more of a passenger than a rider.

“I think Chief likes you,” aunt Ashley said, “but he’s humoring you. He doesn’t really see you as a control figure. If he gets thirsty, he’s going to take himself off for a drink, and you’ll have to pretend you wanted to go that way...”

“I’ll... try to be more assertive,” I promised.

“Oh, please, don’t go changing on my behalf,” aunt Ashley smirked. “The future Mrs Jordan Kelly won’t thank me if I go making you all bossy!”

There was nobody in the frame to become Mrs Jordan Kelly and aunt Ashley probably knew as much from my willingness to come and live on a ranch for a month. I’d had girlfriends in the past but they tended to give me the ‘friend speech’ if I attempted to get serious. There was nobody back in Oklahoma City that I was currently pining for – and besides, I had my beautiful aunt, and my fantasies...

That morning we found just one place where the fence needed to be repaired. The wire had been pulled away from three posts but this was easily fixed with some new staples and the small hammer that Ash had brought along. When I finished hammering the staples into place I saw that Ash had spread a picnic rug and poured us each a drink. The horses were nibbling at the grass.

“What if they run off?” I asked. It would be a long walk back to the house.

“I’ve hobbled them,” Aunt Ashley explained. “Come and see.”

I saw how the simple leather device with two loops allowed the animals to browse, but they’d never be able to get very far.

“That’s my big strong boy, all hobbled and helpless!” Again my aunt was fussing over the gelding, and paying him enough attention to make me blush. The horse gazed back at her, his mood stoical, I thought.

I went to get my drink: iced tea, I discovered. A good choice for a hot day, although I guessed that the reason we were taking an early break was because the ice was already melting away to nothing.

My aunt joined me on the picnic rug.

“Jealous?” she asked.

“Of what?”

“I thought I detected... like maybe you were jealous of Chief?”

“No,” I said, “I just thought you two ought to get a room.”

“You are jealous!” My aunt cackled. “Is it because I kiss him on the nose?”

She made as if to kiss me in a similar fashion, and I fended her off.

“Is it... because I put him in hobbles and show him I’m the boss?”

“What? No way!”

Aunt Ashley stuck out her bottom lip.

“Aren’t you even just a little bit intrigued to know what it feels like to be trussed up, helpless?”

“No,” I said. This was getting weird and I was starting to feel that I wasn’t nearly worldly enough to be left alone with aunt Ashley: she seemed to have exotic tastes indeed.

“Oh,” she said, disappointed. “Sometimes it’s fun.”

I racked my brains for some other topic of conversation, and failed to think of anything.

“In fact, I love it,” she said, biting her lip.

“I guess we’ve got a lot more fence to inspect,” I squeaked, scrambling to my feet.

“Spoilsport,” she said.

As we packed away the picnic rug and made ready to ride again, Aunt Ashley muttered something about needing to fix the damn generator, which seemed an odd thing to be thinking about because it was miles away. I let it pass.

The rest of the day saw a couple more fence repairs, and I acquired an appreciation of the scale of the ranch as we rode. We stopped by Broken Hill for a while and watched the mining operation. It wasn’t pretty, what they were doing to the land, but it looked as if the huge open-cast mine must be profitable.

When we got back to the house Ash asked me to take care of the horses. She took herself off to look at the generator again. It was still thundering away and I couldn’t imagine what might be wrong with it. Still, I was happy enough rubbing down Patch and Chief. My aunt must have been gone for almost an hour. When she returned, we made dinner together: another banquet – or maybe I was just hungry.

...

“Oh shitfire!” A discordant, booming sound came from the laundry room.

I looked in and found that Ash was kicking the washing machine.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s stuck,” she said. “This cocksucker is halfway through a wash, and it’s just stopped. It won’t finish the wash and I can’t get the door open.”

I tried to help but the machine was stuck fast. If we didn’t want to permanently wreck the machine and cause a flood we would need to call a repair man. Meanwhile, aunt Ashley’s last set of ‘respectable’ clothes were out of reach, stuck in the machine.

“This is like a bad dream,” aunt Ashley protested.

I’d never seen her look so vulnerable before. She took herself off upstairs, and I think I heard her crying.

I’d never lived with somebody as emotional as aunt Ashley. The highs were wonderful, but the lows could be terrifying. I didn’t know what I could do about all this, so I tried to give her as much space as I could.

...

In the days to come I learned to do many of the simpler jobs that are required on a ranch. When I wasn’t working, I was riding. The strong Arizona sunlight soon baked me nut-brown, while the daily exercise left me with a huge appetite. I thought that perhaps my shirts were starting to feel a little bit tight: it seemed that my scrawny chest was filling out at last.

I loved how the fresh air and exercise made me feel. I think Ash enjoyed her time away from the city too: she was so much calmer – at least, when she wasn’t teasing me or fretting about the washing machine, or the generator.

We had so much fun that it seemed she forgot to go into town and buy new clothes. Even when we took the truck and shopped for groceries, she only picked up some toiletries and a few items of underwear: she said that we didn’t have time as we needed to get back to the horses. Each day she was wearing more of the teenage clothing she’d found in her room. She looked cute in it and I didn’t object because it reinforced my fantasies that she was my girlfriend instead of my aunt.

I was taking care of my sexual tension on a nightly basis.

I believe we were both having a good summer, although from time to time Ash would look puzzled or dismayed, and at such times she would insist on going out to check on the generator. I couldn’t hear anything wrong with it: the machine thrummed steadily all day and night, never missing a beat. I began to wonder if “taking care of the generator” was some kind of euphemism. Did she perhaps use that shed as a private place where she did something to take care of her own needs?

There was a place that Ash associated with sex, although it was nowhere near the generator: it was the other side of the yard. We’d been on the ranch for twelve days when she said that she wanted to show me something cool. She took my hand and led me to spot where two wooden boards had been placed to cover a hole.

“What’s this?” I asked.

She kicked a board aside and I saw that steps led down into darkness.

It’s my dungeon,” she giggled, rolling her eyes theatrically.

“I believe you,” I laughed. “How many people have you got locked up in there?”

“You found me out,” she grinned. “I confess everything: I lure young men here, and add them to my collection. I call it the Stud Farm. You should see how many of them I’ve got down there, all chained up.”

“You’re the one that needs to be chained up,” I countered.

“Promises, promises!” she said, looking up at me through fluttering eyelashes.

She seized my hand again and led me down the steps, pausing to take a flashlight from a niche.

“This is a storm shelter with a difference,” she explained as we descended. “It was originally built to be a bomb shelter, just after the Cuban missile crisis. We’re about twenty feet below ground level here. This is the first of two steel blast doors. Give it a push: it still opens.”

I did so. Beyond, I found myself in a short corridor with another blast door ahead.

“Go on,” aunt Ashley encouraged me.

“Nuh-uh,” I said. “You go first. You’re not shutting me in here!”

“Aw, you’re no fun at all,” she said, and squeezed past me. We both felt the sex that sparked between us as she rubbed her body against mine.

She swung the door aside. “Won’t you come into my parlor?” she said, biting her lip.

Groping around for a light switch, at last she was able to provide some much-needed illumination, although the single bulb didn’t do much. Battery power, I guessed.

The room was cylindrical, like a tunnel. There was a large tank marked “water” and shelves containing tins and boxes of food.

“Jesus,” I said, “these crackers are dated 1964.”

“It’s the maid’s day off,” Ash giggled, “but I didn’t bring you down here to look at my crackers.”

“Why did you?” I asked, hardly daring to hope.

“Because... what happens in the underworld stays in the underworld... right?”

It was wrong. I knew that: but I was nearly seventeen and Ash was gorgeous and she was throwing herself at me. What would you have done?

Of course, I kissed her.

“I just feel so naughty all the time,” she said, when we stopped kissing long enough to get some buttons undone. “I don’t understand it! I’m just... such a complete ditz, now. I just want to... all the time...”

“You want to what?” I demanded.

For once, I was feeling bold. This was it: ignore the freaky surroundings. Maybe try to respect what she’s said about this being an out-of-bounds place where we could play this game and the normal rules didn’t apply. Worry about that later.

“Don’t you feel it?” she asked. “It’s so... interesting.”

“Interesting?” I asked, trying to make sure I hadn’t misread the signals: that I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself.

Ash outlined her fantasy:

“I’m all alone with you. You’re so strong, so completely in control. I don’t even have any clothes to wear! And if I don’t please you, I know you can chain me up, down here. You can lock me up, if I don’t do as I’m told...”

There was a length of chain on the floor. It was dusty and a little bit corroded, but she eagerly picked it up, wrapping it twice around her body.

“Uhhh, this is getting me so fucking hot!” she exclaimed. Already, she had hitched up her little denim skirt and reached into her panties. I think she was fingering herself.

So that was where I lost my virginity: in a filthy old bomb shelter, far under ground. Given the forbidden nature of our relationship, perhaps it helped to know that we wouldn’t be found, or overheard.

We kissed – urgent, demanding kisses on both sides. After a minute or two I indicated that Ash should lie down on one of the bunks. Despite the filth she complied eagerly.

“Chain me up, chain me up!” Ash said urgently. She held out her forearms, and I wrapped the chain about them. There was no means of locking the chain in place, but I improvised with a twist of wire. I think she liked that.

Looking back, I have some regrets. My first time should have been with a high school sweetheart, every bit as nervous and excited as I was. Ash, in contrast, knew exactly what she wanted – and exactly what she needed to do to get me off. It was intense when it should have been tentative; kinky when even the good old missionary position would have been novel, for me.

So maybe it was a mistake, but sex with Ash was addictive.

Over dinner that evening, she asked me if I wanted to have another look at the bomb shelter.

“Sure,” I said. Then we broke the rule of “what happens in the underworld”: we never made it out of the house.

Ash begged me to spank her, and slithered out of her shorts before settling herself on all fours on the sofa. I obliged her – although I didn’t satisfy her until I increased the force of the slaps to the maximum of which I was capable. My hand stung terribly, and I can’t imagine what her ass must have felt like.

When she turned over and invited me to screw her she was very wet.

That night demolished any inhibitions I might have had. It set the pattern for the days that followed: Ash was like a mare in heat, demanding attention. She wore the skimpiest outfits from her teenage collection and she begged me to administer punishments or to restrain her. This was unfamiliar territory for me and I doubt that I was inventive enough to fully satisfy her needs, but I was young and fit. By day I rode horses; by night I rode her.

One evening, we were entangled together on the floor of her ridiculous boudoir, both blissed out. We hadn’t managed to reach the bed.

We were interrupted by a heavy thumping on the door.

“Who could that be?” I wondered.

We peeped out the window.

“The dance!” my aunt exclaimed. “I’d forgotten! It’s Thursday. Isn’t it? Yes, I think it is. That’s Dennis and his son Sean, from up the valley. I invited them to come over so we could all go to the dance in East Hollow tonight.”

“What?” I said, hurrying to pull on my jeans. “Why in the world did you do that?”

Ash looked genuinely alarmed. “I don’t know!” She exclaimed, zipping herself into a denim miniskirt. She frowned prettily, but she was clearly concerned.

“I have literally no idea why I thought that would be a good idea,” she said, twisting her hair nervously.

Ash was all thumbs, and still half naked. I hauled on my shirt and hurried downstairs to greet our visitors.

I think they were a little taken aback at our lack of readiness, but nobody could stay mad at Ash. She looked cute in that tiny denim skirt and an imported Japanese tee that featured Donkey Kong Junior.

“You planning on going like that?” Dennis grinned.

“Give me five minutes!” she called, and ran upstairs.

I offered Dennis and Sean a beer and we tried to make polite conversation while we waited. Ash was plenty more than five minutes – probably trying and failing to find something suitable to wear.

My aunt called from upstairs: “Jordan, could you help me with something?”

Pleased to have some excuse to escape from the awkward sausagefest in the kitchen, I left them to their beers and joined her. She was wearing a short sundress and she looked gorgeous – but it wasn’t the kind of thing you’d normally see on anybody over the age of about fourteen. The matching headband made her look particularly innocent. Butter wouldn’t melt...

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Can I borrow some sneakers?”

“Sorry, but no: mine are covered in horseshit. All I have is these shoes I’m wearing, or my riding boots.”

She pondered for a moment, then surrendered to her fate with a sigh: “I’ll have to see if there are some shoes that fit me in this embarrassingly pink bedroom,” she said. “Give me a hand?”

There were a bunch of shoeboxes in the closet. She opened the first, revealing a pair with a heel of at least three inches.

“I won’t be dancing in those,” she said, and kept on looking – but it seemed that each pair of shoes she found was more girlie and impractical than the last.

“They look to be about your size,” I ventured.

“Yeah, maybe,” she muttered, reaching up to a high shelf, “but there’s got to be some goddam sneakers!”

As she searched, a pile of several boxes was dislodged. They cascaded down all around us, bursting open to reveal their contents. Everything I saw was for a fashion-conscious teenager, except –

“What’s that?” I asked, puzzled at the sight of an insubstantial black and white outfit.

“I’m, er, not sure you’re quite old enough to know about things like that,” she said, and coughed daintily.

“Huh?”

“It’s, er, a maid’s outfit.”

I held up the satin confection, and grinned. “I guess it’s the maid’s day off, again,” I joked, indicating the chaos that aunt Ashley had left in her wake as she searched for shoes.

It seemed that aunt Ashley misunderstood me. “It’s not a real one,” she said. “Obviously, it’s... more of a costume.”

“Wow,” I said, quietly. “I’d dearly love to see you in it, sometime.”

Aunt Ashley took the maid’s cap from the box, and held it in place.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

I noticed that her pupils were dilated, and she was flushed. She was even more turned on by this than I was – and that hardly seemed possible.

With regret, I remembered our visitors, downstairs.

“You must really like to play dress-up,” I said, trying to make light of her blatant show of sexuality and submissiveness.

“Yes, sir,” she said again; licked her lower lip.

“Hey! Snap out of it,” I protested. “Your friend and his son are downstairs!”

Aunt Ashley shook herself, and tried to gather her thoughts.

“Shoes,” I prompted. “How about those?” I indicated a pair that matched the pale yellow of her sundress.

“I’ve never worn girlie-girl heels in my life!” she protested.

“Your riding boots have a built up heel,” I pointed out.

She grumbled, but took the shoes over to the bed, at least. She sat and regarded them.

“See if they fit,” I said. “It’s got to be better than going barefoot, right?”

Yes, sir,” she said, pouting.

She put the shoes on.

We went downstairs and Ash earned an admiring whistle from Dennis. She looked like a teenage girl in that short sundress; it was barely enough to preserve her modesty and no amount of tugging at the hem was going to resolve that. She started to explain about the suitcase full of clothes that had been doused in gas, but Dennis insisted that she looked great.

Ash asked me to drive, citing the unfamiliar heels. That was a bind because it meant I was going to be the designated driver for the evening. Nothing but Coke for me!

For a person who claimed never to have worn high heels, Ash did remarkably well in them. She danced with Dennis, mostly, although she did join me for an Alabama Jubilee and later on a Virginia Reel. Other than that I danced with a few local girls, although I had eyes only for my aunt.

Sean drank too much. He seemed awkward around the girls: I guess he’d known them all for years, whereas I had the advantage of being the mysterious new guy.

“You got a sister?” Sean demanded.

“Uh, nope. There’s just me.”

“Weird. I could’a sworn your aunt said she was bringing her niece to the dance. That’s why I agreed to come.”

“Sorry,” I said, “but I can’t imagine why she would have given you that idea.”

“This is a bust,” Sean declared.

“There’s plenty of girls here!” I objected.

“Yeah, but they’re all...” he paused for a swig of his beer. “Never mind.”

“That Meghan’s looking at you,” I said.

“Yeah, but have you seen the size of her brother? I do anything more than dance with her and he’s gonna come round and give me a free demonstration of his stump grinding service, If you catch my drift.”

“So just dance with her, then,” I said, but Sean preferred to devote his evening to the King of Beers.

I danced with Meghan. She was sweet... but her youthful face seemed doughy and half-formed when compared to aunt Ashley. Also, I remembered what Sean had said about her terrifyingly proportioned brother: thus I was a perfect gentleman.

At last the evening came to a close. Sean was almost incoherent at this point and we had to manhandle him into the truck.

“You should’a brought your sister along!” he grumbled as I put a seatbelt on him.

Ash insisted that I should take Dennis and his son back to their farm, and this was a good strategy because it provided her with a way to escape: I don’t doubt that Dennis had thought his luck was in when he first saw Ash in that short dress, but she didn’t want sex with him.

As soon as we dropped them off, she began to apologize profusely for having invited them.

“I honestly don’t know why I did it!” she said. “If I wanted to dance with anybody, it’d be you.”

“It’s Sean I felt sorry for,” I said as I parked up, back at the ranch. “I wonder how he got his wires crossed like that?”

“Wires crossed!” Ash exclaimed. “Give me a minute...”

Again, she ran off to her favorite outbuilding.

I was intrigued.

“What’s she got in there?” I wondered out loud, getting myself a Pabst Blue Ribbon from the refrigerator.

I took a swig of the beer and headed back outside.

“Ash! What’s going on?”

I let the sound of the generator guide me. The second time I called out I head a door slam, and the rattle of keys. Ash skidded around the corner and bumped into me.

“Sorry,” she said breathlessly. “I just –”

“Had to take care of the generator, I know.”

Still she clung to me, and that was nice.

“Damn, I wish somebody would take care of me as good as you take care of that generator,” I grumbled.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and unzipped my fly. She knelt before me, right there in the yard and took me in her mouth.

...

In the morning a white-faced and clearly hung over Sean drove his father out to the ranch so they could retrieve their truck. Ash offered them coffee, and as we drank this she was careful to make sure that Dennis understood that although she’d had a good evening, dancing was all she’d been interested in. He took it well enough.

When our visitors left we spent some time with the horses. We got them ready to ride, but it never happened.

In the tack room Ash searched around and presently found a riding crop.

“I’ve been bad again, sir,” she said, eyes downcast as she handed me the weapon. As soon as I accepted it she stripped naked and grabbed her ankles.

I gave her an experimental swat. I knew she liked pain, so I swung as hard as I dared. The flared leather strap at the end of the riding crop made a sharp smack, and left a bright red mark on her beautiful ass.

“Oh!’ She gasped, “Yes!”

I had an idea. Pausing for a moment, I took down a hobble and put it in place about her ankles. She squirmed with pleasure, and from the sounds she made I thought she might come just from the beating I gave her.

After ten strokes each side, I knew she was close. Her ass cheeks glowed red, like a beacon. I pushed her down onto the hard floor, then tore off my own clothes. I entered her from behind, finding her to be very wet and in need of very little stimulation before she reached a climax.

I heard Star snort anxiously as she yelled her pleasure.

I emptied my balls into her just a few strokes later. I leaned in close, and whispered to her as I came:

“That’s my good little mare.”

Ash was breathing hard and I could tell that she wanted more. She was really getting into this! I knew that I would need more than an hour before I could go again, but Ash showed no sign of wanting it to be over. She stayed in place, on all fours.

Since I couldn’t screw her again, I decided to try something else. The tack room contained masses of reins, halters, assorted harnesses and martingales: for a person who wanted to be put into bondage (and my aunt evidently did) it was a paradise.

Since she’d never shown any squeamishness about horse germs I decided that it would be permissible to fit her out with a curb bit. This I pressed into her mouth, and she accepted it with a muffled “mngf!” that communicated the lust that she felt. Most of the tack wouldn’t fit her, of course, being designed for equine proportions, but there was a tool on the bench that could be used to make extra holes in a leather strap. This I used to adapt a halter, fastening it firmly about her head. I added reins, and then a breast collar. Departing from the usual configuration of harness, I used some leather thonging to tie her up more thoroughly, until she was entirely immobilized.

I was amused at the idea of leaving Ash trussed up, and I think it turned her on, too: to have to wait and wonder when I would return. I decided to use the time to check on the horses.

After that I went into the kitchen, quite maliciously leaving Ash to listen for sounds of my return. I was washing my hands when I heard the ‘clunk, clunk’ of two car doors being closed.

Two large men were approaching the house. They wore protective clothing of some kind – a funny getup that made each look like the bastard lovechild of a beekeeper and a deep sea diver. Each was carrying a hat and gloves.

“I’m Agent Parker, FBI,” the taller man said, flashing me a quick view of a shield. “This here is Agent Sewell.”

You wouldn’t believe just how much an introduction like that can focus the mind when you have a tied up and freshly fucked woman concealed in your tack room.

I looked from one man to the other.

“Is there a problem, officers?”

“We’ve detected an unlicensed Murchison field on this property,” the one called Sewell said, producing a gadget. I’d never seen anything like it – or not since ‘Ghostbusters’, anyhow.

“A what?”

Sewell took a step forward, purely for the purpose of intimidating me. He needn’t have bothered: I was petrified.

My rabbit-in-the-headlights impression didn’t satisfy my visitors, though.

“Oh, you want to play the innocent with me?” Sewell demanded. “I’m talking about a reality-altering field projector. Illegal in just about any country you could name. Using one here will get you fifteen years in jail, easy – but I reckon you knew that.”

“Reality... what?” I sputtered.

“Somebody set it up, and it’s centered right here! If not you, who? Who lives on the property?”

“Just me and my aunt Ashley, I guess,” I said, reluctantly.

Aunt Ashley who was currently bound in the stable, blissed out, in full harness and freshly screwed. I reckoned I’d have to tell them that she’d gone out, or something.

“Mind if we look around?” Agent Parker said, not bothering to wait for my reply. He stalked off towards the outbuildings.

Agent Sewell placed a hand firmly on my chest when I attempted to follow, detaining me on the porch.

“That’s a noisy generator you’ve got,” he observed. “What’s she running?”

“I dunno,” I said. Some lights at night. Refrigerator. Record player, sometimes...”

“Bullshit,” the burly agent said. “Show me.”

The outbuilding that housed the generator had a locked door.

“Key?” Agent Sewell demanded.

“I don’t have it,” I said. “There’s a whole bunch of keys on a hook in the kitchen!” I added, quickly, when it looked as if he might smash the door down.

“Show me,” he said again. It was plain that he wasn’t going to leave me alone for a second – meaning I’d have no chance to slip away and free aunt Ashley.

Together we fetched the keys. Sure enough, one of them fitted the lock on the generator building and we went inside.

The diesel generator shuddered on its mountings and it was difficult to make myself heard as I asked what the agent was doing. He ignored me anyway.

He located some thick cables that led away from the generator and pulled them up off the floor, so as to follow them. Reaching into his pockets he produced another gadget and clamped this around one of the cables.

“Pulling a lot of amps here, kid!” he shouted.

I shrugged to indicate that I had no idea what this setup was for, but he looked unimpressed. He followed the cables down the length of the building, to a room at the end of the shed.

“Well hello, mister Murchison,” he grinned.

“What is it?” I asked, regarding the rack of electrical equipment. Red, green and amber lights blinked; wires with quarter-inch plugs snaked here and there between three plug boards, making the whole thing resemble an old telephone switchboard, I guess.

“Suppose you tell me, kid,” Sewell said. “What’s it set up to do?”

“I never saw this before in my life!” I protested. “What’s a... Murchison field?”

“Oh, please! Are you going to keep up the innocent act all day? Make it easy on yourself. You know I’m going to shut this down anyway, don’t you?”

“I don’t even know what it is!” I protested.

Agent Parker joined us and studied the equipment at length. Meanwhile it seemed that Sewell’s job was to loom over me in a threatening manner, ensuring that I didn’t do anything to interfere.

I had to assume that Parker’s search hadn’t taken him into the tack room, else he would have mentioned finding aunt Ashley. Wouldn’t he? Surely...

I was wondering if it was time to insist that I get a lawyer. Being almost seventeen was great an’ all, but right then I really needed the comforting reassurance of a friendly adult.

“You might want to go easy on the kid,” Parker said, at last.

“How’s that?” his partner asked, not taking his eyes off me.

“He’s not the perp,” Parker said, at last. Almost reluctantly: “I think he was the intended victim.”

Sewell turned to face his partner, while clamping one of my shoulders beneath his massive paw. I was going nowhere.

“He’s the victim? How’d you figure?”

“Look at this setup,” Parker indicated something on the right-hand side, but all I saw was a baffling jumble of boxes and wires. “Whoever set this up, they bollixed it. See this here? It’s an XY module and it’s been mounted upside down. Whoever did it didn’t realize they’d gone wrong at the outset, and they’ve added a whole mess of jumper wires but they just made it worse.”

“Made what worse?” I asked – then regretted it as they turned their attention on me.

“Anything odd been happening around here?” Sewell regarded me quizzically, but he seemed to have dialed down the open hostility a little.

“Odd how?” I asked. “I’m only here for a holiday, so I wouldn’t really know...”

Parker interrupted me. “Has anybody been behaving strangely? This aunt you mentioned: where is she?”

“Shopping for groceries,” I lied.

“Expecting her back?”

“Not for hours,” I said – then regretted this as it might encourage them to linger.

“Alright,” Parker said. “It’ll take a while to run a report on this lash-up anyway.”

Again, Parker walked away while Sewell detained me. When he returned he was carrying an equipment case. Inside was something that looked like an electric typewriter, with cables coming from the back, ending in crocodile clips.

“Okay, story time!” he said.

He began attaching wires to various places on the rack of electrical equipment. From time to time he struck a spark and backed away, rubbing his hand. Eventually, he seemed satisfied. He operated a control on his ‘electric typewriter’ and it began clicking. Drums shifted back and forth, but then the machine fell silent. Just when I thought that was the end of the performance, a rasping noise began and a printout inched its way out of the machine.

Parker read the output, and smirked.

“Oh, this is a doozy,” was all he said.

Sewell didn’t take his eyes off me, every inch the G-man. After a minute or so the printing process stopped and Parker tore off the sheet. He gave it to Sewell to read while he took over the job of watching me.

Whatever this alleged crime was, they sure treated me bad, for a person who had been judged victim and not perpetrator.

Sewell began to laugh. He laughed uproariously, the printout shaking in his meaty fist as he read.

He shared some of his favorite excerpts:

“French maid’s outfit!”

“Invited to the dance!”

“Oh – kinky: pony-girl bondage? Jesus!”

At last, his laughter subsided.

“Son,” he said, “it appears that your aunt is one twisted bitch. You’ve had a very lucky escape.”

“Uh...” I didn’t know how to respond to that.

“Listen,” Parker said, “I don’t wanna leave this mess running for another minute. It’s one of the worst mix-ups I’ve ever seen. It could even go critical.”

“Go critical?” I asked.

Sewell frowned.

“Theoretically, this could go self-sustaining,” Parker told his partner.

“Another Pyongyang? Fuck: shut it down.” Swell glanced at a length of two-by-four in the corner.

“Nothing so dramatic,” Parker reassured him. “First, we should set the machine to undo as much as possible. It’s fucked up and I doubt it’ll manage a full revert, but let’s have it do some good before it folds. And if it doesn’t melt down completely there’s always the thermite.”

“I don’t understand!” I protested.

“Just a minute, kid,” said Parker, fiddling with his ‘typewriter’. It started clicking again, and he seemed satisfied.

“Let’s see how far it gets,” he said, and shrugged.

“But, what is it?” I demanded.

Parker considered me for a long moment. At last he decided to let me in on his secret.

“The Murchison field dates back to 1943, and a story that you might know as the Philadelphia Experiment.”

“I saw that film,” I said, warily. “What –”

“The real Philadelphia Experiment didn’t involve hyperspace,” Parker began to explain, but Sewell interrupted him.

“Naw, the real Philadelphia Experiment was an attempt to blend full fat and half fat cheese,” he said, “Christ sakes, Parker, why are you telling the kid this?”

“Like it matters?” he countered. “The kid’s going to get pinched in a few minutes anyway.”

“Pinched?” I asked, fearfully.

“Pinched,” Parker confirmed. “Do you want me to explain? Since you’re the victim, perhaps you deserve that.”

“Please,” I said, “tell me.”

“Okay,” he said. “The Murchison field alters reality. The original one required a huge array of primitive electrical equipment: so much that you could only fit it on a ship. The ship would slip into an alternate universe, just fractionally different from our own. Sail the seas of another Earth and you’re invisible: impossible to attack. That was the idea, anyway.”

This sounded like horseshit to me, but it also sounded like it was just a preamble, so I waited to hear what the Big Secret might be.

“Trouble is,” he went on, “the secret of its construction leaked out. Meanwhile, electronics became a lot cheaper and simpler. Pretty soon anybody with the right connections could buy and set up an illegal Murchison. Make yourself a pocket universe where you’re lucky at cards, and ruin Las Vegas in an afternoon; make yourself a pocket universe where the South won the Civil War; that kind of thing.”

“So... this is a pocket universe?”

“Yeah. A tiny one: but it’s our job to shut it down. To make it like it never existed.”

“What’s different from... reality?” I asked.

“In a nutshell, your aunt appears to have wanted to make you into some kind of sex slave. She’s got all kinds of modules wired up here. If she’d had her way, you’d be mincing around like a fairy by now. Or trussed up like a chicken, maybe. And loving it.”

“But,” I protested, “I didn’t... I never...”

“Relax, kid,” Parker smiled. “She wired it up wrong. She fitted the XY module upside down, so everything she did after that backfired.”

“The generator,” I said. “It all makes sense now.”

“How’s that?”

“She kept saying she needed to check on the generator,” I explained.

“Yeah, probably scratching her increasingly ditzy head each time something didn’t work out,” Parker shook his head. “Some people just don’t have the sense to leave alone what they don’t understand!”

Sewell spoke up:

“So, did you fuck her?”

I looked at him, but said nothing: he was a G-man, after all.

Sewell Shrugged. “I would’a.”

The ‘typewriter’ machine made a pinging sound.

“That’s all folks,” Parker said. He disconnected the machine; stowed it.

He and Sewell drew on their ‘beekeeper’ hats, and their gloves, too.

Since I lacked this protective clothing, I became alarmed.

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Sewell said.

“When reality gets here, you won’t remember a thing,” Parker explained. “The pocket universe that your aunt made is collapsing. The Murchison Constant tells us that alternate realities collapse at one hundred and fifty-three miles per hour, give or take. A couple of minutes from now this aberration will be pinched out of existence and everything will be back to normal.”

I went to the door and they followed me outside. All around there were dark clouds on the horizon, and they seemed to be rolling in on all sides at once.

“That’s a big one,” Sewell exclaimed. “Auntie must’a really fucked with the fabric of the universe!”

Ash would have left the keys in her truck, for sure. I wondered if I should make a break for it? Parker and Sewell had arrived in a Lincoln and I knew that if I went cross-country they’d never catch me... but what about that weird thunderstorm?

Parker, it seemed, could read my mind.

“You might as well try to outrun a tornado, son. You run away from the epicenter, you’re just going to reach the interface sooner. It’s over!”

That gave me an idea.

“They always gotta try!” I heard Agent Sewell laugh as I dashed away from them.

I ran through the stable and into the tack room. Ash was still there, of course: it would have been hard for her to escape as I’d lashed her in place pretty good.

I loved how the leather thongs made her breasts stand out, painfully constricted but with erect nipples. She looked at me with nothing but lust in her eyes.

My girlfriend: my aunt.

She was drooling around the curb bit and she looked up at me expectantly. I was drawn to her, and under any other circumstances I would have wanted to grab her rein, lead her up into the loft, fasten her down to a couple of cleats and fuck her again. She’d have liked that.

Then I remembered what the agents had tried to explain to me. The Murchison field, and that strange machine.

She was the one who’d wired it up wrong: all this was meant for me. She wanted me to be the pony girl.

I knew that the storm front that was closing in – at something like a hundred and fifty miles an hour if the agents were to be believed.

You might as well try to outrun a tornado, son.

Except... why run from a tornado when you can hide from it?

There was no time to free Ash from her bondage – and anyway, she’d caused this, hadn’t she? The air reeked of strange, metallic odors and my hair was starting to stand on end. Reality was closing in and it was time to go!

I ran through the stable and back outside. I took the steps down into the bomb shelter three at a time, hurled myself through the first big door and dragged it closed behind me. I spun the wheel to lock it and moved on to the second.

As I labored to get that reluctant door to move, I sensed rather than heard a kind of soft thunderclap. Ancient dust was dislodged, raining down from the ceiling and making me cough. I tried to use my shirt to keep the worst of the dust out of my lungs.

I felt... nothing. I waited a long time so as to be sure that whatever was happening up above must have resolved itself

I left the shelter and climbed the steps.

There was a board over the stairs at the top but I heaved it aside readily enough. I emerged into good weather: no sign of the storm. I wondered what had become of Ash, and walked towards the barn.

“Help you?” somebody called.

I turned. “Jed?”

“Huh? I know you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “You’re Jed, right sir?”

“Yeah,” he conceded. “Who’re you?”

“I’m a relative of Ashley Kelly,” I said. “I’m called Jordan.”

“Huh. I see.”

He glanced over to the gate; saw no vehicle.

“How’d you get here?” he asked.

“One of the truck drivers for the mine,” I improvised.

He regarded my dusty condition. “What, he made you ride in back?”

I grinned and tried to slap away the worst of the dust. “Something like that,” I said.

“God damn mine: God damn eyesore!” Jed was scathing.

“You don’t like the mine?”

“No, I don’t. But the deal was already in place when I inherited the ranch.”

“Inherited?”

“Yeah. If you’re related to the Kellys, you must know the story. When Frank and Ashley died, they surprised me by leaving me the ranch – and the animals. ‘Owning’ isn’t really something you do, on the timescale of a landscape like this, but I get to take care of the place. For the rest of my life.”

He carried on, further developing the theme that people belong to the land and not vice-versa, but I didn’t listen.

Aunt Ashley was gone. Years gone. I worried at the memory, as if it were a piece of something stuck in my teeth.

Yes, I thought, Ashley and Frank were both killed in that auto accident... weren’t they?

“Where you from, son?”

“Oklahoma City,” I said.

“You got folks, know you’re all the way out here?”

“I think they’re still on holiday,” I said.

“You think?”

“Hey, I’m seventeen!” I protested.

Well, almost.

Jed shrugged. “Nobody’s going to call you a runaway and haul you back home at seventeen, but it doesn’t mean they stopped caring about you.”

While we talked, Star ambled over and snorted softly at Jed.

“Is he favoring his right foreleg?” I asked, innocently.

“Good eye!” Jed was impressed. “You know your horses.”

I decided to continue with the game, exploiting my unfair advantage for all it was worth. I made a show of studying Chief: he was off in the distance but I recognized him.

“That’s a fine Dutch warmblood,” I said approvingly. “Gelding, I guess...”

“No,” Jed shook his head. “Stallion.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Tolerates the heat OK?”

“We’ve come to an arrangement,” Jed grinned ruefully. “I don’t ride him at noon; he doesn’t throw me and trample me.”

So, aunt Ashley never took your balls, Chief? Good for you.

“What do you think of this one?” Jed challenged. He whistled and Patch trotted across her paddock.

I stroked her muzzle, and dislodged a persistent fly from her ear. “Hiya Patch,” I said.

“That’s what we call her!” Jed exclaimed.

“Yeah, she told me,” I lied. Didn’t quite manage to convince him, so I abandoned the attempt.

“Just a lucky guess. But Patch, here, is an exceptionally fine Peruvian Paso. She must be worth fifteen thousand dollars!”

“A horse is only worth what a buyer is prepared to pay,” Jed shrugged. “Also, she’s not for sale.”

“She’s pregnant,” I said.

“Right again,” Jed said. “How in the world...?”

“She told me,” I grinned.

He shook is head in wonder. “You sure you’re from Oklahoma City?”

Just then another mare snorted – actually a filly: I could tell at once that it was a youngster. Jed had a lot more horses on the ranch in this new reality and I was rapidly exhausting my store of knowledge. I had no way of identifying the breed because I hadn’t been shown this animal before.

Her bridle was familiar, though. That curb bit, too: I recognized the equipment that I had used to tie up my aunt, just an hour or so before.

“This is Asha,” Jed said proudly. “Missouri Fox Trotter, of course.”

I regarded the beautiful filly and she dipped her head a couple of times. I patted her neck.

“Hi, Asha.”

I leaned in close, and whispered: “Do you believe in reincarnation, aunt Ashley?”

There was no hint of understanding in the placid equine eye that regarded me, and rightly so: Asha was just a horse, after all. I was being silly.

I patted her neck some more. Swallowed, struggling against the hard lump in my throat.

“Come on over to the house and meet Emily,” Jed said. “Maybe you can get cleaned up, some... and call your folks, if you want.”

I realized that I had no money, and no means of getting home.

“That’s very kind,” I said.

...

Sure enough, my parents were home and they were greatly relieved to hear from me. It seemed I had been missing for several days: they agreed to wire some money and arrange for a ’plane ticket.

After a meal, Jed gave me a ride back to civilization, telling me stories about my aunt and uncle as we went.

I thought of Parker and Sewell – and others like them, tracking down people who tried to “fuck with the fabric of the universe” as Sewell had so charmingly put it.

Would they be able to detect that I hadn’t been “pinched” when my aunt’s artificial universe collapsed? Probably not if I kept my mouth shut – but I felt grief, raw and terrible, at the loss of the woman who had been my lover just hours before: a woman that I now knew to have been dead for years.

Try explaining that little conundrum to your therapist, I thought.

Jed pulled up at a bus stop and I thanked him again. He handed me a twenty: I wanted to promise him that I’d pay him back, but he told me to forget it – the least he could do to help out Frank and Ashley’s nephew, he said.

He made a U-turn and gave me a wave as he headed back to the ranch. I don’t suppose I’ll see him again.

I stood in solitude, with a long wait before the bus was due. No cars passed.

A fragment of memory came back to me, from English class. Herman Melville:

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” I said, to nobody in particular.

Call me Ishmael.

+++ ENDS +++

11,300 words © Bryony Marsh, 2017.
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The Passenger
by Bryony Marsh

It was to be exile, to a property the family held in Montana. Montana, of all places! I had become an embarrassment and would be hidden away to avoid a scandal. Perhaps Father hoped there would be fewer reporters – fewer visitors of all kinds – to see what I had become. When he wished me “bon voyage” there was a sense of finality about the meeting and I suspected that I would never see him again.

It hadn’t always been like that. At one time I had basked in the warm glow of his pride, as I won colours and trophies at school. I had been a cadet – and a successful one at that. There had been talk of a place for me in the Guards, or perhaps the Household Cavalry.

Then came the night I found the locket. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been poking around in things that didn’t belong to me, but I was always one to explore and to push at boundaries. I knew that the servants would have prevented me from ascending the stairs that led to the top floor of the east wing so I waited until two in the morning to conduct the mission – just as if I were a character in one of the ‘penny dreadfuls’ that Mother so disapproved of my reading.

I knew where the spare keys were kept. I was sure that borrowing them at that time of night would be simplicity itself – but what would I find on the top floor, which had always been out of bounds?

Paintings in the French style, with an abundance of flesh and a paucity of clothing: that was my brother Jonathan’s theory. In this he was quite wrong, for when I unlocked the heavy oaken door and pulled it aside I found nothing that was particularly unusual. Instead, there was a home within a home – complete with a sitting room, bedroom and bathroom. There was no provision for the preparation of food, but I saw that the dumb waiter extended to this floor, the suite being located above the kitchens.

Whoever had lived in those rooms – and likely been imprisoned in them, given the stoutness of the door and the bolts on the outside – was long gone, although the furnishings that remained behind suggested that a woman had lived here.

So our family had once kept a mad old woman in the attic? A classic plot element in several of the stories that I had read. Who she might have been, I couldn’t have said.

The place had been emptied of clothes and personal effects. With reluctance, I accepted that the occupant’s identity would not be revealed to me that night. Perhaps some cautious questioning of the older members of staff might reveal the truth to me, later.

It wasn’t until I turned to leave that I noticed the locket, sat atop a coiled silver chain. It was on the mantelpiece and I was surprised that I hadn’t spotted it before.

Perhaps the portrait that the locket held would provide a clue as to who had been imprisoned?

I reached for it – and in that moment my fate was sealed.

Examining it by lantern light, I discerned at once that it must be valuable. The fine pattern traced upon it was like something from the House of Fabergé, and the whole was deceptively heavy. I wondered if it might, in fact, be solid… but I had identified the catch and it popped open readily enough.

Inside I found no portrait, but instead a dark, highly polished surface like black mica. For an instant I thought there was a face within its depths, but when I looked more closely all I could see was my own reflection.

At once, the locket felt unnaturally warm in my grasp. I gripped it tightly, causing it to snap shut. As I held it in my fist the strangest sensation came over me, that I was the locket’s owner. Not in the simple “finders, keepers” sense… but that I had lived in these rooms.

Who was I, then? I didn’t know… but at that moment I was the woman who owned the locket.

Seeing that the door stood ajar, she felt delight – and I felt it, too. At last, she could leave these rooms where she had been confined for so long. I wondered what she looked like, but since she didn’t pause in front of a mirror, this remained a mystery. She had delicate hands and small, bare feet. She wore a simple nightdress and a lace wrap.

It was she, not I, who ran lightly down the stairs and out into the grounds. She was delighted by the moonlit garden and astonished at how tall some of the yew trees had grown. It was clear that she knew the place well: she walked faultlessly through the small maze, to watch the fish in the pool on the far side.

At last, as dawn began to show, the locket cooled. I was myself again, no longer the unknown woman – although I fancied that something of her stayed with me. I wondered what I should do, but decided at once that I couldn’t bring myself to admit to Father what I had done, in case he took steps to ensure that the locket was placed forever beyond my reach. I wanted – needed – to know more about the strange woman and the waking dream that the locket had brought me.

The best course of action, I decided, was to leave everything as I had found it, replacing the locket and barring the door. I was sure that I could borrow the keys again, having succeeded once.

I was tired, all through that that day, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the locket and the woman that I had ‘become’. To have heaped this voyeuristic thrill atop that of marauding at night; of being out of bounds… perhaps it was too much for a young mind to take. I wanted to experience that strange sensation again!

The next night, I was too tired for any roaming. I slept right through but awoke determined that I would creep through the house at the next opportunity, to retrieve the locket and use it again. I wondered how often the closed up rooms were visited and how long it might be before that extraordinary trinket would be missed if I kept it. Even at that early stage, being apart from the locket made me anxious, as I feared that somebody else might find it.

For perhaps a month, my nocturnal adventures with the locket remained a secret. Mother chastised me for the dark bags that were always to be seen under my eyes, pleading with me to get more sleep. Father gave me dire warnings against the excessive masturbation that he had decided must be at the root of my loss of energy. For my part, I was euphoric: it must be some secret of the afterlife, I had decided, whereby a spirit such as the woman I had discovered could be brought back to life, for a time. I hadn’t managed to communicate with her in any sense – in fact, when I grasped the locket it seemed that I ceased to exist, except as her – but I experienced her meanderings through the sleeping house and its grounds. She never uttered a word and radiated only a calm, placid nature that seemed to match her natural grace.

And each time she went away, I found there was a little less of me to take her place.

It couldn’t last, of course. By the end of that month I sometimes felt that the nightly hauntings were more real to me than the exhausting business of keeping up appearances by day. The privileged life of the youngest son of a peer is undemanding, but I was expected to take some interest in the wider world and the social calendar. Visitors began to remark upon the changes they found in me, and it seemed that it was my mannerisms that betrayed me: unconscious moments when I reacted not as myself but as the unknown woman.

Felicity Gale, a sweet girl with whom I had once flirted my way through mixed doubles, piano recitals and the like, was surprised and disappointed to find that I was no longer quite so puppy-dog keen to win her favour. At first she assumed there was somebody else and took it as a challenge, but there was only myself – when I grasped the locket. Felicity was a wholesome and kind girl, but I shut her out of my life as I replied “no thank you” to everything she suggested over the Easter period. None of the other callers took her place in my affections.

I tried to stop using the locket. I tried to leave it where I had found it, but even when I was convinced that I had left it on the mantel in those lonely rooms, I would find it in a pocket. Even in the pocket of a garment not previously worn.

I must be going mad, I decided. There was a contamination: a leakage from the secret life that I was leading by night that spilled over into the waking world that I shared with others – and they were noticing the change.

Father had decided that I was going through ‘a phase’ and needed to be brought back to the path of righteousness, by hook or by crook. I suspect that this made matters worse because with each exchange he simply made it less pleasant for me to be… me. When he spoke of his concerns that I would bring shame on the family by becoming a sodomite, I thought: what’s the very worst that he can do to me?

The rooms at the top of the east wing, I decided. He’ll have me declared mad and lock me away where I can’t disgrace him. And perhaps I would go mad, deprived of liberty and human contact… but it would also free me from the exhausting business of needing to be two people: one by day and one by night.

I surrendered myself to the notion.

“You’re right, Father,” I told him. “You’re absolutely right. Do as you must, because I can’t change my behaviour.”

He surprised me with the Montana plan. There was work to be done in that far-off place: hard work involving a vast acreage of cattle, forests to be cut for timber and so on. Just the sort of place to send a wayward son, to toughen him up.

Well, perhaps.

That’s how I found myself booked on a vast steamship, heading for New York. A gilded cage, at least: the accommodations were the finest I had ever seen aboard a ship.

The locket came on the voyage as well, of course. I didn’t mean for it to come and I had no memory of retrieving it from the locked rooms in the days before my departure… but somehow, there it was in my trunk.

I knew that this was a defining test of my character: that I must somehow muster the courage to drop the thing over the side, sending it down to the ocean deeps before we reached New York. If I could do that, I might be able to serve out my exile, rebuilding my life and making my father proud once again.

The night of the fourteenth of April was bitterly cold. My fellow passengers were below decks, perhaps finishing their brandy and cigars. In the ballroom the band played a waltz, though it was nearing midnight and most people would by that time have been thinking of turning in.

I was at the rail, holding the locket by its chain so that it dangled it over the dark water. I was safe from its effects, holding it in that way, although its appearance remained most alluring.

Surely, a trinket such as this must be worth a fortune! I should keep it, at least until New York, where it would fetch a handsome price…

All the foolish arguments of the addict. It had to go.

One last look at the interior? No! It had to go!

My fingers were cold. Soon, it must slip from their grasp. That would serve, wouldn’t it?

The ship shuddered. Had the engines been thrown into reverse? There were shouts: she commenced a lumbering turn.

I looked ahead and saw the reason for the turn: an iceberg! Though I was on the highest deck, it towered above me. It seemed that we had turned in time, though, for as the wall of ice swept past I wasn’t wiped away – but then the ship lurched as she struck some unseen, projecting spur.

The impact sent me to my knees and I forgot all about the locket.

There was some nonsense talked in the confused hours that followed: that the ship was unsinkable and so on… but she began to go down by the bow and a volley of distress flares were fired.

Having already been on the Boat Deck when the emergency began, one might have thought that I was well-placed to survive what followed, but it transpired that I was poorly qualified:

“Women and children first!” the cry went up all around, causing dismay among those of us who had come promptly to the muster point, only to be turned away by the crew.

I saw lifeboats being lowered even though they were half empty, simply because there were no more women or children to be found… and all the while, members of the crew ordered us away. As if we couldn’t be trusted to act responsibly!

I was shivering, from terror as much as from the cold. As the deck took on a distinct angle, the sea remained obstinately empty: if another ship had seen our distress flares it was still too far away to offer assistance. Our pathetic collection of lifeboats were meant to be used to ferry passengers to another vessel, not as a refuge in their own right.

Just five boats remained, now. I felt numb – although I knew that the embrace of the sea would be far colder.

Thrusting my hands deep into the pockets of the pea coat that I wore, at once I found the locket. Of course: it would be there, wouldn’t it?

I had never tested the power of the locket among others. My haunting of the house and gardens at home had always been a solitary affair but it had felt real enough: I had been no mere phantom. Could the locket once again transform me into the unknown woman, thereby allowing me to board a lifeboat?

And… would I want it to?

This was my dilemma: even assuming that it worked and the locket didn’t simply produce an hallucination, I suspected that its use in this way would represent an act of surrender. The locket had brought me nothing but disgrace and exile. I had come within a whisker of dropping the thing in the ocean, yet now I found a reason to entrust it with my life?

I knew that I was not a brave man. Perhaps I had been, before this madness began, but no longer.

I chose to use the locket.

I ducked into a shaded nook, as if to escape the worst of the wind. When I was certain that nobody was looking my way I gripped the locket in fumbling fingers. At once they were warmed by that strange glow… and I regarded the scene about me with other eyes.

So: if it was a form of madness then at least I would be comforted by the waking dream of life as the unknown woman. Already I felt her strange clam; her sense of acceptance, come what may. I was consoled. Even barefoot and clad only in the nightdress and wrap that had barely been sufficient for walking in the grounds at home, she was content.

A small smile played upon her lips and I knew that death held no terror for her.

It seemed that others were less calm, however.

“Miss! You’ve got to get on the boat!”

Somebody was manhandling me towards a lifeboat – one of the last. I felt confused, as if I had just awoken from a deep sleep.

“What?” I couldn’t take it all in. In that befuddled state I allowed myself to be jostled into the boat, crammed with people of all kinds. Somebody placed a coat around my shoulders.

The boat was lowered expertly, to float in a sea already littered with flotsam. Water splashed us, burning-cold. With three long oars on each side, our tiny vessel was steered away from the stricken liner, then rearing up at her stern.

There came a moan from a thousand throats: from those still aboard who knew in that moment that death was just seconds away. It is a sound that will remain with me for the rest of my days.

I lost the ability to move. At first, it was the cold. We were barely alive, but to live at all seemed impossible when so many had died. We were plucked from our little boat around dawn and though they gave us dry blankets and cocoa, something inside me stayed frozen.

Days passed.

I was somehow held in abeyance. I wouldn’t speak to a soul.

Sometimes they placed food in my mouth and at such times I chewed and swallowed but I did nothing of my own volition. I was transferred to a hospital where I shared a room with some others who had also been through the disaster.

Doctors conferred, within my hearing. Some said the cold had caused a kind of stroke and robbed me of my mind. Others said my ailment was caused by the horrors of that night: that I would recover, in time. There were other theories as well, some with complicated medical names that meant nothing to me.

My hands, face and feet were blistered and swollen. A mild case of frostbite, they said: it would not result in any permanent damage. As my circulation returned, dead skin began to slough away and I must have looked a terrible sight.

One doctor wanted to pry my fingers open, to get at the locket in my right fist. He reasoned that it might offer a clue as to my identity, but my fingers were seized fast. Neither I nor any of the doctors could persuade those fingers to relinquish their grasp. It was decided that this could wait.

Days passed. Perhaps I felt a little more comfortable, at last.

“Is she in here?” Anxious voices in the corridor.

More quietly, the newcomers were admonished with words that I couldn’t make out. I wasn’t very interested anyway.

A doctor showed a man into the room. I only saw him peripherally, but I sensed his anxiety – and perhaps horror as he regarded my face. He stared at me for a long moment.

“Is this your wife?” the doctor prompted.

Before he could speak, two small children dashed in, having evaded a staff member who had tried to keep them in the corridor.

“Is it mama?” the girl demanded, clinging to her father and looking in my direction.

The tragedy of the sinking was still being played out, I realised. It wasn’t yet known – not for certain – who was alive and who was lost. This husband had lost his wife and two children had lost their mother, somehow, in that night of chaos.

I wondered who she had been.

“It is mama!” the boy cried, dashing to my bedside. He grasped my hand – the one with the locket squeezed tightly – in both of his.

It pulsed as warmth again filled my hand. Was this what the locket had intended? Was the unknown woman whose form I inhabited not in fact a ghost from the past, but rather a manifestation of what might yet be?

It seemed the woman herself didn’t have an opinion. She remained motionless: a blank slate characterised by supernatural calm. While she exuded nothing but patience, my thoughts galloped.

Was this what the locket was for? Had all the unhappy events of recent weeks led up to this moment and this decision? If I so chose, could the locket avert one particular tragedy from that terrible night?

I sensed that this was so… but if I surrendered now to the power of the locket, what would become of me?

“Henry! Come away!” the man’s anguish was plain. “It’s not your mama.”

I wondered: could I save Henry and Olivia from their terrible hurt?

Olivia? How did I know her name?

The locket pulsed more strongly and I felt my features subtly rearranging themselves. I didn’t know what the dead woman looked like, but little Henry did and it seemed that this was sufficient. As I changed physically, my mind began to change as well. It seemed that a new path was offered to me and I packed away William, my old self, rather as one puts away childhood toys. Of what would replace him, I had no idea.

I blinked. Coughed. In a voice rusty from disuse, I said:

“Henry. Olivia.”

No doubt my own family would cope. Father might even consider that he’d got off lightly. Jonathan could remember me from earlier days and perhaps imagine me the hero, giving up a place on a lifeboat to one more deserving. Mother… she would have understood what I chose.

“I’m sorry, my darlings,” I said. The American accent was new.

“Rachel?” The man was at my side, now, staring at me in wonder.

I was tired. Terribly confused. I knew that there was much I wouldn’t remember… but at last the unknown woman had a name – and a role. Wife. Mother. Convalescence would be long, but the time would pass happily now that I was reunited with my family. I felt their love for me, plus the tremendous sense of peace that the locket always brought. They had prayed that I would be delivered and I had returned to them.

I should never have gone to Paris, I told myself. But you’re safe now. Be brave – for the children.

When I managed at last to escape from Henry’s grasp I opened aching fingers and found that my hand was empty. For a moment I wondered where the locket had gone, but Ernest was telling me about how they’d heard the news of the sinking and waited through three terrible days until the Carpathia reached New York, where he hadn’t been able to get through the crowds to search for me… and then he couldn’t hold back his tears any longer – and of course Olivia and Henry joined in…

I decided that a missing piece of jewellery was unimportant, in the scheme of things.

+ + + ENDS + + +

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If anybody had seen the youth as he scaled the stile and cut across the fields, they wouldn’t have thought much of it. Few would have recognised him: he wasn’t a native of Shottery, and only an occasional visitor.

He left clear footprints in the soft earth, the overnight frost having been light: not enough to firm up the ground.

A dog barked half-heartedly when he reached the Hathaway farmhouse. Once the boy saw that it was tied up he paid it no further attention.

At the back door he made to knock, but it was flung wide.

“Hello, Millie,” said Anne Hathaway, with a lopsided grin.

William Shakspeare darted a quick glance to left and right, ensuring that nobody was within earshot.

“Don’t call me that!” he hissed.

“There’s nobody to hear. Come in.”

Even now, at the age of eighteen, William was in awe of Anne Hathaway – and rightly so: in a very real sense she had made him. It didn’t take a great leap of the imagination to conclude that she had the power to ruin him, too.

When Anne said she wanted to see young Shakspeare, he treated it as a summons.

Eight years his senior and on home ground, Anne had every reason to be confident. Blackmailing Will wasn’t an idea she entertained: she had never so much as hinted that it was a possibility – but she enjoyed the secret that they shared.

“There’s beer, if you want some?”

“Thank you.”

Anne dipped a mug for each of them. It was the small beer: not enough to make one giddy, but for hospitality it would suffice.

“I read your play,” she began.

“What did you think?” Will asked, quite anxious in case she poured scorn upon his ambitions.

“I liked it. Clever, although some of the speeches were a bit long. I couldn’t understand the battle scene, but perhaps if I saw it acted out it would become clear. I couldn’t picture how a person might fight with two swords at once.”

“Someday I’m going to sell that play,” Will began, but Anne hadn’t invited him here in order to hear his daydreams again. She held up a hand, to silence him.

He took a swig of the beer, instead.

“I need to use the Greek amulet,” Anne said, simply.

“What! Why? … When?” Shakspeare quailed at the thought of giving up the amulet – but it had only ever been a loan, he knew.

“I won’t keep it,” Anne sought to reassure him. “As we agreed: it’s yours to use… but I need it for a moment. Just a moment.”

“A moment?” Will couldn’t imagine why she might want – no, need – to use the amulet.

He threw a hand protectively across his chest, feeling the weight of the amulet, body-warm against him.

“Why?” he asked.

Anne blushed. “Some carelessness. I find myself in a dangerous, difficult situation.”

“One where the amulet can save you?” Will frowned.

“Perhaps,” she said. “I need to try.”

“Nothing foolish,” Will objected. “Not to fight a duel, or some nonsense?”

Anne rolled her eyes.

“Not even to leave this room, Millie. I promise.”

Millie. Said affectionately, but reminding him that she held what might as well be the power of life and death over him. Reluctantly – slowly – he reached inside his tunic, and grasped the amulet.

Convulsively, in a single movement, he pulled the chain over his head, the amulet grasped in his fist: a fist that at once became smaller, with fingers more slender.

Millicent Shakspeare’s breasts swelled; her hips widened. Her face must have changed as well, she knew. Will’s clothing hung loose on her smaller frame.

“Hello, Millie,” Anne said, again.

Millie didn’t trust herself to speak, yet. She felt disoriented, but she managed a nod at the older woman. She held out the amulet to her.

Anne took it, but didn’t place it about her neck right away. Instead, she prayed quietly. Millie thought she heard the words “forgive me” more than once.

At last, she placed the amulet about her own neck, and transformed.

Millie witnessed the mad, magical moment when Anne Hathaway became her own male counterpart. She’d felt the transformation herself more than once, of course, but she’d never seen it take place before.

The powerfully built, bearded man before him admired his muscular forearms, and winked at Millie.

“That should do it,” he said, and took off the amulet.

Anne returned, swaying a little, as if the house were afloat.

At once, she pressed her hands to her belly.

“Damnation!” she said. “It’s still there!”

“What –” Millie began, but realisation arrived: Anne had hoped to use the strange power of the Greek amulet to magic away an unborn child. It seemed that becoming a man hadn’t banished the little one, however.

Or had it? Might she now miscarry? To her shame, Millie hoped that she would – for fear that she might otherwise demand to keep the amulet and use it until the baby was due.

Who might the father be, she wondered.

Anne was weeping. She crossed the room and settled onto a three-legged stool with her head in her hands. Millie – who in truth had spent very little of her life in recent years as Millie – had no idea how to comfort her. She reached out to the older woman, and patted her shoulder, awkwardly.

Anne was speaking, now, but not to Millie.

“You’re not wanted here, you little bastard,” she said, tiredly. “Do you hear me? There’s naught for you here: just disgrace and despair for us both. Why do you persist, you turd?”

“Anne, please!” Millie feared she might attempt something still more drastic.

“The father,” Anne sighed. “He won’t want anything to do with me, now. There’s nothing to be gained by going to him. And some day soon, my sin will be plain for all to see. I hoped the amulet…”

“That was clever,” Millie said. “You always were clever. I’m sorry it didn’t work.”

“Foolish, setting myself against God’s plan, I suppose. Still… a shit-pox on the little wretch!”

“You don’t mean that,” Millie said, sadly.

“What’ll I do?” Anne wailed.

“I really can’t imagine,” said Millie. Her few sexual encounters had all been conducted as Will – with far less at stake.

“I wish there was something I could do,” she said – rashly.

“I can think of one thing you might do,” Anne said, after a pause.

“What’s that?” Millie demanded.

“Marry me,” Anne said, simply.

Whatever Millie had expected her to say, this came as a surprise, and she found herself without a reply.

Marry Anne Hathaway? Millie considered the proposition. She was an extraordinary woman, and she had believed in young Shakspeare, aspiring player and playwright, when nobody else did. At great risk to herself she’d stolen the Greek amulet – a family heirloom – and given it to Millie for her to use for as long as she might wish.

She wasn’t exactly a close friend – the difference in their ages and situations had precluded that – but she was at least a partner in crime.

Six years ago, Millicent Shakspeare had disappeared from public life in Stratford, it being said that she was in service in Ireland. Around the same time, William had “returned from travels in Italy with an uncle”. The magic of the Greek amulet made people more willing to believe such nonsense, and to overlook minor discrepancies. Persuading her parents to go along with the ruse had been much harder, and fears that the ‘witchcraft’ would be discovered had weighed heavily upon her father. He had become a recluse in consequence, but her mother had been a little more supportive.

‘William’ had attended King’s New School, at the Guildhall. As a girl, Millie would never have had such an opportunity. The days were long, and the lessons frequently dull… but Millie was glad to have received an education, rather than being married off and forced to give up her passion for prose.

“Impossible,” Millie said at last. “Your father wouldn’t permit it.”

Anne stood, and put the Greek amulet back around Shakspeare’s neck. Millie felt herself dissolve, to be reconstituted as the invented brother, William. This brought him considerable relief, as he had feared that Anne might keep the amulet, or perhaps use it to demand his involvement in her scheme.

Anne remained in place, her hands around Will’s neck as they had been when she returned the Amulet. She looked into his eyes, and sensed his arousal.

“Would it be so awful, marrying me?” she demanded.

Will regarded the older woman, and felt his body responding to her touch and her scent in a way that Millie could not have.

‘Not too awful,” he said, huskily. “But your father…”

“Father is away,” Anne said firmly. “If we were to post a marriage bond, just a single reading of the banns would be required. We could be safely married before he returns!”

“But a marriage bond must be…”

“Forty pounds,” Anne said.

“Forty pounds?” Will laughed out loud. “I haven’t got forty pence!”

“I have,” Anne said. “Will you help me? I don’t seek to ensnare you. You don’t have to stay and raise this little bastard. You can go on the road with your players – if they’ll have you. Go to London and chase your dreams. Become the most famous playwright in the world, if you can… but please: marry me and wipe away my shame before you go. Will you?”

William Shakspeare regarded the remarkable woman who had seen his potential, and who had given him a future, when he could otherwise have foreseen none.

“I’d be honoured,” he said.

+ + + ENDS + + +

1,600 words © Bryony Marsh 2018

Author’s note: my story is a TG-fictional twist on much of what we know about the early life of the Bard of Avon. He and Anne posted a marriage bond for the outrageous sum of £40, and married in haste. The “little bastard” in my story would turn out to be a girl, Susanna, born in May 1583. Shakspeare (he spelled his name a lot of different ways during his life) then disappears from all records for a few years before arriving on the acting scene in London. I like to imagine the youngster impressing a group of travelling players with his ability to play feminine roles... through judicious use of the Greek amulet, perhaps?

Have a look for my Novella on Amazon? Or stop by my blog and say hello:
http://bryonymarsh.wordpress.com/

Three Steps
By Bryony Marsh

There is a device. It’s not actually a ‘machine’, but more of a user interface. It operates on a quantum level, where information is undetermined and multiple possibilities can exist simultaneously. In ancient times, it would have been described as ‘magic’.

This user interface takes the form of a strip of material, rather like a tape. It has one blue edge, and one pink.

It does just one thing: it serves as a doorway into an alternate universe, where your birth gender was different. If, as a man, you lay down the tape and walk over it from the blue side to the pink, you find that you are a woman. The universe you enter is much the same, except where it has been changed by the choices your female self has made since birth. You retain the memories of your former life as man, although it appears that they will fade if you stay in the new universe for around a month.

The device comes with you into the new universe. You can use it as often as you like, back and forth, and you can roll it up and carry it around, in either universe. Either by design (because it's a secret device) or simply because quantum states are influenced by observation, you can't make the tape work if anybody is watching.

Some of my trans- friends have tried the Tape, but none has chosen to move permanently into the other universe. Two said that if it had been available in their twenties they would have jumped at the chance, but they aren’t prepared to abandon their children. One, who has fought and sacrificed much on the slow path to reassignment surgery said that she couldn’t imagine being that other person: the woman who simply lived all her life as a woman and didn’t go through those years of struggle.

I was given a Tape by a good friend, Lynne: he’s a crossdresser like me. He’d toyed with it a few times, he said, but ultimately decided that it wasn’t doing him any good.

“It’s like heroin, or something,” he said. “Just too tempting!”

I had to try it for myself.

STEP ONE

Victoria has taken Malcolm off to a play date: some soft play place. That's perfect.

The Tape is still safe in its hiding place at the bottom of my gym bag. Deceptively heavy and somewhat rubbery: powder blue down one edge, and baby pink down the other.

What the hell...

I lay it out on the dining-room floor, still not believing.

I step over it… and nothing happens.

Too good to be true. Relieved? Disappointed?

But I had crossed from pink to blue: I’m using it wrong.

I step back the other way, and gasp.

I am different. Everything is different.

I’m about two inches shorter, and as promised I am female. My mother once told me that I would have been called Charlotte if I’d been a girl, and sure enough, I am… although it seems I prefer to be known as Charley.

Trust me to swap gender and end up choosing a masculine name!

I have memories of… well, forty years of doing different things, mostly with different people. There’s too much to sift through all at once. I notice my wedding band, and it brings a memory to the fore. Husband, I think: David. Father of Sophie, George and Grace.

Images of them – and feelings for them – threaten to overwhelm me.

Slow down, I think. And don’t forget Vicky and Malcolm!

I try to concentrate on my surroundings instead of thinking about my loved ones. It seems safer.

It’s the same house, but everything is different. Our dining room has become some kind of home cinema, with a huge TV screen and multiple speakers. The decor is tacky.

It’s not my house: Charley and her family live in Gloucester.

Of course! Vicky loved this house. She pushed for us to buy it and restore it. But in this universe, I’m not with Vicky. So we never went to the auction: never bid for it. That other couple probably bought it.

Oh, fuck… what if they’re home? I’m not welcome here!

I try to walk quietly, but Charley’s heels – my heels – make a tap, tap noise. Fortunately there’s nobody home, but when I enter the living room I encounter the baleful eye of a PIR detector. A burglar alarm begins to shriek.

Fuck, fuck, shit…

That squealing noise really does instill panic in an intruder: it makes me want to flee the building at once.

I make my way to the front door and I’m about to let myself out when I hear footsteps on the gravel. I peep out, and see Hugh, my neighbour… although of course he won’t know me. He wanders around the front and back of the house, checking all the doors and windows. Nice guy! I cower where he won’t see me, and then scoot back into the home cinema room. I step over the Tape once again – pink to blue – and I’m back in my own body; my own reality. The shrilling of the burglar alarm has stopped, but my ears are still ringing.

STEP TWO

Deciding that housebreaking isn’t really my style, I pocket the Tape and head out of the village for a walk in the woods: it should be easy enough to perform my quick-change act there.

As I walk, I think about Charley. She’s… if not exactly cute… certainly very satisfactory. For a person with my transvestite urges, the ability to become Charley is a godsend. She’s the genuine article: I’ll be able to spend time as a woman whenever I choose, and there need be no more anxiety about ‘passing’.

Making certain there’s nobody about, I lay out the Tape on the forest floor, and step over it. Once again, I’m Charley.

She doesn’t seem in any way distressed by this. Good: I’m not staging a hostile takeover of her mind, then.

I pick up the Tape and walk back into the village, just thinking about things that have happened in my life. It might feel a little voyeuristic, but they’re my own memories, sort of… Grace having a brush with meningitis. David proposing to me. The day I learned that Butler, a horse I used to ride, had been shot when he became too arthritic to be of any further use at the equestrian centre. My much deeper relationship with mum.

I say “good morning” to a couple of people. They don’t know me, of course.

Outside the King’s Head I find Sean Reynolds, fallen off his bike. His grazes aren’t too bad, but he’s really wailing. In my reality we know his family well, but here I’m a stranger.

“Hey now,” I comfort him. “You’re going to be an awesome stuntman!”

The motherly feelings come naturally. I pick him up, dust him off and tell him I’ll take him home. He’s upset that his bike is “broken” but it’s actually fine: it’s just that the handlebars need straightening, and I manage to do this for him.

A few people are watching from a distance, but they seem happy to let me take care of this.

If I were a male stranger, they would probably have interceded by now.

“Shall we go and see your mum?” I ask him, but he shakes his head: he’s a bit embarrassed by the whole thing, and he wants to put it behind him.

“Okay then,” I tell him: “you take care!” He rides away.

It’s just starting to rain, and I don’t fancy sitting in the pub on my own, so I sit at the bus stop. No doubt rural buses are still about as rare as rocking-horse shit in this universe so it’s a good place to sit, uninterrupted.

I trawl through Charley’s memories and see how she feels about a number of things. Her politics are a shade more liberal than mine, I discover, but she’s definitely ‘me’ on many levels.

She played lacrosse where I played cricket. Oh – and she can ski quite well, too. She and David have a ‘date night’ once or twice a month and on their way home they like to find somewhere for a secretive outdoor screw. It doesn’t seem seedy – it’s just that they both enjoy the frisson that they get from the risk of being discovered. They never have been, yet.

I start thinking about how much fun it would be to dress this body in some really great lingerie, but I’ve mistimed things: Victoria must be coming home soon, back in the other universe, and she’ll wonder where I’ve got to. I vow that next time I’ll set aside a day for a shopping trip.

I slip away to a quiet alley, put down the Tape and hop over it. I’m male again, and able to return to the house in time to greet Vicky and Malcolm.

STEP THREE

Ten days pass before I get a chance to experiment with the Tape again. That’s usually about the limit of how long I can go before I need to indulge my transvestite urges, but this time it’s maddening.

I don’t have to be a man in a dress: I can be Charley.

Victoria and Malcolm are visiting relatives in London. I book a day off work – having previously told them that this is impossible and I simply can’t accompany them. It’s like having an affair, although the ‘other woman’ in my life isn’t exactly other.

I’m going to spend the afternoon shopping, and then stay at the Holiday Inn in the city centre. The room will be nothing fancy, but I’m not trying to impress anybody: it’s just for me to play dress-up. Looking it up on the computer I discover that check-in is from 3pm, which is fine… except I can’t make a reservation because I’ll be in the other universe when I need the room. Still, I’m reasonably confident that there’ll be a room available if I turn up on the day.

I board the train to travel into the city, and because I fancy spending more time as Charley, I visit the toilet and use the Tape to switch over into her universe. In a Barbour jacket, jeans and boots, Charley is dressed appropriately for the shopping trip. That’s a relief: I wonder if there was a possibility that I might have yanked her out of her daily life at a time when she didn’t have her purse with her, when she was at home and didn’t have anything on her feet… when she’d been in the bath, even.

It seems that alternate universes don’t work that way – or perhaps I’ve been lucky so far.

At first I worry that somebody might notice when I emerge from the toilet a completely different person, but that’s silly: my fellow passengers belong to Charley’s universe.

There is one problem, though: as Charley I don’t have a ticket.

When I arrive at the ticket barrier, the staff are unimpressed with my flustered “I lost it!” but Charley doesn’t seem like a member of the criminal classes, so they don’t hit me with a fine: they just require me to pay the full standard fare.

Having a foot in two different universes is complicated.

Fifteen pounds poorer, I leave the station concourse and get on with the mission. I see a reflection of myself in a plate glass window, and I enjoy my new look. I’m pleased to note that I move naturally and appropriately for this body. I know that I can ‘sex it up’ when I want to please David, too.

A twinge of disappointment, though: I’m not attracted to Charley.

I’m pleased to look nice… but I don’t see myself as somebody I want to screw. Experimentally, I glance at other women, but the way I appraise them has changed, too. I evaluate them simply in terms of their fashion sense, without my previous male appreciation of females in general. I’ve always been faithful to Victoria (just as Charley has to David) but I could still admire other women: not so much, now.

I’m simultaneously thinking like a man and a woman, and it’s distracting. I try to focus on enjoying my day out as Charley, without too much analysis. I’m still determined to proceed with the plan, and that means going to the Holiday Inn and booking a room; then shopping for an outfit.

There’s no problem getting a room at the Holiday Inn. The kid on reception tells me I can have the room right away, if I want. I accept the key, but don’t bother going up to see the place: I’m sure they’re all much of a muchness.

Time to shop! I mean, to shop without having to feel shame about wanting to obtain a bra, or some lipstick. Bliss…

Although I have access to all Charley’s memories, I realise that I don’t know exactly what size I am. I’ve put on some weight, lately.

David likes it. I’m not so sure.

There’s a specialist lingerie shop, a fair distance from the Holiday Inn but as soon as I think of it, I just know that I’ve got to go there. I want not only to be measured, but to be fussed over: the full girlie experience, as I imagine it.

I’m probably going to splurge two hundred quid on underwear, here. What the fuck: if God hadn’t meant us to do frivolous things, he wouldn’t have made alternate universes, right?

I think that most of the women who shop at ‘Boutique You’ must be brides-to-be, rather than my own slightly care-worn and stretch-marked self. No matter: they’re very professional, and two members of staff show me some lovely lingerie. There are no other customers in.

I tell them that I’m looking for something special, and perhaps a little bit old-fashioned. Their polite, careful process of inquiry ensures that I’m not going to be better off buying something slutty from the Ann Summers branch down the street, and that I understand the kind of price range I’m looking at.

Ouch… I just trashed two hundred and thirty pounds – but at least I’ve been measured properly.

In the bag at my side I have a basque with French lace and heavy boning. It’s by Agent Provocateur: the kind of thing I have always wanted to own, but previously I’ve resisted such an expensive purchase because I knew it wouldn’t look right on my male body. I have matching panties (more practical) and also a thong.

Lucky old David.

Also, it’s useful to know that I’m a 36C. Charley believes that she’s going to slim down, and it’s a shame to buy clothes at her current size, but I pay no attention: I’m shopping in the here and now.

Since the basque has suspenders, I need a pair of stockings. I decide that Marks & Spencer will do for these, and go inside. I also find a bra that I like, and a sleeveless, square back dress with a bold floral print. It will be nice for summer…

For Charley, girlie shopping is accompanied with a sense of satisfaction, rather than the transvestite thrill that I normally feel.

I pick up a few items at the MAC counter in Debenhams, and browse my way through Next and House of Fraser. So different from the experience when I’m with Vicky, feigning disinterest in all the pretty things!

When I’m starting to feel all shopped out, I pause and refuel at Café Nero. I permit myself a slice of chocolate cake – not usually allowed, but I allow myself a few treats when I’m in the run-up to my period and feeling a bit shit. Bloated.

Just because I can be Charley doesn’t mean every day is going to be a perfect one.

Primark. TK Maxx. I decide that I’m scraping the barrel. Also, I’m carrying rather a lot of shopping bags now. I’ve spent maybe five hundred pounds and I know that I can’t carry on like this, or I’ll be in the shit with David. I fancy a glass of wine… but I don’t want to go into a bar on my own – or not in any of the city-centre dives that I can see.

Perhaps a glass in my room at the Holiday Inn, then.

I go there and let myself into my room. It’s entirely as I expected: It will do. For a few minutes I admire the view from the eighth floor.

I fancy a bath, but I realise that other than my new MAC cosmetics and a few bits and pieces in my handbag, I don’t have any toiletries with me. The freebie offerings in the bathroom are okay, but hardly fitting for my special, girlie day of pampering. Still, I decide to have a shower.

Once out, I rely on Charley’s skills, as it seems that her hair requires a lot more care than I’m used to. I locate a hairdryer in one of the drawers, but it’s wired in place and the cord is a little bit short: it’s hard to see myself in the mirror.

Obviously installed by some fucking male.

At last, my hair is sorted and I turn my attention to makeup. Charley is either much better at this than I am, or makeup just looks better on her: my usual laborious efforts are not required and after just ten minutes I’m looking nice.

I still don’t fancy myself, though.

I turn my attention to the Agent Provocateur underwear, and the stockings.

Fuck me, that’s nice. I feel really special.

I raid the mini-bar and pour myself a glass of wine. Well, I say a glass… plastic tumbler. Classy! After a few minutes I lie back on the bed and caress my body, experimentally. It doesn’t respond very well to my touch.

Too familiar.

Charley knows how to get herself off, though. She’s not in the mood at first, but she feels nice in her new underwear, and despite knowing that she’ll be ‘trolling for vampires’ (her term) in a day or two, she’s prepared to frig herself – although she’d prefer that David was doing it to her.

The eroticism of being in a woman’s body, of dressing, of touching my most intimate places… it falls strangely flat. I’m turned on… but Charley’s body doesn’t respond to these things. I would have orgasmed long since, but she’s on a much slower journey.

Still, it feels nice. Mostly, it feels nice to be clean, and expensively dressed. Special.

It’s enough.

The orgasm, when it comes, is different. Deep. A whole-body experience that’s at once less concentrated, and much more intense.

I lay there for some unknown amount of time. Shadows lengthen. I flop some of the duvet on top of me, but that’s about it.

I’m… not exactly tired. Sated.

My phone buzzes, bringing me back to present time, present universe.

It’s a message from David: ‘Are you okay, mouse?’

Oh, fuck.

The unstated question: where are you?

Do issues like these resolve themselves, if I use the Tape and duck out? If I go ‘home’, will Charley never have been here?

I think back, and I still remember when I picked Sean Reynolds up after his bike accident. That implies causality. And while I was here playing at being Charley, I guess she wasn’t down in Gloucester.

And now I’m missing in action. Will that fix itself, if I leave this universe?

I decide, for Charley’s sake, that I’d better go. Hurriedly, I dress, and snatch up all my belongings.

What the fuck is she going to do?

I feel like a rat, but I suspect that I’ll probably make things worse if I try to intercede. Best if she takes care of things herself…

I resolve to look in on her in a few days, and find out what happened. It’s all I can think of.

Meanwhile, time to leave this universe. I abandon the room, and bustle down the corridor with my shopping bags.

When the lift comes, there’s nobody else inside, so I decide that it will serve as a sufficiently private place in which to perform a trans-universe hop. I quickly lay down the Tape, and step across.

At once, I’m in darkness, and I’m falling.

What’s happening?

I just have time to work it out: I’ve stepped into the other universe – the one where I didn’t call a lift. In this universe, the lift is still down in the lobby.

I curse my stupidity. It’s the last thing I do.

---

© Bryony Marsh 2017

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