Wuthering Dormice (aka Bike) Part 775 by Angharad

After a poor night’s sleep and the excitement of the day before, I felt like a lie in – it wasn’t to be of course; I had three girls to look after and Simon. I rose from the bed in time to catch the aliens en route and divert them to the bathroom and the shower. Then it was a case of combing and drying hair which I put into pigtails with green ribbons. My own hair, I dried and tied back in a ponytail, dressed in jeans and a long sleeved tee shirt, slipped on my trainers and went down to start breakfasts and packed lunches.

After the girls were busy with their breakfasts, I took Simon up a cup of coffee and made some for Tom as well. Tom’s is like river mud, I should know, I spent two weeks in Sussex playing with the smelly stuff and a microscope. It helped me decide I wanted to study mammals rather than estuarine crustaceans and plankton.

I’ve known grown men who’d get so excited talking about krill – the shrimp like creatures which are a major food source of the baleen whales – but the idea of cuddling a shrimp hardly compares to my little critters. So the dormeece won hands down. However, on occasion the thought of being in the Arctic Ocean or even the Southern Ocean, on a floating laboratory, away from everything else does have its attractions. But, I’m a land-lubber, so I’ll stick with what I know, it’s safer.

“Mummy, are we going to school?” Trish disturbed my reverie and a quick glance at the clock meant we had to dash. I took Meems with me – I had half thought about one of those wrist things, where you attach one of their wrists to a leash-like thing and then put the other end around your own wrist. Knowing my luck we’d end up tripping people up or going round opposite sides of a post when we went shopping.

After dropping the students off at their institution of educational facilities, Meems and I went for therapy of a retail nature. I decided to treat myself to a new pair of shoes – because a girl can’t have too many. Meems loves shoes too, if you recall it was her playing with a pair of my red stilettos that got Trish walking again.

In a local department store’s shoe and boot department, I found a pair of knee-length boots that wanted to come home with me, in chocolate brown leather made by the Scandinavian firm Ecco. I also found a matching bag and pair of black courts which had a three-inch heel – the same as the boots. The boots, I decided needed to be worn home to acclimatise to them. Meems, blackmailed me into buying her a pair of boots, also in brown, obviously with flat heels and bows stitched on the outside of the legs.

After this we went to Morrisons and did some food shopping, filled the tank with diesel, and drove home. On the car radio were reports of the earthquakes in Sumatra and the fact that a hospital had collapsed on hundreds of people. It made me shudder.

The picture of whole villages being swallowed by the earth was so disgusting to contemplate that I switched the radio off. We in the West have so little to worry about by comparison to those in the third world and yet we have higher levels of mental illness and unhappiness.

I thought about all those poor people who have nothing, having even that taken from them in disasters of Biblical proportions. At the back of my mind I had vague recollections of somewhere in the Bible it saying, ’To them who hath, shall be given. To them that hath not shall be taken away.’ I tried to equate this with, the meek inheriting the earth – somehow, it wouldn’t. And people wonder why I’m agnostic.

The fun I’d felt through my retail therapy was so superficial and I sent a donation of the same amount as my boots and bag cost to the Disasters Emergency Fund.

Simon had taken the day off and earned brownie points by noticing my new boots. If I’d worn nothing else, I’d have considered he’d see them –eventually. So for him to notice them almost as soon as I went in, was a huge surprise. He got a kiss and a cuddle for that and a promise of more tonight. At lunch, I learned that Mima had told him we both had new boots – so much for my Renaissance Man.

“What happened with the school bully?” Simon asked at lunch.

“Her mother pulled her out of the school.”

“Oh good-o,” said Simon beaming.

“Hardly, she’ll just go on and do it elsewhere. I’d have preferred she’d stayed and we’d changed her behaviour for the better. Bullies are often victims, too.”

“Cathy, be thankful for small mercies – it’s no longer our problem.”

“No, it’s someone else’s, which can sometimes come back to bite you on the bum when you’re not looking.”

“Don’t be such a pessimist. I can see no reason why she should be a cause of any concern to us in the future.”

“She hasn’t left the area, so we could still meet, or more importantly, the girls could still meet and she could still insult or intimidate Trish in front of others.”

“From what I heard, Livvie did a good job of defending her sister.
‘

“That’s beside the point. The only way to stop bullying is to re-educate the bully and help them to understand what they’re doing wrong and how to change it.”

“In my day, you just gave ‘em a thick lip or a bloody nose.”

“That’s hardly setting a good example, is it? Violence just begats more violence.”

“Yeah, but it works – give ‘em a black-eye and they leave you in peace.”

“And predate other weaker children – no – they have to be changed…”

“Okay, cut their nadgers off…” he laughed at his own joke and Stella rolled her eyes.

“Talking of removing nadgers, did you read that bit in Dan Brown’s new book about various priestly cults self-castrating, and he suggested that they do it to show control over their bodies. He mentioned transgendered types doing it for the same reasons.”

‘I think he’s confusing anorexia with transgenderism,” was my response.
“I didn’t want to control my body, just make it more comfortable with the rest of my identity.”

“Isn’t that a form of control?” asked Simon.

“No, I wanted to appear to be on the outside what I felt was happening inside.”

“But would many people see that?” he continued his argument.

“No, but I would know that it resembled as much as possible a natural female and would give me confidence to act with relative freedom.”

“Didn’t you act with freedom before?”

“Simon, not entirely. I couldn’t have gone swimming or joined a gym. I couldn’t have sex … um …” I blushed and went quiet. So did he.

“Aren’t there parallels with body dysmorphophobias and gender identity disorders?” Stella weighed in on the argument.

“I think it’s a form of similarity of symptoms, but the causes are different. The symptom being a discomfort with one’s gender via the secondary sexual characteristics could be argued as similar to hating bits of one’s body – but some of them are bizarre, wanting to chop off healthy limbs and so on.”

“Didn’t you want to chop off healthy tissue?” she continued.

“No, I wanted mine modified to resemble something else in as functional a form as possible. It’s the hijras in India who just lop things off, and I’m sure many of them would prefer a proper surgical conversion like mine to a puckered piece of scar tissue. Mine was recycling, not disposal – much more ecological.”

They both laughed, and Simon said quietly, “Well I for one am glad you did.” I had to admit so did I, although I did wonder if he was thinking about tonight or past events.

“Aren’t you going to collect the girls?” Stella said looking at her watch.

I glanced at mine and after muttering, “Oh shit,” I grabbed my car keys and bag and ran off to collect them.