CHAPTER 1
The mynah was doing the toilet again.
Perched on the overflow pipe, repeating the sounds that filled the space around it, this one endlessly flushed the toilet. The silly thing was that such an oddity was now just another fact of daily life, along with the ants and the mossies. Somehow my arm had got out from under the net, and they had feasted on my elbow in my sleep. Not nice, and very red.
I thought back, in my twelve year old mind, to my arrival here that first night, two in the morning of a March day in 68. For most of a day we had lumbered through the skies in a Britannia turbo-prop, passing over wonderful sights such as the edge of the Himalayas and the great cities of India, all of which I had missed as I was spending what seemed like the entire flight on my knees in the toilet revisiting whatever I had tried to eat until all that seemed to be left was bile. Mam had put both of us into little boy suits, proper jackets with matching shorts, so that we felt sort of grown up. I hated mine. My brother and I, .two years apart, were dressed as much alike as possible, and she found it so easy. Instead of going into the shops and buying one set of Ladybird7-8 year old clothes, and one of 9-10, she just got two sets of the junior size. I was that short. Every time I looked at the label on my little-big-man jacket, I was reminded how pathetic I was. My father joked, ‘milk-bottle shoulders’ being the latest, and I don’t think he meant the pain he caused, but it still cut me deeply.
Iain was the one, he was the footballer even at eight, I was the reader, the music addict, the odd boy that couldn’t throw.
I crawled out from under the netting and did my teeth in the single bathroom that I had, for once, managed to get to first. Into the khaki shorts and short-sleeved white shirt, the black socks and brown sandals that made up my school uniform, and down the stairs. It was Friday, Dad was already at work, and Mam had a Tupperware box of jam sandwiches and a bottle of squash ready for me. They fitted into my little briefcase along with the folded plastic mac and cap for the rain that would no doubt come before I was home.
My brother banged down the stairs just as the amah arrived to start the day’s housework, and as he grabbed his own bag I hugged Mam and we were off down the little slope to the school bus stop, my shirt already starting to stick to my back. Please God, no cricket today. I never managed to stay in for long, and fielding was a nightmare. I could never throw, neither straight nor long, and the idea of trying to catch what was basically a hard lump of leather-covered wood did not exactly appeal.
Sally and Julie were at the bus stop already, wearing green summer skirts. It struck me that day that life wasn’t far; there they were in light, floaty clothing that let what passed for cool air get to them, and I was tied into a pair of thick shorts and a shirt. They got to play netball indoors, I had to stand around on the padang under the equatorial sun until the games master had had enough of it himself, and that never seemed to happen.
Sally had her hair ted back with a really pretty ribbon that had a tiny plush parrot on it, and I realised n an odd moment of simultaneous thought that not only could I never wear such a thing, as a boy, but that I hadn’t the necessary hair. What I did have was Brylcreemed back into what my Dad called a ‘wave’, certainly nothing like the length I would need for my own parrot to perch on.
I started to giggle, and Julie looked oddly at me.
“What’s funny?”
“It’s Sally’s parrot. We have a mynah that does the toilet flush, and I just wondered what her parrot would do"
“You’re weird, Stephen”
At that, she turned away from me, just as the old white Vauxhall-badged bus drew up, and we were off to Bourne School. Off the bus, and the long, long walk up the endless steps to the main yard and morning assembly. Each morning I would try to count the number of steps, and each day it would be different as someone spoke near me or otherwise distracted me. The distraction usually consisted of slamming my face into one of the steps by tripping or directly pushing me. Yes, that was my normal day, from start to finish. At some point we would have some sort of organised physical activity, such as the cricket I hated, or the daily game of British Bulldog that was just about compulsory on the padang at late morning break, and that would give the likes of Keith Maxwell and the rest the opportunity to get even more physical with me.
I was the weird boy, the one with the large bull’s eye indelibly painted on my back, and probably my face as well, as they seemed to aim for both. Maxwell had come up with a new trick in the past few weeks, pressing a drawing pin into the sole of his sandal and scuffing his foot on the ground until the friction had heated the metal, at which point he would press the bottom of his foot against my bare leg. Little things, minor things, but they built up.
I had no idea why I didn’t fit, why it was always me they picked on, I just assumed they found the smallest boys the easiest to pick on. That is something I look back on, now, and I am astonished at the way I accepted physical violence, persecution, as being the natural order. I was still puzzled, though, as Paul Betson was smaller even than me, and they left him alone.
I settled into my little corner when break came around, hoping to avoid the padang’s violence, and opened my new copy of Podkayne of Mars, one of the fringe benefits of a father who, while not the most literate man in the world, loved SF. Heinlein was breaking new ground here, writing as a teenaged girl, and it was really drawing me in, so much so that the slap round the head nearly made me scream.
It was Burnside, the Maths teacher.
“What are you doing skulking here, Jones? Healthy boys do healthy things! Are you unhealthy? Answer me! Or get off your fundament and descend to where normality awaits you”
He took my ear in one hand, twisting it nastily, and stuffed my paperback into my little case, dragging me along as I tried to fasten it, before pushing me down the stairs to the playing field where yet another game of Bulldog was just starting. He pushed me sprawling on the grass, and as he walked away I heard him mutter “fucking pansy”, neither of which word meaning anything to me at the time. That would change, of course, as would my ability to recognise that the smell which always seeped from the old sadist was that of gin. So, yet again a break could have spent in a shady corner immersed in a young girl’s entry into adulthood was spent having my face pushed into dry and coarse grass, and yet again I would have to explain to my mother why the ahma had to wash my shirt after only one day’s wear.
The next day I went with my mother to help with the shopping at the NAAFI, and my life changed.
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She also had an appointment to get her hair done, which in those days was a matter of perms, smells, and huge hair driers, which meant sitting for over an hour with a bottle of coke and whatever I could find to read. I was saving the Heinlein, for odd moments in bed with a torch, or on the bus home, and so I descended on the bound volumes of newspapers that were sent out for the Forces. A week’s worth of newspapers bound in a hard-backed folder, with all the cartoons I could ever want. I settled down with the Mirror, and started working my way through a week’s worth of ‘The Perishers’. That was the moment I found out what I was.
There was a running series of articles all that week, all about someone called April Ashley. That was the moment that Heinlein’s story became even more personal for me.
CHAPTER 2
The late sixties were the tail end of Empire. British Forces still spanned the globe, the presence ‘East of Suez’ still felt necessary, but it was in its last days.
Thousands of service personnel and their families still lived in exotic places, with schools, shops and their own island communities amid the sea of locals, but they were that last. We were the last. Gigantic American ships visited the harbour more and more frequently, but we were still there, just. Only a handful of years previously we had fought and beaten the Indonesians on Borneo as they tried to annex another country to their island realm, and so they would later turn their attention to easier prey, and we got to see what sort of overlords they made as they butchered their way through East Timor.
All of that meant that Dad was almost permanently preoccupied with work, and I only really got to see him at weekends. Mam was our anchor in those days, but most evenings she would be out, either playing badminton or at the Mess with Dad, and so Iain and I spent most evenings alone, just the amah for the first part and a shared bottle of pop as our treat. That was when I first discovered how women smell, looking in the laundry basket and seeing what my mother had discarded. It wasn’t an exciting smell, just a funny one, a different smell to anything had come across before. Betson was joking all the time about naked ladies, and sniffing girls’ bike seats, and if this was the smell I couldn’t see what he was so interested in.
Now, of course, I recognise that scent as the product of sixties hygiene and lack of modern deodorants apart from talc and soap, combined with a steady eighty-degree temperature as a minimum each and every day, and humidity to match.
That day n the hairdressers’ I sat reading about April, and wondered how they did what they had. I knew that girls were different to boys, and now knew that it all smelled differently, but I couldn’t understand what the process was. I was 12, and wasn’t quite up to speed there, and in those days even the papers I now consider as scandal sheets and rags, like the Screws and Mirror, drew back from detailed anatomical recitations. All I knew was that there was a way to change from one to the other, and I made myself a promise that when I was really old, at eighteen, and could have a job and money, I would see how much it cost.
Once more, I look back and realise that in my childish subconscious I had picked out my identity from the noise of everything thrown at me as a boy. That came to a head when we had our school medical exam. I stood in a line of boys in shorts, each holding a little pot of pee, behind Betson, who oddly started sniffing his as we got to the nurse’s desk. Then, in one go, he drank the lot.
There was a surge of “Ugh!” from round the room, and one girl was sick on the floor, and Paul just sighed and sad “I need a refill” and went back to the toilets with his empty pot. He whispered to the rest of us as he passed: “Apple juice”
I was taken behind a screen and told to “drop”, and a florid white-coated man pushed his fingers up behind my willy and demanded that I cough. A week later I was in hospital. This time it wasn’t after a kicking from Maxwell, or any of his friends.
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I remember waking after the operation, and being immediately sick, but with nothing to bring up. They had cut through my flesh just above the willy in question, to repair a juvenile hernia, and I hurt more than I could ever remember hurting before. Today was a day that Iain and I should have been walking the old rail tracks to get the bus for our swimming lesson, wearing nothing but our Speedos, flip flops and a short towelling robe with the club badge on. I wasn’t supposed to be lying in a bed with a stab wound trying to get my eyes to focus and my stomach to stay inside me.
I wondered if April had felt like this when they cut her willy off and…well, did whatever it was they did.
Mam was by the bed, looking tired, and smelling a little of gin, and Iain was looking round the ward for something to do, until he spotted a wheelchair and began racing round the ward in it. I just hurt. Years later, I saw a documentary on the Battle of Singapore, and as they recounted the story of how hundreds of patients and medical staff were bayoneted and hacked to death by the Japanese soldiers, they showed pictures of the places in the hospital where it had happened, and I suffered doubly, with sympathy for the poor sods who had been so horribly murdered, and with immediate flashbacks to that morning, and the pain, and what it brought me.
I was eventually allowed home, with the injunction that swimming was not allowed till the doctors gave me an all clear. It is hard to explain to those who live n less sultry climes, of those who have air-conditioning, which was rare then, how much swimming was part of our lives, how necessary it was. At the weekend, we would usually head into town on the free Forces bus and spend most of the day at the Britannia Club. The morning would be at C.K. Tang’s , and then the Singapore Cold Stores, with their air conditioning and free food samples, and we would have our traditional treat from Dad, an ice cream float, where a huge dollop of ice cream would be dropped into a tall and flared glass of pop and served with a long spoon. Much childhood discussion was devoted to the relative merits of each combination of flavours, and we tried our best to work through them all.
Then it was off to the Club, where Iain was fascinated by the huge toy racing car layout and I fretted for the next few weeks because couldn’t go into any of the pools .but had to sit with a shirt on at the edge, even when it was cloudy, because my father told me that you burned worse under cloudy skies than clear ones, and my fair skin and freckles were just a set of blisters in waiting.
The high balconies of the Club left us able to look down into what I now realise was a rather famous hotel’s courtyard, at fat men in once-white suits asleep under parasols, and the balconies on the inside were a temptation to drunken servicemen that brought me my first ever sight of death, as they egged each other to jump from the balcony across the terrace into the main pool, and one day the young man in question didn’t jump hard enough. I can still hear the sound his head made as it struck the edge of the pool, and then we were whisked upstairs and away, and into the Club’s restaurant for the first and only time, for milk shakes and omelettes.
I was back at school after that weekend, and Sally and Julie wanted to know what the doctors had done. I tried my best to explain what little I knew about what I now understand was an inguinal hernia, and I think the girls got it, but Julie was more pushy.
“So they didn’t chop your thingy off, like that woman in the paper?”
“No, they did not! Why would they do that?”
“Well, if you was a girl then Keith wouldn’t keep picking on you”
“And girls don’t get picked on? What about Caroline Whale, I saw her take your sweets once”
Sally giggled. “That’s why she’s so big and fat, like her name, cause she nicks all the sweets!”
Julie sighed. “Yes, girls get picked on, but it’s not the same. It’s more words and stuff, except for Blubber, of course, and you’re clever, you read all the time, you know words and stuff. You’d be good”
“But what if I don’t want to be a girl? And I can’t just go in and say, can I?”
Both girls giggled, and Julie whispered to Sally, who blushed a little, and then said “Lots of people think you are a sissy anyway, even the teachers. And you wouldn’t have to play cricket any more”
“Yeah, but” interrupted Julie, “there would be hockey instead. That’s nasty”
Was life so much easier for girls? It didn’t seem so, just a different set of problems. I thought about it all day, watching and listening as my scar ached and itched. It would be three years before we realised exactly how badly the surgeon had fucked up
CHAPTER 3
After the final healing, my parents treated us to an evening at an amah’s market, our chance to stay up later than normal and eat things my Dad said we wouldn’t want to see by daylight.
There was nasi goring in little cardboard boxes, and pork satay on sticks, and the ubiquitous pint bottles of Fraser and Neave fizzy drinks in a variety of eye-closing colours. This was well before the days of additive control, and tartrazine was everywhere, along with all sorts of other more interesting chemicals. Years later, my mother discovered why she had been drinking so much, in order to sleep, when she found out that the ‘slimming pills’ she was being prescribed were actually amphetamine sulphate, and she was steadily turning into a speed freak, just like the hippies so despised by the Singapore government, who at that time had a policy of compulsory hair cuts for arriving male foreigners.
WE went out in the fragrant dark, and as I walked down the hill to the bus stop I squealed and had to hop under a street light to pull off the red ants that were hanging from my foot by their jaws. Just another evening on the island.
The market had so many smells, from food stalls to burning mosquito cols, and absolutely everywhere was the stink of cigarette smoke. Crowds of people moved through the packed streets, a mixture of local Chinese actually shopping and Forces families grazing and looking for toys and trinkets. Young soldiers and other servicemen talked loudly, cans of Tiger beer clutched in their hands, and MPs and civilian police kept a watchful eye on them.
Iain had spotted a toy stall, and was digging through the racks of ‘Action Man’ compatible outfits. Not that he had a real Action Man; ours were a cheap copy called, believe it or not, G.I. Jose. Iain was addicted to the stuff, and all he really wanted was a proper Action Man with a diving suit. Till then, he consoled himself with what he had.
I had two different interests there, different both from his and from each other. Firstly, I sought books, SF of course, and what I prized were Ace doubles, where two novels were bound back to back and upside down to each other, so that you could read either one you fancied. Two sets of cover art, as well, and less of those irritating notes and selective newspaper quotes from people I had never heard of. Second hand book stalls drew both my father and me as bare flesh drew the mossies. It was one time I could be close to him, standing side by side flicking over the books to find something neither of us had read. These weren’t the sober yellow Gollancz jackets I had learned to look for in the adult library, these were lurid and exciting, and sometimes the pictures matched the stories. There were loads by a man called E.E. Smith at the first stall, but when I picked one up my father put it back down.
“They are rubbish, Stevie, not worth the money. Here, try this one”
And, with that, he handed me a copy of ‘Earth Abides’. Years later I tried the Smith books, and they were very, very dated, and downright silly, but Stewart’s book was a revelation. That was a clue that my difficult, diffident, distant father, who had literacy problems a later generation would call dyslexia, actually had a very deep soul. I loved my dad at that point, really loved him.
The other thing I delighted in was the Chinese clothing on display, satin cheongsams in amazing colours that I wished my mother would wear. She was only five feet tall, and I wanted to see how the colour and brightness would look on her as she always seemed to be dozing in gin or frantically doing something, anything, round the house and beneath the deep tan of her skin she always had a pallor, almost a jaundiced look to her, and dark shadows beneath her eyes. I just felt that something so pretty would make her look brighter, that the brightness might flow into her skin and make her well. She never bought one, though, but I always had a fascination with the outfits. I restricted myself, in the end, to helping her pick cushion covers, as bright and cheerful as I could manage to persuade her to buy. That night, we were laden as we caught the STC bus back home; me with my books, Iain with three outfits for his boy doll, and my parents with more soft furnishings.
Once more, with hindsight, I see how much both of them missed home, my mother in particular. We were coming up to three years out here, our second tour, and with the years between partly taken up by a stint in Germany she had been away from family and friends for what seemed a lifetime, and in Iain’s case actually was.
A month later, and I was back in the swim, literally, out to Gillman for my Personal Survival Award gold test, swimming round a pool in a pair of pyjamas as bats skimmed the water to drink and chase the insects brought in by the brilliant lighting. I had been given money for a beefburger and chips, and of course a drink, and as Iain was finishing his silver test Mam appeared to escort us home.
“Your Dad and I have some news, love. I’ll tell you when your brother is out”
She sat with yet another G&T till Iain joined us for his own meal, and as he ate she worked her way through another Rothman’s king-size.
“We have got a posting at last, so we’ll be going home in two months.”
Just like that, after half my life had been spent on the island, we were going somewhere she thought of as home but which I hardly remembered. Cold, far away, and it would mean a flight, and the last time had flown had meant 23 hours of vomiting.
“Can’t we just stay here? It’s nicer here, not cold and miserable like I remember.”
Iain just sniffed. “Can I go to matches when we get there?”
That really sums him up, even now, an obsession with football above all else. We really were chalk and cheese, so unlike each other I used to wonder if we really had the same father, but one look at my mother’s tired eyes showed no energy in her for anyone else. We had to move out of our house, of course, and into the transit camp, as someone else took over my room, my bed, the swings on the tree in the front garden, and we lived in a chalet until the flight was ready for us. I sad goodbye to Sally and Julie, knowing I would never see them again, and finally our number was up and we were waiting out by Changi for the VC10 that would bring so much of my life to a close. Dad treated me to a rump steak meal before we boarded, but the meat was so full of gristle I could hardly chew it, and then we were onto our plane for the long flight to somewhere my parents called ‘home’. My father already knew that two weeks after we landed he would be off to Germany.
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We flew into Brize Norton on what seemed an Arctic day. As we boarded the bus to cross the tarmac I was sure my skin was actually sticking to the handrail. This was awful. I was wearing the suit I had flown to Singapore in three years earlier, which was a measure of how little I had grown in that time, and my bare legs felt flayed by the wind across the tarmac. It wasn’t fair; why was I being dragged halfway across the world, away from warmth and swimming, to such a hole? I remember thinking that ‘home and family’ had to be pretty wonderful to offer such a temptation to my parents, but first I just wanted to be warm again.
At the school, in Alexandra, we had had a language laboratory where I first started to learn French, and because of the tape-based system it used it was the only air-conditioned room in the entire establishment, chilled all the way down to about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I knew I had a class there I would take a jacket to help keep me from freezing. This was worse, far worse, and it was only September. Could it get any colder?
We took a train into London, and then found a compartment in a train to Carlisle, where a mixture of elderly buses and a final overloaded taxi dropped us at what must have been the shittiest posting in the whole of the UK, a grim military village on Moricambe Bay called Anthorn. No, not Morecombe Bay, Moricambe, a sludgy inlet from the Solway Firth a few miles across boggy moorland from the very end of Hadrian’s Wall at Bowness on Solway, almost on the Scottish Border.
That sounds romantic. It’s a shithole, or so it seemed to me at the time. Basically a huge array of transmitter masts for talking to submarines or something, on the scrag end of a peat bog sticking out into the mud of the Irish Sea. Not a thing to attract anyone except hardened bird watchers, and this was what we had come back for. Nana lived in Eskdale, at the end of the La’l Ratty, and this was the closest Army married billet my Dad could get. No wonder he was straight off to Germany and the cheap beer and night life there.
It was a grim concrete village of grey houses, nothing to keep the Westerlies at bay except a few stunted hedges, and no town anywhere near. I sat in my bedroom after we got the keys, an old mattress on the floor to sleep on until the MFO boxes with our possessions arrived by sea weeks later, and cried. This was not what I wanted, and in my twelve year old mind I could not understand what the hell we were doing here, and why I had had to leave the few friends I had managed to make at school, none of whom I saw again until someone showed me a copy of a porn magazine that had my classmate Yvonne in it, looking rather older and with less clothing than I remembered her wearing.
We had three days to get used to hell, and then my mother announced that we had a school placement. Of course, there was nowhere in the village, and I was expected to go all the way to Bowness. Fortunately, there was a school bus for us, and on the appointed morning I was walked down to the stop, in new corduroy LONG trousers, thank god, and an old Army large pack for my oddments, my PE kit and any books I might have to carry back, and with a group of whey-faced strangers I boarded the old Bedford for the trip across the moors to the Big Village.
I was puzzled by the way the bigger boys rushed to the back bench seat, followed naturally by Iain, and I simply squeezed into the first spare seat I saw. I ended up opposite a couple of obvious twin girls, about my age, and they immediately went on a combined attack.
“Hello, she’s Jane and I’m Emma, and you’re new, aren’t you? Are you a wog, you’re all brown!”
“No, I’m not a wog, we’ve just been living in Singers and you get a suntan out there. Why are they all rushing for the back seat?”
Emma, I think, giggled. “You’ll see, this is one of the good drivers. He does the bumps right.”
I soon saw, all right. The driver actually sped up as we came to each little road hump, so that the back of the bus kicked up and those in the back seats were thrown into the air with a scream. So that was entertainment in Anthorn. I resolved to bring a book with me each day, and then realised that I had no idea where I was supposed to get any more. No amah’s market, no warrens of odd shops in Chinatown, and when Dad finally went to Osnabruck, no father to take me round them if they had existed. I felt lost, really lost.
Emma and Jane were wearing uniform, something Mam had yet to buy me, and it consisted of pinafore dresses in what looked like a really warm material, thick tights, and quilted anoraks over their school blazers. I had a new parka coat, with a fur trim to the hood which I blessed as I sat on the poorly heated bus and wondered what the school would be like.
I got my introduction early. The first lesson was given to me in that morning’s PE lesson. I sat down in the grim concrete changing room, with its slatted wooden benches, and started to get ready for what I was told would be a cross country run, and as I stripped off, there were mutters around me.
“Wog, I tell thee, fucking wog, He’ll stink the showers out, I bet thee”
I suddenly realised one of them was trying to pull my large pack off the hook, and without thinking I grabbed it back.
He actually sat on my shoulders as I knelt on the floor, punching me in the face till I felt my bottom lip burst, and then left me lying on the grey floor while he tipped up my rucksack, finding my copy of Blish’s ‘Welcome to Mars’ and laughing as he dropped it into the toilet and then pissed on it. He prodded me with his foot as he went out with his laughing friends.
“A wog, aal reet, and a puff”
A minute later a man I recognised as the sports master came in.
“You have two minutes to get after the rest, Jones, or I come back with the tawse. Got me?”
This chapter deals with severe issues involving bullying and particularly nasty effects of child abuse. Please move on, if you can't read it, but if you want to know the essential plot outline mail me.
CHAPYER 4
That was my introduction to English school life, and it was a fair one, because that was the way it went just about every day of the next few years. I was still tanned from years in the tropics, so that made me a ’wog’, which in those days was reason enough to beat me. Add in the up and coming skinhead fashion, and top off with the fact that at four foot six inches tall I posed no threat to anyone, male or female, that wanted to give me a bit of a kicking because they had had an argument with their friend, or a teacher had looked at them funny, or, well, just because., and because they could. My academic gifts did not help my case, as that simply added another reason to beat me, and as my father was away so much of the time I had no protector apart from Iain, who, despite being two years younger than me was now four inches taller and growing. I was twelve, nearly thirteen, and being guarded by a ten year old. Not only that, he was too young to be in the same school.
Things came to a head one day when I was attacked by a group of six girls, all shouting ‘Woggy’ at me as they used me as a football until some passing man intervened and called an ambulance. One of the girls was the head’s daughter, and it seemed that as I had lain trying to protect myself from their kicks I had caught her leg with my shoe and bruised it.
I received a visit from a charming policewoman who told me, lying in my hospital bed with two cracked ribs, that boys didn’t hit girls and, in her words, I was fucking lucky not to be charged with assault.
A week later I took my first overdose, of my mother’s sleeping pills. I missed the warmth, I missed my friends, I just hated being alive in this cold grey hellhole. Iain found me, lying on my bed with a tape of Beethoven playing to help me relax, and I was back in Carlisle General by ambulance once more. I remember vomiting round the long tube they forced down my throat, and crying in frustration. My mother hid her pills, so as soon as I was home I tried it again with paracetamol. Same journey, same result. I couldn’t seem to get anything right.
Mam sat by me after the second attempt, and cried with me as I tried to make her understand that it was no problem, just let me go, it was better than staying, and once I was released, with the most perfunctory psych interview I have ever had she took me and Iain away for a few days to Nana’s.
The psychotherapist (‘therapist’? No fucking way!) had been very off-hand. I was just attention-seeking, that was all. He totally missed the point; I didn’t want any attention, I got far too much of that. I just wanted to be left alone, and as that would never happen I just wanted an end.
Nana lived in Boot, a tiny village in Eskdale served by a narrow road from the West, a horrendous one over two extremely steep passes to the East, the Wrynose and Hardknott, and the La’l Ratty, or Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, also from the West. Each end of the valley was controlled by a Roman fort, at Hardknott and Ravenglass, and after the softer land at the estuary the fells started to close in. At Eskdale Green was the King George IV pub, called the King of Prussia till some unfortunate event in 1914 made that a little awkward. I was always fascinated when my Dad took me in there, because they had hundreds and hundreds of bottled of malt whisky arranged in alphabetical order across what seemed like a mile of shelves.
Past the Green, we rolled on in our Vauxhall Viva as the valley got narrower, until we finally arrived at Nana’s old stone cottage near the Boot Inn. I used to love going there, despite the lack of heating and old black-lead range that she used for cooking, because the hills were gorgeous, Nana was sweet, Mam was so much happier and I never, ever saw anyone from school there. As I read more and more about the area, I wanted Mam to drive us up to Langdale, over the passes, but she was too nervous for that, and instead drove us round to Wasdale a few times, where I drank in the view, so much more wonderfully full than the simple bleakness of Anthorn. That was when I hated my life and my new home the most, when I saw the Lakeland Fells receding behind the Vauxhall as we headed back to my hell on Earth.
Nana had been told by Mam what I had been up to, and the tiny old ex-shepherdess was clearly concerned.
“Now then, Stevie, what have thee been doing to thee Mam? She’s scared for thee, tha knaas, and that’s not good, is it?”
She sat me down, under a patchwork quilt she had made some time in the Cretaceous, and as Mam and Iain sorted out the bedrooms, she fed me hot chocolate and hugs, all 4’11’’ of her. I could see where Mam got her stature, and I was clearly following suit.
I just broke down. The contrast between what happened every day at school, and this weathered, withered bundle of love was almost unbearable. In between sobs I told her what I had baulked at telling Mam, and had never had a chance to tell Dad, all about the names, the beatings, the casual destruction of anything they could pull from my bag or my hands. Being left out of every team picked, whatever the game. That made her smile.
“Stevie, I spent aal me life walking these fells tha see around us, and I never had anyone to tramp them with us. What do tha need to play in a team for? If aal these shites hate thee, tha mun find summat tha can do by thesen. Bugger them aal, that’s what I say to thee. Now, can tha run?”
That was how it started, my first recovery. While Mam took Iain out on train rides and walks around castles, Nana showed me her favourite tracks around the head of the valley, the places she had sheltered her flocks when the weather got nasty, and named everything she saw for my benefit. Now, this may sound like some mystical claptrap, meeting the shamaness of the hills and touching the Goddess of whatever the hell, but it wasn’t like that. She was just a tiny old woman, fit as a flea still, who had spent her years working and walking the land when the men were away getting butchered in places like my own hospital. She knew the place as she knew the soles of her old boots, and felt it through them. No mysticism, no revelations, just a mother, loving her child one generation removed and trying to heal him. That was when I started fell running.
Fell running is a Cumbrian sport in the main, which usually involves a race to the top of a hill and back down, at a local fair for example, or longer courses up, over and round a mountain route requiring navigation skills and self reliance. In hindsight, Nana was only in her fifties back then and not the aged gnome my young self saw her as, so when she started showing me how to run hills, how to pace myself and place my feet, it isn’t really surprising that she was still so fit. We covered vast areas of fellside, up to Hardknott fort and back, stopping at the Woolpack for tea before the final leg home along the valley bottom, and it was all so different from that first day’s PE lesson. Gradually, I got fitter and faster, and there were moments when we came tumbling down a hillside when I was actually in heaven, or so it felt.
She didn’t heal me, not really, but every moment I spent with her gave me some surcease from the monsters in my class. I still grew no taller, though, and each day back at school they took away, drip by drip, the peace I had regained through my grandmother’s care.
My mother caught me in the bathroom that day, my thirteenth birthday, when I had thought her out, and the slap split my lip and sent the pack of razor blades flying into the sink.
“WHY? WHY ARE YOU FUCKING DOING THIS? DON’T YOU KNOW WE LOVE YOU?”
What answer can you give to that? I just lay on the floor crying till she gathered me up and rocked me, her tears wet on my back through the shirt that had already been soaked in the piss of three of my classmates. That was the start of the end of my life.
Mr Mitchell was my new psychiatrist, psychologist, exorcist, whatever the term was. I won’t dignify him with the term ‘Doctor’. I was left with him for a half hour that first time. He was a man of fashion, it seemed , with a Mexican bandit’s moustache, collar length but thinning hair and a taste in clothing that extended to velvet jackets with lapels like wings and flared jeans over zipped Chelsea boots. His tie could have been used as a hammock, it was that wide, in a paisley pattern exactly the same as his shirt.
He mostly left me to put pictures in order so as to tell a story that first session, and then on the next one moved on to showing me a picture and trying to get me to make up a story about it, doing not much except making ‘mmm’ sounds and playing with the ‘executive toys’ on his desk.
By the third session he was onto sex. In hindsight, he was probably a paedophile; if not actively molesting kids himself, he certainly got his jollies from talking dirty to children. In hindsight, as well, I could have done the world a service by using one of those razor blades to cut the bastard’s throat….but I was thirteen, and hurting.
“Have you kissed any girls yet, Stevie?”
“No….”
“Have you been looking at their knickers when they sit down?”
He had me there. Micro skirts, along with long socks, were all the rage, and if a girl sat down opposite you there was no real option but to see her underwear. I wasn’t actively looking for little thrills, it was just something I couldn’t help seeing. Besides, I wasn’t actually getting any ‘thrills’ from down there. Then the next question.
“Have you kissed any of the boys yet, Stevie?”
I was flustered by that one. I quite liked the twins, as two girls who had always been among the few who seemed to care for me, but the idea of snogging just didn’t fire any sparks down my spine. The mere thought of doing anything like that with the demons who kicked and punched me, who pissed on my back–well, it sent me white and then red with fear, and shame at what had been done.
Years later, when I had his notes released, I found out he had marked me down as ‘obvious passive effeminate homosexual’
Bastard. Utter, devious, conniving, perverted bastard.
The one thing he did do, though, was take a lot of blood samples, another trick I am sure he actively enjoyed, to try and find out why I wasn’t growing.
Two weeks after his Dracula act, my mother got the results.
CHAPTER 5
I was called in to the doctor’s surgery in Bowness yet again, not Mitchell’s but our family GP, and there was one of those interesting moments where despite being the patient concerned, nobody actually speaks to you.
Parental responsibility was everything, children could sit quietly while their elders and betters made decisions that could change not their own lives but that of the child.
It was also a time of doctrine, and counter-doctrine, and mine is bigger than yours, and all the time it was people like me looking up as the alleged adults, only half realising that we were the subject of the argument. At least our doctor had the good grace to send my mother out of the room when he examined me. That reminded me of the hospital in Singapore, except that now he put gloves on to poke his finger up behind my willy, and to press down either side just above it. Then he told me to lie down on a bench with a long roll of paper covering it, there was a squelch, and before I knew what he was planning he had a finger up my bum after a cold splash there.
Picture this. A naked boy, skinny, looking about ten, lying on his side on a hard table while a much older man stuffs a finger up his arse. No explanation, no warning, just a hard digit probing my innermost parts. He grunted after a while, and pulled out, then washed his hands and sat down to make notes as I lay there still naked and shivering. After what seemed like an hour, he looked up and muttered to me.
“There’s no reason to lie there now, get dressed”
There then followed another of those conversations in which he used phrases and words like ‘bilateral’, ‘post-surgical adhesion’, ‘atrophy’, ‘carcinoma’ that my mother, as an ex-nurse, understood but that I had to memorise until I could find a dictionary to unravel.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, was explained to me, though caught Mam casting me looks of utter pity, and some years later I worked out what had been done to me, but by then the fucking butchers in Singapore were long dead, like their Japanese predecessors.
It was really quite simple. They had botched my hernia operation so badly that both of my then undescended testicles had effectively been sewn into the inguinal canals in which they dwelt until puberty called them out. As a late starter, they had still been up there, where my body was steadily cooking them to a potentially cancerous death. There were two choices available, as I found out years later, and the first was to open me up from underneath and carefully remove the adhesions, lowering my balls to their proper place and checking that they were still healthy.
There was, of course, a much simpler choice, and this was where that arsehole Mitchell came into his pomp as his arrogance and weird obsessions overrode that initial maxim of all doctors: “First, do no harm.”
I found out later, from Mam, that he had pushed and pushed her about my interests, whether I had any interest in clothes or soft furnishings, and she had given him chapter and verse. All my attempts to brighten her up with colour and light, to lift the shadows from her speedfreak eyes, were seen as evidence that I must be queer. No bastard ever, ever asked me anything, I was just a child, so what could I possibly know? Decisions were made for me in which I not only had no say, but that I was unaware were even being made. As my father continued his posting in Germany, my mother sank further into her little glass friend, and turds like Mitchell must have thought all their Christmases had arrived at once.
And day by day, people like the Armstrong brothers, and Eddy Charlton, were leaving me incapable of any rational thought.
I have to explain something here. I was fascinated by the story I had read in Singapore, and I was unaware that my mother had noticed my little obsession. I had fantasised about having my own operation, and being a girl, but in my heart of hearts what I knew was that I simply wanted to escape the horrors of being a boy. Being a boy meant pain, daily torment, and being a girl instead seemed to offer a way out of that nastiness. I have read so many accounts of those poor folk who were that oddity, like April, a woman or man stuck in anatomy that was profoundly wrong, who looked in the mirror each day and wept. That wasn’t me.
I didn’t look down at myself each time I stood at the toilet and feel sick, I didn’t spend my time trying on Mam’s clothes and wanting my own breasts, I just wanted to be normal and free from persecution.
So, of course, they went for the simpler procedure, the one that fitted in with what they assumed were my desires, as perceived by fucking Mitchell, and two months after my diagnosis I was taken to the hospital yet again, and this time the funky little procedure was called bilateral orchidectomy.
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For the benefit of anyone reading this, I am sorry if I lapse into ranting every now and again, but the seventies were still full of jumped-up little oddities who each had a pet theory that they applied to every patient they had. They seemed to work on the bass that if it didn’t work on this patient, it would on the next, and by the time they had established enough of a sample to show others that they were talking rubbish, the subjects had been destroyed. Each subject, of course, was a human being, but in their hubris they knew better than God.
Can I hate? Yes, indeed. Do I hate? Oh, deary me, yes, and I just wish the people in question were still alive so I could return the favours they did to me.
So, I woke once more from surgery down there, and this time it hurt even more, with two incisions in my groin. Mam was there, and Dad was apparently due back in a couple of days, and how I wished he had been there to stop them cutting into me, and I cried at the pain and the nausea and, if you can believe this, at the time, still, NOBODY had told me what they were doing.
Mam smelt of gin again. When she came back the next day she had Nana with her. I cried again, this time with relief, and I noticed there was a real tension between them, perceptible even to a drugged-up thirteen year old. The following evening, my Dad appeared, still in uniform, and he left Nana with me after a hug and dragged my mother out of the ward. I could hear the nose of the argument, but not the words, and when they came back in he nodded sharply to the door and took Nana out. That was a lot quieter, and as Mam just sat and cried, those two came back in.
“Stevie, we’re going to have a few changes once you’re well. I‘ve been talking to your Nana, and it’s clear you’re not happy at Anthorn.”
I couldn’t speak, I just shook my head. Nana took my hand.
“How’d tha like to come and live wi me in Boot?”
I just nodded. Finally there was hope, finally I could escape the Armstrongs, Charlton, Woggy, Anthorn…I was released from hospital after around a week, and as Mam drove me back to the grey house by the muddy shore I was dreaming of days running the fellsides and listening to the Ravens, as Herdwicks scattered before me and this leathery old darling.
Iain was solicitous, as much as an eleven year old obsessed with football can be, and spent the best part of a fortnight only able to sleep on my back, but having to get up every hour or so to walk around trying to ease the pain.
I filled my days with reading, and trying to catch up on schoolwork brought over for me by the twins, who actually seemed to be worried about me. One day Emma produced her make up mirror, and showed me my face. I looked like a famine victim; the only thing missing was the grossly distended stomach I had seen on news reports from Biafra. I was far from well, although physically I was healing, and still nobody had explained what exactly they had done to me, which puzzled me as I could still feel no balls down there.
I packed as best I could for the move to Nana’s, mostly books, it seemed, happily leaving the school blazer hanging in my wardrobe, and then two days before I was due to be driven down there somebody knocked at our front door.
There were two of them, a man and a woman, both in khaki with red on the tops of their caps, whom I recognised as Military Police. The woman smiled at me.
“Hello, young lady, is your mother in?”
“I’m not a girl. I’ll get her. MAM!!”
She took them into the lounge, and I noticed she was shaking. The door was shut, and after a couple of minutes I crashed through it as I heard her scream. She was sobbing and hysterical, and she clutched at me as the woman MP patted her arm and the man went to the kitchen and filled the kettle.
Dad had been on exercise, ‘scheme’ as he called it. The tree he had been standing beside had survived being brushed by the rear of the turning Chieftain tank. Dad hadn’t.
CHAPTER 6
That was the end of everything, it seemed. Our entire world was gone in one stupid accident.
Everything, even our house, as Army married quarters, was gone, and with hindsight the only factor that was keeping my mother from collapse of one sort or another, his distant presence and reassurance that there was worth to the world, had now been yanked from under her feet. Gone. Smashed by so many tons of badly driven armour plate.
Dad’s coffin was delivered a fortnight later, for that was how it felt. Our belongings had arrived from Singapore in a number of wooden crates, onto which my father had stencilled our name, and it felt just like that. Another box from abroad, another crate of our most prized possessions, but this one was broken beyond any possibility of repair. We buried him next to his parents in the yard of his old church, St Mary’s in Gosforth, not that far from Ravenglass, where he had met Mam, and apart from a sizeable number of his comrades, for that was what they told me to call them, the only family left to mourn were the three of us and Nana.
It was a typical West Cumbrian day, all wind and horizontal rain off the sea, the nuclear power plant seeming to hum along with the little organ as we sang some platitudinous hymn or other, until I had to get out of the pew to walk off the pain in my guts from where they had carved my life out of me. We stayed at Nana’s for a couple of nights afterwards, the rain and wind lashing and moaning round the corners of the house, and I tried to put what life I had left into perspective. I knew, now, exactly what the bastards had done to me, just as I knew what would happen to me when the school shits found out, as they would. I now truly had nothing in the world except a brother too young to depend on, and a mother gradually dropping further into the bottle. Nana did her best, but she was in Boot, and Mam was determined to stay where we were, or as near as she could, and so we waited in our grudgingly provided billet until a council house could be available.
One finally came up, and if Anthorn had been hell, Maryport was hell with more demons. That stretch of coast had been a coal mining area, but as they failed, and the docks lost trade, all the coastal towns, like (not)Workington, fell into the limbo of hopelessness that long term unemployment brings. Which, of course, explained why there was a house available for us, as anyone with any mobility had got on their bikes, as a later politician would put it, and just got out as far away as possible. Too far from the Lakes honeypots to get the tourists and their money, the only real industries left there were the atom plant and the Jennings brewery in Cockermouth not far away. For the rest, it was the dole. Mam got a job working a till in a supermarket, supplementing Dad’s pension, and Iain and I got a new school. He was old enough, now, to go to the same school as me, and while I still wasn’t growing, he was shooting up to match Dad. I had nothing, nothing at all, apart from the fact that I had finally escaped from my persecutors, or at least one batch of them. I could only hope that this place would be better.
And I wasn’t arriving as a wog, this time, but as just another totally normal stunted dwarf eunuch.
The new school was a place called Netherhall, and I was stunned by the reception we got. Nowadays, it is a specialist sports establishment in tandem with a secondary school, but back then it was simply a school that insisted on sports as a way of putting ‘character’ into its pupils. That sounds terribly Victorian, awfully intimidating if you are the sort who doesn’t do, or even get, sport, but it wasn’t like that. Mam took us in the first day, and we met the Deputy Head, Miss Graham. She was a solidly built woman of middle age, who wore a wool twin-set rather than a gym skirt. We were sat down in a waiting room as some woman typed away at a desk and Mam went into her office for a private chat. She was, for her, reasonably sober.
A few minutes later Iain and I were called in, and Miss Graham held out her hand to Iain to shake.
“Stevie…”
“No, I’m Iain. That’s me brother there”
“Oh. I see”
There was a brief look between Mam and teacher, and then she was off on a welcome speech.
“So, what are your sports, then? Football? Rugby? Cricket? We have a good, solid reputation in all of those”
Iain was grinning. “Football for me, Miss, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Do we get time off classes for it?”
He was still very young. Miss Graham smiled. “No, er, Iain, but we do run a lot of after school activities, and football is one of the main ones. Once you have settled here, I am sure you will fit in, but…” and here she put on a sterner voice “Academic–classroom studies–come first. We don’t just turn out jocks”
Iain looked puzzled, and I could see how his mind was working, and then Mam clicked to his train of thought as well. She grinned, and suddenly months and years of pain vanished, just for a second or two, as she spoke to the Deputy.
“I think he’s worried you’re planning to turn him Scottish”
The two women laughed, and the one in the hairy suit turned to me.
“What about you, Stevie? Do you play anything?”
I muttered my answer very quietly, almost too quietly to hear. She gently asked again.
“I like to run in the hills with my Nana”
Mam took my hand. “My mother was a shepherdess on the high fells for years. She started with the war, and then sort of stayed with it on and off, and she still helps out even now when it’s lambing season and that. She’s been taking him running with her, up around Eskdale. Isn’t that right, pet?”
Miss Graham’s eyebrows rose. “A fell runner? Like our Joss?”
“Sorry, miss, who’s Joss?”
“Ah, you have a lot to learn, Stevie, so it’s rather fortunate that this is a school and I am a teacher, for learning is what we are for.”
She handed me a pamphlet, made of press clippings that had been badly xeroxed, marked “Local Heroes: We can all be one”
“Take this with you, and have a read of it. It will tell you all you need to know about Joss Naylor, and a few others, and if you are running the hills of Eskdale I look forward to seeing you on the track here.”
She turned serious. “Stevie, this school has a very good reputation, and we value it. I hear from your mother that you had a bit of a hard time in your old place…here, there’s no need for that, I have a hanky somewhere. Please….take your time, but listen, please, to what I have to say.
“We do not tolerate bullying here. Not in any way. Anyone who goes down that road goes down the road out of the school gates and doesn’t come back. Look at me, now, boy, and remember this. I have a very, very good temper. I do not lose it. That makes me a very, very bad enemy. Anyone that does not abide by this school's principles is my enemy. Somehow, I do not see you as falling into that group….so you will make me a promise”
I dried my eyes. “What promise is that, Miss?”
“No silliness about grassing, or telling tales. If you have a problem, you come to me, and me alone. I will deal with it. Do you understand me?”
Iain and I nodded, as Mam squeezed my hand.
“Right. Eight o’clock Monday morning it is then, boys! Iain, bring your boots. Stevie, we can wait until you are well before you show us whether Mr Naylor has any competition on his horizon. Till Monday, then!”
CHAPTER 7
Our new house was far warmer than the old grey block in Anthorn, a Victorian mid-terrace of three floors, quite deep with a narrow frontage.
Typically, an extension had been built to the rear to accommodate such things as an indoor toilet rather than a brick shed at the bottom of the garden, as Nana still had. She had a warped sense of humour, and the first time she showed me the ‘toilet paper’ it was years before I understood the joke. Squares of newspaper, threaded on string, hanging from a nail by the door.
“I always find a proper use for things, Stevie, even the News of the World.”
She received the day’s papers from her neighbour, and they were recycled appropriately, either as stuffing to dry her boots or as toilet paper.
Our new place was indeed palatial, as so few people were left to queue for the available council houses. My room had a bay window, and it was the ideal place to sit and read, especially wrapped in one of Nana’s quilts as the rain slashed across the old sash windows and the wind made them rattle in their tracks. I soon had my books in place on the mantelpiece and in a flatpack book case that Iain and I put together as Mam dozed through Coronation Street downstairs. I understand now that she was a functioning alcoholic. She had started using gin as a ‘downer’ in Singapore to counteract the effects of the amphetamines she was taking unknowingly, and after she had abandoned the speed, the bottle had clung on. She was never obviously drunk, just in a fuzz all day and every day. She kept the house clean, provided our meals, dressed us, did the shopping, and drank steadily.
I tried to find some rational order to my books. Alphabetical was obvious, but what about the Ace Doubles? Anthologies? Collaborations? And in date order, or subject? I had almost everything ever written by E.R. Burroughs, for example, so did I file it in publication order, or by world? I settled on subject, so the Barsoom books followed Tarzan, and were in turn followed by Carson of Venus and the rest. All that may seem like some version of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it wasn’t. It was just my way of building a little literary wall against the outside world.
That led to another discovery: the local library, a mile away from the house. I was n there as soon as I had some documentary proof of the new address, which was an advisory letter to Mam about her contractual obligations as a tenant. There was an astonishingly pretty redheaded girl working there, as well as an older man with a goatee beard, his thinning hair gathered into a ponytail. Karen, the redhead, booked me n, and the older man, who asked me to call him Sid, looked at me appraisingly.
“How old are you, Stevie?”
“Thirteen, mister”
“Sid. That’s Karen. You don’t look it”
I flushed, irritated by his remark and what I thought was his attitude.
“No, lad, I didn’t mean anything nasty. I just have a feeling you aren’t here for the kid’s books. What do you read?”
“SF, mostly, and travel books, wildlife, that sort of thing”
His face lit up. “A fan!”
“Pardon? Fan of what?”
“No, lad, just a fan, plural fen. A word coined by the original writers and readers and stolen by such base rogues as football supporters. Karen, issue …Steve?...with adult tickets, he’s gong to need them. Now, lad, who is your favourite?”
So there I am, the original Cumbrian dwarf, in deep conversation about obscure writers with a forty-something hippy, while a beautiful girl in a skin-tight cashmere sweater and microskirt leans off her platform shoes to write out three adult library cardholders.
Books those days carried a ticket in the front, and each reader was issued a number of little cardboard pockets to be left with the librarian to show who had borrowed the book. The due date of return was stamped in the front of the book.
“Have you tried any Larry Niven yet?”
“No…”
“Right, trust me, and I’ll pick your first three books for you”
I left the library stunned, with ‘Neutron Star”, ‘World of Ptavvs’ and ‘A Gift from Earth’
So, I had a new author, a new friend, and a particularly beautiful girl to ogle, and nothing that I could possibly do about her. I was just at that stage in life where I was recognising the difference between ‘pretty’, as in ‘pretty dress, Mummy’ and ‘beautiful’, as in heartbreaking. And it was heartbreaking. I was never stupid; half of the rationale behind my beatings, when you took away my size and vulnerability, was that I was seen as a swot, which to many children is reason enough. In reality, it’s just another aspect of ‘the Other’, who must be driven away before he infects your tribe with nasty foreignness.
I made my way back to the new house in a slight daze. I had found three adults, if I included Karen at five years older than me, who not only didn’t sneer or spit at me but who actively seemed to want to engage with me. The library would become a small sanctuary for the next few months, a place of warmth and company, the sort of thing I had lacked ever since we had flown to what my mother called ‘home’.
I was also gradually turning my allocated room into My Room, my books slowly being sorted from their boxes and ordered into a sort of armour around the walls. The bay of my window was filled with a small wooden chest with a padded top, covered in Nana’s quilt, and I had a proper desk with a small footstool to stop my legs dangling in space as I sat at it. It was my space, my personal oasis, and it even had a door that locked.
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Monday morning came along, as it always does, and after a breakfast of Ready Brek and toast Iain and I set off for Netherhall through the run-down streets of the town. Many of the shops were boarded up; others had been taken over by shops boasting that everything was sold at a pound. The clear signs of a collapsing community were everywhere to see, and the Heath government’s confrontation with the Unions had not helped in the slightest.
In our new blazers, we made our way to the school gates and the receptionist’s desk, where we were taken together to find our classes. Yet again, I had to insist that I was the elder brother, not Iain, and the process was repeated on my entry into my class, 3SL (Iain was in IN1). The desks were in pairs, and I ended up sat next to a rather overweight girl with dark hair and a wealth of early acne, called Emily Kerr. Before I sat down, though, the teacher had me do the recitation thing at the front of the class.
“My name is Steve Jones, I’ve just moved here from Anthorn up by Bowness, and this is my first day. Before we moved to Anthorn I used to live in Singapore.”
The teacher, our English teacher, as it turned out, Miss Stephenson, asked if there were any questions for “our new friend” and they started, arms up begging for attention.
“Where’s Singapore?”
“Sort of between India and Australia”
“So are you English or a chogie?”
I suddenly remembered Betson, and with a small prayer for Iain’s pardon, I tried the first joke. “I’m English, yes, but when my younger brother heard this place was for jocks he was worried you would try and make him into a Scotchman”
I was rather surprised, and very gratified, when that drew a hearty wave of laughs, and I began to relax. I was beginning to see how Paul had done things.
“What team do you support?”
“I don’t, really, but my brother is a Carlisle fan”
“Do you do any sport?”
“Yes…I run”
“Are you a sprinter?”
“No, I run on the fellsides”
“Do you know Joss Naylor then?”
“No, but I’ve heard a lot about him”
A little white lie, but never mind.
“Have you got a girlfriend?”
Think Betson. “No, are you asking me out then? I’d have to say no because you’re not a girl”
More laughter, and a crimson face.
“Why are you so small?”
A question I couldn’t answer, because nobody had ever told me. “I don’t know. My Mam’s family are all small, but the doctors are doing tests to see if they can find out why I don’t grow”
“Do you like being little?”
“No, but at least I can still get half fares on the bus. I just have to act like a kid”
More laughter, and I was getting a good feeling. Whatever Miss Graham had promised, it had only been words up to now, and yet the atmosphere here was so much warmer, so utterly different to my last school, that I actually felt able to open up a bit. Years later, Miss Stephenson told me that as I spoke I had physically unwound, my shoulders going back and my head lifting. In her words, I had come into her class as a hunted animal, and I had changed before her eyes into a cheeky imp.
CHAPTER 8
The school day passed far more easily than it ever had at Bowness. I was, for the moment, the centre of attention, and classmates were queuing up to ask me about Singapore, my running, all sorts.
There were more questions about my size, of course, but it was all wide-eyed interest rather than the questions the predators at the other place had asked. If the whole school was like this, Miss Graham’s words might actually mean something concrete.
We had school dinners now, and Iain joined me in the dining room with the traditional complaint “No chips?”. It wasn’t actually too bad, a large tray-baked minced beef pie, with those round scoops of mashed potato, followed by dead fly sandwich and custard. Almost perfect. We sat together outside in the playground till Iain spotted a game of football starting up and ran off to ruin his school shoes. I took out “Gift” and found my place, and soon I was lost in the wonders of Mount Lookitthat.
“Hello…can I sit by you?”
It was Emily.
“Oh, yeah, sorry, I was reading, miles away”
“What book is it?”
“It’s SF. The librarian recommended it to me, it’s very good”
It was, too, because among other things I found in the book, Matt Keller’s eyes were the thing I lusted after. To be able to make other people fail to see you, to forget you were ever there…how that would have saved my life in Bowness. I kept that from Emily, though. She seemed a little lost, and very shy, and I didn’t want to scare her.
I caught myself at that. Me? Scaring somebody apart from myself? This was definitely a new world.
“Do you read, Emily?”
She smiled. “Oh yes, I love books. My room is full of them”
“Who’s your favourite?”
Now, I was a rather isolated boy. To me, SF was everything, and everything was SF. The various standard publishers’ logos, such as NEL or Gollancz, were etched into my mind. I just had to spot the cover style to know that I was on home ground. It had never occurred to me that there might be other…realms. Emily showed me that afternoon.
“I collect Mills and Boon”
Now, I was thirteen, I had no idea what she was talking about.
“I’ve not heard of them, what have they written?”
She giggled, her hand covering her mouth. “No, silly, they’re publishers”
She pulled out a paperback with a cover showing a moustached man in some sort of overblown uniform, clutching some woman with more hair than necessary in a sort of elaborate dress with a laced-up top, and I finally twigged.
Mills and Boon publish slushy romances, by the yard, in which, typically, men’s dark eyes burn hypnotically into those of women fainting from passion, as their bosom heaves within their bodice and…you get the picture. Something less interesting to me, apart from football, I could hardly imagine. Still, Emily obviously loved them, and snobbishly I thought “at least she’s reading something”
She was blushing again. “Steve…we all thought you were a girl when you came in this morning….you are a boy, aren’t you?”
No, not any more, you stinking butchers. “Yes, Emily, I’m all boy”
“Well, are there any girls you….like?”
Er, yes, actually, one I was definitely worshipping, along with half the literate population of Maryport, but I realised that that might be the wrong thing to say just then.
“No, not really, I’ve always been a bit sick, so….”
She looked a little worried. “But you do…like...girls? You’re not, you know, one of them? You know, a puff? I mean, you were sitting with that other boy at dinner, and…”
I laughed. “That was my little brother Iain! Yes, I know he’s bigger than me, but he’s two years younger”
Sometimes, even as children, we get little moments of clarity, of seeing beyond our horizons, and that came to me just then. Emily, chubby, pimple-ridden, bespectacled Emily, was lonely. Living in her dreams of flashing eyes and passionate romance, she had seen a new boy enter class who was obviously not first-class stud material, and she was sounding me out before any other girl could. I was, for the first time in my life, being chatted up. Her sense of relief was palpable.
“Well, I have to go…but there are some nice bits of town, and…if…you know…you wanted to sort of look around, and you wanted someone to sort of show you….”
Poor, sweet girl, my first true friend in years. “Yes, that would be great. Thank you. I just tend to go to the library so far”
She grinned. Suddenly I saw a hint of a sharp wit behind the shyness. “So you’ve met Karen Patterson, then? Oh dear, you are blushing!”
“Yes, well, she is just a bit gorgeous, and very nice”
“What I would give….she’s odd, you know? Girls at school, who look good, they’re usually nasty, but she is just, I dunno, nice?”
“Is she, you know…?”
“Spoken for? Oh dear, you and half of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire! She’s seeing some footballer”
I must have looked wounded. She laughed, but there was no nastiness in it. “I do have to go, but thank you for being nice to me. You are easy to talk to, Steve Jones, and I’m not good at it. It’ll be fun; looking forward to showing you my home”
She suddenly blushed bright red as she realised the double meaning. Off she ran, and I sat for a while trying to order my mind. I didn’t fancy her, she was, to my freshly teenaged mind, too fat, too spotty, and I fancied Karen, of the tumbling red curls, pert breasts and endless legs, but she was sweet, and I was flattered. More than that, though, I had a friend. Or, perhaps, a girl friend.
Iain walked back with me after school, and gave me a look. “What was t like, Stevie? Were they as nasty as that other school?”
I felt my face grow warm, half from a smile and half from a blush at my earlier thoughts about girlfriends.
“They were great, Iain. I did the standing up at the front thing, and they all asked questions, but it was all, well, interested, like, not was I a wog or a puff”
Well, I had been asked both questions, but not in the same way as had happened before. Iain would just be confused, though, so I kept it quiet. We were passing more boarded up shops, two of the doorways occupied by tramps, one of them swigging a can of Special Brew, the other just staring into space.
We dropped in to Mam’s work, just to see what she wanted us to do, and she sent me round the shelves to get some pork chops and a packet of instant mashed potato for our tea. I let us in with the key, and after making us both drinks settled down in my window nest to finish the saga of the Sons of Earth.
Niven had the concept of robot colony ships that would select a world for habitable conditions, even if those were only in one place, so the story’s planet had a poisonous atmosphere with just one spot humans could live, at the top of a miles-high mountain. I thought that seemed to match my life: if the rest of it was hell, at least I had today to cling to and remember. I had to remember to thank Sid, for he had really given me a new world to explore, even though it made my old books seem a little stale.
Just before Mam was back I started the dinner, frying the chops in a little lard till their own fat started to come out. They were my favourites, long since banned by Brussels, where each chop had a slice of kidney attached. heated a tin of marrowfat peas, and as Mam set the table as Iain was glued to Blue Peter I poured boiling water onto the powdered potato and whisked it up with a fork.
We ate at the table, Iain at the head so he could continue watching the telly as he ate. It was still what I consider the classic line-up, of Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves, and I lent it half an eye as I ate. We worked through the meal in silence till the programme was finished, and then Mam dropped the bombshell.
“Dr Mitchell wants to see you again”
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I was off round the library that evening, after the dishes were done and Mam had settled down with the News and a glass. I wanted to know what other authors might still be unknown to me, what delights I was missing. I smiled hello to Sid and Karen, and felt my knees wobble as she turned her smile on me like one of Niven’s sunflowers.
“Finished ‘Gift’, Sid, thank you, it was very good!”
He laughed. “You’ll be after some more, then. Have you read any Linebarger?”
“Who?”
“Sorry, it’s a fan in joke. Cordwainer Smith. Real name Paul Linebarger…that gives me another idea, Harlan Ellison. These books are a little darker than the Niven, so you may not like them”
Karen laughed. “He’s been ordering in all these books, and he’s the only one who ever seems to read them. He’s going to hang onto you like grim death, lass–er, lad. Sorry. Look, who else lives with you? Parents, brothers?”
“My Mam and my brother. My Dad got killed in Germany”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Sid, are either of them registered here?2
“I don’t believe so, Karen”
“Well, why don’t we sort of register both of them, and give our young friend here their tickets for safekeeping? Then he could take a few more books rather than just the one”
“Ah, Karen, and you are still refusing to marry me!”
“Sid…you know you have no interest in girls like me! Now, six more tickets, then. I hope you’ve brought a bag!”
I had indeed, and with a bundle of fresh SF books and a couple of guides to the local fells I was off home with a smile plastered to my face. My goddess had spoken to me.
It would have been so much better if she had remembered I was a boy.
CHAPTER 9
The week was a good one, as those things go. I felt safe for the first time I could remember, safe and wanted.
People actually sought out my company, were interested in my life, and didn’t feel the need to add a little physical contact at each encounter. I was, at thirteen, now starting to get more focus in my education. The next year I would have to select my courses for my GCE O-levels, and this year was my chance to explore where my deepest interests lay. Obviously, as a fan, I had at least a slight interest in physics, but it was language that caught my imagination. German, French and Latin were what the school offered, and for some reason the subject choices next year would offer me either chemistry or that teutonic language, which was odd considering the vast amount of research published in it.
Each evening, after tea, I went round to the library, drinking in the sight of Karen’s amazing legs as she tottered on immense platform soles, and talking with Sid about underpeople and the Instrumentality. One evening, as they were locking up around eight, he surprised me.
“Fancy grabbing a coke or something, Steve? Karen and I often stop off at the Wimpy for an unwind, you’re welcome to tag along”
That was tempting, to say the least. A night out with Karen… even if it was only a fizzy drink, and with Sid along. My bubble was pricked, though.
“Sorry, boys, but Brian’s picking me up tonight. We’re off to town”
Sid was still fun, though, but I would have to tell Mam. “Is there a phone box nearby? I would have to let them know at home”
That sounded so much more adult than ‘tell my mother’
“Use the library phone”
She was clearly already relaxed after tea, with the help of her friend Gordon, so there were no objections. I bundled my books, including a history of rock climbing that I wanted to discuss with Nana, and after Sid had locked up I followed them out to where a Jaguar was waiting by the kerb. Brian, evidently, and I deliberately looked away after saying goodbye, as Karen climbed n. Obviously, there would be snogging, and I didn’t want to see that.
He led me down to Senhouse Street where there was one of those odd little places that came along to cater for the fashion in American things, but done as a café rather than in a paper bag on a plastic tray. We took a table, and Sid ordered us two cokes, and I actually felt quite special just being there in adult company. Sid was gently teasing me.
“You quite fancy my young lady, don’t you?”
I blushed a little. “She is very good looking…”
He laughed, but in a friendly way. “So thinks almost every man in the North West”
“Yeah, that’s what Emily said”
“Emily? Girlfriend?”
“Er, no, a girl in school I talk to a lot.”
“That’s always a good start, Steve, communication. Ten to one that the girls with the looks are more concerned with their own looks than anything else.”
“Like Karen, you mean? I don’t think she’s like that at all”
“No, lad, but she wants to get out of this hole, and that’s one route she has available, but she doesn’t look down on people like some of the head-turners can. She’s very well set up, mentally, is our Karen. Not many like her about.”
I was doing my best to be grown up. “You and Karen, you never….?”
Sid laughed. “No, we never, not with any woman in my case. I don’t sort of go that way”
I was shocked, as I realised what he was saying, and thinking back Karen clearly knew all about him. My first ever queer. “So, you’re a puff then?”
He laughed again “Steve, we are going to have to work a bit on your tact and diplomacy. We mostly prefer ‘gay’ as a term. Yes, I am”
A thought struck me. “You don’t think I’m…you didn’t bring me here…”
“No, lad, I didn’t. For starters, you are more than a little too young for me. Secondly, the way you drool every time you see my beautiful assistant you are so straight it must hurt you to sit down. Third, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you look very girly”
“I thought…gays liked girly boys”
“Lesson two, Steve: everybody’s different. I like men, real men, not girls, not pretend girls, and that is all I will say on that subject.”
“It’s just, I’ve never met one before”
“Oh, I’m sure you have, you just didn’t know it. Now, I came here to talk about books, not who we fancy. What did you think of the Shayol story?”
“I thought that was the best one. Just so much in it!”
“Thought so. You see, Steve, that one is very much a boy’s story, full of invention and action. I’m not going to say ‘grow out’, but that is sort of what you might do. A lot of fans never do move on from ray guns and monsters, but if you can there are some very deep, very thought-provoking books out there”
“Is Smith still writing?”
“No, Steve, he died six or seven years ago. Some old fossils seem to go on and on, like Arthur C Clarke, but the really unique ones, they all seem to pop off too young”
I grinned. “Surely any age is too young”
That got us laughing, and he bought me another coke. I felt wonderfully adult, a grown man treating me as his equal and actually seeking out my company. I wasn’t the punchbag of the bigger boys at school, I was now the bigger boy myself. I wasn’t playing back street football, or swapping tea cards, I was in a café with another man discussing literature.
It was absolutely delightful. I lay in bed that night thinking that perhaps, finally, I was being released from my prison. I finally fell asleep wondering what kissing Emily might be like. Behind the spots she did seem rather nice, and she clearly liked me so I wouldn’t have to take a chance on that bit. Sid did talk a lot of sense.
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Life settled into a routine, but not one I found at all bad. School, where the lessons were actually becoming interesting, the library, avoiding the smell of the tramps who slept in the doorways, and gradually feeling myself heal. I spent most lunchtimes talking with Emily, and I got teased about that in class, but I didn’t mind. I was still spared the ordeal of the changing rooms until everything healed, and so far I had avoided a visit to Mitchell.
That was something that Sid had cleared up for me, just by his behaviour. There was a grown man, who fancied other grown men and just treated it as another part of daily life, whereas Mitchell was positively drooling when he asked his questions.
With Mam’s agreement, that first weekend between classes, I took the Coast Line down to Ravenglass, passing through the shitholes of Workington and Whitehaven, as well as along a bleak but lovely coastline. Past the huge nuclear works to prettier lands on the estuary, and a short walk from the station to the Ratty. No boy ever worth his salt would avoid the chance of using a steam-hauled miniature railway as local transport, and I was almost all boy. The breeze whipped my hair off my shoulders as we chuffed up the dale to Boot, and Nana was waiting at the stop for me with a smile and a hug. I was home.
The payback came on Sunday evening, as I walked back into our house. Mam was in fully-fuelled voice.
“Who was that you were in the café with?”
“I told you, Mam, it was the man from the library”
“You didn’t tell me he was a bloody shirtlifter! Vi says everybody knows what he does! You were seen holding hands with a puff in public! How am I to hold my head up at work now, now the whole bloody world knows you’re a queer!”
“I wasn’t holding–“
She slapped me, hard, across the face. “Don’t bloody argue with me! Get to bed now, and you won’t be going anywhere near that place again. I’m in half a mind to get the bloody police round to him, filthy bastard!”
She paused, panting and flushed, as I held my face. “Be round the shop straight after school with Iain. We’re off to Carlisle as soon as you get out. Now, piss off to bed, you dirty little fairy”
I sat the next day with Emily, and talked it over. She was confused.
“So, he’s a queer? And he didn’t try to bum you or anything?”
I explained it all, just as Sid had told me. Emily sat and thought for a while.
“So, you’re not a puff?”
“Not at all, Em”
“And…you like girls?”
“You know that, you know how I fancy that Karen!”
She murmured something in a very small voice. “Sorry, Em, I couldn’t hear you”
She was blushing hard. “I just asked if you thought you could…..fancy…..me…..”
Poor, sweet girl. I screwed up as much courage as I could and took her hand where it lay on the bench beside her.
“I sort of think I like you, Em…”
She leapt at me, tears in her eyes, and that’s when I found out what snogging was all about.
CHAPTER 10
That was rather amazing. Her lips were incredibly soft, and I found out why noses don’t squish when people snog.
It wasn’t some mad tongue wrestle, either, just a sweet, gentle and rather prolonged kiss. Emily broke away, pushing a strand of hair back from her mouth. She was smiling and blushing, all at once.
“Bloody hell, Steve….that was, that was, oh…”
She gave me another, much shorter, one, and then shyly asked “Will you go with us?”
I just nodded. If I had a girlfriend, I must be normal, I must be like other lads. I knew I never would be, really, though I still wasn’t too sure exactly what they had done to me down there, but….there was only one thing I could do, and that was some more kissing, this time to the ribald jeers of some passing fourth years. As they walked away, I heard “Nah, that fair one’s in boy’s kit”
There needs to be an explanation here. Nothing about my medical ‘care’ was ever spelled out to me. I was the child, I was the object of that care, and that word should be stressed. I was an object. Mitchell had promised my mother he would be having tests done to find out why I wasn’t growing, and I assumed they must have been done, but Mam told me nothing, nothing at all. It took years before I could access the records the bastard had meticulously kept and find out what he had told her. That was where I later found that phrase, ‘passive effeminate homosexual’, and all the rest.
I didn’t look forward to seeing him at any time, and certainly not that afternoon. Mam ran us up to town in the old Viva and parked by the hospital. She took my hand as if I was some sort of infant, or as if she thought I might run off, which I was actively considering. She went into his office for a private chat before I was brought in and my mother waved out to rejoin Iain.
“Hello, Stevie, how are we today?”
I would call him a snake, sitting waiting for something to strike out at, but there was more passion behind his eyes, more hunger, greed. I was prey. Sharks, like snakes, when they attack, have dead, flat eyes. His were more like that of a kid at the door of a sweet shop: what can I have first?
“I don’t know how you are today, but I still hurt. And I stopped being called Stevie ages ago”
“Because you want to impress the men with your maturity?”
“No, because I’m a teenager, not a kid”
“Who was the man, Stevie?”
“My librarian, Sid, and he didn’t do anything”
“Why were you holding hands?”
“We weren’t, that’s a lie!”
“Your mother’s friend saw you doing it”
“Then she’s a liar!”
“So much hostility, Stevie. Why is that?”
“Because it’s all lies! We never held hands, we just talked”
“What did you talk about?”
“Books. And women”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
“Did you do any kissing?”
That was the moment I truly understood that he wasn’t actually listening to me, not really, but ploughing ahead with his own agenda. Whatever I said would either be ignored or twisted to fit his own plans. The mention of kissing, though, got through to my shy, inner self, and I am sure I blushed.
“Ah, so you did do some kissing, then. Did he kiss well?”
“It wasn’t him I kissed!”
“Who was the man you did kiss, then?”
“It was a girl, in my class, she’s called Emily, and we’re going together now, so stuff that where the monkey put his nuts!”
There was a definite twitch to his eye then, but he kept the same hungry expression on me. “So… this Emily? Is she bigger than you?”
“Everyone’s bigger than me. You were supposed to sort that out.”
“Yes, I have something for that, we can deal with that later. Does she have short hair, that sort of thing?”
“No, she’s really girly, like Mills and Boon books, that sort of thing”
He muttered something about ‘overcompensating for true desires’ as he made a long note, then he asked for Mam to come back in.
“Mrs Jones, I have had a most informative chat with little Stevie here, and I think it is time we moved along his development. Stevie, your body is no longer producing the things it needs to make you grow, so we need to give it a bit of help. It will mean some injections, and I am afraid they will have to be into the bottom. You will need to have an injection each week for a little while, just till we see how your body is reacting to the medicine. I will also give you some tablets to take each day, but what I need is to examine you each week when you come for your jab.”
The promise that I might grow almost overrode my hatred and distrust, and as Mam, thankfully, left the room again, I underwent a reasonably quick examination of my scars after I dropped my trousers and underpants to receive my very first and very painful dose of growth juice, as I immediately dubbed it. Sore-arsed, I went with Mam to the hospital pharmacy and filled Mitchell’s prescription. Mam was acting odd, a little embarrassed it seemed, and I am sure I saw the slightest hint of an incipient tear. We drove home and as I sat on my sore arse I took the first of my magic pills.
Emily was waiting for me outside the school gates the next day, and she admitted later that she had left home as early as possible so as to be sure she caught me as I entered, and once more we shared the delights of a proper snog. She wasn’t Karen, by any stretch of the imagination, and she never would be, but she was nice, she kissed wonderfully, and she was all mine. I held her hand into class, and there were a few sniggers, but also a lot of smiles. Such a difference to my old place. The word had obviously gone around, and somebody had left a label on our shared desks: “Lovebird seats”
I didn’t mind at all. It was all new to me, new and wonderful, and if I had had anything left I am sure I would have been in agonies of arousal and having constant Nocturnal Emissions, but that had already been dealt with. Terminally, as I was still to find out.
Even the teacher got in on the act, in our registration group. She called out the girls first, and after Emily called out “Here!” Miss Stephenson loudly added “So that means Steven Jones is here too, then”
It was teasing, but it was sweetly done. Emily was a popular girl, and the class hadn’t learnt to hate me, so the mickey-taking was more of a celebration than an infliction. That day, I was happier than I ever remembered being before. It was also the day I decided I would start to run again. According to that snake, I was just about healed, and I wanted to make a name for myself in some small way, a name that might stop all the assumptions that was a girl. I could, I can, run, and as Miss Graham had promised I would have all the help and advice needed to find my distance. That first cross-country run seemed like ancient history now; if I could manage some laps today, then I would be on the fells with Nana again at the weekend. I had growth juice fizzing in my veins, after all, and a book on rock climbing to show her.
That threw me. I had to find some way of using the library without my mother making a fuss. At morning break, I asked my girlfriend (how amazing to be able to say that!) for ideas, after filling in the gaps about Sid.
“Why don’t you just bring the books to school, and we walk there together at lunchtime? If you are with a girl, especially one who really, truly knows you are certainly not a puff, what can anyone say? Especially if we have a snog…”
“Sid says it’s better to call him gay than a puff, but, yeah, you’re right. Now….shall I prove I’m not gay again, then?”
“Mmmmm yes please”
To a chorus of cheers and shouts of “Throw a bucket of cold water over them!” and “Ecchhh!” I proceeded to do my best to lay such rumours to rest.
That afternoon, I got kitted up in my Umbro shorts and Dunlop plimsolls to do a few laps of the track marked out in white on the grass of the sports field. I started gently, just feeling how my legs were working, and sensitive to any pain from my wounds, but soon I was in the zone that distance runners enter, where the body is just running at the aerobic balance point and you feel you can go on forever. The rest of the class were doing various organised things, such as high and long jump practice, and putting the shot, but I was off in my own world. With a start I realised that I had company, one of the teachers in a track suit pacing me as I ran, and he started to talk to me.
“Son, you are running rock solid ninety-five second laps, which is amazing given your size. Where do you normally train?”
“(pant) Eskdale (pant) fells (pant) sir”
“No bloody wonder you cruise this flat stuff, son. I’m going to drop out before you kill me, you’ve already done three miles.”
He moved to the inside of the track, and then started giving me shouted instructions, to lift and ease my pace, and I later discovered he was using a Scandinavian system called fartlek, intended to take my body out of that comfort zone and better replicate the sort of running I did over the fells. It was hard work, which was his intention, and I eventually had to stop as the fatigue poisons built up. I stood inside the track, hands on knees for a while, then on my hips as I walked off the soreness. Mr Robson, the teacher, was all smiles.
“You, son, are good, really good. No false modesty here, and praise where it is due. Why have I never seen you running in any of the schools events?”
Because the shits at my old school did their level best to kill me any time I went into the changing rooms, that’s why. “ I’ve never entered any, sir”
“Well, if you want, I can change that. How would you like to do the 5,000?”
“Five thousand what, sir?”
“Metres, son. Twelve and a half laps, about three and a half miles. Now, it’s long enough to let you settle, but also long enough to have tactical running. Let’s find somewhere to chat after your shower”
That was the start of gaining my new reputation.
CAUTION. This chapter contains references to rape and torture/kind of a particular kind. If not suitable, I am happy to send a plot summary by PM to anyone that wishes.
CHAPTER 11
The next day we put Em’s plan into operation, and after rushing through our dinner we were soon walking hand in hand down Lawson Street to the library. I had to stop a couple of times, just to do some proving, and as we walked in I got a raised eyebrow from Sid and a grin from Karen. She was chuckling at my automatic blush.
“Someone’s been busy, I see!”
Emily took my arm in a very clear ‘hands off---MINE!’ signal, which obviously tickled my goddess’ sense of humour. Sid was gentler.
“Who’s this, then, Steve?”
“My girlfriend, Emily” I announced to anyone that hadn’t worked that one out.
“Pleased to meet you, Emily. Are you a fan, too?”
“Sorry?”
I butted in. “He means do you read science fiction, Em. No, Sid, she reads those Mills and Boon things”
Karen was leaning against the counter, skirt tight against her wonderful thighs —no, put those thoughts away. She was laughing happily.
“That’s one over on you, Sid! This one’s mine, mine I tell you, mwahaha!”
She looked down at me and smiled gently. “He gets to play with all the SF readers, and I get almost nothing for me except women whose parts dried up before I was born. Emily, you are a godsend! I get a new reader to spoil at last! Come into my parlour, said the ginger spider to her new fly”
They disappeared off to the ‘romance’ shelves and I took the opportunity to fill in Sid on the events before and after the visit to Mitchell.
He muttered very quietly, but I still heard the ‘fucking cunts’
“Steve, you have to understand a few things here. You know which way I swing, OK? You might not realise that until just five years ago what I might want to do with a friend in private would land me in prison. Look, I saw you looking at Karen’s thighs…it’s OK, it’s what they are there for! She likes to tease. Now, I am sure that put ideas into your head, and when you are snogging Emily you probably get the same ideas. Imagine that if you were seen kissing her, it might get you arrested. That is where I was, five years ago. If I did anything about finding someone to love, to love me, I would end up in prison having the shit kicked out of me every day. Can you imagine that?”
Oh yes, I could imagine that. I had lived through that same hell every day in Anthorn, so, yes, I knew exactly what Sid feared.
“But…if they changed the law?”
“People still think the same, Steve, despite any law they talk about ‘morality’, ‘sin’, ‘depravity’. Oh, sod it, I could go on all day about it, but that’s not why you are here.”
I suddenly felt very adult. “No, Sid, you listened to me, it’s my turn now”
He sighed. “OK, then, you asked for it. People like me used to get…treatment, a screwed up idea of medical care. Sometimes they would do operations on us. They actually used to cot into the brain to ‘cure’ us, or there would be shock therapy, with ice baths…”
He was drifting away as he spoke, and I realised this gentle man had something awful in his dreams. “I had those, Steve, and then…then it was the ECT. That nearly pushed me over the edge, and it was only when I learnt to act the part that I got out”
“ECT?”
He looked really sour, then, directly at me. “Electro-convulsive therapy, son. They dope you up, put a rubber block between your teeth and wire your head up to the mains. It’s supposed to cure people like me, as if I am some sort of disease. All it did was lose me a lot of my past, and make me a much better actor”
He was trembling, now. “They said it was to help with my depression, but it was being in that place that made me depressed. Being raped does that to you”
“Shit….”
“Yes, Steve, they are all big straight men there, no puffs, no queers, so they prove it by raping the fairies. That’s when the doctors aren’t shocking them, or doping them, or cutting their balls off to stop them committing acts against fucking nature”
He was crying, now. “That is when they did me, Steve, when I was still out from the shocks, unable to fight in any way, and I’d wake up sore and bleeding, and one of them would be smirking, and some time later they would shock me again…enough, enough, I’ll give you nightmares. Here, let’s see what books we can find and then off to school with your girlfriend.”
He closed the conversation down with an almost audible snap, wiped his eyes and led me over to the racks.
“Here, a recent Simak, ‘Out of Their Minds’, it gets silly in places but you’ll enjoy it. Now, go and grab Emily or you’ll be late back. Karen can talk soppiness for England”
After looking round for other customers, I left the sad, gentle, horribly abused man with a hug that clearly surprised him, and an initial stiffness gave way to a rib-crushing return. Grabbing Em’s hand, we were off to school again, for maths and history.
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The maths was sort of OK, but it was history that drew me in. In Singapore, I had studied from a book that had a timeline that still showed the Piltdown Man as being real, and contained various references to ‘advanced types’ such as the Athenians, who were apparently somehow completely different from the Athenians (modern), who were ‘debased’, and the ‘primitive’ Africans. We were taught away from those parts of the book, but they were still there, festering in the relic of Empire.
The history we were getting now was different. We still had dates to remember, and Kings to list, but a lot of what we were asked to do consisted of using imagination and logic. Mr Calvert, our teacher, was fond of attacking sources.
“So, what do we know of the Battle of Hastings?” he would say, and when a few answers had been collected, he would address the source.
“Why was this man writing? What axe did he have to grind? Forster, did you see the game at Carlisle on Saturday?”
“Aye, sir”
“How did the game go?”
“They lost, sir, ref was blind”
“Would he have been blind if you had won?”
“Well….”
“So the other supporters, the other team thought he was clear-sighted”
“I suppose so, sir”
“That’s the thing in a nutshell, there is a saying that history is written by the winners. The trick is to look past what’s written down and try and work out what the agenda, the bias, of the writer is. On that note, homework. I would like a side and a half on what bias is obvious in the Domesday Book, and I will give a bonus mark to anyone who can explain why it doesn’t apply to the North of England. Ready for our next class”
I walked Em home after school, and we found a few spots to share some saliva while Iain ostentatiously looked away and made retching sounds, and after I left her door he asked me what I was doing.
“She’s a girl, Stevie!”
“I noticed, my dear observant brother, I noticed”
“But Mam says you’re a puff! Holding hands and that with blokes!”
“Do you think I’m like that, Iain? Really?”
“Oh, Stevie, I don’t know, I keep hearing Mam talk, when she’s at the gin, and she talks about getting you cured of it, and then you’re snogging some spotty lass as if you mean it, and…you’re not a puff, are you?”
“No, not at all. Em is who I like”. And Karen, of course.
“So why is she always talking to that doctor bloke?”
“He’s not just a queer doctor, Iain, he’s sorting my growth out, helping me get bigger. Hey, Mr Robson wants me to run for the school. Think how much faster I’ll be with longer legs!”
“Yeah, yeah, big head. Race you home?”
“Dear big little brother, you are a mere sprinter, while I shall be racing over the 5,000.”
I grinned at him. “As it’s only a hundred yards to the door, you’d beat me!”
At which point I took off without warning. He came past me like a train. Bloody footballers.
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I was off to Nana’s that Friday again, with my rock-climbing book and a head full of questions. She met me from the Ratty as always, and smiled approvingly when I showed her I had packed my running kit. I showed her the book, and she smiled again.
“Ah, thy dad’s name was famous in climbing round here. The Only Genuine Jones was about last century, and a lot of his routes are still seen as hard ones”
“Only Genuine?”
“Owen Glynne. I’ll take thee up by some of his crags, and tha can have a look. Unless tha fancy having a go…tha’d need someone with thee who knaas what’s what. Promise me that: no scrambling around by thesen, reet?”
“But I could have a try?”
“Aye, I’ll have a word with Arthur, in the Inn, he knaas a bit about it”
True to her word, she took us out for a meal in the Inn, a pie and mushy peas, and as she sipped her Guinness she talked through my interests with Arthur.
“Aye, lad, there’s some folk who come up here regular, from the South, for the cragging. A bit posh, like. But there’s still the lads from Manchester and that to keep the common man in the act. We have a couple of the posh lads here tonight; the Lancs lads all camp up Wasdale Head wi’ the midges”
He wandered over to serve a customer, and after a while a tall man came over to our table.
“Hello, are you Steven and Ada? My name’s Simon Worrell, the barman says this young fellow has an interest in climbing”
And that was our evening filled. Simon called over his friend, Roger Houston, and as Nana nursed another couple of bottle of Guinness and the men downed what seemed like a gallon of Jennings, they answered questions and told hair-raising stories of exposed leads, poor protection, benightment on Alpine ledges; it was wonderful. I keep using that word, but here it was true. I was full of wonder at their stories, and they were charm incarnate. I fell about with laughter when they explained the significance of Kipling Groove on Gimmer Crag, and it was my first real insight to a world beyond what most people saw. Roger was passionate about it.
“Imagine it, Steve. You are there, on the Slabs, in the middle of Tennis Shoe. The climbing just there is so easy you don’t have to think, and you are of the elite. Nobody can get to that spot without climbing, and you are one of those people who can climb. It feels truly special. Or when you are laybacking the Great Flake on CB, and there is no room in your head for anything but the rock and the next move, and all the little irritations of the day disappear”
Simon chuckled. “Apart from the midges, of course!”
“Well, yes, but you can never get away from those little buggers…sorry, Ada”
I was a truly great evening, that I treasure to this day. We said our good nights, and ambled happily back to the cottage.
“Be careful around those two, lad”
“Why, Nana?”
“Lang time sin ah have seen such obvious shirtlifters. They may just fancy a bit of fun”
Even my own grandmother, it seemed.
I fell asleep dreaming of long drops, and scratching at my chest.
CHAPTER 12
Nana ran us up by Eskdale Moor and Burnmoor Tarn the next day, sticking to the track and the footbridges, but there was still bog, and I understood her insistence of doing without socks as the mud splashed my legs and soaked through the canvas of my shoes.
“Aye, it’s grand up here!” she yelled against the wind, as we trotted along the level bit under Raven Crag and past the old cairn. It was indeed, and I felt free and fit as I bog-trotted the occasional really wet bit and we wound our way to our prize–the view out over Wasdale Head. Nana talked me through some of the features on the skyline, and described those hidden behind the sprawling bulk of Sca Fell. Then we picked up the Mite stream and descended, in a bent-kneed scurry at times, through Bakerstead and Low Place to Eskdale Green, where we ducked into the café for a hot chocolate and a cake. We ducked straight back out when they saw the colour of our legs, but they had tables outside where they happily served us, and I pulled on the tracksuit I had wrapped in a polythene bag in my rucksack. Nana was still in her three-quarter length cotton trousers, her only concession to the halt an old worsted wool sweater. She was grinning happily.
“So good to get out wi’thee again, lad! Tha’s running well, and if I’m not wrang tha’s a bit longer in the leg”
“I’m on growth juice, Nana, I get a weekly injection and some pills, but I don’t think it’s soon enough to be growing. I’ve had a few twinges in my bones, but I think that’s it all starting up. Em says it sounds like growing pains”
“Em?”
“I have a girlfriend, Nana. She’s called Emily, she’s in my class at school”
“Is she pretty, Stevie?”
No, not really. “I think so, and she’s all mine, so I’m happy”
“So has thy Mam stopped all this silliness about thee being a queer?”
“No, she hasn’t. I don’t know why that Vi woman told those lies, but Mam seems to be believing her over me. It’s not true, Nana, he’s just a nice man that’s had some bad times. He’s good to talk to…is it true people like him used to get locked up?”
“Aye, and worse. Was the same wi unmarried mothers, those lasses that got themselves caught, in trouble, they used to put them in the loony bins”
“That’s what they did to him, Nana, and worse”
She gave me a sharp look. “Worse? How, exactly?”
I told her, and part way through my account I realised I was actually discussing sex with my mother’s mother. She listened quietly, and then very quietly swore.
“I know I am in the right place, tha knaas, when I hear stories like that, as far away from folks and towns as I can get. There are some bastards about, lad. Tha don’t pick and choose how and when to fall in love, and….”
She sat in silence for a minute, clearly upset. Then. “We fought a fucking war again folk like that. Sorry, Stevie, language. No excuse, but thy granda died to stop such things. If thy Mam, or that doctor tha mention, start doing anything odd, anything scary, tha leave, tha leave right away and tha come to me. Now, an end to that sort of talk. More cake is needed, and then we shall have a very short ride on the Ratty as me legs are seized up”
A run on the high fells, hot chocolate, two slices of jam sponge and a ride on a steam train. That was Saturday, and that was a good day. Nana rode down to the coast with me on Sunday, and we had Sunday lunch in a pub, and before and after she showed me how to name the birds on the mudflats by the estuary, with the help of a small telescope she produced from the front pocket of her cotton duck smock.
Of course it was raining, it was the Lakes on a Sunday! She saw me off on the train back to Maryport with a hug, and exacted two promises, the first being what we had already discussed, the second that I should see if Emily could come one weekend. There would obviously be no running, but there was plenty else to do, and I felt that Nana was starting to see how much control she could get back over her daughter’s behaviour.
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I had another examination, and another dose of growth juice, and Mitchell pronounced himself more than happy with my scars. The running had done them no harm, and me much good, allowing me to blow some of the town’s air from my lungs. More shops were closing, and more men seemed to be idle each day, and the place felt stale, like an old sandwich starting to dry out and curl at the edges. That was how Maryport, and the other towns along the coast, were going. There was no depth to them; once the pits and the dock work went, it was like a film set, nothing behind the façade. It was worse to the East and the South, where Tyneside and Merseyside were staring into the abyss, but the confrontation with Heath had done enough to take away people’s safety nets.
The weeks went by, and the juice fizzed in, and the pills went down, and Mitchell’s fingers probed as his eyes ate my soul. I was definitely showing some growth, up an inch in a month, and it was clear to me that whatever problems the man had, he had certainly managed to kick start my body. I itched, though, in my chest, and around my John Thomas, where I was elated to finally see a few hairs arrive. I was becoming a man, I thought, and checked each day to see f my balls had dropped, as they were supposed to.
You see, nobody had ever told me what they had done to me. I had been told, in Singapore, that it was a hernia, then in England that they were just sorting out a complication. No bastard ever told me that I had been castrated, not for years, not until it was too fucking obvious to hide.
I started to argue with Em, and then make up, tears flowing, and one day she said to me, very quietly, “You’re as changeable as a girl, you know”
Hindsight, don’t you just love its clarity. Despite our odd little arguments, that blew up and faded away just as quick, we managed to get her parents’ permission to have a weekend together at Boot, and we were excited as all hell by it. I felt particularly grown up: I was going away for a weekend in the country with my lover (I had tried one of her books…) and I was getting hairy, at least on my todger. I had a moment of dreaminess as I wondered whether Em was hairy down there yet, and then I thought of ginger curls…
Most of the coast was spent snogging or cuddled up while we each read our own book, and then I had the delight of watching Emily’s face when she saw our final transport.
“It’s so CUTE!!”
Nana was waiting at the usual place, and gave Em a huge smile and hug, and that was really how the weekend went. Nana had dragged her old Morris Traveller out of the garage for what seemed like the first time that year, and though she seemed ill at ease driving she did her best to let Em see some of the delights of Wasdale, where it rained, and Coniston, where it didn’t. We walked partway up from the copper mines until Emily ran out of steam, then just sat and enjoyed the view, and then had sticky toffee pudding in the village as the Gondola chuffed down the lake.
Such a good weekend, such good times.
Mr Robson was on my back, in a nice way, the next week. He had been pushing me on the track, and trying to get me to commit to a race, and finally I caved in and agreed to do one of the early cross-country events, representing the school in Year Three as well as overall team points. It was a short event for me, only five miles running seven laps out by Roseghyll Mill. No hills, just steady pacing, and Mr Robson insisted I should look at controlling the race. Take the first lap steady, get a feel for the other runners, and then see how they played it on the second, where they would know the course. Third, fourth and fifth laps take it up, cruise the sixth to recover, and then attack the last lap. I’m sure he thought he was talking to a runner in the Olympics, but never mind. He had even found some spikes in my size to lend me, so I wouldn’t be running in plimsolls. This man was serious!
The gun went, and the big lads were off. Most of them at least a foot taller than me, I couldn’t cover the ground anything like them, and, besides, I would see f they were still sprinting in a couple of miles. I settled into the pack, doing my best to avoid the shoving, and found my zone of peace.
The second lap came, and the early hares were being reeled in steadily, apart from a couple of lads who seemed to be from some different species to the rest of us. They actually ended up lapping much of the field, so I ignored them and settled into my own race.
The early boisterousness of the pack had faded as lads found their own pace, and as Mr Robson had suggested I started to lift mine on the third lap. Soon, there wasn’t a pack, but a series of clumps, as boys tried to shelter from the raw wind on the back leg and use it on the outward. My coach indicated I was tenth as I went past (yes, he really did have a little chalk board for that) and I stretched it a bit more for the fourth and fifth, leaving only five people ahead of me as I eased back a little and shook my arms out. I kept that position till the bell, and then started to stretch out. I wasn’t just running for the year, now, the first six finishers for a school of whatever age counted for the overall team win, and I wanted that, I wanted to be the Man, the Hero. I could feel my pulse in my face as I wound it up for the last four hundred yards, and closed in on the last of the five in front of me. I thought of Iain, and his tales of being taught how to sprint for football, of using the arms as if pulling oneself in on a rope, and my head went back in the last two hundred yards and I sprinted for the funnel. I wanted that last scalp…
He heard me coming, and kicked himself, and as we hit the funnel he dipped and just, just beat me, and we staggered to a halt, lungs screaming, hands on knees, and he looked at me and said, from his five foot nine or so, “Fuck me, lass, but you can run!”
There was a moment as his brain worked out what was wrong with that picture.
“Sorry, pal, it’s just the hair and that. Well run, though, I really thought you had me! I’ll have to watch you when you get bigger”
“Who are the two boy wonders?”
He laughed. “I’m Danny, and don’t even think about racing those two, they’re already in the national Under-16 squad. How long you been racing?”
“I’m Steve. This was my first race ever”
“Fucking hell, Steve, on second thoughts, DO think of racing those two! Let’s go and get changed before we freeze our bollocks off”
CAUTION. This chapter contains scenes of juvenile sexual exploration that may offend. It is not graphic, but it is necessary for the plot. There are also elements that relate to child abuse and these may affect some readers. Obviously, I hope my writing affects my readers, but not in that way.
CHAPTER 13
That was the start of my ‘official’ running career, though to me running was still the intricate thrills of tussock-leaping over the bogs, or fast descents as I hit just the right outcrop of rock to keep me upright, wild days of gales and rain where we drank from the air, and crisp days of frost where the ice cracked under our feet as the steam from our breath swept past our faces, and as we stopped and doffed our woolly hats more steam rose from our hair. It was the simple joy of being alive, of being young and fit, as Nana led me over the lower fells.
Other days she would insist I did things at a walk, as we hit the High Tops with full rucksacks. She used her old crook for balance on those days, but one day surprised me by producing a very well-worn ice-axe, and in a shaded ghyll filled with early snow she taught me how to cut steps and dance up it, and how to catch myself if I fell.
“This isn’t your rock climbing, Stevie, this is mountaineering. This is looking at the whole great beast that is a fell, and not picking at some scab on its side”
She could be a real snob at times. I still loved her to bits, especially on wild days when she would just yell at the sky, “Yes! This is it, lad, this is being alive!”
Each Monday, after school, I would have more growth juice, and though it left my arse sore and bruised black I knew it was making a difference as Mam had to let the hems down on my trousers and, hair by hair, I started to get what the other boys had always seemed almost to revel in. And I ran, not just at Nana’s but at events all over Cumberland and Westmorland, even into Lancashire proper, and not just Furness. They had published the bill to bugger about with county boundaries, but we ignored it. Furness was still a foreign county, but Lancashire…across the Sands….that was really foreign. This attitude, from a lad who had spent half his life properly abroad; early teenaged years are a time of passions, sometimes odd ones. Speaking of passions…
One night, as Christmas approached, and Iain had football practice, I walked Emily home, as was our practice. A couple of streets away from her door we ducked into a little passage for a snog, one of those that were rapidly becoming the norm for us, and as my fingers meshed themselves in her hair, she was pressing her tongue into my mouth and I was doing my best to push it back into hers. My heart was hammering as if I was in a hard sprint home, and I slowly drew my right hand onto her cheek as she pressed me back against the bricks. I stroked her face, and then slowly, slowly, wetting myself with nerves I traced the line of her chin, and her throat, and just as my palsied hands were drifting towards the slope of her thirteen year old breasts, she simply took that hand and placed it right THERE, and I had a girl’s breast under my hand for the first time ever, although it was through a cardigan, and a blouse, and, I suppose, a bra, and that thought got me so worked up I didn’t notice immediately when she moved in closer. A thigh went between mine, and she moaned into my mouth as the rest of her followed, and that part of her started to grind against my leg, and suddenly she was clutching my hair and shuddering, going “Ah! Ah! Ah!”, then the fingers of one hand digging into my shoulder so hard they left a bruise, as my girlfriend came dry-humping my hard thigh.
She continued to have little twitches for a minute, like those aftershocks we read about in geography, and then she kissed me very, very gently.
“Oh Stevie, that’s so much nicer than on my hand, Thank you….but what about you, are you OK?”
I realised she was feeling me between the legs, and while I was sort of hard, which I had read about, and joked about with the other boys, it was in my chest that I ached for her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I fell back on what I had heard from the other boys.
“It’s OK, Em, it would be too messy for me, I’ll, er….use my hand later. That was great!”
She looked disappointed. “But you didn’t, you know…”
“Yes, but I was there to help you, which was lovely”
“Steve Jones, you are so sweet, and I love you”
She was, I think, a realist at her romantic heart, and rather than wait for an answer she might not get, she just kissed me again. It was still my chest that screamed at me, not just my todger, and I had no idea why.
That moment changed the dynamic between us forever. We had now had sex, of a sort, and that meant that our hands declared their right to roam beyond their prior boundaries, and a few days later, in what we thought of as our passageway, in the darkness of a Northern Winter evening, she slipped my hand under the bottom of her blouse, and then under the band of her bra until her hard point and smooth softness was under my palm, and she got to her happy place once more.
All I can say is that I was fucking confused. I was a teenaged boy. I had my hands on a girl’s bare breasts, while she had an orgasm rubbing herself against me, and…nothing. I had a sort of erection, but not the hard, painful ones the other boys boasted about, and when I tried, in bed, later, with memories of Emily’s flushed face playing in my mind’s eye, and tried my hand….still nothing. I thought of what helped her, what made her shiver, and tried touching one of my own nipples.
Oh god, it was nice, so nice, and I spent the next hour teasing and playing, and then stroking my todger as I knew I was supposed to and, ooooooh. Oh god. Oh my, and there wasn’t much of anything, but just like Em I found myself twitching in little bursts for a couple of minutes. Something had hit me from all directions at once, and I was very, very pleased it had. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I was determined to explore it as fully as I could.
Somehow, the fact that my nipples were bigger passed my sex-crazed weasel of a teenaged mind right by.
The next day, as my post orgasmic body started making tea, Mam crashed the car into a lamp post. Her friend Gordon was along for the ride, of course. The nice policeman recognised his cologne, and got Mam to blow him into a little bag with some chemicals in, and then arrested her for being drunk in charge of a motor vehicle.
She spent that night in the cells, and for the first time in my life I was taken with Iain from our home by Social Services. It wouldn’t be the last time, but at least for the present it was only to emergency fosterers, not…that place.
They were a nice enough couple, and they stayed at ours long enough to help finish cooking the tea, and to help eating it, of course, and then we were off to theirs in their Cortina. They were nice enough, and we took all our school things ready for the next day, which was an odd sort of experience, as the news of the gin-soaked woman had gone all round school. Em was solicitous, of course, and as Mam had been let out n the morning we were able to go home afterwards, which meant, naturally, that I got to walk her home, and….and I moved her hand to my chest, and she put her other down there, and this time it was me who moaned into her mouth.
With hindsight, neither of us knew anything much about se beyond basic biology, what we had heard from schoolmates, and what we had discovered exploring our own bodies. We were very young, we weren’t subject to all the information that rains down on the heads of today’s children, and there was nothing to show where I was odd. There were strict limits engrained n us, and our hands never went inside clothing below the waist. There was certainly no thought of actual intercourse, that was beyond ‘naughty’, although my fantasies did include a vaguely-realised sort of copulation thing that was more a web of sounds and textures than a mental porn film.
Mam was back, and already crying onto her friend’s shoulder, when I got home. She started quietly, accusingly, and then it built up and up, until she was simultaneously accusing me of grotesque acts with Sid and precocious ones with Emily, and her voice rose and rose until she threw her glass at my head, and then there was the knock at the door, and the uniforms, and the emergency foster carers, this time without tea first as Mam was taken to the hospital instead of the nick.
I really, really don’t want to go into details, but that was when it all went really, really bad for us. Social Services marked us down as ‘at risk’, and Iain was packed off to longer-term foster parents. I wasn’t; they cut me away from my brother like I was a diseased limb.
As a disturbed teenager, as someone being seen by a mental health practitioner every bloody Monday, I needed much better care. Care from professionals, not like poor volunteers whose puppy I might bugger.
I went to Castle Keep. Sounds romantic, doesn’t it, but as Carlisle has a castle anything of any note is named after it. Castle chippy, castle newsagents, the Castle pub, even castle bloody adult book shop.
And Castle Keep secure care home. Mitchell was there to look after me.
CAUTION
This chapter deals quite diirectly with sexual abuse of a child. It is brutal, in my opinion. It was hard to write. Chapter 15 will be worse. As stated before I will send a summary to anyone whowishes to avoid the section.
CHAPTER 14
I stood in the doorway of what looked like a rather large suburban house with a car park and a walled garden. There was a small sign on the wall proclaiming it to be Castle Keep Residential Facility, and run by the Council, but that was all the information given apart from the pleasant advice that parking was private and unauthorised vehicles would be removed.
The social worker handed me over to a smiling woman in jeans and a cardigan, who signed a number of documents as I stood with my small bag at my feet and waited silently. She was about fifty, I guessed, greying hair in a bun and absolutely no make up that I could spot. The social worker addressed her as Mrs Cunningham. I noticed a man, standing just round the corner, with a rather large belly pushing against a sort of tunic thing like the one that male nurses wore in the hospital, and after the social worker had wished me good luck, she called him over.
“Alf, put this one in Eden, get its bits of stuff stowed, then get it back to me for the orientation talk”
Alf led me up two flights of stairs, wheezing as he went, until we arrived at a solid-looking door, which he unlocked with a key from a large ring. There were other, similar, doors around us, with names like “Derwent” and “Esk”, and when Eden’s door opened I saw two sets of bunk beds, a table with four chairs around it, two sinks against the wall and what was obviously a toilet behind another door. There were four small wardrobe type things, and without any preamble Alf grabbed my bag, opened one of them and stuffed my possessions into it.
“Stowed, as ordered. Out, you”
I followed him back downstairs and into what was clearly Miss Cunningham’s office, where she sat at a desk with some sort of file before her. Alf left, and I realised there were no other chairs.
“I’ve been reading your file, Jones. Apparently you have no other next of kin apart from your mother, and she may well end up sectioned. Either way, as you are at risk you will be staying here”
“But I do have kin, I have my Nana at Boot, Miss”
She didn’t change expression, she didn’t raise her voice or even alter the tone of it. Flat and calm, no passion showing in any way apart from two little red spots on her cheeks.
“Not according to your doctor’s records, Jones. Don’t ever contradict me again, and do not speak until I tell you to, or you won’t eat for a week, you dirty little shirtlifting cunt. Your records don’t mention it, so she does not exist. We will be your new family here, and we will look after you properly. You will not ply your perverted little trade here, you will not corrupt the other boys and we will assist you to learn to become a normal member of society. If you persist in being a bum boy I will personally inflict a very large amount of pain on you. Now, have we reached an agreement?”
“When can I speak to my Nana, Miss?”
“You do not have a Nana, Jones. You persist in contradicting me.”
She pressed a button on some sort of desk intercom. “Alf? Can you come here, please?”
The florid-faced man came back into the office, and once again without any stress she simply said “Insolence, Alf” and suddenly I was held down over the desk. Cunningham came round from behind it, and I saw she held a cane. Six times she lashed me across my upper thighs until I screamed, and then, her breathing slightly quicker, she just said “Thirlmere, two days, then bring it back here”
He dragged me sobbing out of the room and down a corridor until we reached another locked door, and a flight of steps that led down.
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I suppose it was two days later that I was back in her office, and she was still utterly calm, as I stood there blinking in the daylight. Thirlmere was a cell; the only word that fits better would be dungeon, or perhaps oubliette, that place where prisoners are thrown to rot, forgotten.
Eight feet by four feet. No light at all, not even around the door. A potty for waste, that wasn’t collected until I was let out. No food. No water. No bedding. No bed. I was desperate for a drink, and my stomach ached with hunger, but I realised that I was walking a knife edge, and one wrong word to this bitch would be a seriously bad idea.
“Is it contrite?”
Alf muttered “Dunno, Miss C. You, you contrite? Tell the nice lady”
“Yes, Miss, I am”
I shut my mouth hard, not wanting to risk anything more in case she went lunatic on me again. This woman was dangerous.
“Alf, it’s contrite. Get it changed and show it where things are.”
He led me out of the office this time, rather than dragging me as before, and I was shown a small dining room with long tables set by benches, a shower room, and the walled garden where a number of boys sat and read or played board games. I realised it must be Saturday…how long had I really been in the cell? Alf pointed through the window to the boys, all of whom were wearing similar T-shirts bearing a small picture of the castle on the left breast. They were in three or four solid colours, black, green, blue and yellow visible on the boys outside.
“Aye, you’ll meet them soon enough. Now, off to change.”
He took me back to Eden and unlocked the door. Indicating some clothes on a chair, he just pushed me towards them. They consisted of a cheap pair of jeans, and a T-shirt, the same as the other boys wore, but in lurid pink. In a tired voice, he started ticking off colours.
“Yellow–thief. Black–junky. Blue–runaway. Green---underage sex. Purple---violent. Red---cutter. Pink---arse bandit. Lets the other patients see what sort of a risk you are. Lets us see who we might have to watch in the showers”
I changed into the badly made clothes, and went to put my old things into the cupboard with mu other stuff. Of course, as I should have guessed, it was empty, everything gone, even the bag. Alf actually chuckled.
“Aye, it’s a fresh start you’ll get here. You never know, you might get a boyfriend….or six”
I was soon back down in front of that woman.
“Ah, it’s properly dressed at last. Now, listen to me, my little shitstabber, we are going to lead you out of your ways of sin. Your doctor will be here later to see to your physical welfare, but I will guide your personal development. You will not argue, you will not disrupt, you will not CORrupt. There will be no theft, because I allow no possessions here. You will worship properly on Sundays, and you will remain clean, and silent in front of staff and visitors. Any slandering of this institution will be looked on most gravely and you will by doing so be treated to another holiday below Helvellyn. Those holidays can be extended, so be judicious and respectful at all times. Alf, I do believe it is time for the evening meal, now. Take it away and let it feed”
Alf led me back to the dining room where another fourteen or so boys were waiting silently, with two other older men. I felt all eyes on me as Alf led me to a table with three boys at it already, one purple and two yellows. I went to sit down, and Alf shook his head.
“Last one sat down gets the food for the table”
He pointed to a hatch where two other boys stood with trays, and I joined them after picking up a tray of my own. My first load was soup, bread and butter, in little foil packets. My tray only held two soups, the bread and the plate with the butter, so I took that back to the table and went back to the hatch for the remaining two soups. When I got back to my table with them, all the butter was gone. I must have indicated surprise in some way, as the purple glared at me, but as nobody else was speaking I too stayed silent. I was learning.
The main course was some sort of gristle-rich stew, and sweet was semolina. Once each course was done, it was clearly my job to carry off the dirty plates. I noticed the ‘chef’ count all the cutlery as I handed it back. Once the meal was done, another man came over, sallow and balding, with a Bobby Charlton haircut that just looked stupid.
“You, Miss C, now.”
I knew better already, so just followed him back to her lair. Mitchell was there, in one of two extra chairs. Cunningham nodded to Comb-Over.
“Thank you, Donald. Jones, the good doctor here will be helping you to do what I believe our colonial cousins call ‘get with the programme’. Doctor?”
“Yes, Stevie, your Mother’s misfortune will allow us to help you escape even more quickly from your unfortunate course of perversion and unnatural behaviour. It seems, from your earlier life, that my diagnosis of you as a pederast may have been premature. It s possible that your mental problems go even deeper, but there s a solution, pioneered by an American gentleman, that will help avoid that. I will talk you through the process when you are older and able to understand, but for now, I will examine you. Get undressed”
A raised eyebrow from the hellbitch left me unwilling to risk argument, and soon I was standing naked before them. To my surprise, Mitchell took some measurements, around my hips and waist, then some photographs with a flash camera. He also spent a while squeezing my chest around my nipples, and then produced a needle. Yet again, I felt it enter my rump, but this time I began to wonder what exactly he was sticking into me.
As the needle came out, Miss C looked at me in disgust. “Why are you naked?”
I scrambled to dress, and then she rang for Donald to take me back to Eden. Behind the locked door, the other three boys were already there.
It clicked shut, and I heard the lock turn, and at that point the purple boy nodded to the other two and punched me hard in the stomach.
The first hurt more than anything I had ever suffered before, but the third…the third was the worst, because by then they had run out of butter and he went in on blood.
****CAUTION****
Severely unpleasant scenes of rape, suicide and other abuse. I want to get this part of the story out of the way as it is unpleasant to write and probably just as unpleasant to read. There is a light at the end of the tunnel...but.
CHAPTER 15
I had thought Anthorn hell. This was so far beyond that I had no words. They took turns again before breakfast, dragging me from the corner where I had wrapped myself in a blanket. I had tried the toilet, but the door had no lock and there was no way I could wedge myself in there. I tried to stay in the corner again afterwards, but Alf just ripped the blanket off me, looked at the blood and muttered “Fucking arsebandit. You have two minutes to get down for breakfast or it’s Mrs C”
So, breakfast it was. I sat at the table with my three rapists, trying not to look at them, really trying not to look when the purple started miming pushing a sausage into his mouth. I stood up to take back the plates, and Don saw a bloodstain where I had been sitting, even though I had packed my bottom with the painfully harsh Izal ‘medicated’ toilet paper on offer.
“You dirty little cunt, already at it I see…Mrs C will want to see you”
So it proved. To the smirks of my rapists I was marched in to see the hag. It may sound like I was frigidly calm, but I was far from it. What I was, was in deep shock. I am not going to describe the feelings in detail; anyone with a soul will already have some idea, and anyone who does not understand already is simply incapable of such understanding and, to be honest, probably not fully human. She didn’t disappoint.
“You filthy fucking whore. I think it is clear that you are not truly contrite after all. Strip. Now.”
All this, as before, with no drama in her voice, no audible anger. It was as if she was asking for some stamps at the Post Office, and that was what frightened me more than anything. I mentioned not being fully human. She wasn’t. She walked round me, calmly tutting as she saw the injuries.
“I see you enjoy the rougher side of rutting. Well, there are several boys here who enjoy rough and tumble, and I am sure that you will meet all of them in due course. Dress.”
She walked over to the desk and dialled a number.
“Harold? Elsie Cunningham. Your little pet has been fornicating and may need some running repairs. An hour? Fine, I will have tea and biscuits ready. You, wait outside the door”
She had kept the toilet paper, but I had at last stopped actively bleeding, though I dreaded having to go to the toilet. She left me standing there for the hour, of course, until Mitchell arrived and for an hour afterwards, as tea was taken past me, and then finally I was brought in, still standing. She prodded me n the chest with her cane, which really hurt, far more than I expected.
“Strip”
Once more naked before the two of them, and Mitchell paid close attention to the damage.
“We do like it rough, don’t we? But nothing essential damaged, and the more you use it, the easier it will get. Hmmm…areolae developing nicely, and a touch more callipygian below…yes, Elsie, I think she is going to be an ideal subject”
“It, Harold, it. One mustn’t form attachments to these little animals. Thank you for your prompt response, shall we see you at the Lodge at the weekend? Raynor will be wanting to discuss your progress, I am sure. Till then?”
The snake left, and I was left with the bitch, still naked.
“Donald, if you please?”
Six more strokes. Three more days in Thirlmere. That had one advantage; no food for all that time meant I didn’t have to try and shit. There is no need for any more detail on that point.
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After I got out of the darkness, I had it all again, of course. And again, and again, and true to her word the hag moved me around the dorms so that I could CORrupt as many of her boys as possible, which allowed me to be punished some more, and….I was literally, truly, losing the will to live.
We were going to school on four days each week, taken by minibus to a local Approved School that taught us nothing like what I had been getting at Netherhall. Basic maths, English, and, of course, Religious Instruction, which did exactly what it said. Mrs C wanted us all to be sunbeams for Jesus, apparently, so we got the heavy duty hellfire version. The Approved School boys, no girls, all wore overalls, a sort of boiler suit thing, and I realised quite quickly that there was a system of status that rode along with wearing the T-shirts. We were all mad, officially, so we had a cachet that the various subspecies of Borstal scum rarely achieved, especially the purples. Pink, on the other hand…
The third day at the school I was sold to a group of boys for an hour in the toilets. A few days later it was to a couple of the screws.
I really, really don’t want to go on any more about this. I tried finding something to cut my wrists, and nearly managed it on the edge of the Izal dispenser, which I honed with a small stone I pocketed at the school one day when I bent down ostensibly to tie my laces, but I was caught by one of the blacks, I was in Esk, who came into the cubicle for a blow job, and then the metal dispenser went and it was just the paper packets.
I stopped eating, which after all was what they wanted when I went to Thirlmere, and under Mitchell’s supervision they forced my jaws apart and fed me by tube. I asked one of the purples to try breaking my neck when he was about to come, as a boy had said it was a trick he had heard his brother boast about when fucking a chicken, but he refused. That is a mark of how utterly hopeless I was, how I was grasping at any straw, even a second-hand boast based on a fantasy.
I didn’t hope to survive, to escape any more. I just wanted to be dead, for it all to be over. The other things that were happening were just the icing on a cake made of shit.
You know, it may seem at times as if I was privy to Mitchell’s thoughts, that he discussed his plans like some badly-scripted James Bond villain. It wasn’t like that at all. What little I now know of what the cunt did to me, what he was trying to do to me, comes from the notes I have already mentioned, that it took two decades to get access to. They are not like him; he was always hungry, always almost drooling as he looked at me, measured, took pictures. The notes were dry, precise, terrifying in their utter banality.
I was finally noticing what Mitchell had been measuring and recording since that first injection, as things became too obvious even for me to miss, and they certainly weren’t missed by the boys. As my breasts grew, the price at the school was raised, as a fuck toy with real tits was worth a lot more snout. Some people didn’t have to pay, of course, such as whoever was in the dorm I was shoved into, or Don, or Alf….
Alf, Alf was a godsend. Nobody wants to rape you when you have the clap, and while Mitchell took me through the course of antibiotics I was free to sleep and go some way to recovery down there. Yes, I was happy to have a dose, even with all its inherent discomfort, because I was left alone. Can anyone sink any lower?
Three years. Three fucking years. Not a word from Mam, nothing from Iain, or Nana, or Emily, and what would she see? Her boyfriend, or the hollow-faced girl that looked back from the mirrors at me? The one the bitch now insisted wear a fucking bra? That, of course, was only at Castle Keep; when I was getting my rich and challenging education I had to strap everything down as otherwise questions might be asked.
I had no idea why Mitchell was doing this, none at all till long after, but I knew why Mrs C indulged him, oh yes, and that was because she was clinically insane. That was beside the fact that as I learned to tune out the pain of the beatings I was able to observe better what she was doing, and in particular I got that smell, that smell from my mother’s laundry basket all those years ago, the stink of a woman in arousal.
Mitchell had called them growth hormones, or other such words, and of course they were nothing of the sort. With hindsight, and access to his notes, they were an interesting cocktail of estrogens and other nasties, and their purpose was to alter me, and that was what they did. As soon as I had realised their nature, I stopped taking the pills. As they had been fed to me under supervision by Alf, or Don, or Charlie…oh god, Charlie. Oh god.
As they had been personally giving me my daily pill, they saw immediately when I stopped taking them. There was no brutal attempt to force them into me, just more visits from Mitchell, and more injections, until I started taking the pills again. It saved me the pain of the beating that went with each injection.
I was taller, after those three years, five foot two as it turned out. I had finally outgrown my mother. I wasn’t anything like Karen in build, certainly not like Emily, who I found myself missing dreadfully, but I had hips and a stupid fat arse and, after those three years, what my bra told me was a C-cup. Cunningham would never let me have a belt, of course, and after my attempts she had my shoes replaced with elastic-sided plimsolls, so at first I had real problems with my trousers, till she relented and had some delivered in a girl’s cut.
Clothes. Charlie….he liked schoolgirls, so every so often he would push me into the dorm and lock the door, and on the bed would be some clothes, a uniform, and some little bits of make up, and he would lock me in, and half an hour later he would come back, and afterwards he would pack everything away again and leave whistling after kicking me back out of the dorm.
There were occasional evening visitors, almost all male, but once a couple came and she sat to one side and made grunting noises and little requests as he did his thing, and several of them dressed me up for the event. I got used to the taste of lipstick, just as I got used to the taste of my own blood, and other things.
All of that sounds like it was a non stop round of rapes and beatings, but that’s just because that’s exactly what it was.
Three years, and then…and then, one day, one Spring day, we were bussed down to the Borstal for our lessons, and probably for my handlers-for-the-day to make a bit of income from me, and instead we were herded into an auditorium, assembly hall, large space, whatever. Apparently, someone in the local authority had decided that an Aspirational Talk would be a Good Thing, and we were to be Addressed by a Successful Working Class Man. I could hear the capitals as the chief screw spoke on the little stage, and then on came the SWCM, and a woman.
“Boys, I give you Brian Dennahy, player-coach of Carlisle City FC, and his wife. Mr and Mrs Dennahy!”
We applauded dutifully, and they stepped onto the stage. Of course, to better stay under observation, I was very near the front, and as they came up to the microphones I saw Mrs Dennahy look straight at me ,and her eyes flew wide open.
It was my goddess.
This still addresses traumatic issues, but is largely past the brutal subjects of the last two chapters. A goddess is invoked.
CHAPTER 16
She was staring straight at me, her mouth opening, and I realised she was about to jump up and come down from the stage, and for an instant I hoped she would, for it would all be over, and my darling Karen would take me home with her, and…and then I realised that this was a secure place, and she wouldn’t be allowed, and by the time she was able to tell anyone I might find myself in a shallow grave somewhere.
That was a sudden change of my feelings. For three years had been hoping, trying, to die, to get it all over with, and suddenly hope danced in front of me in a pretty dress and I wanted to live, really, really needed to live. I made the slightest of head shakes possible and saw her recognise my meaning, and after it was over we were allowed to file past the great man and his lovely wife, and I caught just the faintest whisper from her.
“Stay alive”
What happened afterwards I only know from what the people concerned later told me, so there will be errors and omissions, but from now on I will be omitting what happened on a day by day basis to me because you have already been told more than it is good for a decent soul to bear. I will make one point, though, and that is that I have named none of the boys, described none of them. I will not do so. There were so many of them, some of them brutal, some of them needy, many of them simply following their peers. For all of their sinning against me, they were still, really, only children, and children whose mentors, whose fucking ‘carers’, were people like Alf, and Charlie, and the hellbitch herself. Children who would have had their own little holidays in Thirlmere, and who only moved up the pecking order because I was permanently crucified at the bottom of it.
So, this is what I was told. It will seem disjointed; some conversations Karen could recount almost verbatim, some things were less clear. As I write this, I am both excited and seriously disturbed by the memories it brings back. Please allow for my difficulty with that part of my life.
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Karen had come along to the Borstal session because, well, it was what she had to do. It went with the position. Brian had indeed looked after her well, she had made that leap from poverty using her body, her smile and, in her pride, her personality. Most people recognised that she had no pretensions, though she did love to tease and flirt, and she was well aware of my lusting after her from afar. She was five years older than me, but at that age five years is an unbridgeable gulf.
She told me she had always found me cute, like a little puppy that just adores its owner, for those were the eyes I had when I was sound her. In my youthful conceit I had thought that I had successfully concealed my infatuation, but for a practised tease like Karen that was as clear as still water. I was sweet, she said, sweet and harmless and interesting, and then Emily was there, the spotty fat girl, and everything was even sweeter to watch. Not only that, but Emily had a mind, and they shared tastes, and there were so many delights to keep her smiling until Brian proposed.
And then, one day, I was gone. Just like some odd spy thriller, I had dropped off the world into–where? My girlfriend came round for months, just looking for any word or hint of where I was, and then as all hope drained from her eyes and her posture she started to do little things to help out, to be around the books she loved and not alone as she was in the crowds at school. At fifteen, she started officially working part-time as an assistant, and her acne began to ease as her body stayed plump.
It was Sid who seemed hardest hit. I had really clicked with him, as he spotted someone else with a mind that wanted to fly free and a body or soul that imposed restrictions. He had apparently gone to the school, along with Emily, to see if there was any way to track me down, and that turned out to be something that froze what was left of my spirit.
Apparently, Social Services were not able to release details to a non-relative. There were no relatives on file apart from my mother, who was in a ward devoted to chronic alcoholism and was hardly competent.
They asked about my grandmother. What grandmother? The person to whom Mam had assigned my guardianship had no knowledge of her.
Who was this person? We are not at liberty to say, but it is a medical practitioner.
Stonewalled at every turn, Emily had refused to give up. She had a rough idea of where Nana lived, and for some months she rode the Coast Line down on a Saturday, and the La’l Ratty up the Dale, and walked till her feet hurt, but she never found the cottage, never found Nana. Eventually, it all became like a dream, some Golden Age of the past that probably never existed, and she settled into her part-time job and her girliness with Karen, as more life drained from Sid, until the day when Brian finally did ask the Question, and my goddess was out of Maryport like a rat up a drainpipe.
That was all she knew up until that day when she looked out over a sea of bored little shits, and a lot of bored big shits, and in the middle a small group of bright colour, around a shocking pink T-shirt, and that boy was very girly, and…oh shit.
She had caught my eye, and seen my little gesture, “No!” and with a crash she understood. This was a juvenile prison, in all but name, and she wasn’t going to take my hand and just walk out, not past a whole row of screws, and if she made a fuss…well, a fuss would be made over me, and that would be something terrible. Some aspect of the situation, she said, something about my face, some little thing was tapping at her mind saying “Danger”
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Karen left the horrible place on Brian’s arm, smiling falsely at all around, until they were safe in the Jaguar and she started to shake.
“What’s up, pet?”
“Just get me home, Bri, I want to be well away before I tell you”
He drove them smoothly, but not too fast, well, not that much too fast, to the rather nice place she had picked out on the Eden bank, and as soon as he had parked in one of the double garages she burst into tears, real tears, the full-force scream of emotion.
“Christ, Karen, what’s the matter?”
“Bri, you remember me telling you about that tiny little kid, had the crush on me? The one I thought might be dead?”
“Fuck’s sake, love, not in that shithole”
“Yes…”
Brian thought for a while, and she was chilled by the way his tone changed.
“Kaz, love, tell me…was he in overalls, blue overalls, or was he in a T-shirt and jeans?”
“A pink T-shirt”
“Oh fuck. Oh fucking hell. You told me he had a girlfriend, yes?”
“Yeah, fat little spotty thing, but lovely, really sweet, Emily”
“Then he is truly fucked. Look, Kaz, you know my background, you know I was a bad boy, that’s why we went to that fucking place today.”
Karen realised he was actually shaking.
“I spent a year in there, a year of…just let’s agree it was not a good time. Those T-shirts, that’s Flogger Cunningham’s little private hell.”
He was staring off into space, lost in some old vision. “Karen…do you remember me telling you about Eric Wildman, the coaching assistant? The one found dead at home a year or so ago?”
“Yes…I remember you saying how he made your skin crawl, always coming into the showers after training when you were an apprentice”
“Yeah, my skin crawled for a fucking good reason. He obviously liked ‘em a bit younger than most men, and a bit less girly.”
He sat silent for a minute. “It was when I was first seeing you, and he made a joke about you being rather mature, and then….then he suggested that if I ever fancied something a bit fresher, that was his word, fresher, he knew somewhere I could get it…
“We heard stories, in the borstal, about that place. About fucking parties, and bigwigs, and…..fuck, Kaz, we have to get the little sod out of there”
“They won’t talk to us, Bri, Sid and Em tried for months, and they got stonewalled.”
“Well, call Sid, call him now, and see what we can come up with. Kaz, if he stays there he’s as good as dead”
Sid answered first ring, and Emily was there.
“Can I please speak to her, Sid? Ta….Em, it’s Kaz, yeah, I’m fine, look, shit, hell...I’ve just seen Stevie”
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Emily stood in stunned silence as Karen continued to talk down the line. He was alive. He wasn’t dead. After an eternity that could only have been seconds, she looked at Sid.
“Karen’s found Stevie”
Sid collapsed on the floor, and she reached down to take his hand as a world of thoughts tore her mind apart. His Nana. His Nana.
“Karen, we have to find his Nana and tell her, she must be able to get him”
That was when Brian finally did become that Bad Boy Made Good, made very Good indeed.
I have tried to reconstruct what they said, how they felt, but I can only go by their words, not their inner feelings, so if I go overboard please forgive my overdramatic excess, but all of this WAS drama for me, it was real.
Brian knew someone, who knew someone, and that second someone was an independent muck raker, as his targets called him, or investigative journalist, as he actually preferred. Brian had him round at the house within three days, and locked Karen out of the room when he told his story.
That one detail disturbs me now, and I wonder what exactly Brian Dennahy went through in his own time at the borstal. Whatever it was, he didn’t, and doesn’t, want his wife to know. That both cheers me and appals me. It means that I was not alone in my suffering, and also that I was not alone in my suffering; in other words, comfort in realising that I was not some mad, bad, evil child that needed to be punished, but also that countless numbers of other lost children suffered at least as badly as me.
While Dave Embleton went off to do his bit, Brian drove over to Maryport with Karen, and as Sid locked up early four people armed with the Yellow Pages drove down the coast to Ravenglass and, pub by pub, worked their way up the Dale.
Emily had clear memories of the Ratty, and of things around the Estuary, but she was never a fells lass, nor a lover of pubs, and so they drove up the valley calling in at pub by pub, asking after a woman whose surname Emily had never heard, until, finally, they ended up in the Boot Inn and Arthur ended their quest.
Emily said that he immediately recognised Brian, then looked at her as if he knew her but couldn’t place her, saw something in her face, and then just said “Have you got him?”
Brian answered. “Not yet. Is she here”
Arthur called out to the bar “They think they’ve found Ada’s kid. Someone go and get her, please”
Ten minutes later, in Emily’s words, a leathery gnome of a woman came running into the bar, as a customer ran in behind her and pointed her at them. Her eyes went wide.
“Emily? Stevie’s Emily? Tha’s got my boy?”
Brian caught her as she collapsed, and Arthur immediately got a pot of tea going, and a rum on the table. Half the pub was gathered round them, and Karen smiled as nicely as she could and asked them, nicely, if they wouldn’t please leave them alone for a bit, while fighting the urge to scream at them. Nana was crying, and clinging onto Em as if she would drown if she let go, but the rum helped and eventually she was able to talk without her voice breaking. She looked at Karen.
“I know thee. Tha were that library lass that my boy fancied, went off with some footballer or other”
“That’s the some footballer or other there. My husband, Brian. Look, we’ve spent hours trying to find this place, we need to get something to eat and explain what we think has happened.”
“Arthur? Can tha feed this lot, I’ll sort thee in the morn”
Brian called out “No, pal, I‘ll sort you out now. And have you a couple of rooms for us, I’ve had a bit of a day of it and I need a drink”
“There’s room for thee in my cott!”
Emily smiled “I’ve told them about how you use the News of the World…”
And that wasn’t the start of it, and certainly not the end, but the first bricks were starting to come away from the wall.
CHAPTER 17
That was an evening of deep pain for Nana as Karen and Brian filled her in on what sort of place I was in. Brian explained about his friend’s friend after Nana’s tears had eased a bit, and also, very slowly, and gently, and brutally, why she could not just march in and get me.
“There were rumours, Ada, about times there when things went a bit far, and lads never came out. They…absconded and dropped off the map, and nobody ever saw them again. If we kick up a fuss now, they might abscond him. We need evidence to get him out, and we need to do it with back up”
“From what tha say, the police won’t be too willing”
“Then we give them no choice. If Dave can get enough, then we go in hard with the bizzies and take the place apart. If we go in on our own, he’s as good as dead”
“What do we need?”
“A tame lawyer would be nice. I have one for my contracts, but he might know a suitable shark for this”
“Hang on. Arthur, can I use thy phone?”
Ten minutes later she was talking to Roger Houston, the man I had met so long ago and who Nana had warned me off.
“Roger, it’s Ada. Aye, I’m in the Boot. Look, this is really, really important….I know tha remember my little lad, the one that went missing. Well, we’ve found him”
“Na, Roger, he’s been locked up, and worse…”
“Aye, a care home type place, but with a reputation. Listen…”
She gave him a summary of what they knew. “Now, I know tha liked the lad, and after aal these years of the two of thee coming back here I know tha never meant any harm to him, despite…”
“What the two of thee do together is thy business, tha’re adults, but they’re doing it to Stevie, and for three FUCKING YEARS!”
“Sorry. I’m just a bit, tha knows…aye, aye, if tha can, we need aal we can get. Simon? Of course. When?”
She turned to the table. “Who can stay here for a couple of days? They’re coming up. Brian, I’ve hooked thee thy shark”
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This was a hard time for me. I knew they had found me, I knew my beloved wouldn’t let me down, but I still had to live each day, survive each day. I had stopped crying over two years before, but I could still scream. Except when my mouth was blocked, of course.
Dave was already at work, with a couple of friends, and what I didn’t know was that they had been scouting the hellhole from every angle possible, until they found somewhere that they could use a long lens from. Embleton was methodical in his investigations, turning over everything from the rubbish bins to the numbers of visiting cars, and he had a friend, or victim, or associate in whatever you call his system, who had access to the Police computer, and as my evening performances were being brought to a successful (for somebody) conclusion, he was capturing faces and cars on film.
His breakthrough came at a time when I was starting to despair once more, and believing that Karen had abandoned me in shame and horror. That was the thing; they can call it whatever they like, but when you spend all day and every day being told you are a worthless piece of shit, unfit to be anything other than holes for someone better than you to fill, you start to believe it. If you were worth something, your mother, or family, or friends, would have come for you by now, so you must be that object, that toy, in reality.
So, there I was, one afternoon. I was wearing a black push-up bra under a white blouse two or three sizes too small so that my tits were almost popping the buttons, with a partly-undone tie that Charlie always made sure to collect before I could hide it, a tartan mini skirt and stupidly high sandals over black stockings, with suspenders of course. Hair in two bunches, heavily made up…I mean, how many real schoolgirls do you see looking anything like that? Charlie was on my back, grunting as he banged away at me as I tried to disappear off into the world of the clouds outside my window, looking for shapes, for fells and tarns, and trying to tune out the feel of him inside me. No, I didn’t spot any flash of reflected light, but a quarter of a mile away a photographer was doing his best not to shake too much as he wept over his long-lensed SLR camera.
He had caught many things that afternoon, starting with Charlie’s casual back-handed slap, and me as I changed, and then all sorts of interesting angles as the turd did me doggy style against the window sill. He caught both our faces, in some delightful detail. He went through four rolls of film, and that was the day that Cunningham’s empire finally started to fall down on her filthy head.
While a truly horrified photographer was sobbing in his car before reporting back to Dave Embleton, Emily was haranguing Miss Graham, trying to get her to see that I needed every possible ally, and her trump card was a simple one: I was in that place not because I had done anything wrong, but because my mother had left. She invoked my Nana’s love, and that seemed to do the trick.
Every ally, every friend, no matter how weak, was pulled into it
Embleton pulled up another shock for them all, though, the day after Charlie and the Chocolate Highway had been immortalised on film, and that was Mam.
All this time, all these years, Nana had been trying to find not just me, but her daughter, and every enquiry was met with ‘next of kin only’, and that avenue had been closed down with lies and fraud. Embleton set a team of what might now be called data miners to trawl through death records, employment records, court notices, anything that might give a clue.
Eventually, they got it, in a burial notice in a Carlisle hospital’s archives they had obtained by methods that were…questionable.
On April 14th, 1974, my mother had choked on her own vomit in a Sally Ann shelter in Workington. She had been cremated at council expense. I was an orphan, and Nana had lost a child. There is a natural order to things, which doesn’t always work out, and it is this: a parent should predecease their children.
Now, all that she had left was me, and that was still very doubtful.
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After Roger and Simon had driven up, Brian had not so much insisted as instructed that Nana move for the duration into their house on the Eden, and every few days there was a council of war. That was the term Emily coined when she was told of Charlie’s moment of glory, though she was not allowed to see the photos.
Dave had come up with an interesting list of visitors, including a magistrate and two police officers, one an Inspector, and had another revelation.
“I am sort of freelance, you know, Brian, and, well, I have an offer for the story. I’ve not spelled out where it is to them, but I could get quite a good sum…and the publicity would do us no harm.”
“ ‘Us’?”
“After what I’ve seen so far, Brian, most definitely it’s ‘us’. We just need to find the best way to crack the place open. If we get it wrong, he stays there, or worse”
Roger was smiling at this point, definitely as a shark would. “ I have some information from a…discreet source. There is a Chief Super in the area who likes to spend his weekends in London”
It was Sid who got the reference first. “Oh, dear, he’s one of the bona boys….in blue.”
Roger grinned. “Yes, Simon was sure he’d vada’d his jolly old eek somewhere, and then I came across him…in a manner of speaking…in a bona little lattie in Wardour Street”
Emily was puzzled. “English would be nice…”
Roger quietly explained. “Polari, my dear, a sort of mixture of backslang and Italian used by theatrical folk and gay men, and often they were the same, back in the days of our callow youth. Not true, Sid my love?”
Simon was nodding. “Eek–ecaf–face. So Simon thought he’d seen him before, and then I saw him in a nice little establishment for the discerning gentleman in Soho. Queer as a nine bob note, my darling”
Nana was dubious. “So he might be one of they who are hurting my boy?”
Sid sighed. “Ada, a man who like women doesn’t go for little girls, does he? Why should a gay man want a little boy? Roger, what sort of trade was he into when you saw him?”
“Oh, very Mary, our copper, very great hairy butch things, his type, all moustaches and leather. Certainly not your Stevie’s type”
Nana was thoughtful. “So what do we do?”
Save had the final answer. “I talk to the Screws again, and then I talk to our Queen of the Peelers”
Roger snorted. “Peelers…”
“No, seriously, I let him know what we have on that place, I tell him that we will be releasing it to the Screws as the coppers go in, and then if he argues I give him some more facts. What details, Roger? I can get pics if we need them”
Roger frowned. “We still have one big problem, and that is getting a warrant, and getting one issued without telling Cunningham what we are about to do”
Dave nodded. “The bitch is a Mason….”
“I’ll have a word with dear Simon. If we take this past the Magistrate’s level. I think the level of corruption we already have should give us an excuse to at least go out of area. As Dave says, we need this to be a true surprise, and I trust nobody at all around here. Leave it to us”
And so the ideas came together, and still I was in there, still hurting and being hurt.
.
CHAPTER 18
I have still not named any of the other boys, nor described them,
but one of them was just wiping his cock after he had finished with me in the day room when the hellbitch came in.
“Ye gods, it can’t even restrain its lust until it’s in private. Alf, Thirlmere, three days.”
No big deal. Along with my ability to cry, I had lost my fear of the darkness down there. I still got no food, nor water, so I always kept a slice of stale bread, if I could, in my pockets, sifting for crumbs as I lay in the dark, and drank as often as I could manage during the day. I had developed my version of a pregnant woman’s labour pack, the bare essentials in one place, in my own case as much in the way of odd scraps in my pockets as I could get and a fully hydrated body.
Three days was pushing it, though, as while I had got used to fasting, it was the thirst that got me. Once, only once, when the witch had sent me there for four days, I tried drinking my own piss from the chamber pot, but it didn’t really help. I suppose most people would have vomited by that stage, but, well..
It wasn’t the first time. I will say no more. Cunningham’s friends….
I went into the darkness almost grateful. Every day I spent in there was a day I wasn’t raped, and while I know the apologists for those things tell stories of ‘learning to like it’, that never fucking happened; every single time was a nightmare, and the nightmare was endless, a horror story in an infinite number of chapters.
I was actually looking at my approaching legal maturity, and what would happen then? Released into society with a thank you, and a story for the papers? Or a spade to the back of the head and a shallow grave somewhere? Or that cunt Mitchell, a needle, and just another teenaged dead junkie found in an alley? I clung to Karen, prayed to my goddess, she couldn’t fail me, because if she did, I was dead.
I had, by now, a technique of sorts, and it was a type of catatonia. I recycled, endlessly, the good times. Almost beating that lad on my first race. Betson and the apple juice. My first kiss with Em. My first sight of Karen’s thighs slipping smoothly together under the tiniest of skirts. Sid getting really, really excited about Niven’s invented universe. Nana screaming at the sky on a wild day on top of the high fells, feeling the world and life hammering through her soul. Racing Iain home. That kiss with Em in the alley when she came on my thigh. I knew all about coming, now, oh yes, but that, that was a small clean thing that I held in my soul to keep the filth of my life from soiling it.
I had lost track of the days when there was a sudden avalanche of light as the door opened. A dark silhouette stood there silent, just for an instant, as I lay on the concrete floor, and I was away in a world of love and life when I heard “Jesus fucking Christ, somebody call an ambulance”
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They brought me out of hell on one of those wheeled stretcher things and Karen was there, sobbing like her heart was being ripped out through her throat. There were flashes going off everywhere; I later found out Dave and Roger’s deal with the Bona Boy in Blue had included immediate access to the raid that had been meticulously assembled by a small team of mid-ranking officers under the Chief Super in question. Teams were assembled, equipment loaded into vans, and nobody, nobody at all, told the location of the raid until they were on their way. This was well before mobile phones were around, so the only way any of Cunningham’s friends or, I suppose, customers could warn her would have been by police radio, which would have been a quick route to a cell in the circumstances.
They formed up on two parallel streets, out of their vans with helmets and short shields, truncheons out, and as they waited either side, the CS rang the bell himself. Dave said that he saw it as a boost to his career, as opposed to what Roger could have done for it. Alf answered.
“Police, we have a warrant to search…”
The slammed door was put in with a sledge hammer and Alf was taken straight off his feet by a police dog, and the CS was into Flogger’s office as she rose in indignation to tell him his career had just gone down in spectacular flames. He showed her the warrant, and had her removed.
It was apparently an hour before they found me, as one of the smallest and newest boys told them of Cunningham’s little holiday home and Charlie locked himself in Esk and tried to hang himself with ‘my’ tie.
The copper who found me was apparently struggling to hold his stomach in check, because..
Because there were other rooms in the cellar, that I hadn’t seen, and although I now know what was there I don’t think I want to spell it our here. I had been wondering what would happen when I hit eighteen, and those rooms were apparently where some boys had graduated from the home.
They began digging the grounds the same day.
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I knew nothing of this, as some well-meaning quack had dosed me to the eyeballs with some seriously good shit while they ran a drip into me to try and boost my fluid levels, and the siren wailed, and the blue lights flashed, and I went away from everything.
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I was lying on clean sheets, and there was sunlight through a window. Someone was holding my hand loosely, and I could hear snoring. I tried to sit up, and nearly threw up as the room span.
“Stevie?”
It was a girl’s voice. A face came into view, flaming curls, beautiful, my beloved Karen, and then another, now even more beautiful to me, all spots cleared, well, nearly….you notice the smallest things, the least important, when your world changes, and it was Emily whose tears fell onto my pillow, and then the snoring stopped as they shook Nana awake and she wailed her pain to the world as she clung to me.
It was a long time before we could have any coherent conversation. I had sort of got out of the habit of talking to people, you see. For a while there had been visitors who wanted me to talk dirty to them, or praise their great prowess as wondrous lovers, but that had been my one successful bit of rebellion. It got me more time in the dark, but, as I have said, there was nobody in there to harm me.
I surprised them all when the first male nurse came in that day, by screaming and trying to get out of the bed, and apparently it was Karen who worked it out. The uniforms…from then on, all my medical visitors were female. I had any number of examinations, and once the antibiotics had done their job, and the lice had been removed, there were a number of...procedures to repair the damage done to me by so many rapes. And not once did I see that other doctor, for which I thanked the god I no longer believed in.
Nana was sleeping with me, on a cot in the room, and Karen, Emily and Sid were running a shift system so that we never, ever had to be alone, and that was something I was terrified of. I was fully aware that that bitch had a lot of friends, and even with the coppers stationed outside my room I could never be sure of anyone except my little group of friends.
One day, I woke from a doze to see two tall men staring at me, and I thought that was it, and then one of them started crying while the second wrapped him in a hug, and I remembered the two toffs from a lifetime ago, and I managed to smile at them. I didn’t know then how much they had done for me, but once I was well, and the full story had been given to me, I realised that they were part of a very select crew.
So many others before me, without that luck. Oh god.
Emily there, every day she could manage, as school still had its call on her, and Nana, prattling on without a pause, always in the most stupidly cheerful voice she could manage, until the day I asked her what was happening with Cunningham, Alf, Don, Charlie….
“Not now, pet, not now. When tha’re stronger, then aye, mebbe.”
Finally I left hospital, and Karen and Brian took us all in while I healed, and the police dug, and the case hit the News of the World first, and then every other paper, as the extent of the corruption and evil was unveiled, despite a very clumsy and partial arson of council records.
Nobody had yet mentioned my bodily changes, but Emily provided me with a number of comfortable items including some much better bras, acting as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Nobody stressed me, nobody was even the slightest downbeat around me, until I was well into my sessions with a therapist and a police witness statement scribe.
I look back now and I realise that my reaction to the male nurse had disturbed them, and they were all assuming I was as fragile as a snowflake. I had survived three years of hell; couldn’t they see I must have some inner strength, just a little bit?
The façade started to break when I asked the obvious question, the day after Don was found face-down in the Eden. The river, not the cell, of course.
“Where’s Iain?”
CHAPTER 19
There were so many things going on just then, things I didn’t see or know about till it was all over, or very nearly. What I was involved with was my healing, or healing as much as I was able.
So much of it could never go away, never get better. I took what I could, though, clinging onto the wonders of my release, and all through it the love of my friends.
I didn’t settle with men around me for a long time, but a few were always there, always welcome. Simon and Roger, of course, and dear Brian, who had done so much. It was clear that Karen had found more than a ticket out of a dead end life, but a gem, and at times, when we spoke, and Brian went a little distant, I knew that there were things in his own past that tied us almost as brothers.
It was the same with Sid. He prattled on and on, making jokes of everything, particularly of the fact that with three lost years I had a huge number of books to get through, and how that made him jealous. All the time, I could feel his own memories, his own pain, bubbling away beneath.
I was standing naked one morning, in my room, my little sanctuary, looking at myself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door. I was seeing myself through two sets of eyes. One, dispassionately, saw the girl. She wasn’t tall, but she had long and shapely legs for her height, and moderately large and shapely breasts which were only marred by the faint scars of old bites. Her body wasn’t heavy in the hips, but definitely female, and attractively so, marred only by the small but obvious penis. Strawberry blonde hair, clean now, fell to her shoulders.
Through my own eyes, as Steve, I saw myself warped. The hollows, the dark patches beneath the eyes, had gone, and while the various scars were still there, they were healing. I knew, however, that I could never be myself again. Even cutting the tits off wouldn’t get rid of the changes that had come to my pelvis, and that was like a small death. Mitchell, for whatever reason, had killed me.
I have read stories, years after things finally ended, or ended as much as they could, and there is a sort of convention in them. The changed boy learns to love his new femininity, embraces his curves, leaps into womanhood with a smile. Just like I learned to love it when men, and women, did those things to me? My body was just another type of rape, of murder, almost, but I was still alive to see my own corpse. Stupid, irrelevant thoughts came to me. I remembered those two boys who had chewed up and spat out the rest of the field on that windy race day, and knew I could never, ever compete against them. I could never compete against anyone. I wasn’t male anymore, and as much as I didn’t want it, I could never be female. I was standing there cursing and looking at my stupid fucking tits when Emily came in.
“Stevie….you OK?”
“Fucking look at me, is this OK?”
She came up behind me and put her arms around me. “Somehow, love, I don’t think telling you how pretty you look would go down well, so hear me out for a bit.”
I started to make some angry reply, and she just covered my mouth with her hand.
“Steve, I fell in love with you at school. I was the awkward one–no, just shut up and let me speak. You came in and made that speech, that day you arrived, and sat by me, and you were funny, you were cheeky, and I could see that you were nervous under it all. You looked like a sponge; the more people laughed the more you soaked it up.
“I had enough crap in my life even then to spot a victim, and you were like that, but as soon as you got a chance you bloomed, and I was jealous. I was fat, I had a face like the moon, all holes and pimples, and you didn’t mind, and you ---shut up---you took me and you kissed me and you didn’t hide me away as the fat spotty girl that you played with in private. You even took me to your Nana’s, and told the world I was yours, and you were mine”
She came round to the front of me, and held my eyes with hers, and we were both crying.
“Do you remember that time we…oh, crap, the time I dry humped your leg till I came? That was the first time I ever made love to anyone, the first time anyone had ever loved me in any way whatsoever, and I have held that memory ever since. I loved you then, Steve Jones, and I love you now, and I don’t give a shit what you look like, because you did the same for me. Have you got that?”
She took her hand from my mouth, and kissed me, hard, and it was so different from all the others who had kissed me, their breath stale with tobacco or alcohol or worse, and so I did what I had dreamt of for three years, and kissed her back, and as I did so I realised that I was crying for the first time in an age.
Em let me go and stepped back, and slowly undressed until she stood naked and blushing before me. She was taller, by three inches or so, and plumper, though no longer as much of a butterball as she had been, but I hadn’t cared then and I didn’t now. Her dark curls fell to breasts that an odd corner of my abused mind noted were smaller than my own, and further down…
She leant in again, and kissed me again, and then led me over to the bed and we slipped together under the covers.
No, we didn’t. Life isn’t that simple, unlike her books, but she held me, and I held her, and after a while I drifted off to sleep in the warmth of her presence, and I didn’t need to hide in memories of the high fells and good times of the past, because the present was catching up.
From then on, whenever she stayed, she stayed with me.
It was Karen who found us, that lunchtime, as we dozed together, and she woke me with another kiss, and slowly, slowly, those two, and Nana, broke down the horror of physical contact I had learned in that place.
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My statement was a marathon task, and once it was over the journalists were at me. Dave had done so much to get me out, even if it was to his financial advantage, and I couldn’t begrudge him my cooperation, though it had to be in very short bursts. One day, just after a session together, he said he had someone who wanted to meet me.
It was a short man, nondescript in a deliberate sort of way, somebody you would pass in the street and immediately forget.
“Steve, this is Aidan. He was up a tree a little while ago”
I realised that this was the man who had captured Charlie on film as he raped me, the man whose presence of mind even as he was ready to vomit had been the key to my release, and he was trembling as he looked at me. I stood up to shake his hand in gratitude, and to my horror he wrapped me in a hug, and I nearly screamed, but some small part of me said “No! Good guy! Good guy!” and so I just about managed to squeeze him back.
He dropped me quickly.
“Sorry, Steve, I didn’t think, it was just, well, that was the worst thing I ever snapped, and, well, you are alive and…oh shit, I was terrified the pics were going to be shown at an inquest, not to the victim. Sorry…”
Good guy. White hat. I was healing, slowly. I could never be whole, but I could be better, day by day.
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Dave was still at work, as it turned out, looking for Iain as well as the missing piece from our dirty little jigsaw, and that was Mitchell. He had gone to ground somewhere as the news of the raid had reached him, and in parallel with the police Dave was doing his best to unearth the cunt.
I make no apologies whatsoever for the language I use here. If there were stronger words, I would use them, as the words I do use don’t even begin to express my hatred. Nana was the same; she swore like a trooper when she spoke of those people, as did Brian. It was only Karen and Emily who exercised any control over their language, but their feelings were clear. Emily burned, hot and passionate, like one of her literary heroines, while Karen, as always in control, had a cold, hard fury about her, and I knew that if either of them actually got their hands on Mitchell it would not be a Good Thing for him.
The police, meanwhile, were still digging, and had expanded their search to a couple of properties owned by the Cunninghams. Two days into their new search they found the first body.
CHAPTYER 20
“Brian, how big is this place?”
“Well, there are five bedrooms–“
“No, the grounds. I want to start running again.”
That was a decision that had come to me after another night wrapped up in Emily. I was going to start trying to reclaim my life. That sounds like some facile road to Damascus reawakening, but it wasn’t. My body was wrong, totally not me, but I was stuck with it. The deep changes were irreversible, and if I say that I wasn’t too keen on going anywhere near a doctor for any surgery, I am sure that people will understand exactly why.
For three years my body had been broken on the wheel of others’ desires, and I had finally had a return of some backbone. I was going to make it do what I wanted for a change, even though I had a sneaking suspicion that it would be far from easy.
Sneaking suspicion? Absolute stone cold certainty. I knew I would be completely out of condition. If I didn’t feel like puking I would be astonished. Karen popped in after Brian had relayed the news.
“Steve….we have a gym in the house”
“I know, Kaz, but I want to get out in the open, get some real air”
“Well…there is no way to be subtle about this, pet, but I am going to have to do some shopping for you, and it will be for women’s clothing”
“I am not wearing a fucking skirt. That’s what Charlie made me do…and some of the other cunts”
“We are going to have to work on your language too, Steve…..look, it’s not girly stuff I’m talking about, just day to day stuff that will fit you. If you are going to start running, trust me, you will need the right underwear, and sports clothing cut to fit you, and the right shoes, and….and you will need more clothes anyway just for daily wear. It doesn’t have to mean high heels and cocktail dresses, but you are going to want trousers that fit your bum as well as your waist.”
“Karen, you can’t pay for all that!”
“Oh yes I can, actually. Brian does rather well…and just think: if you don’t get a rather large compensation pay-out from the Council, then I’m bloody Chinese. If you want to, you can pay me back afterwards. Now, you have a visitor due in an hour, so get cleaned up, and then we’re off for some retail abuse”
The visitor turned out to be none other than Miss Graham. I was sitting in the…call it a reception room, it was that big, having a cuppa with Nana, and I recognised her voice as she came in with Karen. I was wearing an old pair of Karen’s jeans, with the legs rolled up, and a baggy T shirt in blue (never, ever fucking pink, never again) and as I stood and turned to greet her she just said “Oh god….oh god…” and stood for what seemed like an eternity before stepping forward to hug me. I could handle that from women, but from men, men I didn’t know, men outside my little band of heroes, it was atrociously difficult.
We went through the little dance of tact that I had grown used to, where a new visitor burned to ask me questions, but was shocked into stammering incoherence with the need to avoid bringing things back to the surface, and then she stepped onto thicker ice and explained why she had come.
“Stephen, we have, I have an offer for you. This is probably going to sound like the least important thing imaginable, given your current, er, circumstances, but think of it this way: you now have a life again, and we would like to make sure you have a chance of a future. I’m talking about education. That establishment you were being taught in was only really setting you up for CSE level in maths and English, and if you had had the opportunity I am sure you would have been up there with our brighter O-level GCE pupils.
“We can’t give you those two years of O-level study back, but if you wish we can give you your A-levels in a few subjects. We just need to have some idea of what you would wish to study. Stephen, this is a way of getting you into University, getting you a chance at a real life after all this is over. It will be hard, but several of my staff have volunteered to give you evening tuition, and you will of course be welcome back at Netherhall”
She had managed to make the word ‘establishment’ sound worse than any of the swearing I had been doing so unconsciously. As for the word ‘taught’…
Karen spoke up. “One of Brian’s minders will be with you each day, and will drive you to school and back. It’s something your Nana and us have been discussing for a while. Kid, they’ve taken three years of your life, don’t throw the rest away after it.”
Nana was nodding. “Tha’ve got a mind, Stevie, tha’ve kept it free aal these years. We’re going to show those bastards that tha’s beaten them. Will tha do it?”
It seemed I had no choice. Of course I would do it, but the thought of going to school…dressed how? When stressed, the slightest of things assumes major importance, and so I had to ask. Miss Graham chuckled.
“There’s no uniform for the sixth form, Stephen, so don’t worry. You will be fine. All you need to do is think about which subjects you wish to study. I suggest that we get you through O-level English and Maths, which you should pass easily, and then four subjects at A-level. That will stretch you, stretch you a lot, but it will help you get a good place at college. Now, there are a number of ways you can come back to school. I will make an announcement to the whole school before you do, but I think most of the pupils will have already read quite a bit in the papers.
“Stephen, I intend to make it very clear that any unpleasantness will be terminal in its effect on the culprit’s education at my school. And think on this: the strength you have already shown tells me that you will succeed. A week to think about it? Good oh!”
And she was off, and Nana was squeezing my hand.
“There’s a world out there, pet. Tha can have a big piece of t, but tha has to go out and get it. Now…time for the big shops!”
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Karen drove us to Carlisle in the Jag and we were soon in the centre, which sent me into the early stages of a panic attack. Despite the solid bulk of Tom, one of Brian’s ‘personal assistants’, I felt disorientated by the crowds and noise. I clung close to my grandmother, trying to focus on the shop names rather than the crowds, and finally spotted a sign reading “Track and Field”
The window display was so brightly coloured I was shocked, and the shoes…oh, the shoes were a delight. I stood looking at the racks and racks of them inside the shop, realising that things were very different indeed. Gone were my Dunlop plimsolls, and in their place stood multicoloured creations from Adidas, Nike, Puma, Reebok…wrap around tread, multiple layer insoles, arch supports…I was in heaven, even when some spotty youth asked the inevitable question “What can we do for you ladies?”
Nana was gobsmacked by the variety, and when she spotted some purpose-built fell-running shoes, she just looked at Karen like a kid in a sweet shop, and my goddess just smiled and said “Of course, Ada!” and it turned into a minor shopping spree for two of us.
I settled on some Nikes, which were amazing just to walk in, and a couple of pairs of three-quarter-length running trousers, leggings, whatever, plus some tops that spoke about ‘wicking’ and ‘moisture control’, and they all fitted, and none of them were pink. Then it was on to some department store or other, and that was where it all got almost too much.
I was measured properly, for the first time ever, for a bra, and it nearly sent me over the edge. All the assumptions made by the staff were painful, and when the girl doing the fitting brought me a selection to try, using words like ‘pretty’ and ‘assets’ I wanted to scream, and it was only Nana beside me that helped me keep it in. I wanted plain, I wanted white, I wanted simple. Yes, they were pretty, and I loved them, but my thoughts filled their cups with Em’s breasts.
I had to rein Karen back, but soon we had a reasonable collection of things like jeans, simple blouses, plain underwear including some special support bras for running, and shoes. Real shoes, flat, with laces, that looked almost masculine. Other bits and pieces went into the Jag for the trip back, and then we were back in the safety of the house and away from the crowds of strangers. I had clothes that fitted, and a purpose in life.
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We talked and talked about the subjects I should choose, and eventually I settled on English, History, Geography and Technology, which was a new course designed to bring together Physics, Computing and other science subjects, and as a fan, how could I refuse? The day finally came when I would have to show my face at Netherhall, and I was acting as much like a girl as I ever would: I didn’t know what to wear. Eventually, Karen just laid out a blouse that looked like a checked shirt, my black Oxford shoes and a pair of jeans that weren’t too tight.
“Do you want a hair cut?”
That was a sore point. I had always loved long hair, ever since those days of Brylcreem and mynah birds, but I also knew that it shouted out “GIRL”. I suppose my final decision was a sort of confused rebellion. They had made me look like a girl, but this was my choice before they did it to me, and I would keep it as my own. Fuck YOU this time, Mitchell, Charlie, all the rest.
Tom drove me to school, and we went straight to Miss Graham’s office, where my Emily was waiting.
“Morning, Stephen, Tom. I have arranged an announcement at assembly, and then, as we discussed, Stephen, you can say something to the school. Now, are you absolutely sure you are up to going out in front of everybody?”
“You will be with me, and Emily?”
“Yes, of course”
“Then lead on McDuff”
“Lay on, actually, Stephen, but you will study the Scottish Play later. You see, you are already learning again!”
I was settled onto a chair off stage, Emily beside me. As the morning hymn ended, Miss Graham stood at the front of the stage.
“Ladies, gentlemen, of Netherhall. We have an important day ahead of us. Three years ago this school was robbed of a most promising pupil. Popular, witty, a champion athlete in the making, Stephen Jones was snatched from us and abused in the most horrible ways imaginable. Purely by chance was he delivered from hell, and only now are we beginning to find out how many other poor souls never did emerge from that place.
“Now, many of you will no doubt have fond memories of Mister Jones. Many of you will have read the lurid reports in the newspapers, or have followed the horrifying revelations that even now are emerging on the television news reports. You will know that changes have been made to Mr Jones, changes beyond his control. You may also be aware that terrible things were done to him, things that he must live with, and things that render him more than a little nervous.
“Be aware that this school will tolerate no abuse of any kind directed at this innocent victim. Consider, instead, this:
“Monstrous criminals, evil incarnate, stole away one of our own, one of Netherhall’s own. That is not done. Stephen Jones is OURS, he is YOURS, and we will not allow anyone to harm one of our own. Do we all agree on that point?”
There was a roar of agreement, and I stumbled out with Emily clutching my hand, and as I looked out over a sea of faces the speech I had prepared. vanished from my mind and I started to weep. Someone in the crowded hall began to clap, and then there was nothing I could hear apart from applause, and so I went down off the stage and just began shaking hands. Em never left my side.
That day I only stayed the morning, just to settle things like timetables, and a locker, and, to be honest, see if could cope, and Tom drove me back to the house as his favourite Radio 2 played. The news came on, and the eleventh body was being disinterred from the Cunningham properties. I realised, once more, how amazingly lucky I had been.
That evening, Brian came in as we sat down for tea, breathless and excited.
“I think I’ve found Iain”
CHAPTER 21
Brian was almost hyperventilating, and for an instant the news...eleven bodies…then I saw his excitement, and I realised that it was nothing like that, nothing at all.
“Where is he? When can we get him?”
“Slowly, Steve, slowly. I’ve been having some of the lads check through the local youth football scene, trying to find anyone who fits n the age range. The good thing was that his name is the Scots version, so that cut out a few false leads, but then again a lot of the coaches can’t spell too well, and….ah shit, look, he has a match tonight, if it’s the right boy, and if we get down there we can see if you can identify him. Look, we need to get moving, he’s playing in Whitehaven tonight, the match has started”
“Can we get Emily?”
“Kaz, lover, can you grab the girlfriend while I get these two out to the coast? It’s at the Bransty ground. Come on, Ada, let’s get off”
How the hell Brian wasn’t pulled over for speeding, I don’t know, but we were soon through Carlisle and past Cockermouth, and god knows what speed he got up to, but he really, really knew how to throw the car around. Some other time I might have worried about other road users, but not then, not then. As we passed Workington he guessed that we were at half time, and he wasn’t far off. The second half was just starting when we pulled into the car park, and Nana and I stepped out as Brian hid in the car to avoid recognition for the moment.
I watched the play for ten minutes, and then…there he was. He was bigger by far, playing what I thought of as left half, as it used to be in the days of wingers and centre forwards that I had been born into. I didn’t understand much of the game, but he held up well, and tackled almost brutally for a fourteen year old. I spotted a couple on the sidelines, cheering every time he got the ball, and realised these must be his foster parents. Nana and I walked over to them, and with the strength I had been given that morning I asked the woman “Is that your boy, the number four?”
They turned and looked hard at me, but clearly just saw a teenaged girl. The man smiled as the woman grinned.
“Our Iain’s already got a girlfriend, lass”
“Ah…that’s not why I’m asking. It’s just…I…well, he’s my brother”
“Aye” Nana added, “and my grandson. We lost him three years ago”
The woman’s mouth was working like a fish, and she started to shake. The man pulled her to him. His voice was bitter.
“You timed that so well. We’re adopting him, or we were…why did you just bloody leave him for three years then? He’s ours now, or we thought he was, and nobody ever told us he had a sister, much less a grandmother. It’s OK, Audrey, it’s OK, love…”
I drew in a breath. “I’m not his sister, I’m his brother”
That was when I saw the recognition, the realisation, strike her. Audrey turned absolutely white.
“You…you’re that one….all those dead children…Oh Jesus, oh I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise, oh you poor thing”
Suddenly she was hugging me, repeating over and over that she didn’t know, and just then Karen arrived with Emily. I pointed my brother out to my lover as he took an opposition player away at the ankle and cleared the ball away upfield, and there were only twenty minutes left to go. I steered us all over to Brian’s car, and after a brief moment of being starstruck, the man, Kieran, tried to be businesslike.
“Look, sorry about earlier, we had no idea, and after his mother died”
Stab to my heart, visible to everyone.
“Sorry, lass…Steve. After that, we had been told, like, that there was no next of kin, nothing, by the council, and he’s a lovely lad…”
I smiled. “Oh, yes, he’s always been my favourite brother”
Emily slapped my arm, and Kieran continued. “We have been given the go-ahead to adopt him, and well, he’s been so like our own, and we are sure he’s been happy with us, and…look, we’re sorry, we didn’t know”
My grandmother has always been a woman of immense heart, and just then she proved it.
“Lad, listen to me for a minute. Aal we’ve been doing is trying to find him. He needs to know Stevie here’s safe, he needs to know what has happened. We’re not here to ‘steal him away’, tha hear? Now, what did he think of this adoption business?”
Audrey was sniffling slightly. “He was really pleased with the idea”
“Then why don’t we aal ask him again and see what he says?”
How I love you, Nana.
The final whistle blew, for a draw, and the players were coming off the field. We made quite a large group as we waited for an, and his eyes went wide.
“Brian Dennahy! Cool!”
A small leathery woman cleared her throat, and Iain went white.
“Nana? NANA!!”
He threw himself at her, sobbing, and after a minute, as his self control returned, he suddenly started to see the people around him, not just Nana, and Brian, but Karen, and then:
“I remember you, you were Stevie’s girlfriend, you were always nice to him…..Emily?”
She kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Iain, Steve is always nice to me, and I’m still his girlfriend”
That was when he started looking around for me, which was one of the most painful moments of my life, and then he saw, and then he realised, and then his poor heart seemed to break as he sobbed over his lost brother.
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We drove back to their house in convoy, Iain insisting on riding with me and leaving a shower till he got home. I had worried about the mud on Brian’s upholstery, but all he said was “That’s what valet services are for”
It was a semi-detached house with a garage, and the garage door was scarred from repeated applications of a football. Audrey kept the house absolutely spick and span, and there was a small glass cabinet filled with medals, little cups, and football memorabilia, plus multiple photos of Iain. They were clearly very, very proud of him, and I could see how much at ease he was with them. As he washed upstairs, and Audrey produced tea and biscuits, Nana continued.
“Understand this, if my boy is happy here, then he is happy, and I am happy to let him stay. And if he wants thee for his mam and dad, then that’s for him to say. Now that that’s said, and out of the way, I noticed tha have a bottle of Navy there, and if it is not being too cheeky, I think I could do with a gill after the fuss”
A rum was poured, and Iain was back down in a rush, and yet again, with certain exclusions, I went through my tale.
Kieran was sober. “So…if Karen here hadn’t recognised you, or Brian hadn’t done all he did…shit. How the hell did Iain here escape that?”
“I don’t know why, but Mitchell’s report on me seems to be why I was locked up, and that let him do what he did to me. Why he did that, I don’t know. They still haven’t found the bastard”
Iain was looking confused, and nervous. “Stevie…you do know you look really pretty…”
I snapped at that. “Yes, brother dear, an awful lot of men told me that over the last three years”
Nana put her hand on my arm. “No, Stevie, no. Iain, it’s not something he’s too happy about”
Emily spoke up just then, having sat quietly throughout, just leaning against me.
“Yes, Iain, Steve does look very pretty, but that’s not what he wanted. It’s not what I would have wanted. I’m a girl, and even if looked like you, I would still be a girl, and I would hate it. Stevie’s the same, just the other way round”
She turned to me. “Look, love, you could be as ugly as sin, and I would still love you, because you are still you, whatever the outside looks like, and you did the same for me years ago. I haven’t got a sin-ugly boyfriend, I haven’t got a film-star looks boyfriend, I’ve got a pretty boyfriend. However you looked, I’d still love you, and as you are pretty I can like that as well. I know that makes no real sense, but I know what I mean. And what it means for you is that at least you can walk down the street without attracting attention.”
I understood what she meant, of course. My bed was made, I just had to lie in it. If I spent my life worrying about the past I would never have a future. At some point I would have to try and make her understand that there was more to living than being in love, but my train of thought was disrupted by her whisper in my ear.
“You haven’t made me come for three years, Stephen Jones. I want you to make love to me tonight”
That sort of knocked my train of thought right off its rails.
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The Jennings, Kieran and Audrey, agreed to come back to the big house with us, with overnight bags, so that we could talk longer. It would mean a drive back at an early hour for Iain’s school, but that was of rather lesser importance than our reunion, and if the school was unhappy, tough. We wanted to give the boy a chance to see that I was safe, as well as allow Nana, as the true next of kin, a chance to discuss adoption with all three.
That was her graciousness. She instinctively knew that the family was a sound one, and had been watching how they interacted through the evening. She explained to me that she wasn’t worried about him getting new parents, as long as he kept his blood kin. We sent everyone off to bed in a mood that made the day’s more unpleasant revelations fade into the background.
Emily was waiting by my bed when I came out of the bathroom, wearing a long dressing gown, and as she stood up it slid from her shoulders, and she was naked before me. She stepped forward and tugged my sleep shirt off over my head, until I was naked but for a pair of knickers. Yes, I wore knickers, they fitted.
Her nipples were really hard, and as she knelt down in front of me to tug down my pants they brushed against mine, and I felt a real shock go through me, and then my knickers were off, and before she stood up she kissed the end of my penis, which was also electric, and then she kissed me, and pulled me under the covers, and kissed me again, and as our nipples collided again and again she grabbed my hand and pushed it somewhere wet, warm ….and she kept teasing my cock, and my breasts, and then she was pushing my hand hard against her as she moaned into my mouth just like the last time, and then the fireworks hit me too, and for a long moment I didn’t care what I looked like because she was mine and I was hers and at long last I was making love.
CHAPTER 22
I woke slowly, for once, no sudden impact of awareness on my mind, and then I remembered, and of course Emily was there next to me, still, awake and looking at me as I slept.
Her dark curls hung over one green eye, and I could see the tiny faint scars of her acne. Her head propped on one arm, she just stroked my cheek with the back of the other, and I could smell that scent again, the scent of my mother’s laundry basket, of Cunningham as she whipped me, of that woman who liked to wank as her husband buggered me after dressing me in what she clearly saw as sexy clothes, and I was nearly overwhelmed with a flashback till Em smiled, and that smell became a fresher memory, of her face flushing as we made love.
“Stevie, love….I know you hate me saying so, but you do look pretty. I’ve been watching you for an hour, and…oh, I don’t know. I never went for girls…there were girls, you know, when you’re young, and you get a crush, and you can’t tell whether it’s envy, or love, or lust, or if you’re a lezzer like in the papers...oh, why can’t I say it right?”
She flopped down on her back, almost pouting, and I realised that despite her strength, her love, she was still only sixteen, and confused to hell. I pulled myself across so that I lay on her shoulder, her arm around me, and looking at the ceiling she tried again. Slowly, quietly, she tried to put order to her thoughts.
“I wanted a boyfriend, just like most other girls. I read the books, you know that, and they were all so simple. You have the ups and downs, the separation, and then it all comes together in a big reunion scene, and there’s kissing, and then dot dot dot. Yeah, I know every book is the same, but just now and again there would be a way of saying something, something a little new, and I would dream…
“Then you were there, and I said this last night, and I said this before, but you looked right past my spots, and my belly, and my fat arse, and you were funny. You were funny that first day, and that’s what I hate most, they beat that out of you, Stevie, and I want it back.
“Please just shut up. Let me try and get this right, because I don’t want to hurt you. I can still see you, despite the changes, and you are still inside. When I tell you you look pretty, I mean to say that they didn’t make you something to scare kids with. It means we can walk down the street and not get stares, and that means that we have a chance of getting more of your life back. I know you are a boy, a man, and if you choose to have the doctors try and fix you, I will be there, still, but….
“Stevie, you are so much better at words than me, and all I am trying to say is whatever you do, whatever you want to do with your body, I will still love you, because it’s still you, just don’t do anything, any more harm, just because you think you have to for me”
Her hand was stroking my shoulder and the top of my breast, and I realised that I felt both wrong and absolutely right with her. Wrong, because all of my body was foreign territory. I wanted to be the man, I wanted to act as I had dreamt of when I was younger, finding my Dad’s stash of dirty books when Iain and I had searched for our Christmas presents in advance. At the same time, I was used to the body I wore. I hadn’t been thrown into it, I had grown it as any teenaged girl would have done. My balance, my spatial sense, had altered with me, and all I can say is that while my body was WRONG, it didn’t feel foreign.
“Em….I just never wanted to be pretty. I wanted to be me, just bigger, just another boy. I promise you I won’t do anything without talking to you.”
I shuddered. Doctors. That would involve doctors. After my terror at the hospital, all of my doctors so far had been female, but the thought of seeing them brought me out in cold sweat. Where the fuck was Mitchell?
Emily’s cuddling had reached my nipple, and of its own volition it responded. She giggled.
“Stevie…please, please take this the right way, but last night…oh, my…..”
So what was I, then? She had done things to me that had had me almost screaming, but they mostly involved bits of my anatomy that were not supposed to be there. It had been like that first fumble, at home in bed, and I realised that I had never, ever had a sexual experience as a boy would. It just didn’t respond, not like that, though it leaked something…
Sorry, this is all getting very clinical. I talked it through with one of my doctors, years later, and they pointed out that I still had a prostate, I still had plumbing. She had the good grace, unlike an earlier medic, not to ask if any of the rapes had ever ‘aroused’ me.
There I was, in bed with my girlfriend, a boy with breasts, with a girlfriend who had used those same breasts to bring me to orgasm, who was now idly starting me off down the same path once more, playing with the breasts that made me want to scream when I thought about them, which was every hour of every day, and I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was going to do. I just knew, knew utterly, that I wasn’t going to let anyone near my body with a knife, ever again.
“Em…?”
“Yes, love?”
“Been thinking…I know you are all confused, and so am I. But I know one thing…this is what I have, this is what I am going to have to deal with, and those bastards aren’t going to win. I’m going to have a good life, whatever I look like, and fuck ‘em”
She pulled me to her, and my hand naturally found her breast, and, well, it had been supposed to be a school day, but after Iain and his…parents, for that was what they were, had left that morning, my new family, for that was certainly what they were, had looked in on us, and Nana had rung Netherhall and explained. She knew damned well what we had been doing, and after Emily had finished celebrating my new life with me, she brought us a cuppa.
“Tha’re both sixteen, so it’s legal, but aal I will suggest is that before Tom teks thee to school, tha have a shower”
With a sudden impish grin, she added “And separately, otherwise tha’ll never get out of the house!”
That was another moment of rebirth, that morning, that lovemaking. I had been dealt a hand, and I would play it. I wasn’t a woman, I would never, ever be a woman, and I would never want to be one, but I wasn’t dead, and fuck them if they thought I would ever finish what they started. I was going to live.
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Tom took us to school, and we were there in time for my first proper English literature lesson. It was a class we shared, and it was quite funny when Miss Stephenson…oh, god, after all those years, dear, sweet Miss Stephenson…when she had to ask Tom to sit in the back of the class because half of the girls were salivating over him. That was quite sneaky on her part, because I soon realised she wasn’t exactly repelled by my bodyguard, and it gave her a better chance of looking at him.
We were working, as a class, on Richard III, and the opening lines spoke volumes to me. There was a man, for good or bad, speaking of a new day, a new Spring after a dreadful Winter, and Em saw my reaction, and squeezed my hand. There was a fine moment of generosity from Miss S as well, when she asked me to read, and it wasn’t a woman’s part, but the crookback himself, and when I stood up, dropped one shoulder and did my best to imitate Olivier the class fell about.
When Miss S stopped laughing, she just said “Thank you, Larry Jones. I look forward to your attempt at the Scottish Play, but please, don’t bring a kilt”
Em passed me a little note as I sat back down. She had drawn a little box, with a tick n it, and next to it the words “recover sense of humour”
School dinner was another favour the hellhole had done to me, in that I was actually able to appreciate the cuisine. My table was mobbed by a series of wellwishers, and once more banality made my day. Most of the boys wanted to ask about Brian. There I was, a multiply-raped eunuch with tits, and they simply wanted to talk football. I cannot express how that pleased me. The rambling, confused talks with Em, my new determination, all of them flourished in the school’s warmth of spirit.
I had just turned away another group of autograph seekers, when a solid man appeared at the table, and Tom stirred quickly as I had a moment of panic before realising that it was Mr Robson.
“Welcome back, Steve. Welcome back indeed. I bet you missed the running, and we missed you”
“I’ve just started again, sir. Running round the grounds till I see if I can get my strength back. Once I have a bit of that, I’ll probably be back on the fells”
“No hurry, son, no hurry, but if you want any help, any track time, you know where I am”
And he was off, and yet another moment of simple humanity hurried my healing along.
CHAPTER 23
And so it went, day by day and night by night. Em’s parents, Barbara and Peter, started coming round to the house, at first to make sure their daughter wasn’t in some vice den, which she was, in a way, and their initial take on our cuddling was a little off.
Emily hadn’t introduced me properly to them before things went bad, so they had no experiences of me as a fully (ha!) fledged boy. I knew what they were seeing, now, some wild lesbian romp, and despite my urge to suggest they go fuck themselves I made myself cling to the fact that they were family, and vitally important ones.
It was something I was slowly coming to terms with, in the way that two warring countries do at a ceasefire. People who knew, KNEW. They knew that I wasn’t a girl, they knew my history, but they saw a girl. That caused their thought processes to stumble, and many times I had to sit quietly as somebody tried to recover. People who didn’t know just treated me as a girl. I was getting past the stage of wanting to whip it out and wave it at them, but the need to scream was never far away.
There was also the problem of numbers of people. I had met lots of new friends over the past two years, but most of them only for the time it took for them to come. The boys….some of them were there for ages, some of them only for a few days, but all of them blurred into one amorphous bully figure. I had, indeed, met a lot of people but they were ciphers in my life, I had never had the need, nor the desire, to get all sociable with them, and certainly not the opportunity.
Now, though, I had waves of strangers washing over me, and each had their own needs, their own lives away from me, lives I needed to respect and consider. There was a huge temptation to act the spoiled brat, to shout and demand as my just reward for being the Victim, but Em and Nana kept an eye on me, and every so often I got a quiet word, and a reminder that I was at the edge of my life, not the end of it.
So, instead of dismissing the concerns of Em’s parents and carrying on, I did what I could to cultivate them, and after a while they thawed. Peter even got past his initial dreadful habit of staring at my tits when he spoke to me, so it went both ways.
I was running, now, slowly building up my stamina and strength, and adjusting to the different way my legs and chest moved. As I have said, I grew into my body, it didn’t appear fully-formed one morning, so I was familiar with how it moved, but hadn’t run for three years. I almost had to learn from scratch, and it was so absorbing I nearly missed the news.
The digging had finished, fourteen bodies recovered, fourteen murdered kids brought back to our world. The police were now demolishing the houses, just as they would do years later when Fred and Rose West’s abominations came to light. That case left me with flashbacks and nightmares for months.
Fourteen post-mortem examinations, fourteen attempts at identification, fourteen charges of murder against Elsie, and Raynor, , and Charlie, but not Don, no, and not Alf, not him, because he had succeeded in cutting his wrists on remand, after one too many ‘accidents’ on stairs and with hot drinks spilled in his lap.
We would have the post-mortems, then the trial, and finally a full inquiry into how the Council had left those bastards to do just what they liked for so long, and to so many. I looked forward to seeing new shits come out of the woodwork, new faces to see locked up, and when it was all over I wanted to go and find Don’s grave, and Alf’s, and dance on them, because it was my turn now.
The days led to weeks, and the weeks to months, and as the result of the post-mortems came out from the coroner’s office, Dave called around.
“Brian, Steve, we have a problem. I had a suspicion, when we broke this open, and it looks like I’m right”
He laid out a wad of newspaper cuttings, all from local papers, no nationals. Almost all of them told the same story, just with different characters, where rent boys or junkies had been found dead in dingy rooms, needles in their arms, death in their veins. Manchester, Carlisle, Lancaster, Liverpool, even London.
“Brian, I’m running this one past the Telegraph and the Guardian, because they have their own little sources, but I would lay odds on that almost every one of these lads has been somewhere we know and love”
Brian was sober. “Yeah…we knew they had friends. You think, a go at Stevie?”
“Or Karen, or you, or Ada, or anyone connected to you. I think it’s time to pull a few horns in, the kids in particular. They may know where Iain is, and they certainly know where Emily is.”
Kieran was shocked when I rang him.
“They would kill a kid like our Iain?”
“They killed fourteen that we know of, these in the papers were probably them as well, and I am certain they planned on doing me in the end, so, yes, they would kill another one. Look, you know we aren’t trying to take Iain away from you…”
“Aye, I know that. You have a generous soul, Steve Jones”
“Well, we can see if Netherhall can take him, and then we’ll have Tom with us, and lodge him here at night, if that’s OK”
“It will have to be. I want my son safe”
Oh, Iain, how lucky you have been. Brian went for him with Tom that evening, as the news spoke of blunt instrument trauma to the back of the skulls, consistent in size and shape with blows from a ball-peen hammer, and saw marks to long bones, and as the weeks went by there would be fourteen verdicts of ‘unlawful killing’
Who were they? What had they suffered, before being taken into the cellar, and Alf, or Don, or perhaps even the hellbitch, had taken the hammer to the back of their heads until they stopped moving, and then the knife, and the axe, and the hacksaw to their limbs? If I danced on two graves, I would be certain to pay my respects properly to my dead brothers.
School continued as a celebration of freedom, and my status as a nine-days’-wonder faded to that of a classmate, and I was happier than I had been since that race day. Iain was there, Em was beside me (and Tom was definitely beside Miss Stephenson), and Mr Robson had changed from “I’ll give you some track time” to “Come on, Jones, you can and will do better!”
With Karen’s help and advice, I had finally found just the right sports bra, and I was beginning to stretch myself again. I would never be top flight, not in the way I had once promised, but I could challenge myself, and soon I was recovering that zone, that drifting state of consciousness that comes with distance running. I was coming home at last.
It was the Telegraph that broke the story that Dave had been working on, and I wondered idly how much he had made from me, directly and indirectly, and didn’t give a shit. He hadn’t just done his job, he had pushed himself beyond that for my sake, and as he said, it was ‘us’.
Six of the dead men had been found to have links with social services in the Carlisle area. Four of them had been at the Approved School where I had been sold to screws and inmates alike, and two of them had actually been with Cunningham. The paper carried it as a front page story, with a long article inside rehashing my own case, and an editorial thundering away in true Torygraph style demanding that Questions be Asked, and in the end they were, in the House of Commons, where Harold was asked what the hell was rotten in Cumberland, or Cumbria as it now was. That was when the Inquiry stopped being a local government thing and became a full-scale select committee-style thing
It looked like their attempt to tie up loose ends and close down witnesses had backfired, and yet again I owed Dave.
“Don’t worry, kiddo, that’s the second new car you’ve bought me!”
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There were, of course, other things going on all this time, not least my medical treatment, and my psychotherapy. Despite my vow about doctors and knives, there were still a few things that had to be tidied away surgically, and I am not going into detail there. I have said what was done to me, and the rest is exactly what should be expected as a result. Book closed.
The therapist, though, was different. I threw an ashtray at the head of the first one when she started talking about ‘embracing my femininity’ and told her she could stick that up her arse and fuck off, which seemed to answer her question, and after she fucked off I got a new one.
Valerie had obviously heard of my earlier reaction, and decided on a much softer approach. We spoke in my room.
“Stevie, how do you feel about your body?”
“I hate and detest it, but I have to live in it, so tough on me”
“Why do you hate it? Is it unhealthy?”
“No, but it’s wrong”
“Why?”
“Well, look at it. What do you see?”
“What do you see when you look in the mirror?”
I thought for a second. “You want an objective answer?”
“As best you can. Come and stand at the mirror and tell me what you see, starting from the feet. As objective as you can, try and step outside yourself”
I did what I could. “Black Oxford shoes, small feet, and jeans, Wranglers, loose-fitting. A checked shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbow”
“And the person? What do you see?”
“Honestly? My mother, younger than I remember her. Pretty, wavy hair, in a ponytail, reddish blonde…some freckles. Pretty face, nice body; if it were on someone else I would fancy it”
She laughed. “But on you?”
“All wrong”
“Why?”
“Because I am not a girl and never have been and never will be”
“Why will you never be a girl?”
“Because I am not one. You could put my brain into a dog, and I wouldn’t be a dog, I’d be me in a dog’s body”
“You think a girl is like a dog?”
“No, I just think a girl is different to a bloke”
She flicked through some papers. “There is a feminist viewpoint, backed up by some research in America by a Dr Money, that human gender is a learned construct, that is that being a boy or a girl is something you learn. What do you think about that?”
“I think it’s utter bollocks. You know you’re a boy even before you see your willy”
“What if you were adjusted before then, a sex change operation?”
I thought about it for a while. “No, I still think…Mitchell. Was that what that fucker was trying to do to me? He was always calling me his ‘subject’ or ‘project’…well, Valerie, they did their best to ‘teach me’ my ‘gender’, and they gave me tits and dressed me up and raped me, but I can assure you that all I learned was hate. The only reasons that I still look like this are because one, I won’t let anyone with a knife at me to do anything but the most essential repairs, which are now over, and two, because the only things they can do to make me almost like a man would just make me worse. Does that answer your question?”
She grinned. “Absolutely, Stevie. I always thought Money talks out of his arse anyway. I think we shall get on fine now!”
And we did, and she was great.
This s the trial. It necessarily rehashes a lot of the unpleasantness of earlier chapters, but it is drier, less direct. Please read with caution, though.
CHAPTER 24
That was the start of a clean up, as the Met took over from the local Yokel Cumbrian police and started to kick doors in and make more arrests. The attempts to get rid of witnesses simply drew another group of people into the net, and as well as the Castle Keep Three there were nine others, so far. Four of them were Council employees, three worked at the Approved School, one was a school governor, and the last a copper. They truly had been deep into the local government.
The trial was soon on us, and due to the entrenched corruption beginning to show out in Cumbria, it was to be held in the Central Criminal Court in London. We made our way down in a little convoy of cars, and Brian found us rather a nice hotel where our little party of, er, eight were well settled, and I looked forward to at least some time off with Iain to trawl the sports shops, and with Sid to give the Charing Cross Road bookshops a hammering. The Toffs were waiting, and they insisted on taking us to “a sweet little place in Kensington, darlings” where we ate well, only slightly spoilt by Nana's reaction to the menu prices.
“HOW bloody much?”
And then...then it was into the suit we had had made to fit me, to show my breasts and make it bloody obvious what had been done to me, and after Aidan and Dave had given their evidence Karen went in, short and sweet, and I heard later how she had described my face, how sick I looked, and the shock when she realised who I was. Then it was my turn.
Roger had drilled me in the way to behave, and I clung to his words as I walked the gauntlet to the witness box. Charlie sat with his head bowed, but while Raynor Cunningham pretended nonchalance, the hellbitch locked her gaze on me. Just get through this, Stevie, just do it, do it for fourteen poor dead boys.
Short answers. Give them to the jury, not the wig. Do not, ever, get into a discussion with a barrister, and certainly never argue with one. Pick a juror that looks interested and catch their eye; talk to them.
“Above all, Steve, remember that you are not alone. There were witnesses before you, there are more to come”
I took the oath, and our barrister led me through my evidence, beginning with our days in Singapore, my operation, the move 'home' to Anthorn, and then the appearance of Mitchell. Where the fuck was he? On to the second operation.
“So, the result of that operation, Stephen, was your castration. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir, but I didn't know that till years later”
“Did you give your consent to this procedure?”
“OBJECTION!” One of the defence silks was on his feet. “The child would have been too young to have been able to give informed consent”
The judge looked at me, then over her glasses at the wig in question.
“I rather think that Mr Jones' consent is germane to the bulk of his evidence. Overruled. Proceed”
We carried on through the death of my father, and my mother's close relationship with Gilbey and Gordon, and Mitchell's close attention to my 'wellbeing'.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please turn in your bundles to folder eighteen which holds some facsimile documents. Number five, the one that appears half burned, there is a signature in the bottom right corner. Stephen, do you recognise that signature?”
“It's Mitchell's. Same as the ones on my prescriptions”
"Thank you”
“Who did you meet on your arrival at Castle Keep residential home?”
“Elsie Cunningham”
“Can you see her in this courtroom?”
“Yes. She's the grey-haired bitch in the dock”
The judge turned to me
“Mr Jones, Stephen, you will please respect this court even if you cannot respect those brought to it. Continue”
“What happened when you entered?”
“She told me I had no kin, and I mentioned Nana, and she said she didn't exist. I said she did”
“What happened then, Stephen?”
“She called a big fat man, Alf, and got him to hold me down while she caned me”
“Is Alf here?”
“No, he killed himself in prison”
I had the eye contact, a well-made black woman in her forties on the front bench.
“What happened then, Stephen?”
“I got two days in Thirlmere.”
“Please explain what that means”
“It's a cell, no light, no bedding”
“What did they feed you?”
“No food, nothing to drink”
“For two days?”
“Yes”
What happened when you came out?”
“I was taken to the dining room and sat at a table with three boys. One of them collected up all the butter from the table”
“Why would he do that?”
“Well, when we went to the dorm, and the three of them beat the shit...sorry, beat me up, they used it as a lubricant when they took turns to rape me”
My woman's mouth was moving like that of a fish. There were gasps from the public gallery, and I fastened on my lady for help.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please turn to the bundle of photographs introduced by the previous witness. Numbers sixteen to twenty seven. Stephen, who is the girl in those photographs?”
“That's no girl, that is me. Charlie liked to dress me up as a schoolgirl when he raped me”
“Yes, the dark haired man with the tache, and the blonde woman next to him. He liked me in a ball gown and lacy underwear when he raped me, and lots of make up. She used to sit and wank–er, masturbate while he buggered me”
The judge did the glasses thing again. “Let the record show that the witness has indicated Mrs Marjorie Allison and Police Inspector Peter Allison”
“Yes, the bald bloke with the glasses, he was a screw, a warder, in the Approved School, he would buy me from the boys for an hour with cigarettes. When Alf gave me the clap, he was the first to catch it”
“Yes, I think she did get a sexual thrill out of hitting me, she used to stink just like that woman who used to wank over me”
“More times than I could count.”
“What was the longest you were left in there?”
“Four days, I think. That was the time I tried drinking my own pee”
That, I think, was what nearly broke my lady juror, and the judge had to call for silence. Two days, it took me, two days explaining how I still had to take the hormones because otherwise I wouldn't survive to live anything like a normal life, and then I had two days of the cross-examinations, from a series of barristers. Ask any woman who went through it, back then, what a rape trial was like, and how it was more like the woman was on trial than the culprit. Except, of course, that back then there was no such thing as rape of a man, just 'indecent assault', but I was given the works, oh yes. I was a violent little monster, who destroyed the comfortable furnishings of the last-resort restraining room I claimed was a cell. I was a cock-hungry pederast, preying on the other boys and flaunting the attributes I had grown with illegally-obtained hormones I extorted from poor warders with my evil sexual wiles. And so on, and so on, and I kept my gaze on my lady, and she wept regularly, and all I felt coming off her was the deep love of an obvious mother.
Half an hour after I finally stood down and was discharged, Charlie turned Queen's Evidence. Brian went to the box.
“You spent time at the Approved School in question, Mr Dennahy?”
“Yes, but my wife does not know what happened to me in there, and I would rather she did not find out”
Once more, the judge. “Mr Dennahy's experiences are not an issue here, and they will not be an issue in this Court”
With those limitations, Brian told his own story of small boys, predatory warders, sudden and permanent disappearances....and then Charlie, now as a prosecution witness, came up. Oh god...
Raynor's thrill was the hammer. Except when Elsie got Alf and Don to hold a boy down so that she could get some good swings in, it was Raynor's passion for a good, solid thwack. Alf and Don were there of course, and they were the ones with the saws and the axe, but Charlie...no, not Charlie. He just liked pretty boys, and was that so wrong?
I had to leave the gallery to be sick.
We left the place in the Jag, and were soon on the M1, then peeling off on the M6 as Brian drove smoothly and not too fast for home. Tom took the front seat, and Em and Karen squeezed in with me in the back, in that age before seatbelts. Karen was twitchy.
“Stevie...there's something I want to ask you. It's just that, well, if anything happens to Ada, you've got no protection from them, and Brian, well...”
She was pink. “Look, you never really got anywhere having me as a girlfriend, so would you accept me as a mam?”
CHAPTER 25
Karen was trembling with nerves.
“Look, Steve, I know I'm not that much older than you, but it would be a way of keeping the fucking social workers from getting at you if Ada goes. We've talked it over with her, haven't we, Bri, and she is happy with the idea. You've had so much shit we can't bear the thought of you having any more”
Em was grinning, and nodding in agreement, as the Jag rolled smoothly North. I slid over to cuddle up with my prospective mother, and as I reached over to join Em into the hug Brian cracked a joke about me always wanting to cuddle up with his wife, but just this once he would let it go. Tom was laughing, up until the point when I suggested he was feeling much the same about Miss Stephenson, and Brian turned to crack a joke over his shoulder just as Tom dropped his head into his hands in mock embarrassment just as the bullet went between their heads and totally shattered the passenger door window.
Brian stood on the brakes instinctively and the large bike shot ahead, the pillion in his leathers and full face helmet turning to look over their shoulder and raising a large pistol. From somewhere, I don't know where exactly, Tom had produced the largest pistol I had ever seen, and as he shouted “Keep it steady Brian” calmly shot the man in the face, through his helmet and the windscreen. His dying spasm took the bike completely off course, and a rider and an obvious corpse slammed into the road surface as the bike highsided and spat them off. Brian started to brake, as did the other drivers, and Tom just sad “NO! Keep going!”
Brushing the glass off him, he dug out the fitting I had always seen as flash and over the top, the radio telephone, and cranked it up. His voice was oddly calm, entirely dispassionate, for someone who had just killed at least one man.
“Operator....thank you. Emergency services please”
“Thank you, police.”
“My name is Tom Skinner and I am in a blue Jaguar, licence plate bravo romeo india two treble zero. I have just shot a man who attacked our vehicle with a handgun. I am North of Hilton Park services on the northbound carriageway. Nobody in our vehicle is hurt”
“I believe it is an attempt to kill a prosecution witness in a major murder trial. They were on a large Ducati motorcycle.”
“Yes, I have a licence. I am formerly of the Diplomatic Protection Service”
“I intend to keep driving until I am satisfied the vehicles near me are police”
“Thank you”
“Brian, keep on course for home. I will tell you when we can stop. Girls, Steve, eyes open, please.”
He had a small notebook out and was calmly recording the events, but I saw his eye twitch, just a bit, as I leant forward to squeeze his shoulder, the draft roaring in through the shattered window. Twenty minutes later, we saw the first blue lights, and then there were four Rovers around us, and Emily swore.
“They've got soldiers in with them!”
We were shepherded off and led to a training camp up by Warcop, to be joined an hour later by the others in Sid's car, and three days later, with plastic sheeting over the shattered window we were allowed home, where armed police stationed themselves around the place as the big boys broke in some more doors and removed a few more people with no more than reasonable force.
We went back down after the weekend to take another unexpected and totally unusual stand in the box to recount our near miss, with many more people in the dock, and after that, when we were all dismissed, and the court was settling down to the truly nasty shit that made my story look like a cake walk, the stories of blunt trauma and saw marks, of shallow graves and rose bushes, Tom muttered to me.
“Kid, thank you. If you hadn't made me blush, that cunt would have had me. I owe you”
I hugged him, which made me feel just a little like a girl, but not that much. He smiled at me.
“There are times when I realise why I took my old job, and this is one of them. Let's make sure that bitch gets buried, and all of her friends. Yes indeed....and I think it is time I stopped havering and dragged Sally out before she gives up on me, or some twat gets lucky
“Steve, I know you might not feel like it at the moment, but life is good, and even when it isn't it's better than being fucking dead, so you hang onto your lady there. She's diamond, and if you don't mind I shall have a go at your teacher, because this has got too much to bear on my own.
“And don't tell my boss I sad that, OK? You of all people know where I am coming from”
I did, and while I had never been there, this good man was having to deal with the fact that he had calmly, dispassionately, killed two men, for the rider had died from a broken neck.
He had been another policeman. The gunman had been one of my customers. What the fuck was wrong with this place?
At least, for us, the trial was over. That night, I made love to Em as Valerie had suggested,and with the judicious application, to my shame, of a number of mental images of Karen in some interesting positions, what was left of my old self woke up a little bit,and it was enough for us both to be happy, in a way, to be less of a girl.
The hormones I had spoken of in court were still vital to my health. Having stopped the intake of my natural supply by terminal surgery, I needed the replacement doses just to allow my bones to develop properly. I had continued to grow, just a little, and reached five foot five and a vital and important half, and as I ran the grounds and pounded the track I went from pallid, undernourished waif to slim, fit female athlete. Yes, that was the look I had, and there were boys who would hang round the track to ogle as I ran. How more confusing could life get?
I had persuaded Em to start jogging, and Karen took her in hand in the gym, and as we both hit seventeen she was really blooming. My Emily was beautiful, not as instantly striking as Karen, but beautiful, in a slow-burning way that cut me to the soul when she ducked her head and those green eyes looked out from under a drift of dark curls,or when those same curls lay damp on her flushed forehead as she came to orgasm with me. I realised that while she had gone with me at first partly because I was there and I was available, she stayed with me because she truly loved me, and as she bloomed into a woman that was now capable of turning heads in her own right, it was my head she wanted filled with desire.
The hormones kept me moody, though, and sometimes there would be dark times, arguments that any couple would have, but made worse by the fact that every time we did argue, I would hate my body and blame it for everything, and Em would see, and make some joke about how much she loved my tits, and do something to them that made me forget whatever it was we had argued about.
I know, really know, that Emily is at least inclined to bisexuality, but whether that was in her from the start or learned from me I can never know. One of our biggest arguments came when she first remarked, as we shopped in Debenham's for some clothes for a posh dinner Brian was having, that I would look good in some dress or other. Tom started to look concerned as my face reddened,and before my stack blew he intervened.
“Em...just remember what being n a dress means to Steve. Think of the Allisons”
I was still angry. “ I need a piss. Where's the gents' ?”
“Use the ladies' “
“I can still do it standing up, they didn't cut that off!”
“Steve, just think. I would have to come in with you, and that leaves Emily out here on her own. Use the ladies', nobody will complain.”
“Why can't I for once just be allowed to be a man?”
“Stephen Jones, if you act like this you are not being a man, you are being a spoilt brat, and you deserve to grow up better than that, so for once do as you are told and make my job easier, OK?”
I was still fuming. He suddenly grinned. “You know, you could be on Doctor Who, one of his bloody stupid assistants, companions, whatever. Every time he tells them not to go somewhere, what do they bloody well do?”
That broke the mood, and I laughed as I said “Yeah, but I'd need to practise the panting and the screaming. 'Oh–gasp gasp–Doctor--gasp gasp!' “
Em giggled. “Lover, you have the panting and the screaming down just right, in my experience,” and Tom blushed, and the next day the two of us started learning to fight.
CHAPTER 26
We weren't learning some mad form of instant death to our enemies, just some basic moves to break out of someone's grip and discourage them from trying to get another one. Above all, what Tom was trying to teach us was observation and awareness. He was forever saying “What is wrong with this picture?”
The work was absorbing, and bruising, and when Karen and Brian joined in it became truly fun as well, especially the first time Em put Tom on his arse. Tom called in an old friend, as he put it, for a few weeks around the verdict, just so the three of us could be that little bit safer at school. Typically, my brother's main concern was the fact that he might have to play football against his old school, which would become his new school when he went home, as he must.
My fitness built, and Valerie talked, and slowly I began to come to some sort of terms with my situation.
“So you wanted to use the men's toilets, Steve? What did you envisage doing?”
“What I always used to, pull it out and wee in the trough”
“And how would that have made you feel?”
“Better”
“So, all the stares wouldn't have disturbed you?”
“What stares?”
“Hmm. Pretty girl, for all intents and purposes, walks into men's lavatory, unzips, produces a penis and lets go. Those stares”
“Well, they could all fuck off”
“But they wouldn't, Steve. That's the point. So how would you feel about their staring?”
“I wouldn't be too happy about it, you know that”
“So why invite the stares? You have a number of choices, Steve. What do you think you should do?”
I knew what she was saying. I could adopt a more obviously female style, go with the flow and just accept how I would look for the rest of my life. Little dresses, heels, bugger that for a choice. That was for girls. I know I got smug when some of the older boys watched me running, but that was really just nastiness on my part.
Or I could allow the butchers at me, cut off my tits and pump me full of boy juice. I had real issues with that, too, apart from the simple fact of doctors with knives. While the only tits I had ever truly wanted resided in girls' blouses,the ones on me had sort of crept up on me. I didn't want them, to be sure, but in the circumstances I didn't actively not want them. They were a part of me, and I was sort of attached to them and averse to blades....and Emily loved them. There was also the fact that my shape could never be male and, to be honest, I did sometimes actively want the stares. Look at this, you gawping bastards, look what they did to me!
Confused? Oh, yes.
The trials had finally run their course, a total of no less than twenty three defendants in the dock, and the Parliamentary enquiry was building up a real head of steam now. Almost every week, some other self-appointed council 'authority' or 'expert' was resigning, and for a while the Cumbrian coastal towns picked up a little as the sackings followed and a few jobs became available for the untainted.
We drove down to London for the verdicts, as we had to. I wanted to see them as their own lives ended. There was no death penalty, that had gone over ten years before, but I still wanted to watch the spectacle. The court was packed as the jury came back in; With fourteen known murders as well as countless charges of assault, both common and indecent, it had taken a long while, and I pitied the jurors.
In they came, faces grim, and extra police guarded the extended dock as the small army of shits were brought in. I scanned their faces as they arrived, looking for any trace of fear or remorse, and there were flickers. Charlie wasn't there, for his own safety, but in a separate little enclosure to one side. The judge entered, we rose and sat, and she addressed the jury.
“Ladies and gentlemen, have you elected a foreman?”
A tall man stood. “Yes, your honour”
“And have you reached verdicts on all of the charges?”
“Yes, your honour”
“Are these verdicts unanimous?”
“Most of them are, your honour. Some are ten to two”
“Please be so good as to confirm those as you deliver them. I will address Elsie Cunningham first. On the first charge, the murder of Child A, how do you find her?”
“Guilty, the verdict of us all.”
And so they went, fourteen times, all unanimous.
“And on multiple accounts of grievous bodily harm to Stephen Jones?”
“Guilty, the verdict of us all”
“Similarly, indecent assault on Mr Jones?”
“Guilty, verdict of us all”
“Attempted procurement of the murder of Mr Jones and others?”
“Guilty, verdict of us all”
So it went, down her list of offences, and then down the list for the other defendants, and while they weren't all found guilty of everything, there was enough to share around. I spotted my lady juror, and she saw me, and smiled and gave a little nod as if to say that the job was done.
Maybe for her it was, but I still had a life ahead.
The verdicts took all day, and once more the Toffs were on hand for a celebration, and we would be back in court n the morning for some of the sentencing. We ate, we drank, we cuddled up as a group, and Nana was more than a little tipsy as we went to our rooms.
Charlie was on me, and he had me by the throat, and I felt him hard against my arse.
“You always were a good fuck, Stevie, and you know what, once I've had you Raynor's going to have his fun”
And there was his cock, in my face, as he swung the hammer, and Em was holding me as I lay on the floor of the hotel room and screamed until the faces went away and Tom hammered at the door, gun out and naked.
He covered himself with a towel, still checking every corner.
“You OK, lad?”
“Sorry, people, sorry...”
I dissolved in tears, and Em held me, and Nana wrapped us both in a blanket until I was at least sane again, and then she did her little tea ritual and things were better, but I lay in the dark afterwards wondering if it would ever be over.
The morning came, and I picked at my breakfast, feeling and probably looking like shit. We made our way to the courtroom and went through the rituals, and then they brought in the first little batch.
The Cunninghams were there, and the Allisons. The judge's voice was quiet, and measured, but she left nobody in any doubt as to the strength of her feelings.
“This case has attracted a great deal of attention throughout this nation. I speak as a grandmother, and a mother, and can honestly say that I was both appalled and sickened by the quantity and sheer depth of depravity and sin, yes, sin, sin and evil, that has come to light thanks to the courage and strength of persons now present. Would that this strength had been found earlier, so that fourteen poor children would not have needed to be sent so brutally into darkness.
“For over fifteen years, Raynor and Elsie Cunningham, here before me, ran an establishment that only the camps of the last war exceeded in the evil practised there. When their activities were uncovered, they sought to escape justice by further murders of poor children they had already tortured. They even attempted the murder of the one child who escaped them and so ended their rule of horror. They were aided by a level of corruption deeply unsettling in its extent. We have been presented with a catalogue of systematic rape, for despite the wording of the law, that is surely what is was, of torture and brutalisation, and bloody murder.
“I see before me Marjorie Allison, school governor and mother, who masturbated while a young child was raped by her husband, who sits beside her, a grotesque and perverted rapist who demeans the office of Police inspector that he once held. Marjorie Allison, Peter Allison, stand.”
My ballgown lover and his wife stood, and she was in tears, and I couldn't give a damn because it was my turn.
“Marjorie Allison, Peter Allison, life imprisonment. Minimum term to be reviewed by the Home Secretary. Raynor Cunningham, Elsie Cunningham, stand”
Raynor rose, and turned to his wife as she remained seated, one eyebrow raised as she faced down the judge. She in turn looked out at the police around the dock, and very quietly said,
“That woman is to stand”
Four officers went into the dock, and the hellbitch lashed out, but the coppers simply slapped her arm out of the way, took her down to the floor and brought her back up in handcuffs. Two other policemen stood by her husband, batons drawn, and he shrugged and turned away as his wife was hauled to her feet.
The judge continued. “I have never presided over a trial of such evil, and hope never to do so again. Not even Brady and Hindley were as evil as you. Your complete lack of any form of remorse leaves me no option but to refer you for assessment in a secure establishment. If you are found to be of sound mind, you will be imprisoned for the rest of your natural life.
“One way or another, Elsie and Raynor Cunningham, the public will be kept safe from you. Take them down, all of them.”
I had had enough, and together with my family we went out onto the streets as flashguns popped and mikes were thrust at me. How did I feel, was I happy with the verdict, would I get my tits out for the Sun, we pushed our way through until I spotted a shabby figure on the pavement, looking at me and crying.
He looked about twenty, dirty and unshaven and despite Tom's warning hand on my shoulder I went over to him. He looked at me, tears streaking the grime on his cheeks, and he simply said “Did that cow go down, Stevie?” and I realised where I knew him from, fists, butter....and then he was gone, into the streets, and I knew I hadn't been the only one.
CHAPTER 27
Cunningham was gone, and I was technically free, but what the tramp had made clear to me was that it would never be real. Cunningham, the Allisons, Alf, they would all lurk just beyond that wall of sleep waiting to smile at me at night.
We had a series of meetings with the SS, and the profile of the case did us no harm. I had worried that the sackings and arrests that had slashed through the local council might have closed the ranks of the remaining employees, but while that had been the case at the start the details that emerged had been so shocking that they were almost falling over each other in their attempts to distance themselves from the horrors of Castle Keep. What was a problem, however, was the disappearance of so many relevant documents, particularly in connection with Mitchell and his ‘guardianship’ of me.
Life went on, though, and after a few weeks the police withdrew their operation from our house, though they left us a panic button, just as Brian and Karen were submitting their application for adoption. Kieran and Audrey had already successfully adopted Iain, and it was an odd little family we were assembling. And then….the long Summer holidays were upon us, and Brian gave in to my request for some time at Boot, where I could perhaps convince myself that I did have my freedom. Iain was off with his new family to Majorca, and Em’s parents were taking her to some campsite in Brittany, so it would be five of us for Boot, as Karen insisted that Sid come with us. Tom asked a favour.
“Bri, oh wonderful boss man and fount of all generosity?”
“What are you after, Skinner, oh miserable lackey?”
“Would it be possible for me to bring a friend?”
We all laughed at that, and it was Karen who asked the obvious question. “Would she happen to be blonde, a teacher, and called Sally?”
He grinned. “Ah, you can see why the security services let me go, I show out too easily”
Karen kept prodding, and Tom kept blushingly confirming how accurate she was being, and it felt good, to me, that two people who had helped bring my life back were getting something out of it themselves.
So, one day in August we joined the slow moving queue of cars that wound up Eskdale, and Arthur greeted us as old friends and showed the two couples to their rooms as I moved back in to my old, familiar place in Nana’s and Sid took the other room. She showed me that she had moved on to the Mail for sanitary purposes, as the News of the World had, in her opinion, done so much to get me back to her, and it would be bad manners. Two days after we arrived, eating a pub dinner after a there-and-back crossing of the two passes to show people the Langdale Pikes, there was a shout of “Darlings! Uncork the bubbly, here we are!”
Simon and Roger, looking fit and happy, with another man hovering behind looking uncertain. He was a small man, in his thirties, with some slight facial resemblance to Roger: the same prominent nose and cleft chin, but darker and with longer hair.
Roger brought him forward. “This is my cousin Timothy, we dragged him out of some pathetic excuse of a Summer’s break in London to get some of the soot out of his lungs, and stop him spending all day on the Heath and all night on the Common”
Timothy started at that. “You really are far too open about those things, dear cuz”
“Nonsense, my dear, they all know us up here, and almost nobody cares. Timmy, these lovely people are Karen, Brian, Stevie, Ada, Sid, Tom, and…sorry, my love, but who is this ravishing beauty? Tommy, my dear, have you been playing lights and bushels?”
Sally was looking very confused, and ‘Tommy’, like the rest of us, was trying not to laugh, as Roger went into full queen mode in an obvious attempt to embarrass his cousin. Tom revealed all.
“Roger, Simon, Timothy, this is Sally, my girlfriend”
Simon took her hand. “Charmed, my dear, and what do you do? Roger, white wine please, leave the champers for later”
Sally looked pink. “I’m a teacher”
Roger howled with laughter. “Priceless! Extra-curricular activity at young Steven’s school, no doubt?”
Yet again I saw that flicker in someone’s eyes as two and two made seven, and Timothy suddenly realised who exactly I was, but he made no comment and just carried on as if he had always known. I was slowly getting used to it, as I knew I would have to. Roger and Simon carried on with the deliberately over-the-top camping, and beer and wine flowed, and the evening was a very much better celebration of the end of hell than anything in London could have been, for I was on home ground here. Timothy just sat quietly, and every now and then I caught him looking at me, and there was something in his eye. Sid was also looking a little sharply at him, and when the new friend went to the Gents’ he had a quiet word with me.
“Something off there, Steve, something skewed”
I thought of Tom’s dictum: “What’s wrong with this picture?”
“Is he gay, do you think?”
“Not the feeling I’m getting, kid, not quite right. Simon and Rog are up to something. Did you see him staring at Karen’s legs?”
“Yeah, I caught that, but he wasn’t drooling, if you see what I mean”
“Steve…be careful, he’s not right.”
“Would Roger and Simon bring him up if he were…you know?”
“I don’t know. I thought at first they might be looking to do some matchmaking with me…but no, that’s not what I feel”
“Well, Sid, I’m not going to worry, I’m going to put my size fives in it and ask him, because I feel like living tonight, and I can’t be bothered with silly games”
“Yeah, but carefully, OK?”
I waited till Karen got up again, for the ladies’, and watched his eyes follow her out.
“She’s a looker, our Karen, isn’t she?”
“She’s absolutely beautiful, Stephen”
“I always did fancy her, ever since I was a kid, and it seems odd that she’ll be legally my mam in a few weeks. You got a girl back in London?”
“Er, I don’t actually go for women….”
His voice was trailing off as he spoke, and he was blushing, and I realised he wasn’t as up front about it as the others. I dropped my own voice.
“Look, it’s OK here, Arthur is cool with everything, and they all know about the boys and Sid and it’s still OK”
“Sid’s gay too? I thought he might be. He’s a nice guy”
“So you go for men, then?”
“Well, yes, but Sid’s gay, so…”
I was obviously being remarkably dense. “So, who would you go for then?”
“Well, Brian’s rather sweet, and Tom is very dishy…”
“But they aren’t gay”
“Neither am I, love”
Bang. My stupidity evaporated and I understood, and the off-kilter impression I was getting from her vanished, because she was just like me. I was a square mind in a round body, while her mind was the round part in her case. “Oh, I see. You are like me, then. Wrong body”
“You have it. Please understand me when I say I am jealous of you in a way. If I could have had what you had….oh, god, I would feel so much happier”
I was about to explode at that when she put her hand on my arm. “No, love, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. And I know that you didn’t want, don’t want, any of it, but…just to look like Karen, or you, it would have been so much more RIGHT for me, and….well, look”
She rolled up her left sleeve, and I saw scars. “As you can see, I’m right handed. I’ve done some reading since, and apparently it works better if you cut along rather than across, opens the arteries better”
I sat open-mouthed, and she continued. “Rog thought we might be able to help each other, that we might be able to walk some of our road together. I am waiting for the day when I have enough saved, and then, well, it will be Casablanca, or maybe Thailand.”
“You know I had no choice in this, don’t you? You know what price they made me pay?”
“Yes, I know, but I hope you can forgive my envy”
Sid was listening in at this point. “You are doubly screwed, aren’t you? By the way, I’m Sid. Who might you be?”
She ducked her head, and softly, so softly, murmured “Tessa”
“Well, Tessa, both this young man and this old puff are pleased to meet you”
He reached over, and shook her hand, and I noticed Simon and Roger exchange a glance. I muttered “Excuse me a minute” to Tessa and slid over to the Toffs.
“A bit of warning would be nice next time”
Simon looked a little contrite, but Roger was unabashed. “You need to start seeing the wider world, Steve. You have had nothing but that shithole, in one way or another, for years. We just thought, well, both of you are in shit state, pardon my French, and sometimes two hurt souls can heal each other.
“Steve, Timmy, Tess, she needs that same outlet, that same escape route. Sometimes, darling, the only one who can understand is the one who has been in the same place. We thought, just perhaps, you might sort of, you know, oh bugger, you know exactly what I mean. A shrink is fine, but they don’t KNOW, and I do not want to spend another minute riding in an ambulance, for that is what I have had to do with the silly creature, so yes, I am scheming. Sorry”
I couldn’t hold that against him, I couldn’t actually hold anything against him after everything, so I hugged him, and he hugged me back and sniffed up a few tears, and then changed the subject.
“So, are we taking you somewhere steeper then, my boy?”
He reached under his seat and brought out a carrier bag, and in it were a pair of French rubber-soled climbing boots.
“Time to rise above, Stephen!”
CHAPTER 28
Tessa was suddenly looking more than a little confused.
“I’m not used to this….this sort of acceptance”
I had to laugh. “Look, just look around you. Ignoring me, just for the moment, You’ve got three gay men, one elderly female fell runner, one man who made a fortune by kicking as bag of wind about a patch of grass in shorts and a funny shirt, a schoolteacher who’s shagging her pupil’s bodyguard, and a truly beautiful woman who somehow manages to be a human being. In a pub full of people that make sheep nervous and who talk to magpies, and who commute by toy train... You still feel odd?”
She did laugh at that. I am obviously writing this some time after the events, which is how I am able to ease into the correct pronoun, but as we spoke, and as she relaxed and realised that nobody thought her strange, she slowly came out of her shell, sitting straighter and losing some of the hunted look. Sid noticed as well, and in a mock-serious tone said “A hint: don’t EVER try to outdo our Stephen here in the world of pain competition, he’s seen it, done it and got the T-shirt”
I looked a little harshly at him, and he winced. “Yes, mate, and it was pink”
Change the subject, Steve. “You read? I first met these two in the library, which was rather lucky for me as it turned out”
Another blush rose through her face, and I realised. “Don’t tell me….you are just like Kaz and Em.”
“Em?”
“Em, my girlfriend. Mills….”
“And Boon!” finished Sid. “Please tell me you’re not into that silly cow Cartland…oh, no, she is! Kaz, bring me another fan, this one is playing for your team”
One honey-smooth slither later, and my red lady was sitting on the bench next to him. “I know, Roger told me just now.”
Sid grinned. “No, this is something important. She’s not a fan, she’s one of yours, like Emily!”
Her face lit up, and in a remarkably silly voice she said “Gurly gurl books?”
Tess nodded. “Yes...romances. It’s a bit like window shopping somewhere expensive, though; you can see what you would really love, but the price is just…”
Karen was looking hard at her. With the fingertips of her left hand, she lifted Tessa’s head, turning it to get different angles.
“Sally, front and centre, girl!”
My teacher joined us. “What’s the score, Karen?”
“Sal, meet Tessa. She has a similar problem to our boy here, just sort of arsey-varsey. What do you think?”
Sally was very, very quick off the mark, and I wondered if some planning was involved beforehand.
“Nice shape to the face, though the nose is a bit strong”
“Ah” said Tessa, “That’s a family thing. Our mothers were sisters”
Karen still had that studious expression. “Think we could, Sally? Think we can work with it?”
“I think so, Kaz”
Tessa and I were looking hard at the two, and Karen put on a fine display of mock indignation, all waving hands and fluttering eyelashes, like some Thirties film star. “What? You think looking this gorgeous is EASY?”
She turned to me and Sid. “Right, you two, bugger off to the rest of the lads. This is girl talk. Tess, what size are you? Bring any clothes?”
The last I heard was “Sixteen, fourteen in some, and yeah, I did”
Simon looked sharply at me as we joined them.
“Well?”
“Well, you’ve stitched me up, haven’t you, but I might just forgive you this once. She’s in a bad way, isn’t she?”
Roger took my hand. “Thank you for getting that bit right. Not many do.”
“Yeah, well, I do have a sort of inside track on it, don’t I? Tell me, though, whose benefit is she here for, really?”
Simon gave Roger a look, as if to say “Go on”
“It’s all a bit odd, Steve. We’ve been trying to find somebody who can get a handle on what is driving her, but there’s not a lot of literature about, and most of the shrinks we have tried tend to be of the “Pull yourself together sonny” variety, or insist that she’s a gay man with a fetish for transvestism. Has she given you the ‘I’m not gay’ line yet? That’s the thing that’s driving her spare. I just wish there were someone around who understood…and then I thought of you, and, well, sorry if it’s a bit of a surprise.
“Look, we’ve tried to find anything published that might be of use, and the only thing we keep coming back to is some odd bloke called Money who seems obsessed by it all”
“Valerie mentioned him”
“Valerie?”
“My new shrink. She says he talks out of his arse, all about things being learned. All I ever learned was how to switch off”
Simon leant towards me. “Well, darling, do you think you might be able to help each other?”
I gave that a few seconds. “No, I don’t. But I do think we can listen; we each have a lot to talk about. Better than nowt.”
“Right, got that settled, then. Now, on to other things…tomorrow. What do you think about a little drive out to Borrowdale? There’s a crag near the road there that has a classic beginner’s route for you. I assume your dishy bodyguard has done some cragging, so that would make two ropes of two, much easier than one of three. See how you get on there, and then we might go up high in Langdale, or even up Wasdale and do the Needle”
Roger grinned. “Not CB?”
“No, darling, not the mess you made of it last time. Central Buttress, Steve, a rather large flake with a long layback, and he’s getting on a bit, a little past it for that. But he’s still aged well”
“Like a fine brandy, my love”
“And just as intoxicating”
I looked from one to the other. “You two are even worse than those stupid books the girls like.”
Simon gave me a very pointed look from under his eyebrows. “Just remember…for years just talking like we are now was enough to get us sent to prison. What happened to you was the sort of thing that happened to men like us in places like Pentonville. They can’t touch us now, so we are determined to be as open as we can. There are a lot of dead to remember. Just think what was done to Sid.”
“Well, I promise nothing, but I will say, I think she and I will get on fine. Just a pity about her tastes”
So, the next day, while Sally and Karen settled in for some female thing or other with Tessa, and Nana muttered something about ‘scab picking’, Brian, Tom and I followed the Toffs out to near Derwentwater to a place the boys called ‘Shepherd’s Crag of Borrowdale’, a great lump of pale rock rising out of the vegetation.
The boys were uncoiling great lengths of rope and had all sorts of odd bits of tape and rope loops, giant snap links they called karabiners, lumps of metal like old engineering nuts on more bits of rope, and a number of odd belt things with tape hanging off them, one of which I was required to step into. A strap came up between my legs, and it all sort of fastened together into something like the skeleton of a nappy.
Simon demonstrated by picking me up from a seated position. “Whillans harness, Steve, lets you sit on the rope.”
He then proceeded to hang all sorts of stuff round his neck and shoulders before tying the rope onto my harness with a complicated knot and then the same with the other end to his harness. He passed the rope through a sort of figure of eight shaped piece of metal and gave me a few hints on what to do if he fell off, tied me bodily to the ground after some advice about what I should say in mid air apart from “Oh bugger!” and was off. Tom was doing much the same with Roger, and when Simon shouted “On belay!” Rog unfastened the main rope from my metal thing and yelled “Take in!”
The rope started to snake up the rock, and when it came tight he shouted “That’s Steve!”
A long pause, then we heard “Climb when ready!”
Roger undid all the bits holding me to the ground, ushered me to the rock, and said “Now shout out ‘climbing’ “
I did, and I was. The first part was easy, and I joined Simon at a resting point, quickly followed by Roger, who tied me to the rock and showed me how to control the rope for the next bit, and off I went again, air around me, at one point on what felt like the top of a roof, legs dangling down either side as I wriggled along, and then….then there was this great overhanging wall and I thought, you are taking the`piss.
Roger was just behind me. “Looks steep, doesn’t it? Now look closer. Can you see the marks on the rock from hobnails? See how the little folds and knobbles show you the way up? Just trust the boots, trust your feet, and try not to reach up too high or your arms will lose all strength. Balance and steadiness….”
Off I went, and it was steep, and it was high, and the views out were amazing, and I had never, ever done something so completely absorbing. I finally arrived right at the top, where Simon was sat tied to a tree while he pulled the rope in, and he just grinned and said “Good, wasn’t it?” and there was nothing else for it but to give him a kiss on the cheek.
We moved back from the edge as Roger arrived, and tied himself on to bring up Tom, and the rhythm of it all, and the ritual of the calls, was so absorbing that I nearly cried at the loss of so many years I could have been climbing.
Tom was grinning. “Bugger, so that’s what it’s meant to be like! I only ever did it in the dark and wet before”
We and looked out over the lake, just soaking up the beauty, and in a moment of mixed pain and joy I realised how many people, from Cunningham to Child Q, would never see this or feel such delight.
CHAPTER 29
We returned to Boot with me buzzing away and the other three somehow completely relaxed, after another four climbs.
It was all I had read of, in that book so long ago, and everything that Simon and Roger had spoken of. Space beneath my feet, as I would later find a woman climber had called her story, and that feeling of being somewhere you had earned a right to be. Lesser mortals, that was the phrase, earthbound.
Nana was grinning as we got out of the car.
“Tha enjoyed that, then?”
I noticed a hint of a tear there, and I realised that it wasn’t just me that had waited the best part of four years from dream to delight. Nana had been in her own prison all that time, with the obstruction, corruptly or otherwise, of the council, and there I was free and happy, and picking at her rocky scabs. I expected a comment on that one, and I wasn’t disappointed.
“If tha’re going up in the world, Steve, I think tha’ll be fine for a crossing of the Sca Fells. We could go by Mickledore…” and she winked at Simon, far too obviously, “And Broad Stand”
There was something hidden in her words, and I decided the first thing I would do would be some research. First, though, dinner, and Nana was the one pushing the boat out, with a meal that left us groaning, a full roast dinner that Arthur allowed her to serve on his picnic tables in the evening sun. After all, the boys got through enough beer to keep him happy, and I had already realised what a soft spot he had for my grandmother, and for me.
This was a community. The way Karen had described the bonding and banding together when she had found me, the completely unconscious acts of almost family generosity, this was Nana’s home ground in so many ways. Other people, like the Toffs, rode in on that wave of feeling, and the more I watched it the more I realised how deeply sick Castle Keep was. This was humanity, there was a place stripped of all fellow-feeling. Once more, despite what I knew and remembered, I had a sudden surge of sympathy for that lost boy in London.
There were revelations at tea, though. Arthur had happily chilled some champagne, as the mark up on that was a major boost to his takings, and as we six men (well, I would be eighteen in 76, so as far as I was concerned I was one) relaxed with a pint each before the champagne was unleashed, or whatever the term is, the four girls brought out platters of roast Herdwick lamb and vegetables, bowls of roast potatoes, mint sauce and gravy, Brian and Sid just sat and smirked. The slight buzz I had from the alcohol must have slowed my thoughts, because it was a minute or two before I clicked. Karen noticed my sudden understanding, and struck a “Ta dah!” pose as Tessa went to sit, in a summer dress and sandals, soft make up and a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head that held her hair back from her ears. Somehow she had gained a bosom, and she looked like nothing so much as a rather raw-boned and broad-shouldered woman in her thirties. As I looked closer, I could still see a soft hint of beard shadow, but otherwise she was all woman, and then I made the connection.
She was relaxed, and that was the main change, not the clothes, the lipstick or the shoes. I could still see the scars across her wrist, but now they had no significance, no story of hurt and confusion, of resentment and despair. Just another blemish.
Karen was still grinning. “What do you think then, Stevie lad?”
I was bowled over. “She looks great, Karen! Where…the clothes, and shoes and that?”
Tessa was grinning too. “My shoes, but Sally had this dress, and the girls sort of did a job on my face, and my hands and….look, they did my toes!”
Karen was pretending to buff her nails in an act of obvious false modesty. “I do know what I am doing, then”
There was a bang, then another, and Simon was on his feet. Fizzy wine was poured, and he raised a hand for silence.
“My darlings, we do know that a delightful roast of perfect Lakeland lamb is not best accompanied by such a wine, but we have some suitable bottles breathing behind the bar with the ever amenable Arthur. This is by way of a toast to mark ends, and beginnings. The end of a living nightmare for so many of us here and for others known and unknown. The end of hurt and evil. And beginnings, the beginning of healing, the beginning of a new life. Please, a toast, to true friendship, the cure for all ills!”
I could drink to that.
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The next morning I was woken out of a slight hangover by Nana shaking me.
“Right lad, it’s Fell and Pike today! OUT AND ON WITH THY BOOTS!”
It really did feel that loud. I staggered down to breakfast where the Toffs, Tom and Sid were already dressed in breeks and flannel shirts, accompanied, to my surprise, by everyone else, in a variety of outdoorsy rigs. Nana was grinning.
“I was a shepherd, lad, and I can still round them up! This is going to be a proper outing, and we’ll see how people feel at Mickledore. There’s nobody fat here, so we should be aal reet. Now, a good breakfast, load thy sack with plenty to drink, and we’re off.”
A little while later our cars were rolling up the banks of Wastwater past the screes that slide precipitously into the dark waters, Yewbarrow standing sentinel at the Head. We parked by the campsite, and then set off easily up Lingmell Gill and then more steeply onto Brown Tongue and Hollowstones. As a seasoned crag rat I was, in my teenage arrogance, of which I had some, watching for signs of weakness in my companions. Nana walked steadily and economically, though I felt she would rather have run up, as did the Toffs. And all the others, as it turned out. That was when I started paying attention to how they were dressed, and realised that none of them had new boots. All showed the signs of regular use, and to be honest, I should have known better. Apart from the Toffs, we all lived around the hills, so I should have expected it.
Tom was, of course, very fit, as was Brian, and Karen’s dedicated gym work left her relaxed and happy. Sal and Sid were breathing hard, but their footwork was still comfortable and precise, and Tessa….
In unisex mountain clothes, she made her statement with a padded bosom and a lavender shirt, with a marching Alice band for her hair, and a smile to break hearts. I found out later that she had packed a razor to make sure that she didn’t give herself away too obviously as the day went on, and realised she had one advantage over me.
The chest strap on my rucksack was most uncomfortable across my tits, for mine were real. I resolved to ask Karen to help me find a woman’s pack, if such a thing existed. If it wasn’t for the fact that Em, who I missed dreadfully, would object, I would consider losing them, but of course that would mean doctors…
A thought struck me, in the way the mind wanders as you plod up hills. I hadn’t had a single nightmare since arriving in Boot, despite the lack of Em’s warmth by me at night. This truly was my home.
The route passed under the huge cliffs of Scafell Crag, and Roger pointed out some of the routes that worked their way up the vertical rock, including something he just called CB. “You’ll do that one day, Steve, trust me”
We rounded the end of the crags to the North and then headed south-east towards the summit of England, Sal and Sid panting a little, and then we had a small celebration as we looked out across a sea of hills, to Broad Crag and Ill Crag, Bow Fell and Great Gable, and the boys were right, and then I caught Nana’s grin and remembered her from years ago, on wild wet days on the high fells, shouting at the sky that this was living.
There was a little conference of war at the top of the Pike, and Simon asked for some decisions.
“We have a choice of two routes for you, boys and girls. Both start with a descent into that dip over there, which is Mickledore. The simple route contours round to the south by a small tarn, then up the back to the top of Sca Fell. The harder route goes straight up that jumble of rocks over there.
“Doesn’t look too bad” said Tom, and Simon started to laugh.
“Funny how many people think that…Sally, you and Karen will not like it at all. Ada?”
Nana grinned, and muttered something about backwards with a lamb under her arm, and Simon just nodded. “Right, then, Roger will take the more sensible folk for a gentle scenic stroll, and we have the torment of the adipose awaiting. Vamos, muchachos”
Roger sighed. “Forget Clint, dear, he’s absolutely straight. At least, that’s what I heard from his boyfriend”
Sal and Karen went off with Brian and Roger for the Foxes Tarn path, and the rest of us made our way up to the tumble of broken slabs that make up Broad Stand. At the initial chimney, aptly called ‘Fat Man’s Agony’, there was a dad and lad, in plimsolls, shorts and vests, with bottles of fizzy pop in carrier bags, and Dad attempting to push sonny boy up the chimney. Simon winced, and ostentatiously started to uncoil a rope.
“Don’t mind us, we’ll take a while to sort our climbing gear out. You go on ahead, we’ll follow”
Dad looked at us with apprehension. “Is this a proper rock climb, like?”
Simon was friendly helpfulness incarnate. “This bit? No, this is just a scramble. Further on is the fun bit!”
“Oh….is there another way up? We want to get to the highest point, say we’ve done the top of England, like”
“Oh, that’s not this one, it’s that one over there”
“Oh, aye? Come on our Darren, we’re going up wrong peak. Thanks mate!”
Off they went up the Pike, and Simon sighed as he put the rope away. “Thank god for that. The number of people who get cragfast here…right, those with tits might find this awkward, but onward and upward!”
The chimney was easy, actually, but the ‘easy’ slabs afterwards were nerve-racking, with a real lack of sharp holds, and some long reaches. There was one corner where both Tessa and I needed a boost up, but the others made it look so easy I hated them, and it was all so absorbing that it was hard to make the transition to standing upright when the angle finally eased and we were there.
The others joined us at the summit, and after some refreshments we set off down to Burnmoor Tarn, where I had run on a wet day in another life, and I got a little weepy, and Nana saw. She turned to the rest and said “Stevie and me knaa our way home from here. We’ll have the kettle on for ye aal, we’ll run home.”
She turned to me. “Ready, lad?”
Ready.
CHAPTER 30
That was living, as Nana would say. How to sum up what I consider now as my first true holiday? I could list the climbs we did, or the peaks we crossed, or the silliness in boats on Derwentwater, or…it would be just that, a list, and while each of the items there brings me a memory, a smile, it remains a series of names and dates for anyone else.
Tessa and I spent a great deal of time talking, as the boys had hoped, and one day I got more of an insight into her nature, and by proxy that of my old passion April, than I anticipated. What struck me was the utter certainty she brought to the chats, the conviction. I thought back to Valerie’s question, and asked the same one, and to my total lack of surprise got the same answer: as soon as she knew there was a difference.
“That’s the point, Steve, they ask the wrong question, every time: when did you start feeling like a girl? I never did, I just always felt like me, and as soon as I realised that other girls were different…look, we used to go down to the beach, down at Studland, and little children never used to have costumes, just run around as nature intended, and I could see that some kids were like me and others had front bottoms as well as back ones, and as I got older I asked My mum why. They’re girls, she said, you’re a boy.
“Look, I’m sure there are lots like me, and they will all say the same things, but this is me, it’s who I am. I’ve been through the letters to Santa bit, I did all the ‘please God can I wake up tomorrow’ prayers, I’ve read the Jorgensen and Ashley stories over and over again, and nothing whatsoever changes. I tried….”
She was getting upset at that point, and I took her hand, me, a seventeen year old boy comforting a thirty-odd year old, well, woman.
“There’s a film I saw, called ‘I want what I want’, and it just spoke to me because it was my life, except that it didn’t work like that for me, not quite”
In the film, as Tessa told it, a young ‘man’ just like her gets caught in a dress by her parents after falling asleep, and after all the usual recriminations and visits to shrinks she leaves home, changes clothes in a public toilet, and starts a new life, finding a job and a boyfriend.
“It’s not as simple as all that, of course, but it was just about what I did, except I didn’t get that far. I packed up the few clothes I had harvested over the years, and all the money I had, and went up to London and changed in the toilet on the train. I started to walk around the shops, around Carnaby Street, looking to see if they wanted a shop girl, and all I got was ‘piss off, son’. I was twenty, I’d done my best with the make up and everything, but I’m too dark, and there’s only so much I can do with the beard.
“I was up there for three days, in a cheap hotel, and my money just evaporated, and then it was gone, and I’m in a twenty year old man’s body, in a dress and kitten heels, and too much make-up, and it’s never going to be any different….
“It’s awkward, you know? After the first cut, when you haven’t got deep enough, yet there’s still plenty of blood, so the blade gets slippery, and you have to cut again...
“I’d found an alley, and got behind some bins, but I didn’t realise it was the back of a café, and the kitchen staff came out to dump some rubbish and one of them stepped in my blood and, well, that was that. Ambulance, more psychiatrists, strapped down in the bed so I couldn’t open the cut again. I had a vicar telling me suicide is a sin, and a copper telling me it’s a crime, and I’d had enough, and I just said ‘what are you going to do, fucking hang me?’ “
She was crying now, her forehead furrowed with remembered pain.
“It was shame, Stevie, shame that got me the most. Shame that I had let down my parents, shame that I hadn’t managed to get something as simple as death right. I’d had this fantasy, you see, I’d move into life as the woman I am, and it would all be so simple, and once I had the cash I could go back to the family as myself, as Karen says, ta dah! Instead, they’ve got this useless excuse for a son bleeding into some London gutter and ‘showing them up’. That was the thing, the embarrassment I caused them, at the golf club, or the whist drive.”
There was anger there now. “It was all condemnation, and how I shamed them, and visits to head doctors who talked about fetishistic homosexuality, and back then, Steve, that was something that held the threat of a prison sentence, and I had a real urge to do the job properly, find a locked room or something, and my parents made me burn all my clothes in front of them…and then there was Roger, who was a lawyer, so they all thought he was so, so straight and sensible, and he offered to take me in while I had another go at University, well, polytechnic in the end.”
Tessa grinned at the memory. “If they only knew! Two nights after I moved in, there’s Simon at the door. Now I knew him as a friend of Roger’s, but this time, as soon as I shut the door behind him, the two of them are snogging! I mean, where are you supposed to look? This was another country, back then. In theory I could have been hanged for a suicide attempt, and those two would certainly have gone to gaol, but this….it was so natural. And then…then Roger just introduces me as his cousin Tessa, and Simon kisses my hand and…”
Now it was full sobs, and it took a while, but she got the rest out.
“And that was the hardest part, you know, because suddenly I was me, I was Tessa in daily life, but every time I went out the door I had to be Tim. I got my degree, I did what I needed to do, and Roger took me on in his chambers. My parents were ecstatic, as their macho, mountaineering nephew had made a real man of me at last”
I couldn’t help it, looking at her in a fitted dress with a little bow at the back, her pink toenails poking out of her sandals, and I just started to laugh. She understood, and Nana found the two of us sat on the doorstep howling, and just handed us each a cuppa and left us alone.
I looked at Tessa. “You know, I never wanted any of this. This isn’t me, but it is me, and, well, I know that sounds stupid, but I just have to accept it. Couldn’t you just, you know, go on as best as you can as you are?”
“No. This goes, or I go. I used to think my suicide was due to stress, depression, all that nastiness n London, but it wasn’t. It was actually a perfectly calm decision. I can’t live a lie any more. It was Simon who showed me all the stories, of Christine, and April, and that’s what has kept me going. I’m not living just now, love, I’m working towards a life. That’s what I use to keep me alive, that at some point I can stop being a caterpillar.”
She chuckled. “That film I mentioned, they really took the easy way out in it, you know. They had the boy played by a woman, and a pretty one. Life isn’t like that, or at least mine isn’t”
Once again she was looking wistfully at me, and I knew all too well what she was seeing.
“Hey, we should get someone to work on that Heinlein brain transplant thing”
She looked puzzled. “Heinlein? Who’s that?”
Danes. Such poor, limited people.
So much of what Tessa said was the mirror of my life, but there was always that one glaring difference: she had been born, while I had been made. I had no belief in any god, none at all, and that was all she had to blame, but I had a man, very much mortal and very much guilty. All I had to do was find him.
CHAPTER 31
When you are a small child, Summer lasts forever, and for me it was almost like that.
As Karen was a kept woman, and the holiday was sort of Tom’s job, they stayed on, but the rest had jobs to go back to. All except Sally, of course, who shared the same schedule as me. Brian had off-season training to coordinate, Roger and Simon had a life in London.
Tessa, working for her cousin, was also off, and I had a surprise when she appeared at the car, with her bags, still in a cotton dress. She caught my raised eyebrows, and smiled, a little sadly.
“It’s time, Stevie. Time I grew up and stopped being frightened, and how can it go wrong with these two to look after me?”
I gave her a hug, and then each of the boys, and then I did the hardest thing I had done since my escape, which, oddly, was also the easiest as soon as I started, and I kissed two men. Not on the lips, not sexually, but on the cheek, and out of love, for I loved those two. All they had done for me had been for nothing other than simple humanity and generosity of spirit, just as Sid had done when he took a timid little reader under his wing. I mean, I owed these two my life, along with the little family around me. Why should it be hard to give them just a small show of affection?
Simon blushed. Roger just hugged me harder. Tessa made a point of kissing me on the lips, and after the initial shock I realised her aim: this was a woman kissing a man, her way of giving two fingers to the way our bodies were screwed up. I made my own point of kissing her back, just to make my understanding clear to her.
Roger and Simon gave Nana a hug each, thanking her for her generosity and getting a very direct remark about how any bill had been paid in full.
“Aye, that’s my price canoodling with your cousin!”
Then they were off, Brian running Sid back in the Jag and the other three heading for the M6 by the scenic route over the passes and down Langdale. The holiday wasn’t over, for shortly both Iain and my girl would be back from their own family trips, and the plan was for them to join us for the week before school started again. I was determined that I would make the most of this time, for once we started the new year I would be worked tremendously hard at trying to gain the A-levels I would need for college. This was my last bit of free time for a year. And then, the day before my brother and Em joined me, Brian rang to say that the adoption papers were there. Finally, as much as Boot remained my spiritual home, the place that I felt most kinship with, finally I would have an official home.
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Tanned and gorgeous, she nearly took me off my feet with a diving hug and a kiss that left my nipples standing to attention, Iain just as tanned and smugly grinning at the two of us. Her parents had dropped her off at Kieran and Audrey’s for Iain’s new parents to drive them both up here, and I got a whole series of hugs from all of them, the two adults looking proud of their new son. He looked good, and I was beginning to see my father in him, which sort of balanced my unwanted resemblance to our mother. I had had all sorts of ideas about his return, which had included climbing, at which I was an expert now. Nana said no, emphatically, so I went to Roger.
“No. You have no idea yet of what it involves. You will get yourselves killed. Go scrambling with him, with Ada, that’ll let him see what it’s about and keep you out of too much trouble”
Well, he was off line with that one, for the trouble came two days later, with a knock on the door as we were about to settle down for tea. It was Arthur.
“Ada, is that Tom lad still here?”
“Aye, Arthur, what do tha want him for?”
“Ah, lass, there’s been a fall up in the upper dale, lad’s quite poorly, we need someone who can get up and bring him out. There’s been another one off Napes, and they’ve got the helicopter. We need some strong lads to get a stretcher up and down off the crag to where he can be treated”
“Tom’ll go, and me and the lad’ll go on ahead, aye?”
Arthur grinned. “I was hoping tha’d say that. lass. I’ll take a pack up for thee and Stevie”
He was off, as Tom started getting into his boots and Sal and Karen busied themselves with food and drink for us all. As I was about to change, Nana said “Tek them fancy rubbers of thine. We might need them.”
Several Landrovers had been brought round, and we were driven up as far past Taw House as we could get before being dropped off on foot. As Tom and the other lads loaded themselves up with the bulky rescue kit, Nana muttered “Remember thy breathing” and set off at a steady lope.
It was a warm Summer’s evening, and I quickly started to sweat as she led the way up the zigzag to the higher path past Silverybield. I felt good, the work done on the track and with Nana that Summer bringing me back towards where I had been so many years before, and I centred myself on the rhythm of my breathing, which was easier after the first steepness, and remembered her words. Look to the ground, don’t look at the heights ahead, let your arrival surprise you.
I was back in that race so many lifetimes ago, and it was just the one lap this time, but t was a long one. We panted on, my pack full of medical kit and primus slapping against my back so that I had to haul the straps that bit tighter as the sweat pooled in the small of my back and erupted from under my breasts. A fox took off from in front of us, stopping to see what we were doing once it had made safety room, and meadow pipits shot from the ground only to parachute back down. The only sound apart from that of our feet and panting breath was the ‘kronk’ of a solitary raven.
We took a pause under the splash of Cam Spout, and Nana had her little telescope out, scanning the great lump of rock that was our destination.
“Aye, Stevie, tha’re going to need those French shoes. He’s caught up on the big ledge there.”
We trotted off again, and some time later we were under the crag, where a man sat on a rock holding an obviously broken arm. He was from somewhere down South, from his accent.
“Thank god! Dick got down OK then? Is the helicopter coming?”
“Nay, lad, there’s been another accident. The lads are on their way, though. Where’s thy friend?”
“Up near the Waiting Room, I haven’t heard anything from him for a while…”
It was one of those really, really stupid accidents. They had got up Bower’s Route, as a rope of three, and Dick had set up the camera on some cable release thing to take the three of them, and Alan had stepped just that bit too far back. The two of them had then tried to reach him from the Chimneys,, but Tony, our man, had fallen badly. Dick was the one who had stumbled into the Inn nearly dead from the run down. Nana looked at Tony.
“Right, lad, tha’ve still got thy gear about thee? Ropes and slings and aal? Off with the harness, son”
She turned to me. “It’s more than a rope can do to get down from there, so we are going to climb that chimney and then I am going to let thee down to that chap so he has a hand to hold if nothing else. If tha can, tie him onto the ledge. Sharp now, he’s been there at least two hours”
She was picking through his kit, and spotted a figure of eight, as Simon called it.
Tony was staring at her. “You sure you know what to do with this stuff?”
She gave him a hard stare, and I caught that mutter again, backwards with a lamb, and we were off. Her grace on the rock was amazing, and I did my best to copy her style, such economy of effort that I was profoundly jealous. This was another side to Nana, one I had only glimpsed on Broad Stand.
The chimney was a bloody sight harder than it looked, but just about within my capabilities. I mean, I got to the top, so it must have been, my French rubbers helped, and then I watched Nana set up a complicated arrangement I later learned was called a direct belay. She had me get into Tony’s harness and tied the rope to me, then clipped it through the descendeur.
“Steve, this is important, reet? Do not hang on the rope with thy hands. Lean backwards, legs wide apart and walk down the crag. I‘ll let thy pack down to thee after, but tha’ll take down some gear to tie the poor bugger on.”
I stepped backwards towards the edge, the rope tight, and she tersely nodded and I stepped out.
There was a huge depth of fresh air under my backside, and I quailed for a bit, but then Alan moaned, and I thought, “sod it” and walked down the rock until I was at the ledge. Following Nana’s very detailed instructions, I tied his harness to some nuts I wedged in the rock, then secured myself the same way.
Alan looked at me, obviously in great pain, muttered “Angel…” and passed out.
“BOTH ON BELAY!”
“AYE AYE!!”
I untied the main rope, with a little fear. Were my belays sound? That was when i understood exactly why Nana and the boys had been so completely against my going climbing without them.
“TAKE IN!”
“TAKING IN!”
The rope slithered off up the cliff, and a minute later I heard “BELOW!” and two packs came sliding down to the ledge. There was nothing I could really do with Alan apart from cover him, but he was soon awake again.
“My friends….”
“Both fine. Rescue is on its way. Just stay comfy and we’ll soon have you down.”
I gave him a few sips of tea after I got the stove going, and watched the sun start to sink over the flank of Sca Fell. It was some time later when I heard the first yell.
“Ada! How is he?”
“Ask Stevie!”
I shouted down. “Cut face, but he had a helmet. I think spinal injury”
Slowly, slowly the lads worked their way up and around the flanks of our buttress until they could join Nana above me, and then I saw the silhouette of two men as they walked a stretcher down towards us. It was now heading towards sunset, and once beside me they nodded in recognition and salute and sent me walking back up on a man-hauled pulley system. Tom was there waiting.
“The helicopter’s on its way back, they’ll take us off from here. Well done, Stevie”
Twenty minutes later there was the whup-whup of the rotors as the RAF came round the flank of the mountain, and then the winchman was taking first the stretcher and then our little party, before landing on the valley floor to pick up Tony, and off to Carlisle hospital, and I only started to shake after we got down.
Alan died en route.
CHAPTER 32
I remembered that hospital, Mitchell’s den. He was long gone, crawled into some hole or other, but the smell of the place still brought the fear back.
I had sat with a dying man three-quarters of the way up a four hundred foot cliff, as the sun set, but I was still frightened here. I was on full alert for any familiar faces, and Tom caught my mood.
“This was where Mitchell worked, Tom”
“I know, Steve. I’m here, he isn’t.”
Nana and I were ushered to a side room, where a policeman waited, and I balked at the door, waiting for Tom. Once more he understood, and joined us there, to the copper’s obvious annoyance.
“I’m PC Noble. It’s just these two I want to have a talk with for now, we’ll get to you later”
“I’m the boy’s minder”
“Boy?”
He looked at me, and yet again I saw the penny drop.
“Oh, that Jones. Well, it’s OK, I’m here, so he’ll be all right.”
“Oh yes? I seem to remember one of your colleagues trying to shoot me and him, and one of your skippers doing worse.. I’ll just sit quietly by the door. Don’t mind me”
The copper blushed, but the point was brutally well made. He talked us through the day’s events, our run, the scramble up the chimney and my semi-abseil down, and in the end he was actually a nice man, unlike some of his colleagues. When I came to the setting up of belays, he was very, very precise.
“Did you move him at all, Steve?”
“No, his harness was still on him, I just crabbed some slings on and set some nuts. He was sort of sitting up where he had landed on a rock, that’s why I thought his back might’ve gone. He was only conscious a couple of times.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“Well, he was asking about his mates the second time, and I told him all was well, that there were people coming, and gave him some teas”
“While he was conscious?”
“Nil by mouth if unconscious, that’s what I was told”
“Good lad. You said the second time?”
“Yeah, he woke up for a second when I first got there”
“What did he say?”
I blushed. “Angel…”
He nodded. “I can see why. There’s always a worry in cases like this that somebody does something wrong, something they think will help but actually makes things worse. You seem to have done not only all the right things, but some remarkably brave ones as well. After what you went through with that cunt Allison…sorry, Ada.”
He looked across at Tom, who was sweeping the area steadily with his gaze.
“Bad apples, Mr Skinner. Truly rotten, and gone, and that’s how we want it. Pity Allison didn’t go the way of Carstairs. Pity they got rid of the rope. You look after this lad. He deserves better, and it looks like he’s getting it”
He shook hands with all three of us and went on to debrief the rest of the rescue team. Brian arrived an hour later, and took us back to the house for the night. He was smiling as he drove.
“Steve, my dear soon-to-be-son, how would you like some money of your own? Real money?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I was thinking of giving Dave a ring. This is the sort of story that the Sunday rags will pay top dollar for. Famous boy rescues man from cliff, while beautiful girlfriend and gorgeous stepmother pine and fret in fear for his life. Couple of shots of the girls in bikinis, you on some bit of rock looking all adventurous, that sort of thing”
“They’d pay for that?”
“Oh yes, and then there’s syndication rights abroad. Karen did it years ago, ‘I was just a meek librarian is twinset and glasses till I met football star etc’. They had pictures of her in a bikini, and in a cardy and glasses!”
“She doesn’t need…oh, I see.”
He rang Dave once we were home, and he was excited about the prospects of yet another sale from me, this time targeting the Express. Aidan would be along for the photos in a couple of days, he said, and once more I was spinning along as events went out of my control. I wasn’t worried, though. This was my chance to get a little of my own money. I had been paid, of course, for the little bit I gave out for the papers at the trial, but nothing big as Dave was holding out for a book contract, which would earn me a lot of money if it took off.
It was self respect. Nana looked after me, and with Brian and Karen I was short of nothing. They were stupidly well off, so could more than afford it, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to be responsible for my own life, to have some of the freedom that I had never had and the little bit of adulthood that comes from paying one’s own way.
Tom drove us back the next day in the Rover, and Em went all soppy when we got in. I ran Brian’s proposal past them, and Karen looked at Em.
“Have we got bikinis, pet?”
“Oh, I think we have bikinis, Kaz”
Two minutes later they were demonstrating that they did, indeed, have bikinis, and the wherewithal to fill them extremely nicely. Sally took one look, sniffed, and disappeared, only to return looking almost as nice. There was something in her smile, though…
“Steve…some day you will want to go swimming again. We’re not trying to get you to be a girl, or anything stupid like that, but your old Speedos are not exactly, well, decent. We went shopping, and….”
She was holding out a dark blue bikini. That was a moment that left me with no idea at all as to how I should react. This was purely girl clothing, but then I had a girl’s body. I didn’t want to dress as a girl, for I was a man, but I had to wear bras and knickers because the latter fitted and the first was essential. I loved to swim, but Sally was right, I couldn’t exactly walk down the beach with my top bare.
Such a small thing, and I don’t mean the costume. Such a huge step.
I drew a deep breath, took it and changed. Tom grinned at me as I came out.
“It’s the right thing to do, Steve, get on and live your life and give two fingers to opinion. Want me to drive you all out to the beach? You’ll need two cars”
In the end, Nana dug out the half-timbered relic and we piled in with towels and windbreak, stove and picnic, and headed on down the Dale and up the coast to Braystones, a little further away from the nuclear power station, and while the girls were in sarongs or sundresses I had my shorts and a T-shirt on over my new costume. Nana has never been a real fan of thermos flasks, and insists on taking her battered primus stove on trips, as then tea can be made properly. Back then, there were still many cafes that sold boiling water for people like her. They would turn up with empty thermos, loose tea or bags, and a little pot of milk, and for a few pennies the café owner would let them brew properly rather than drink something that had sat all day.
We did the usual British thing and set up a little wall of stick and canvas wind breaks to mark our little patch of beach, and then Nana got to work with paraffin, pricker, pump and priming paste, as Tom grabbed Sally and ran with her into the waves, her screams echoing the cries of the gulls. I noticed, though that just before he grabbed her he scanned the full length of the beach. Even when he switched off, he didn’t, really.
There were families set up along the sand, little groups of girls of all ages in the least amount of material they could get away with, young lads in similar groups orbiting the girls, older couples in deck chairs with rolled up trouser legs and sleeves, the men definitely not watching the teenaged girls.
Kaz and Em walked up to the ice cream van with me, and got the predictable “What can I get thee ladies?”
It wasn’t worth arguing, as it was a more than natural error, and of course it was followed by the flicker of recognition when Emily called me by name, and the ice cream man smiled.
“Tha’re that lad that was in the news this morning”
I started to close down, as I tended to do once my notoriety was brought up, and the man noticed, and held up a hand. “Na, LAD, I don’t mean that nastiness, though I’d pull the bloody lever mesel, I meant what tha did yestere’en. That was right brave of thee. Is that thy nana down on the beach with thee?”
“Aye, and Tom, who helped carry the rescue kit up”
“Well, let me shake thy hand, lad, and the ice creams are on the house. I mean, on the van, ah, tha knaas what I mean! “
He shook my hand with genuine warmth, through the window of the van,
Once more I was learning that once I broke away from the evil I had lived in, the vast majority of folk were simply people, fellow human beings, with the ability to share that humanity. To all intents and purposes, to outside eyes I was just another bikini-clad teenage girl. He had made a point of stressing the ‘lad’ bit, though, once he knew, and it was simple gestures like his which were the real balm that was healing me. I could almost live with myself, now, and I was learning, slowly, to live with others.
CHAPTER 33
The papers were full of interest, as it turned out, and Dave and Aidan were more than happy for a little more income from me. Aidan was still so self-effacing I could have forgotten he was there, if it wasn’t for his military style commands.
We started with some beach pictures, our lovelies smiling in what seemed like three square inches each of whatever the hell the material is, and Aidan had enough empathy that he never suggested I join them. I must admit, though, I did enjoy that session. My beautiful Em in a string bikini. My gorgeous stepmother-to-be in even less. And my bloody teacher as well; I mean, surely it is every teenaged boy’s fantasy to mentally undress their favourite woman teacher, and there she was. I could have sold tickets to half my class, and it would do my reputation with them absolutely no harm.
Nana and I took him along to one of the smaller outcrops, and got the necessary square-jawed mountain sort-of-man pictures, and in the end we made a day of it and walked up to the buttress itself so that Aidan could get some dramatic shots of the place. As he bustled about with light meter and a collection of lenses, Dave sat by me.
“You’re looking good, Steve. I still have problems…..shit, look, you still give me sleepless nights. When you came out of that hole…I look at you now, and it’s like you’re real now, not some ghost.”
I’d bridled a little at his first words, and he saw. “Look, mate, I know what you thought I meant. Yes, you do look good that way, but there’s fuck all you can do about that, and I get the impression you are almost happy just to tell the world to kiss your arse, am I right?”
I had to laugh at that. “Yeah, so I can out-tit Nicki Debuse. Not high on the ambition list for a teenaged boy, is it?”
Dave grinned. “That is what I meant. You’re not just alive, you’re full of life now. That’s what I want for the book, FTW, and that irreverence”
“FTW?”
“A yank thing, fuck the world. I watched you in court, and you were trying to show what you had, saying ‘look at what they did to me’, and I could see you were struggling, but you did it. You’re still doing it”
“Dave, I haven’t got any fucking alternative. I don’t have the guts to let them try and sort me out. I was going to say I don’t have the balls, but…”
“That’s exactly the attitude I want to get down, kid. I want them to cry over you, puke over you, and laugh with you. Think you can get that out? If you can, I’ll slip a plug or six into the article. I’ve got another proposal, too…could you speak about it? On radio? I would like to get you on One and Four, so we get both the teeny crowd and their parents, the ones with the money. Oh, and any old photos of you? Before, I mean?”
That one hurt, for apart from a few Nana might have, all the old pictures had disappeared with Mam and her bottled friends. Then, a thought.
“I might have one or two very specific ones. I was in a race just before that cow got her hands on me, and there were two lads there who were hot stuff. If the locals didn’t cover it, Mr Robson might have some snaps. My sports master, he was always pushing me to run”
“That would be useful indeed. Now, what I want to do is sit down with you and set out the pitch markings. Just set the boundaries that we can work within, that won’t cause you pain”
I sighed. “You really think I can do this without pain? Let’s get the fucker written, printed, and delivered free to whichever prisons the cunts are in and let our ‘dear readers’ do what they can”
“Whatever happened to Christian charity?”
“It locked me up and fucked me in the arse for three years, that’s what happened to it.”
I was getting too wound up. Perhaps this book wasn’t such a good idea. I reined my emotions back in, it wasn’t fair on one of the people who had saved my life.
“Look, Dave, you know I will never be over this. There are two things driving me here. The first is that the country, the world, has to know what those bastards did. It’s a faint hope, but if I shout loud enough, perhaps some other kid won’t end up in shit. Just one would be good.
“And there’s another thing I want. Just to be able to point at them, show faces, names, let people know what they are. I want them looking over their fucking shoulders till they day they die. Yes, oh yes, we’re writing that book.”
Dave laughed out loud, shaking his head. “When that poor bugger called you an angel, I didn’t think he meant the one with the flaming sword”
I grinned back. “It’s my turn now. And my turn to ask you what you asked me: are you up to this?”
He held out his hand, and we shook. “Oh, yes, Steve, they are about to get fucked up the arse themselves. As ye sow”
Aidan found us howling with laughter, and even though we tried to explain, I don’t think he quite got it.
Dave was right. Fuck the world; I was healthy, and happy, and loved, and free. I had more than most people had, and I definitely had more than my abusers now possessed.
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Summer finally came to an end, or at least the holiday part of it, and I fell into a maelstrom of work. School was relentless, and in between were the hours talking to Dave over a tape recorder. My only breaks in term time were sessions with Mr Robson, where he would try to draw every last drop of energy from me, and then grinningly tell me how much up or down I was on my personal best.
I was actually enjoying my studies, as there was such an emphasis on thinking rather than remembering. Mr Calvert still tore into preconceptions and prejudice, forever quoting the aphorism ‘history is written by the winners’, and to my astonishment and gratification he started giving us SF as reading assignments.
Well, when I say SF, it was one book, Keith Roberts’ ‘Pavane’, the story of England and the world if the Armada, in effect, had won. It was his way of making us look at events and their causes rather than just accept what we were told. Where do these people come from, these educators? ‘Teachers’ is too small a word for them, for that year they took me out of a small Cumbrian town and showed me a world of thought. They didn’t just tell me to remember things, they taught me how to think, and I am still grateful for that. I spread my wings under Mr Robson, and Sally, Mr Calvert and the rest set my mind free.
I could spend so much time recounting my studies, but perhaps I would lose you. The more detailed analysis of writing, which showed me simultaneously how poor some of my Ace Double authors were, and at the same time how exceptional the rest. The early days of computer programming, so far from the talking machines of Star Trek that I almost despaired. Chaucer. If ever there was an author who better embodied life and living, I haven’t come across him.
All the time I was expanding, Cunningham and the rest were shrinking. One day, I came home and Karen said something to me which I half heard, and Brian just said “Are you listening to your mother?” and grinned, and that was it, the process was done, and without any fanfares, but with a lot of grins, I had new parents.
That night my hormones must have been particularly girly, because whilst I was over the moon with joy at the adoption I spent the night sobbing my heart out in memory of my poor, dead mother. In the small hours, Karen must have heard, for she came in and crawled into bed with me to hold me as I wept.
Control came back slowly, and I settled into her warmth. A thought struck me, and I had to ask it, as teenagers do.
“Karen…..why no kids with Bri?”
She stiffened slightly, then:
“Because we can’t, Stevie. I can’t. I know I am the most beautiful woman the gods ever sent down to earth, but, well, I’m a bit sort of stuffed in the baby department. I just can’t. We tried, and then he had some tests, and then me, and…
“You know, I wondered whether he would get someone else, you know, a baby factory, and he just stayed, and that’s when I realised he does love me, and I’m not just some arse and tits from the local night club, I’m his, and he’s mine….can you see why he is so passionate about you?
“I set out to catch someone with money, and I got a real man, a man with a soul, and if I could have given him what he wants…shit, pet, we’re still looking at ways, but just now he has you.
“You’ve given him a reason to go on, someone to fight for. So do us all a favour, and keep fighting for yourself”
That was a real kick up the arse, a timely reminder that others suffered, and when the Express article came out I made a point of involving Brian in the celebrations. Em scored huge cool points, and a lot of admirers that I had to warn off, from the article, but poor Sally….
I just basked in my fame. Fuck the world,
CHAPTER 34
School felt, some days, as if it was burning me at both ends, rather than a candle, and it was only the people round me who stopped the cracks from spreading.
Miss Graham was true to her word, doing her level best to get me into university, but sometimes I just wanted to let go and forget the whole thing. Sally, or Miss Stephenson at school, of course, worked harder than I then realised to keep me on track, and Emily did it in other ways, largely by being absolutely placid about everything.
Sally was tickled by the pure adoration that erupted from the boys when her bikini-clad form appeared in the Sunday Express, which at that time was a broadsheet, so the pictures could be larger than tacky tabloids like the Sun could manage. Half a page, that photograph Aidan took, of three girls in next to nothing, and the only thing that kept some of the more daring sixth-formers off her was the reputation Tom carried about with him. Emily and I, by contrast, were almost idolised, it seemed, as the school’s dream couple. Despite my physical problems, I knew I was well-liked, which was an amazing thing in hindsight. Even at the time, I kept waiting for the bubble to burst, for someone to have a go about nancy-boys, but for once I don’t believe it was Tom who stopped it.
Trying to analyse it, now, all I can suppose the strength of feeling came from is revulsion. Carlisle isn’t a huge city, and Maryport is a tiny place. What happened to me, and to others, including other children from Maryport itself, was not only shocking, but very, very close to home. Parents looked at their children and feared; brothers and sisters looked at each other and shuddered at the thought that any one of them could have ended up in Thirlmere, or with Charlie, or under a suburban garden.
I was a scapegoat in reverse, having borne the sin I had come back to them. It helped that I didn’t make a huge song and dance out of it, as some might have. Nana would never, ever have let me play the victim.
The first time I had a breakdown after my release, she tended me, and then asked the big question: was I going to let them win? I had my life back, I had the chance of doing something with it, and she wasn’t going to let me throw it away.
So, I slaved at the schoolwork, I talked for hours with Dave, and as often as we could Emily and I made love, and it never got stale.
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The Summer of 1976 was a famous one, with a severe drought and soaring temperatures sandwiched between two extremely wet periods. When the drought broke, it broke with a deluge, but up to that point the weather was a fever dream of heat and sunshine. I sat my four A-levels, after having done very nearly double the work of other pupils to catch up. Sally had been a huge help in spending time after school pushing me even harder, and although she had the excuse that Tom was about I still felt I owed her more than I could adequately repay. It got to the stage where there would be three or four teachers at our house, working me through mock exam questions and tearing my answers constructively into shreds, then showing me how to give better ones. Those were evenings where Em would join in as her own subjects came up, and Karen would float by with a tray of tea or, later in the evening, a great jug of Sangria and an array of snacks, and then the session would degenerate into a melee of teasing and tall stories.
And then there were two things. In June, my eighteenth birthday. Legally, they could never again touch me, but I could go after them, and Roger had been working on that one for some time. We had sued the Council, of course, and a tidy sum had arrived in my trust fund, but I wanted hellbitch.
That was where Simon and Dave got down to it, and as I should have expected Dave knew a man, and one day I had a phone call from Simon that delivered a lovely little bonus.
“Stephen, my dear, they do after all appear to have some funds. My little friends in the Revenue and H.M. Customs are rather good at ferreting, and we have a couple of off record accounts. By a couple, of course, I mean seven or eight. Elsie has some new charges to answer, mostly involving such terms as evasion, fraudulent, false….”
“Simon, she’s in Broadmoor. She’s officially mad. How can you do her for knowingly and with intent when she’s irrational?”
“Oh, darling Stephen, you know so little of the world. We’re going after the person, not the loony”
“Simon….”
“Legal person, my love. The legal entity for your suit is the home, which was run as a limited company. As long as we can trace the funds to the home, we can sequester them, no matter whose name they have been attributed to. I have another reason for this, and I have to be blunt. As long as that cow has access to any funds outside our control, she can threaten you. There may come a time when we can take such monies as a matter of course, but not yet, so we do it in other ways. Remember Al Capone? Never done for murder, but jailed for the rest of his life for tax fraud.”
“Yes…..and it’s just one more way to shit on her. Simon, if I wasn’t straight….”
“Darling, you are far too young for an old queen like me! I’ll stick to the other elderly monarch, I’ve almost got him house-trained”
And then it was exam time. No, I don’t want to go into detail about serried ranks of folding tables in the sports hall, or “Now turn your paper over”, “Thirty minutes!”, “Stop writing now!”
I had a couple of sessions where as my melted brain ran out of my ears I went straight from the exam hall to the track and ran my stress away.
It was over at last. All I had ahead of me now were three years of study…and more exams. I was eighteen, I was legally an adult, I was free, I was in love, I had the finest adoptive parents imaginable, the list went on and on, and yet there had to be more. Always more, because there was always that ghost at the wedding, the missing piece. Where the hell was he?
1976…I decided that I wanted to see other mountains, and almost fell out with Brian when I begged him to let me get down to the Alps.
“You won’t be safe”
“They’re in bloody prison!”
“Until Simon has stripped them, they can still get you, and Tom can’t travel too easily armed. Look, son, just one more season, and then we’ll have their hides and everything they own as well.”
He was right, and I had words with Simon and Roger, and they were the ones who came up with the suggestion that broke our deadlock.
“Darling, Roger and I want to go cottaging”
I didn’t get the joke, though I could hear him giggling in the background.
“Be quiet, Roger, or you shan’t come. Oh, you and your filthy mind. Stephen, we would like to take a couple of cottages in North Wales for a couple or three weeks, would you and darling Emily like to come along? There is the most wonderful walking, and the climbing is a delight, and for once it appears we shan’t have to worry about rain. We have an option of a couple of places right next to Rupert’s little shop”
“Rupert?”
“Rupert the bear, the strip cartoon. In Beddgelert.”
I rang Em, and she was definitely interested. Iain’s parents also agreed, and Tom just smiled and said that the sheep would be safe as Sally would no doubt join us. We had a plan.
Just before the holiday, though, Simon’s ferrets struck gold. The Crown took a huge chunk, in both arrears and penalties, and the rest….one hundred and fifty thousand pounds in damages to me. I didn’t quite follow Simon’s account, but words like “aggravated”, “exemplary” and “punitive” seemed to feature rather a lot.
“My darling boy, you do realise what this means?”
“That I’m rich?”
“Not quite, but now you are eighteen, and legal, and have funds, it is your turn to buy the bubbly!”
There was one other comment that struck me almost physically. Before we all set off for our strange foreign holiday, I was talking to Em about the funds I was getting from so many sources so suddenly, and she just kissed me gently and said “As long as you realise I’m not marrying you for your money, love”
CHAPTER 35
I had my session with my lady shrink before we went.
“So you’re rich, then, Stevie. Does that make you happy?”
“No. But it makes me less unhappy”
“What makes you happy, then?”
“Emily, for one. Nana. Iain. Brian and Karen”
“So your happiness is people?”
“Well, yes. Isn’t everybody’s?”
“Not at all, Steve, not at all. Some people need things”
“Well, I don’t. I never had them, so…”
“So, if you never saw a mountain again…”
“What do you mean?”
“Would you be happy indoors, with your people, forever?”
“No, of course not. What are you saying?”
“That you do yourself a disservice. If you focus on other people, as you are doing, you forget yourself, and you become a chameleon, forever changing to suit whomever you are with. Steve, those people love you, that is something so easy to see it could be painted on their faces. They love you, and not a weathercock. What I would like you to try and do is be yourself more, do things that you want to do rather than what you think they would like to do.”
She paused, looking at her notes. “When did you start fell-running?”
“When Nana took me out”
“When did you start rock climbing?”
“When Simon and Roger took me”
“Why?”
“Well, I’d seen this book…”
“Bingo. You made a decision totally off your own bat. You read voraciously, but so does Emily, am I right?”
“Yeah, but she reads romances”
“And you don’t?”
“No, of course not”
“And she hates you because of that?”
“Of course not!”
“Steve, that’s the point. What I have noticed is that you have clung to people tightly after your release, as if they might run away if you don’t tie them down. These people aren’t going anywhere, so take some risks, now, live a full life…and enjoy your holiday. Ada going with you?”
“Not this time, she says they talk funny”
“Then time to spread your wings, young man. Bring me back a bottle of Swn y Mor!”
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The drive down was quick, at the start, down the M6, but the A55 was a pain, through shitty industrial areas that reminded me of Workington and Whitehaven, until we hit the Conwy and started the run down to Llanrwst and then Betws y Coed, which was a real disappointment, so horribly tacky it could have been Windermere. Our car wound uphill through some woods past a tatty hotel and a run down sort of stone thing, and the hills were closing in. There was a glimpse of a waterfall or two, and then an old stagecoach outside a pub as we came into a small village called Capel something, which I later found out was Capel Curig. Tom told the four of us to look down at this point and he would tell us when to look out, and as he turned down a side road he murmured “now” and I saw the most wonderful view I had ever seen.
Val was right, I love mountains, and this one was just so perfect it hurt. Tom had pulled over by a lake and the four peaks of Snowdon hung in a frozen dance across the water down a textbook glaciated valley (bloody geography exams), complete with drumlins, under a cloudless blue sky, and I felt almost like an adulterer, lusting after something other than my own dear Cumbrian fells. Tom looked back.
“What do you think, people?”
Emily got her voice back first. “Amazing….is it all as good?”
“The valley over to the right is better, I think, but yeah, there’s an awful lot just as good. Steve?”
“I think I owe the boys a drink. This is almost as good as Wasdale Head or Fairfield”
Tom was laughing. “Oh, you parochial bugger! I’ll have another stop at Bwlch y Gwyddel, and you’ll get an even better look. Tell you what, let’s have a cuppa in the Climber’s Bar in the Gwryd, that’ll get you going.”
And it did. All those signatures….names I idolised, and then the view up into the huge great cirque that had expanded on our drive West along the valley, and the realisation that this beast was so much bigger than anything at home, and I wanted to be on it, running it, finding its bones.
Emily was talking to me, I realised. “Steve, love, there is an awful lot around here for me as well. If I don’t see you for a month, I think I’ll understand. Iain, has he always been like this?”
“Oh god, yes, he used to play mountaineers on Marina Hill on Kent Ridge, and that’s no worse that the walk to Windermere from the ferry”
Sally chipped in. “I checked. There are beaches. And ice cream shops. And I have my cossie. Stephen Jones, YOU may not see US for a month!”
Off we went down the twisty road past two lakes, until we arrived at a typical little North Welsh town of slate and slate, and following the instructions posted to us we were at the ‘cottage’ the boys had booked. As we started to haul out the bags, Simon and Roger appeared, in the most abbreviated running shorts I had ever seen, and then a bony girl came running past them and wrapped me in a hug. Tessa.
She squidged as we hugged, and I realised that it wasn’t just my own breasts, and she danced back grinning, showing off her incipient cleavage.
“We found a doctor who understood! And Roger found some money from somewhere, and there’s a place, and, and, oh shit, Steve, I can become me at last!”
“You’ve found a surgeon?”
“Yes! Casablanca, and I’m off there in a month, and, oh shit, I don’t know what to say, it’s just, I haven’t got the words!”
“Then we better get as much mountain stuff in as we can before you get laid up, lass. Simon, have we got somewhere near here where we can have an amble after the drive? Stretch our legs?”
“I think so…I know just the place. We shall walk past the Grave to the Dark Tunnel and see if Shelob is home. But first, tea!”
After tea, the boys took us across a field to a little mound, with a clump of trees and a couple of incised slabs, where we read the story of the great hound Gelert, after whom the village was named. Apparently, the prince Llywelyn left his baby son under the care of a nurse and his great war hound Gelert, while he went princing about somewhere, and when he came back he was met with the sight of the nursery in shambles, his son vanished, and the nurse with her throat torn out.
Gelert came running up to his master, full of puppylike joy and his muzzle caked with blood, and in a fit of rage and betrayed sorrow, Llywelyn drew his sword and slew his erstwhile friend. As the dog’s despairing howl resounded through the nursery, a baby’s cry was heard. Picking through the scattered bedding, the prince found his son alive and well, next to the body of a huge grey wolf, with the nurse’s blood drying on its muzzle and its own still red and wet from its torn throat.
In shame and sorrow Prince Llywelyn erected a mound over the body of his hound, faithful till death, and renamed the village Beddgelert, “Gelert’s Grave”
Both Sal and Em were sniffling at that point, but for some reason Tessa was smirking.
I looked at her. “What?”
She grinned broadly. “Good story, hey? Invented by a local pub landlord to boost tourism!”
Oh, you sods. Apparently Saint Gelert was the real occupant of the grave.
The rest of the walk was a delight. An old railway bed took us through long, dark tunnels where the boys did stupid Gollum voices, and pied flycatchers called out their promises to their trees above a gorge where a river tumbled over rocks, and Simon pointed out the hillside that featured as China in some film or other, and I started to realise that I didn’t need to go as far as the Alps to find new and beautiful mountains. The cramps and discomfort of the drive down evaporated, and Tessa continued to supply us with local stories, about white and red dragons, and river monsters, and oxen who pulled so hard their eyes flew from their heads, and she looked so happy I knew that the money I had sent Roger to pay for her operation was the best thing, in all senses, I had ever done.
CHAPTER 36
That night was a private party, in effect, as all the pent-up stress of our exams erupted into collision and collusion with the joy of being reunited with such good friends.
Tessa’s mood was a revelation, so different from the hunched and damaged figure we had first met, and she was clearly very proud indeed of her developing chest. I looked down at my own and wondered if I could simply have offered a transplant, but then Em gave me a hug from behind, and I got a little distracted.
Can you believe that the main part of the evening consisted of two groups of people looking over maps? The girls were huddled round a road map discussing Morfa Harlech and Trearddur, we adults were swapping between climbing guides and the OS maps of the area trying to decide which rock or peak was to be the first we graced with our presence.
Roger was arguing with Tom, and both were being contradicted by Simon, and Tessa spared some of her beach-planning time to add her own little snippets and verbal prods. Simon wanted to some meandering and stupidly long route on Lliwedd, while Tom was angling for the Llanberis Pass and Roger was trying very hard to sell the Ogwen, while Tessa, of all people, was suggesting the long walk and towering route of Craig yr Ysfa.
It’s a peculiarity of us English climbers in Wales that we know the names, in Welsh, of none of the towns and all of the crags. We can’t, apparently, pronounce them, but hey, how many soft southerners can pronounce Skiddaw correctly? Or Bleaberry Tarn? In the end, we told Tessa to go away and stop being silly, and then they tossed coins for it, odd one out each time, and the Pass won.
It balanced nicely in the morning, with the three girls dragging Iain off on a tour of castles, beaches and ice creams, and we four men heading for Pen y Pass and the Three/Four/Five (depends on viewpoint) cliffs of Llanberis Pass. We ground up the hill to the viewpoint again, and then Roger turned left at the hotel and took us up to the summit of the pass, where there was an elderly youth hostel and a car park. Down we went to where the road made a zig zag over a stream, and past two huge boulders to a long lay by that we parked in. Towering over us was a huge and amazing piece of rock, split like an open book with a vertical corner. Simon pointed up.
“That’s Dinas y Cromlech, or just The Cromlech. See the corner? That’s Cenotaph corner, a Joe Brown route, and can you see on the right wall a sort of faint line? Cemetery Gates, Brown and the Villain”
“We doing those?”
“Bloody hell, no, you aren’t, and nor are we doing Right Wall! Tom and you can do Flying Buttress and see us at the top. We’re off up the Gates and Grond and we’ll meet you at the top”
It was a long drag up loose stuff to the clean rock, and we settled down to sort out the gear at the foot of the most intimidating cliff I had ever seen. Tom looked up our route, and said with a calm that belied the nature of the comment.
“Fancy leading?”
Bloody hell, aye! We pulled on our rubbers and Tom set up his ground anchor as I festooned myself with slings and metal, and he looked at me and said gently “Climb when ready”
Such a different feeling. I mean, the route was piss easy, big holds at an easy angle up a leaning pillar, and I made two pitches of it up to the top of the pinnacle. Tom joined me, and we took a while to look around the wall ahead of us and the expansive views out over the valley and the cars parked so far below. I caught a flash of reflected light, and realised somebody had binoculars or a telescope. Tom saw too, and grunted “Like the bloody Eiger”
“What do you mean?”
“Hotel under the Eiger Nordwand. They rent out telescopes so tourists can watch the climbers die”
Thanks, Tom. The next pitches were, to be honest, a little intimidating. We were on a little saddle, and the route rose up what seemed like a vertical wall to a flake, and the wall dropped sheer below our starting point. Tom noticed.
“Want me to lead the bit after the flake? You’ll kick yourself if you don’t do any of the wall”
It was actually quite easy, just the situation grabbing at my heels, and so when Tom arrived at the flake I insisted on keeping the lead, up the exposed wall to a slanting ramp, where I tied off to a jammed block and brought him up before I led the final pitch up a cramped and slanting chimney where I really, really hated my tits. The summit was a rounded piece of bare rock, and we sat in the sun as we awaited the boys.
“Well done, Steve, your first proper lead. That climb’s undergraded, in my view. The situations are really those a much harder climb would take you to, and it’s a mind game, climbing. Hey, you didn’t want to give me the lead, did you? Greedy!”
He turned a little more serious. “It’s addictive, lad. Just do me a favour, and don’t try pushing your boat too far out. You haven’t fallen yet, and that can make a difference to the way you see a route”
We were distracted by a stream of obscenities coming from over the edge of the rock on the valley side, and with a chorus of grunts and “cunts” Roger appeared, hauling over onto the summit and setting up a multi point belay. He grinned at us.
“Bit sort of strenuous that one! Simon, love, you will enjoy that, just make sure you save some strength for that darling jam. You’ll lose some skin, but it is just SO perfect!”
Theirs was a world apart from mine when it came to climbing. Tom just grinned, again, clearly reading my mind.
“Time, lad, time. You led that well, and it was your first, so think how much you have ahead of you. Let’s get down this gully and have a cuppa and see what’s next”
And that was half of my holiday. Wrinkle and Crackstone Rib in what I came to know simply as ‘The Pass’, and Tennis Shoe, Hope, Soapgut and Gashed Crag in ‘The Valley’; Christmas Curry and Poor Man’s Peuterey at Tremadog. Beer in the Vaynol at Nant Peris, where a short and frighteningly dour man with a beard and a flat cap was pointed out in whispers as ‘the Villain’. Days on the beach with my love and my brother, and other days high on mountain ridges in the company of true friends. None truer, it would be impossible, and still the sun beat down out of a burnt blue sky as we swam in the lakes and watched the buzzards and the ravens cruise the air.
All good things come to an end is a cliché that isn’t always true, but the holiday was at an end one day. We loaded up, and said our farewells, Iain seeming to take quite a while with Tessa, and I realised that he had quite the adolescent crush on her. The boys were all hugs and affection, but time was no longer our friend, and we had to be off.
I look back on that holiday as a jewel of memory, a moment of perfection in a less than perfect life. It was all I had hoped for, and the people around me were as close to perfection as I could have prayed for.
Once more we wound our way through the hills, and Tom was good enough to stop at our first viewpoint to let us take a few last pictures, and then it was A55 and then M6, past Lancaster and then swinging to the coast road to drop Em and me at Nana’s and Iain at his parents’ before Tom left Sally at home. He would return to pick up his minding of me after a night at hers, and I anticipated him returning a little the worse for wear.
We swayed and swang up the dale to Boot, happily picking out the familiar landmarks, and then we were outside the blackened shell that had been Nana’s cottage.
CHAPTER 37
I stood outside the car in shock. The place stank of wet smoke, of burnt plastic and cloth. I knew, at that point, with absolute conviction that the bastards had finally got one of us, and cursed my lack of conviction in dragging her off to foreign parts.
Em came up and hugged me, as Tom took a closer look.
“Aye, Stevie, tha’ll have to stay in the Inn tonight, teach me to play about with me stove in a power cut”
She was stood behind me, dressings on her hands, and I couldn’t help breaking down completely in tears as I hugged the most important person in my life along with Iain. Em and Sally were sobbing with relief, and I almost crushed her in my broken-hearted joy. The cottage was burnt, but she was here, whole, and that was all that mattered.
She led us into the bar, where Arthur’s wife Meg was serving, and the man himself came out with similar dressing on his arms and what looked like a sunburnt face. There was something odd about it, and then I realised that he had lost his eyebrows.
“Arthur saw the flames, lad, and I was the wrong side of them, and then the stairs were ahad, so the daft big bugger puts the door in and comes through the fire for us, so I’ll be saying thanks for a while”
Arthur looked embarrassed at the praise, but I could see how much damage he had done in getting her out.
“Aye, Stevie, I’ll be billing Ada for a new shirt and jacket, the old’uns are a bit spoiled”
Nana filled us in on the rest of the story, of a night with a power cut that left her without lights or electric kettle, and so she had set up the old primus as always, happy to brew on the old kitchen table, but something had distracted her, she said, and putting the stove down onto the table she had somehow missed the edge, and the stove had fallen onto the fuel container underneath. She hadn’t capped it, it fell over, and before she knew what was happening something akin to a hand grenade had gone off in the kitchen, leaving her caught between an inside wall and the flames.
“Aye” said Arthur, “and one of the old lads says, has Ada got some giant bloody candles on in there, cause it’s all flickering, and then I realise the front room door’s alight, and then the stairs, so I goes round to the back, and I can see her in the kitchen all stuck like, so I puts the back door in and gets her out”
As simple as that, as he told it. In fact, he had tried the front door but the flames were roaring, and at the back they were just a little lower. Seeing his friend trapped he had put his boot to the locked door and taken the jamb out with sheer strength, before taking the soaked blanket he had called for from his wife and charging through the flames to throw it over Nana as his hair caught fire, all but throwing her out of the back door to where the pub customers were forming a bucket chain to try and contain the blaze until the Brigade arrived. Three of the regulars had doused him with water as he stumbled out, coughing from the smoke. The bulk of the house had been saved, structurally, but the contents had been ruined, and I realised with a catch in my throat that that would include almost all of the pictures I had of my father and mother, or even myself as a proper boy. Another link with the reality of my past had just snapped.
I looked at Arthur, though, in a new light. He had done something that most people could never have faced, and it had not been done without thought, for he had prepared himself before going in. No sudden rush of blood to the head, but steady courage, and I couldn’t help it when I walked over and hugged him tight. I could see the blisters on his nose and ears, and the shine of the ointment.
“Arthur…I don’t know what to say.”
“Nothing to be said, lad, Ada’s family, in a way, and it's what tha do , isn’t it?”
No, you great soft love, it isn’t what you do, or at least not always. There were more people out there who would have stood outside and watched in terror and futility than those who would calmly set about saving a life. I owed this man, and I owed Nana.
I started to laugh, as the reality struck me. Nana was puzzled, at first, then she realised, almost telepathically, and joined in. It was Emily who didn’t get it.
“What’s the joke, Steve?”
Nana was howling, but managed to get out a few words.
“Lass---before some woman marries this lad for his money----this woman here is going to have spent it all!”
She knew me well, that hard little terrier, so well. If there was one thing my cash and compensation was for, it was family. Her cottage was stone, it could be rescued, rebuilt. The old lives and memories it contained were lost, so we would have to work hard to make new ones to fill its walls when it was fit again for our family.
I think that was the final proof, if I had ever needed proof, that my first and last hope, my strength and shield, was as Val had suggested, the people around me, family, friends. Nana hadn’t asked for the money to renew her home, she hadn’t needed to. She knew I would give it, without being asked, just as I knew without doubt that there was nothing else to do, and nothing I would rather do. Life is love, life is people.
Emily suddenly understood, and giggled, “I was right, I’m not marrying you for your money, then!”
That was the second time, and Nana gave her a sharp look.
Arthur had already set aside rooms for us, and I was gratified to see how he had simply and without fuss put Emily and myself into a double. Tom rang Kieran to explain the delay, and once more there was a moment devoid of argument or fuss where my brother was left to comfort his grandmother rather than rushed home. We saw Tom off with his lady, then settled down for a simple meal with Arthur while Meg fed him, as his hands were too swathed to hold the fork. I was a little worried about that, but he just said they were bulky dressings rather than full-thickness burns.
“Besides” he said as another carefully sliced mouthful of rump steak was held before his mouth, “I could get used to this!”
That night, I was still stressed, and Em could feel it, and without anything other than sighs and soft moans she proceeded to do things to and with me that were almost more than I could take, and I did my best to return the favour.
Twice now she had mentioned marriage. Could we do it? Could someone as damaged as me make a go of it? I fell asleep with her hand on my breast and her head on my shoulder, our hair tangled together.
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It turned out that Nana did actually have rather good insurance, as befitted such a shrewd old lady, and while I shelled out to get the place habitable again I was down to get a large proportion of it back. As usual, Brian knew someone who knew someone else, and a lot of the work done was at a very good price. We had a very daft weekend once the structure was sound, with paint and rollers and great silliness decorating the place, and then I sorted out a deal with Arthur for what can only be called a beer-garden party for the merry band who had passed pots and bins and buckets from hand to hand to keep the blaze as much under control as they could. We had music and other happiness, and I got to dance with my girl in public as the Summer wound down to our entry into University.
Miss Graham’s sadism, helped on by her torturers Sally, and Mr Calvert and the rest, had got me enough of a boost in my exam results to swing a place in college for me.
I was off to Bangor, to read history, for Mr Calvert’s eclectic approach to his subject had swung me from English, while Emily had stuck with that subject. She was also sticking with me. We were both off to North Wales for three years. Beaches, mountains, intellectual stimulation, and bloody good climbing.
Does life get any better?
The only doubt that was gnawing at me was the obvious one. I had become almost a household name in Cumbria, partly because of the failed rescue but mainly because of three years of hell in Castle Keep. There was almost a collective sense of guilt in the community, which was a relief. Some places would have closed ranks, perhaps blamed me, but the sheer scale of the horror that had been revealed left no room for that, and the utter raving insanity of the Cunninghams sealed it. The people involved had moved beyond revulsion to the sort of territory occupied by Jack the Ripper or perhaps the Bogeyman who hides under your bed or in the wardrobe.
That meant that my big-arsed and fat-titted figure drew no nasty comments, just stares and shudders. Would it be the same in Bangor, especially with Emily dangling all over me? Well, they would have three years to get used to me. And once more I clung to that mantra, FTW and hold fast to family.
CHAPTER 38
We had enough resources between us, and independence, to take rooms of our own rather than be tied to the halls of residence.
The city lies in a trough between two ridges, with the University on the one to the North West. Tom had found us a place on the Holyhead Road, not far from the Uni, and I was amazed one day to realise how much I took for granted his quiet and reassuring presence. The nightmares still came, especially when Emily wasn’t there with me, but the simple act of getting to sleep in the first place became so much easier with him around. He was like a child’s security blanket.
It had taken a little persuasion before the college authorities had agreed to let him do his job, but a couple of promises from Brian, and some photo-opportunities for the suits (or, rather, gowns) had gained us the green light. We got the place set up two days before our fist appearance was due on campus, which was at the Fresher’s Bazaar, where all the various student societies hold out for fresh blood. We wandered about, hand in hand or arm around waist as the space available allowed, eying up the obvious, the strange and the truly perverse. Em signed up for the swimming and literary societies , and I put my name down for the mountaineering club; I mean, there are toilet habits of ursines to consider, and the religious affiliation of some bloke in the Vatican.
It was the athletics society that brought the first little quiver to my cheek, as the spotty tosser behind the desk addressed both of us as ‘ladies’ before asking what distance I preferred.
“10,000 metres or so, but more cross-country and fell-running”
“Unusual for a woman. I’m Simon, club secretary”
“Stephen. Stephen Jones”
His eyes did a funny little dance, his thoughts lagging only slightly behind.
“Sorry…”
“Don’t worry, the three A’s* still consider me a bloke, and I can still run.”
He smiled, and he looked a lot nicer that way. “Oh dear, I feel a few scalps coming your way and some delicious piss-taking!”
We took our leave, and I spotted another stand and perhaps it was the fall-out from being ‘ladied’ several times but I couldn’t resist it, and so arm in arm we ambled over to the Bangor Gay and Lesbian Students’ Association. A seriously over the top individual in jeans and workboots smiled at us. “Hiya, girls, come to sign up?”
I looked at my lover. “What do you think, Emily?”
She kissed me, as the person smirked. “But I’m not a lesbian, Stephen my love”
Now, I know, it was cruel, it was nasty, it was unfair, and we later got to know the people n the society and persuaded them to add that ‘T’ to their initials…but it was so damned funny! We were in that first euphoria of being a fresher in that great big world of academe, and there are sound reasons for the term ‘student humour’.
The lectures began on the Monday, and that was where we split each day, as Em went off to pursue some hidden meaning or other in Austen or Bainbridge, and I buckled down to the first sessions on something that would have had Mr Calvert salivating: sources, bias and veracity.
It was a good life, a damned good life. Each Wednesday afternoon was set aside for sport or other activity, and each Saturday was the same. I trained over the hills of the golf club on the Wednesdays, and on the Saturdays, as my fitness settled back in, either with the club on a longer run or off with the climbing club to explore the wonders of the Ogwen Valley or, when Summer came around, the incredible sea-cliff climbing on Anglesey.
Before we got there, though, there was the cross-country season to enjoy. One race, that was all that fucker had let me run, and now was my chance to try and make my own mark. I was well off financially, now, I had a beautiful girlfriend, an even more beautiful (sorry, Em) stepmother, but I wanted to do something that was all mine. There is nothing purer than running. All it needs is space, and we had that in the hills around us, and so I persuaded Simon to let me take a representative place n a 10km cross-country event to be run up near Deiniolen, to the Marchlyn Mawr reservoir and back again. It would be partly on roads, so knees could suffer a bit on the descent, but it was my sort of race, a classic Cumbrian up as hard as you can then tumble back down to the prize.
I settled down at the start, looking once to the top so I could see where it went, in a mixed pack of men and women. Once again, we had a team of ten men, and another of eight women, only six of each group counting for the team result. We jostled a little at the start, and at the gun there was a short sprint between those who wanted to grab some room to start setting their own stamp on the race. It would be an out and round, then a fast downhill to finish, seven km to the top and a quick 3 down, and I remembered Nana’s instructions at the rescue and watched my breathing, settling into a little world of calm as I ran uphill.
True cross country running is all broken pace, stride length changing and chopping as the terrain dictates, whereas a steady uphill is a meditation in rhythm. Find that place in your head and sit in it until the slope eases. I did that, finding dreams of good times to distract me. Em’s comments about marriage gave the seed, and I bathed in worlds of domesticity, of children and family holidays. I didn’t worry about the ‘how’ of children, I just ran the dream until suddenly we were there, and our strides lengthened as the road took us around the edge of the reservoir. I was looking up now, trying to spot the architects of the race, the lads who were seeking to make it their own. There was nothing like the two incredible runners who had dominated that race by Maryport, and I was well up with the leaders. We turned for home, and I let the slope and gravity draw my body downhill as only about ten competitors lay ahead of me.
As the final three km unwound and the valley drew me home I was watching the other men as they watched each other, and I suddenly realised that none of them were watching me. I wasn’t in their race; I was a woman, no threat to their team or individual placings, and I could have run past them and been ignored. A woman, eh? I started to pick off runners and easing my way towards the front. Just as the last klick was hit, three of the leaders attacked each other in sequence, and as they went, the heads of the others dropped. This woman quietly inserted herself into fourth place, and as I saw the finish I attacked properly, remembering all Iain had told me. FTW indeed, and none of the buggers was coming past me. Into the funnel and fourth place, and as it turned out the second of our team to score.
My number was taken, and I joined Rhodri, my teammate, as we awaited the rest. Our main opposition had been UMIST from Manchester, who had one of the three in front of me, and as they counted the runners in we had four of ours and five of theirs, at which point the first UMIST runner went “YES!” and went to shake the hand of Rhodri, who just smiled. The Mancunian was a little puzzled.
“We got our six home first…why are you so pleased?”
“Because you didn’t. Me and Stevie here, and four of our boys, before your fourth runner was in. That means we have it.”
“But she doesn’t count…”
“He. Stephen Jones, meet Alastair Wells. Ali, Steve. Our win I believe, Ali”
Ali’s confusion was even greater when my darling came hurtling across to plant a great wet smacker on my lips. I broke free long enough to tell him to do some research on Stephen Jones and Carlisle, and then settled into enjoying what my girl was so determined to give me.
That was a pattern repeated for a while till the clubs got word out about me, and then it started to get a little physical as the elbows and spikes were used just as they would be for a male, for now it was clear I wasn’t a precocious but unthreatening woman in a parallel race but a man whom they needed to beat. I honed my instincts, and my body hardened to the task.
I might never be a real man again, but I could run like one, once more, and I could beat them.
Fuck you Mitchell!
CHAPTER 39
Bangor was three years of intensity. I was racing to a high level, and though never scaling the heights of those wonders Coe and Ovett I wasn’t doing too badly on the UAU circuit.
For those unfamiliar with the UK, there are two universities that consider themselves a different breed to the rest, being Oxford and Cambridge, and they have what they refer to as ‘varsity’ competitions. The Univerities Athletics Union was established to cater for proper sporting competition between real universities, and even though it rapidly turned into an annual presentation of a trophy to Loughborough, who won the points championship every year it seemed, it allowed us plebs to get some serious racing in.
My activities polarised quite quickly. Winters and the tag-end of Autumn found me running cross country on muddy tracks all over the UK, while the warmer weather allowed me to take to the high tops of Snowdonia as well as push my climbing skills. I was eventually seconding routes like Cemetery Gates and that Corner next to it, but I could never manage a lot of the Villain’s thug routes, one of which was famously described as being like its originator, “nasty, brutish and short”
I lived in my body, as I have said, grown into it and used to the balance and articulation. No matter what I did, however, I could never build up the strength needed for what climbers refer to as thugging, overcoming obstacles by the scientific application of brutality. I was wiry, I had excellent feet, but I couldn’t manage the roofs and overhangs that male strength could. My forte was in the technical slab, the delicate move up on minimal holds, and when I was first shown Clogwyn Du’r Arddu I fell instantly in love. Serious routes in serious positions were what I came to love, positions, as I had been told right from the start, that only a climber could attain.
We had a couple of trips out to near Sheffield, where there were low cliffs with lovely rough rock, but the climbing tended to the thuggish and it didn’t suit me. The heather was pretty, and the grouse noisy, but there were no real mountains.
Em was doing her own thing, of course, and the competition bug had bit her too. She was no great athlete, but she became a competent swimmer and I made a point of turning up for her races whenever I could. It was only fair, after all. I loved swimming too, but the thought of what I would look like racing against other men made me nauseous. I was living with my body, but only just. I think, with hindsight, that it was only Em who kept me sane, kept me working.
There were a few things I did avoid, like the plague. Discos were one. I was never that much for dancing, anyway, but when we tried a couple of nights out, and I got men asking to dance, and my arse and my tits groped, it got to be just too much and we dropped the idea. I worried then that I was stifling Emily. One night I had it out with her.
“Why don’t you go out anyway, love?”
“Not without you. We work together, we play together, we do naughties together”
“No, seriously, if you want to go out and shake your thang… you have the right to a social life, pet”
“Stephen Jones, if it wasn’t for the ability of a particular young man to see past spots and flab I wouldn’t have any social life”
I had to smile at that, the memories of my first kiss would never leave me. There were times when I was under Charlie, or the Allisons were being particularly perverse, and I would taste the lipstick they put on me and dream it was Emily’s, so that I could find that little doorway into a dream of love and green eyes.
“My love, without you I wouldn’t have a life at all, so we’ are at least even”
She grinned happily. “I make that you owing me, so how about you start repaying? Fancy a shag?”
Typical of my girl, that. I worry about her not going out, and she shows me the best way to stay in. Sometimes you think you might love someone, other times you just know, in everything you and they do or say.
We lay together afterwards, sweaty and fuzzy n the head, and she murmured into my ear:
“My darling, you do know that I am not joking when I mention marrying you, and I am getting a little tired of waiting for you to ask. So take a hint, love”
I rang Nana ten minutes later, then Brian, and then Iain, and finally Roger. Tom already knew, as he was in the next room and heard Em’s squeals. No, not those squeals, the other ones, the ones where she was shouting “Yes I will!”
The next week, after ring shopping, we made a point of going to the newly-named GLT group meeting. I had been to a couple, and it had led to one of those moments of understanding. I had always seen myself and Tessa as somehow different, similar but fundamentally of another kind to each other. It was listening to some of the others’ experiences that brought it properly home to me.
There was a fundamental difference n the three letters being discussed. Nowadays there are four, but back then bisexuality was derided as ‘greedy’ or ‘indecisive’. I realised that we were dealing with things internal as well as external. The gay man, or the lesbian, seeks another who will return their affection, their need. Sexuality finds its answer in another person, despite the taboos and abuse that come from ‘straight’ society.
Gender, on the other hand…Tessa could have found any number of men who would have loved her for herself, but that self would not have been her. It was an internal thing; the eyes she looked out of were in the wrong place, and so she was doubly cursed, despising herself and being despised by society at large. I recognised myself in her, finally; the only difference between us was that she had been malformed by nature, or the Great Sky Pixie, or whatever, and I had been twisted by a man. The outcome had been the same; a misfitting of mind and body.
We were so alike, but I had avoided the persuasive entreaties of suicide partly because of Em, but mostly because Mitchell had never finished the job I was beginning to suspect he had planned. To be blunt, I still had my cock, and it still had a lot of sensation, and I still peed standing up when I wanted to. Sounds petty? Not at all, every time I doubted I was a man, Em would make a point of treasuring that part of me, of showing me that she knew my fears and doubts better than I did. That little bit of flesh kept me as sane as I could be.
We had arranged a visitor for the session with the GLT lot, and she arrived in her little mini the day before. I had to laugh, as she came strutting up to the door in a tiny miniskirt and truly silly heels, her sharp nose poking out from under really, really big hair, her blouse showing as much skin as she could get away with without being arrested.
“EMILY!!!!!”
A serious amount of hugging and squealing, and then a much softer greeting to me.
“Tessa, are you worried people will think you’re a bloke or something?” I teased.
“Darling Stephen, the best Moroccan surgeons have turned my stalk into the smoothest butter you could imagine. Want to see?”
“Er, no, thank you, Tessa….what the hell has happened to your self confidence?”
“A pair of 38C’s, all natural, and a streamlined knicker area, my dear!”
She turned serious. “It’s called being myself, Steve, something I never thought I could do. Every time I look at my wrist, and then into the mirror, I know how close I came. Now, answer a question, truthfully.”
“OK, if I can”
“How much money did you give to Roger for me?”
“Er…”
“Thought so. Steve, you do know that I could never repay you, don’t you? I don’t mean in cash terms, I mean in the life I can now have. Why did you do it?”
I sighed. It was a thought I had had many times, before and since.
“Tess, because you were hurting, and I could see myself, and, well, it was only money, and… look, it was dirty money, it was from those two psychos, and what better way to clean it up than to help someone hurting like I was?”
She kissed me gently on the cheek. “Stephen Jones, it’s been said before, but you are a good man. You know I am in your debt, and it will never be repaid, so all I can do is say if you need me,,,”
There was a little silence, and then Em said “What if I need you?
“Anything!”
“Well, how about a tissue to wipe that lipstick off my fiancé’s cheek?”
We made a tight little group heading down to the meeting, Tom and I strolling behind, me watching Em’s nice bottom with an owner’s eye, and Tom just ogling, while the girls nattered about girliness. Tessa introduced herself by making a little autobiographical speech, and then all eyes were on me. I decided to face up to life.
“Hi everybody, my name is Stephen, and I suppose you can say that I am a transsexual”
CHAPTER 40
That took me full circle, back to those articles about April Ashley, and I felt an odd sense of calm as I spoke.
“Tessa has been good enough to give you some idea of how it feels to be mismatched as we are, but those of you who know my story also know what was done to me, and that I wasn’t born to be like this. In a way, you could say I am worse off than my friend, because I can actually remember having my body as it should have been, and then watching as it was stolen from me. Tessa herself has said how she, whilst understanding it is wrong, is still jealous of me.
“What we have worked for here is to try and get some recognition that who you are is just as important as who you love. Neither of them is voluntary, nor arbitrary, and neither of them should become a stick to be beaten with. I have a friend, a gay man, who was given ‘treatment’ to try and ‘cure’ him, and all it did was drive him near to death. Tess has told you how she tried that, and I did much the same, and I want nobody else to be faced with that choice.
“Look at us now, look at her smile, look at my beautiful bride to be, and try and do as I was advised to do. This world is full of small minds, and they will close themselves to people like us. Neither Tess nor myself would have been included here only a year ago, but people learn and times change. No, the opinions of the mean-spirited are only relevant when you have to deal with them.
“What I was asked by a very wise person was this: do these people matter to you? Do the opinions of such people have any value? No? Then fuck them. Fuck the world, and be who you need to be, love who you have to love, and smile at those who are too cramped in their souls to understand”
There was applause, and then Em shouted “Oy, Jones, I’m the one who’s supposed to be studying literature, get back to your dead white men and stop stealing my thunder!”
When the laughter died down she called “But I still love you!”
That was actually, when I look back at it, a formative moment. It was my first overt speech, and it gave me a taste of how it felt trying to move an audience, persuade a crowd, and it was also a crux in my life. I could so easily have moved over into politics, sold my soul to the thrill of rhetoric and approval, but Em kept me grounded.
She would ask me “Do you want to talk to real people, as a real person, or talk at a crowd as a fictional character?”
How could every boy she met before me have missed the sheer beauty and depth of her? Each day I was realising, utterly and profoundly, that she was indeed the love of my life. I had adored my flaming goddess of the bookshelves, and still did, but it was Emily Kerr I loved more than that same life.
The following weekend we had arranged some visitors, and taken some rooms in three Capel Curig hotels for them. This was going to be the celebration of our engagement, and I wanted, we wanted, every important person in our lives to be there to celebrate, and while we would be having a meal together, the rest of the evening was open for our college friends.
What a list… my brother, his adoptive parents, my adoptive parents, Nana, Em’s parents, Sid, Tom and Sally, Arthur and Meg, Dave and Aidan, Tessa and the Toffs, and Miss Graham, who was Emily’s suggestion and as soon as she said the name I just knew how right she was. To my delight, not one of them cried off, and the Ty’n y Coed did a splendid meal. I had to make another speech, they said, but I reminded Em of her complaint at the TGL meeting and she had to do the standing up thing, her cheeks pink with wine and embarrassment, and I know that I wept, as did Nana, and just about every other woman in the room, as strong men found little things to pick out of their eyes, not tears, no.
The evening was polarised a little as it went on, for like calls to like, and Arthur was soon in deep conversation with the landlord about beer pricing or cellar depth or something, and Iain was bending Brian’s ear about leather balls and funny boots or something, and Tessa was stuck into Karen and Sally about some girly thing or other, and the boys were talking sensible subjects with me as we pondered the new routes only just starting to be pushed out on slate. I detested the very idea at first, the lack of friction and strange post-industrial surroundings, but in later years I came to love the sharpness of the holds and the purity of the climbing. Though I had to pick my climbs to allow for my lack of upper body strength, I was already leading E2 consistently and that was news that put a little sparkle into Roger’s eyes.
“Stephen, darling, at some point we will just have to take you to the Alps and teach you about real mountaineering.”
Nana was listening in to that exchange, and she just grinned at him. “Ah, a lad that knows better than picking at scabs! A mountain has a soul, a personality tha has to find, and tha only get to know it by being there in all weathers”
That was something we could all drink to, and so we did, and somewhere in the evening, as is traditional, another proposal was elicited by a very smug Sally, and I saw Miss Graham get very emotional indeed. It was poor Aidan that had my sympathy, as Tessa went ubergirly on him, and Simon and I remarked what a monster we had unleashed. It was another evening in my life that marked a high point, a time of joy.
We adjourned afterwards to the climbers’ bar in Ty’n y Cobden’s up the road, which is built out of the back of the hotel up against a rock face, and what seemed like half the college was there to help us celebrate, and the next day I had the worst hangover of my life and Tessa the biggest smile. Poor Aidan, he hadn’t had a snowball’s chance in Hell.
Em and I joined our hotel’s party for breakfast, and as I slowly woke from my beer dream, the boys insisted we have a gentle day at Tryfan fach with the whole party and a picnic, so cars were loaded, sandwiches and other supplies garnered and a convoy led off down the A5 to Little Willy’s, or Gwern y Gof Uchaf, and we walked and splashed the little bit of hillside to the crag. It was a silly day, only the two really girly girls refusing to have a go (Karen and Tessa) as it would do something to their fingernails. I mean, the damned things just grow back, don’t they? Even people like Meg and Miss Graham (“Call me Hilda”) found themselves at the end of a rope, giggling as they were lowered back down, but Kaz and Tess simply found a slab of rock opposite the crag and did a synchronised and clearly rehearsed strip down to incredibly skimpy bathing suits before rubbing each other with sun cream and stretching out on beach towels.
I mean, she’s my adoptive mother, but I’m just an ordinary man, for god’s sake, and it nearly made me fall off. Aidan still looked either badly hung over or drained of all vitality, and kept giving Tessa little glances. I caught his eye at one point and raised an eyebrow. He muttered under his breath.
“No way that was ever a bloke. Just don’t let her at me tonight, she’ll bleed me dry”
“You complaining?”
He grinned, ruefully. “Not exactly, mate, but….I couldn’t keep up with her long term, I’d be dead in a month”
I understood her all too well. Just like me, she had been locked up for years, and now she was doing the best she could to make up for lost time. I had run and run, and she…well, she was doing her own thing.
Nana loved the crag, bouncing all over it unroped just for the joy of it, and we four male climbers were busy shepherding a variety of stooges up the easiest of rock. There was laughter, and shrieks of mock terror, and I realised that the two in the bikinis were actually doing synchronised sunbathing for a while, turning over and cocking a leg at the same time as each other, with that sneering expression of ‘you can look but…’ firmly in place. Eventually, of course, they caught my Paddington stare and it was Tessa who corpsed first, and then the two of them were hugging, laughing like idiots.
There was one person I was watching, though, apart from my beloved, and that was Sid. He was more animated than I had ever seen him before, even when discussing the latest Bob Shaw or Niven book. Something was stirring him, taking away the weight of past years that had always pressed on his shoulders and hung behind his eyes. I made time to talk to him, and let him know what I had noticed.
“Ah, Stevie, my dear friend, what else can I be but happy? You are my proxy, son, my proof that the fuckers don’t always win. They broke me, but I look at you, and Emily, and all this beauty, and I know that there is hope for the world. That sounds really over the top, doesn’t it?”
I hugged him. “Sid, love, if you can still see all that, you were never broken”
CHAPTER 41
Three years we had at Bangor, three years of growth mental and physical, and although I know I am biased my Emily became daily more beautiful.
We kept pushing with the TLG group, which was quite an introduction to pettiness and pink politics.
One of the givens of student life is that all students know everything from the day of their arrival, and are often happy to share that view with anyone whose ear they can catch. They are also the first to come up with any particular insight, and the first ever to have suffered from any specific problem. That led to a few personality collisions, as so many of our fellow ‘pinks’ were as narrow in their thinking as the ‘straights’ they so often derided for their narrowness of viewpoint.
We had lesbians who wanted all men exterminated, even gay men, for the simple fact that they weren’t women. We had gay men whose attitude to women was best summed up by “Why?” Both types had real issues with Tessa, the ultra-feminists of the time taking their lead from people like Germaine Greer, and deriding her as a surgically mutilated man, while the more over-the-top gay men called her a coward.
She snapped back at one of the latter during a visit to us.
“So I’m a coward who is pretending not to be gay? A coward? No balls, then?”
She pretended to rummage in her knickers. “Nope, no balls there. Just the way I like it!”
Emily got a lot of grief from some of the harder-edged dykes, who pointed out that she was clearly in denial, having a boyfriend who looked so much like a girl. Mostly she just replied along the lines of having had better chat-up lines from more attractive people, but I will always remember the first time I heard her tell somebody to fuck off and die. Tessa and I may have lost our balls, but Emily had enough to spare.
As for me, I was just in limbo. Neither fish nor fowl, the good thing was that I existed largely in my own world, shared with Emily and Tom, and regular visitors from the real world outside. I have referred to the abusive people as men and women but, in reality, so many of them were really still children, and this was their chance to try and become who they felt they were, and live. It was exactly what Tessa had been trying to do when she ended up bleeding to death in some kitchen alley in London.
That sounds nasty, as if all the students were queuing up to have a go, like a return to Bowness, but it wasn’t like that. The vast majority of students were either neutral, as they were strangers to us, or supportive. I refined my FTW philosophy to add the rider that when the small-minded spoke, they were to be invited to speak elsewhere.
My running kept me well-known, though, and I even managed to put up a handful of new Extremes on the slate I was learning to enjoy. Three years….
Iain had started at Loughborough on a sports science and education course, and Tessa was by all accounts (mostly hers, in lurid detail) making up for her lost years in a huge way. Every visit saw her more confident, more upright in her stance, and the times she slapped down some of the harder-edged bra-burners were joys to behold.
I never understood that bit, the braless fashion. I mean, if ever a man had an insight into female anatomy it was me, and the thought of doing anything energetic without a bra, that didn’t involve being naked with my bride-to-be, was unthinkable. Ouch!”
The mood swings of my youth had passed, but oddly I found myself synchronising little periods of irritability with Em’s PMT, as women who live together tend to do, and that confused me. I talked it through with her.
“Love, I have options still, I just don’t know what to do about them”
“You’re doing the ‘manly’ thing again, aren’t you? Cut ‘em off, grow a beard, that sort of thing”
“Well….yes”
“What would you get out of it, love? Short arse bloke with a set of hips, a flat chest and a wisp of hair on the chin?”
“Well, perhaps I would be more me than I am now”
“Would you? And what would it change? “
“Self respect? I don’t know. I just feel I’ve got too used to this body, and that’s not right”
“Self respect, you say? With your strength, you know better than that. Love, I just want you to be happy, and I don’t think you would be any happier by letting them cut you up again. Besides…..I’m used to this body too”
She did something very nice with her lips and tongue at that point, and that sort of stopped me talking. She brought her head back up to kiss me.
“And I rather like this body, and love its owner to bits”
Which ended that train of thought. She was right, though. I could never be a man again, not really, and as I have said I could still glance down and see the proof of my real gender, if I looked past my tits. That was a moment when I felt really confused. They were mine, even though I hadn’t wanted them, but Emily clearly did want them. She did things to them that were amazing, and although I know it is a dreadful pun, they were growing on me. It made no real sense to me at all at the time, but I was seeing myself through her eyes now as well as my own, and it was easier.
How I would have coped without her balance, her love, I do not know. I had visions of the figure she described, a travesty of a man, and knew that she was managing to bring me to compromise, if not actual acceptance.
I still wanted Mitchell dead, though. That would never, ever change.
Finals came along, and we did all the usual cramming and sleepless panic, followed by an excess of alcohol. Tom drove us back to Cumbria in a Luton van, all our belongings piled up in the back and Bangor left behind. It was odd, because unlike so many of the other climbers, I was leaving university merely to move somewhere else with easy access to the hills. Our first stop was home, as I now knew my parents’ place, and a round of hugs from Brian and Karen. Tom ran Emily home, and I suddenly felt lost. For three years we had lived, effectively, as man and wife, and suddenly she wasn’t there. I knew there was a need for her to see her own family, but a little bit of jealousy stepped in. She was mine, now…I got through the first night, in a bed too big for one, and the next day I was distracted from my pining and my book by Karen’s shout.
“Stevie! Visitor!”
It turned out to be Miss Graham, of all people. Yet another hug, and the tea was poured, and she came straight to the point.
“What are your plans now you have your degree?”
“I don’t yet, we still have to wait for the results”
“Don’t be silly, we both know you’ve passed. No, what are you looking to do as a career?”
I really hadn’t thought about that, and said so. My aim had been, all along, to study something I loved and prove myself to others with that bit of paper.
“Stephen, I have a suggestion, and I think it is worth consideration. You could teach. I have heard you speak, and to be honest you could go into politics, but I suspect you would find that just a little bit distasteful. Or, you could take the necessary training courses and use your gifts to open the eyes of children. I would have you, you know, at Netherhall. You not only have the skills, but you have the ethos. And I feel you have the passion to get it across. Will you think about it?”
That was another turning point. She was right; I had seen no further ahead than my exams, and now there was a new target, and if t worked each year would bring a steady flow of fresh-faced challenges. I rang Em, and to no surprise at all she confirmed that Hilda had already been to see her with a similar offer. She giggled down the phone.
“Lover, that leaves us just one question. Do I teach as Miss Kerr or Mrs Jones?”
I laughed. “I think, from what Kaz says, that either way you’ll be teaching next to Mrs Skinner!”
A few days later we were in Em’s mother’s car, as Em drove us down to Eskdale for a few days in Boot. Nana was there, of course, to welcome us, and Arthur and Meg had a cake, and then the Toffs and Tessa turned up with the usual bottles of fizzy. A few days of running with Nana while the girls hit the beach, of climbing with the boys (we finally did CB) while she ran up the back with a new (gas) stove to have tea waiting for us, sunshine and rain, laughter and love.
And Emily and I decided it would be as Mrs Jones, and the date was set, the vicar at St Catherine’s being more than happy to set a May day aside for our celebration. I took Sid to one side a few days after we got back, and he cried as he agreed to be my best man, and I toyed with the idea of sending the Cunninghams a souvenir photo.
It was all so wonderful, but somewhere, somewhere, Mitchell lay hidden.
CHAPTER 42
That was an odd time, truly odd. I had spent my entire, if compressed, academic career listening to people tell me things, explaining to them what I thought I understood, and then listening to them correct me, sometimes dismissively.
Now, I was learning how to be the one doing the telling.
Emily crowed a little over our results, as I had only got a 2:1 to her First, but her heart wasn’t in such competitiveness, and I remained proud of my brunette genius. Peter and Barbara were, of course, ecstatic at her achievement, and we all had a little dinner to celebrate the results. By ‘all’, of course, I mean nothing like my extended family, just two sets of parents and us. There had been a few hiccups with that concept, as Barbara in particular seemed to suffer from double vision when she looked at me. , That sort of confirmed me in my never-ending internal debate on whether, or how, to change myself.
I was slowly coming out of the shadows, but there were still moments when I would awake from some nightmare of weight and rough penetration to find Emily holding me, or sometimes Karen, as the nightmare took flight back to its lair. This was how I learned the real meaning of love, and how many forms it took, from the urgent totality of Em for me, to the ferocious protectiveness of my grandmother. There was a trick Val taught me, which was to imagine, every time a thought of the hellbitch stirred in me, to imagine my grandmother charging in with her old crook to lay about her; without telling Val, I turned sheepcrook into ice axe, and enough said there.
Christmas came, and the message went out: nothing expensive, but something special, so typically for Brian the ‘inexpensive’ was a basic Ford Fiesta for me, and a day training with Newcastle’s first team for Iain. He, of course, asked ‘Why not Carlisle?”
“Because that would mean training with me, and that’s hardly special, is it?”
That seemed a fair point to Iain. I don’t want to go into a list of Christmas presents, but I will say I ended up having four Christmas dinners, because Em’s parents, Iain’s parents, Nana and Kaz all insisted on doing one. I was never further from the dark days, it seemed, but May was not that far ahead and I had somewhere to go and someone to see there. Brian had taken the lead this time, as he was more than familiar with the better tailors of London, and I was whisked down there by Tom for a couple of days with the boys and some serious fitting. Brian had been most insistent.
“No, she can’t. Will you see her before the wedding? No, so she won’t see you”
What we were looking for was a tailor who was willing and able to cut and shape a suit so that while it hung properly, it didn’t follow my curves too closely. I intended to wear a sports bra for the day, so my breasts wouldn’t be too prominent. I know now that the stories people make up about this sort of thing always have the poor bloke in some lacy fluff of a dress, or at least underwear, but all I wanted was them out of the way, under control until they were back under Em’s touch.
And the day came, at last. We made our way down to the Church, Brian, Karen, Sid and I, to the scattered gravestones around the low stone building and its slate roof. The Lakeland gods had been kind to us, and the deluges of the previous few weeks had given way to sun and brilliant clouds, the light dancing on the water of the river and the falls. The fells still clung onto their grey shawls, but the valley was filled with sun and sparkle. I took my place next to Sid at the front, both of us in our morning suits beneath the open wood rafters of the old building. Brian and Karen took a moment for some quiet words, and then it was time. There was an audible straightening up from the pews, and that tune struck up on the little organ, and I knew she was behind me. Sid muttered “eyes front” and three seconds later she appeared at my side, Peter fading back into his pew and Tessa and Sally taking station.
Now, I know that my lover is beautiful, she was beautiful even when she was a fat, spotty teenager, because Emily has always shone through her skin, and Emily is what beauty is to me, but that day...
The hairdresser had left her hair down, but teased her curls so that they were almost like some Pre-Raphaelite vision of Camelot, then woven a swarm of tiny white silk flowers into them. All I can say about her dress was that it was pretty and white, because my attention was swallowed up by the green of her eyes and the rose of her shy blush.
The litany is well known, but it meant so much to me. This woman had stayed true to me, fought to find me and delivered me from a very real hell. Did I wish to cleave only to her until death us do part? There was only one answer to such a question, and she gave the same one, and Sid gave me our rings, and it was done, and I kissed her gentle lips as I knew I would never tire of doing.
I helped my wife up into the flower-covered trap behind Young Arthur’s patient pony, and we trotted along to the Inn, where the buffet Arthur and Meg had prepared earlier was waiting. They had been quite robust about it, particularly Arthur, as Meg nodded agreement.
“There is no bloody way I am missing thy wedding, Steve Jones, no way at all, no matter how many guests tha pay me for! Nothing hot, except we’ll do some STP later if people want, but tha’ll have sandwiches and corned beef slice, well, and a bit more…and I’ll put a marquee up outside if tha want.”
And he did, and the spread was a lot more than sandwiches and a thin pie; the sticky toffee pudding appeared just before the toasts and disappeared just as quickly, and after we had done our poses for the photographers amateur and professional we had the speeches.
“It was a slow day when we met Steve here, Karen and I. I had just got another load of decent books in, and she was still playing around with ripped bodices, and neither of us had anyone to read them with. The door opens, and there’s this tiny creature. Was it a brownie? An elf? No, it was a Fan, and I had someone to share my books with and a reason to keep reading. He was a loyal fan, too, with a real sense of wonder, and then he doubled our pleasures by bringing another small person to our lair, and she was one of Karen’s clan, with no literary taste at all, though somehow her professors missed that and awarded her a First.”
When the laughter eased, he continued. “There were hard times then, times that nearly broke all of us, all except that little girl, who never let go, never forgot, never stopped looking until he was found. And that boy himself, who stayed alive and somehow sane, and had the strength of character to shed those horrors as a snake sheds its skin to show us all what a good man he now is, what a great heart he has.
“I know the best man’s speech is traditionally full of jokes and rude humour, but I can’t do that. Instead, I give you two people whom I love as I love my own life; indeed, who showed me that life was there to be lived and to be loved. Ladies and gentlemen, I trust you have your glasses charged, for I give you Mr Stephen and Mrs Emily Jones! The bride and groom!”
There were more speeches, including a surprisingly touching one from Peter which embarrassed me in its praise, and then there was the traditional first dance, with the traditional tears from all the women present, which disappeared once the disco proper started, only to return once the wine took effect. Two of Emily’s cousins had the traditional dust-up outside the pub, but that was the only thing that marred the day. Sid spent part of the evening crying outside, till Roger went and collected him, and once again I had a moment of insight. The only real difference between what was done to me, and what Sid suffered, wasn’t the fact that he had been unconscious when he was raped, but that his rapists were still free. How he had ever managed to stay alive, and to keep his soul, astonished and perplexed me. I remembered that insight, that I wasn’t suffering alone, that there were so many others being hurt, and I realised that that was what gave me what others kept calling my big heart.
It would have been easy to settle into petulance, to be the victim, but I had realised I was but one of more than I could imagine. Time for some payback, time for me to nurture and protect.
Iain was wrapped round his Icelandic long-jumper girlfriend when I went back in, Simon and Roger were dancing slowly together, as were so many other couples, Tessa having snagged Young Arthur, so I relieved her parents of my bride and we headed off n the taxi to the Toffs’ wedding present to us, a flight from Manchester out to Innsbruck, whence a tram took us up the hill to Stubaital and the village of Fulpmes. The Hotel Roas’nhof was our base for two weeks, and it was the first time in the Alps for either of us. First impressions…flowers everywhere, snow-capped peaks all around, spotlessly clean and incredibly welcoming. I got some funny looks, but I was used to that, and with a little pidgin German we got the idea across, and they shrugged their shoulders and gave us a wonderful stay.
Two weeks of walking little paths through the woods, eating cakes and walking on the glacier. Cable car rides to the tops, snowball fights that ended in passionate grapples in the white stuff, tram rides down to the city to marvel at the architecture and mountain scenery, to eat more cake and walk hand in hand beside the thundering white-blue river.
Sid was so, so right.
CHAPTER 43
My wife was fussing with my hair as I looked in the mirror, and I slapped her hand away gently as she tried to reset my ponytail. If this went on, I was going to have to get it cut off.
I finally turned around, and started playing with the lapels of her blouse to return the favour.
“Shoulder pads, love, you look like some Yank football player”
“That’s fashion. You never pay any attention to it, so there’s no point explaining it!”
“Yeah but….the shoes as well. All day on your feet, is that going to be fun? And I haven’t even mentioned the most important bit!”
“Which is?”
“Teenaged boys. Here we are, about to head out to work, and I don’t know if we will get there because just now I’m feeling the urge to throw you down on the stairs and ravish you, and you expect some spotty lad to be able to concentrate?”
She put on a little girl voice.
“Am I pretty, mister?”
I just growled and took her out to the car. Women….
We were now living, at the end of our teacher training, in a terraced house in Maryport similar to the one I used to share with Mam all those years ago. It was a council property, but there were still plenty of them spare as the economy only slowly started to improve back in the early eighties. The current government had come in on the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’ and then proceeded to increase the unemployment queues to a terrible length. We had work, though, and were grateful for that, and despite the investments that had kept my windfalls comfortably filled, I was looking forward to what Dave said would be serious ‘wonga’ once the book was published.
That had been a hard journey, and I had been forced to take several long breaks from the project when the resulting nightmares began interfering with my studies, but in three months it would be out and I would once more have a little moment of fame. Tom had pulled back to my parents’ house, as I never thought of it, as the perceived threat from any left-over friends of the hellbitch had gone. It had been Tom who summed it up.
“Steve, when they were still being hunted they wanted to shut you up. They fucked that one up big style, and in my humble opinion any that are left are more concerned with hiding and survival than in getting you. Cunningham’s got no reach any more; without funds, she’s just another nutter in Broadmoor”
“What if you are wrong, Tom?”
“Sue me….”
We parked alongside all the other teachers’ cars, which was a weird thought, and made our way to the staffroom, which was even weirder. Our classroom experience had been in various Carlisle schools, so we were used to the general idea, but this was our place, the one we used to stay outside as kids. Sally, Bill Calvert and Harry Robson were already there, and Harry (Harry! No longer Mr Robson!) muttered something, grinning, which sounded like “fresh meat”
Sal took one look at Em, sighed, and said “Hope you brought some other shoes, pet”
I sighed myself. “I told her, but she goes on about fashion…”
Em produced an even bigger sigh, theatrically tossing her curls. “When you have a mother-in-law that looks like mine, you have no choice!”
That produced a girly giggling fit, and I just raised my eyebrows at the other men in a bonding recognition of female incomprehensibility. Bill was all smiles.
“Just remember, everything you know, I taught you, so you can’t go wrong! Just don’t bugger them up before I get them, OK?”
New academic year, new life. Tom and Sally had wed that Summer, on the beach in St Lucia, their wedding present from Brian and Karen, and I had delighted in the warm seas and tropical smells, ending up with seriously female tan lines. I could’ve done without the mossies though; not as swarming as midges, but steadily irritating before, during and after. Em had suffered almost as much as me, as we were both fair-skinned, but I had memories of her on the beach, and photos….the horrors of that place went further away each day I was loved and cared for, and I felt almost whole. The more my wife, in the words of the service, worshipped my body with hers, the more I was able to put aside that sense of wrongness I would always feel, the more I could accept that however I looked, I was loved for myself.
It was time. With a mutter from Hilda of “Morituri te salutamus” we stepped out of our room. Many years later, when I saw the film “Reservoir Dogs”, I thought of that first day.
“Let’s go to work”
It was nowhere near as bad as I had expected, for I was using Bill’s technique as much as possible. We had a curriculum to teach, but he believed in setting research targets rather than burying the kids in dry facts. I had come to an arrangement with Sid, and he had expanded the library’s history section n the appropriate areas. The children would have to ferret through the books to find the answers, and as Bill had explained, we were trying to teach them how to learn, not how to remember.
“Morning all, My name is Mr Jones, and I am your new history teacher. My wife is going to be teaching you English, so you have a double act to face. You see, even though we are married, we still talk to each other, so be very careful!”
I caught the first mutters, as I had expected, and there was that word “tits” there, but they would learn, in all senses. I wasn’t there to grandstand, but to try and give them a life, as so many had done for me.
“Right….the Romans. What have the Romans ever done for us?”
That got the expected laugh, and we were rolling.
I caught up with Emily at first break. “OK?”
She smiled, her face alight. “What a buzz! I think I was born for this!”
Sally put her hand on her arm. “Wait until you have to start marking. That generally pricks the bubble”
Bill called across “And when the boys discover what girls are for! Classrooms get very interesting then!”
A cup of bad coffee, and then back in. It was great.
We had a meal out to celebrate, that evening, just a curry in the local Indian, with a bottle of sweet German wine to wash it down, and to toast our new life.
A few weeks into our career, we had a visit from my brother, over from Loughborough with Hildi the longjumper. Iain seemed a little nervous for some reason, and asked if we could have a little chat out in the garden.
“What’s up, mate?”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Stevie…please bear with me. This is going to sound odd, but I’ve been doing a lot of shagging”
I started to laugh. “What bloke wouldn’t? She’s gorgeous!”
He was pink. “Yeah, yeah, she is, and because we both have studies, careers…look, it’s the contraception bit. Every time I put one on, I end up thinking of you, because you can’t, and…I love you, Stevie, and it hurts that what I try and avoid you can’t ever have. Does that make sense?”
It did. I had often wondered about children, and the thought that we were both so involved in teaching, that perhaps we were trying to sublimate things. I knew that Emily would have loved children, but after Mitchell there wasn’t the option. There was something more to what Iain was on about, though.
“So I did some thinking, Stevie. Hear me out…whatever it was n you that kept you short didn’t come through to me, and, well, we can’t really get much closer than brothers, and, if, em, do you see?”
I did, and I loved him for it. I put on a serious voice. “Iain Jones, you are not shagging my wife!”
“No, no, Hildi would kill me, but there are ways….”
“Stay here.”
I went for Emily, and explained quietly his offer. To my surprise, she burst into tears, ran out into the garden and kissed him hard. When I caught up, she was still crying.
“More than almost anything, my love, but I worried about hurting you. If, if we can, then, oh shit, I can’t talk straight”
We brought Hildi in on the conversation, and then took a drive out to Brian’s. I faced Karen squarely, took my wife’s and brother’s hands, and asked my stepmother.
“How would you like to become a grandma?”
CHAPTER 44
I watched Kaz’s face go through a series of twitches, and I could almost track them, from ‘I’m too young’, to ‘How?’, then ‘Who?’, and finally ‘Ah!’
My goddess was never, ever stupid. “He really does love you, doesn’t he?”
With one question, I knew not only that Iain truly loved me, but that Karen did. She stepped forward to take me in her arms, still taller than me even without the heels she lived in, and talked my fears away.
“I would have doubts about most people, Steve, that they would want the kid for themselves, but for once, just once, I think….Em, pet, you really want this, don’t you?”
Emily just nodded, and I could see the little flicker on Karen’s face. She was like me; never could she be a natural parent, and in a parallel to my earlier thought I realised how much I actually loved her. This was the woman who had delivered a stepson, but could never deliver one of her own. I realised, as well, that Em had written so much of her life’s possibilities off because of her own love for me.
What a shitty world.
Finally, Kaz pulled back. “Oddly….I know a bloody good gynaecologist. Shall we get some decent lowdown on this?”
We had a lot to sort out, of course. Not least the legality of the donation, and the law regarding maintenance and responsibility for any child. Before that, there was one person who needed to be given, at the very least, her chance to approve. Iain was still embarrassed about his offer, and I wondered how much agonising my big, strong brother had done over the idea. It was certainly a bolt from the blue, but Emily’s reaction was all I needed to make my own decision.
The book was going to be out, though, before anything was done. And we definitely needed to get our feet under the staffroom table before planning any long, parental break. That was simple common sense. Once we had our life in some sort of rhythm, we could consider breaking step for a while.
Work did indeed impose a rhythm to everything, much more so than college had done. After the first few days, Em’s style had changed to the more comfortable end of her wardrobe, and the scuttlebutt was that a large number of hormonal boys was rather disappointed. That kept me smiling up until the day the book came out and Tom, as a precaution, took over the spare bedroom, with Sally, of course.
Book releases are reported in various ways depending on the newspaper in question. The Guardian and Times had a condensed summary in their book review sections, the NotW did a series of lurid extracts with ‘artist’s impressions’, and the Sun did the same with photos posed by models, rather giving the impression that I looked like a beauty queen and spent all day wearing nothing but a minimal set of bra and knickers. Its coverage consisted largely of “Grunt! Man! With tits!”, which was to be expected. Tom pointed out the old, old adage of no publicity and bad publicity, and I managed to let it slide. The editorials, though, were irritating. While the Guardian did its usual job of pointing out the need for better systems of inspection, and an expansion in the child protection system, the Mail bleated on about how everything could be solved by privatising the whole system and letting ‘the market’ decide, as clearly the council had failed in its duty, etc, etc.
I wrote to them and pointed out that Castle Keep had, to all intents and purposes, been a private establishment, but for some reason they ignored my letter.
It was the bottom feeders, though, who were unfortunately closest to the truth. The Sun and Mirror did ‘how many more?’ features, echoed in a slightly more literate way by the Express, and over the years I was shaken to see that my little piece of Hell had counterparts all over the United Kingdom, never mind Europe. I was also following the steadily unravelling of a group called PIE, the Paedophile Information Exchange, which at one point had even been consulted by governments for things such as the age of consent. Their survey of members, I found out, showed that they were most attracted to girls between the ages of 9 and 11, and boys from 11 to 15, and couldn’t see any problems as long as the child ‘consented’
Their trials kept hitting my attention for decades, and I had double vision each time. One more predator down, one more set of nightmares for a week.
The interesting part, though, was becoming a television celebrity, at least for a week. That involved not just ‘Look North’ from Newcastle, where I had a surprisingly sensitive interview by Mike Neville, but also a rather more serious visit to the studios of ‘World in Action’, where I was one of the talking heads they used on a very disturbing shock piece on paedophile networks.
That was, oddly, an excellent weekend, because we ended up staying with the boys and meeting Tessa’s new boyfriend Wyn.
She had finally, it seemed, moved on from trying to wear out her new equipment, as well as toning down the pelmet and heels look she had sported for years. I could sympathise, and empathise to an extent. All her life she had been locked up and once set free she had tried to see and experience the world in a day. Now, however, it looked as if she was finding her own corner of it. Wyn was a sizeable chap, a rugby player of some kind, and the raw edges of Tessa’s former life blurred against his bulk. Whenever we sat in the lounge, she was perched on his lap, and there looked to be a genuine affection in the way he absent-mindedly played with her hair or touched her arm. Life was moving on, and now she was swimming with it instead of drowning.
We did the bits for ‘World n Action’ in a remarkably quick time, which gave Emily and Tessa time to do girly shopping together while I did a signing at Foyles. What do you say to somebody who tells you that they ‘enjoyed’ such a book? That was only one of the comments I got, some of which profoundly disturbed me.
“I couldn’t put it down”---fine.
“I cried all the way through”---thank you, sincerely.
“I am not in favour of hanging, but….”---oh, trust me, I know that one.
“Where did you get the idea from?”---fuck off.
“Was it an exciting time (and many similar questions)?”---fuck off and die painfully.
In the main, though, my ‘fans’ (not fen) were subdued, nervous, as if talking to me might break me. I had made sure that there were plenty of posters showing the proportion of royalties I was donating to Barnardo’s and the NSPCC, so the questions about cashing in were stifled at birth.
It still hurt, though. Yes, in a way I was cashing in, but the drip-drip of people who saw it all as a fiction cut me. That ended almost completely once the WiA piece came out, and we had Kincora, and Bryn Estyn, and so many other horrors, and bit by bit PIE was disassembled.
I can’t really remember the day to day of my life back then, as it disappears into a fuzzy blur around bright snapshots. The money, in the words of the old song, did indeed roll in, and I was busier than ever. Harry had leant on me big style, and I was now involved in after-school athletics coaching, which gave me excuses to lead school trips. Oh, what a sadist I was! Rather than taking groups of teenagers on a wander round some castle or other, we went to Boot, where my prospective track stars were introduced to a little old lady who would take them for a jog around a few local sights.
Two boys, and a girl, that came out of that game ended up in the Olympic squad for 1988. Not bad going, Nana.
And Iain. With the help of Karen’s doctor, he did…things, and things were done, and, after a while of trying in which my wife and brother never gave up, in August 1985…
In August 1985, at 3am on the fifth, as I held her hand and she panted and moaned, and Iain and Nana waited with Karen and Brian outside, Steven Iain Brian Jones and his slightly younger sister Karen Elizabeth Barbara joined our family. Em was sweaty, and stank, and there was the mixed smell of blood and disinfectant that I remembered all too well, but there were two mewling little bundles trying to work out where all the bright light had come from and all of us, every one, had moved on a stage in lives we might never have had.
CHAPTER 45
That was indeed the start of a new life and lives. Em was home in a few days, and as a constant stream of wellwishers, including several pupils, came round the house to pay their respects and leave flowers and chocolates, babygros and bootees, we learned how little sleep it is possible to exist on.
Not ‘live’, not even ‘survive’, but just exist. The twins worked a tag-team system of early morning alarm calls that left me pondering the age-old parental question: why exactly had we done this?
I could go into another long and detailed description, this time of the learning process involved in everything from nappies to bathing, but there are some things it is best to draw a veil over. The one good thing was that we had such a list of girlfriends and relatives who wanted, or needed, to come round and enjoy the two. Karen, of course, spent as much time as she could just holding them, and I hurt deeply for her inability to follow our path. While I still felt an ache that the twins were not really mine, it was different for a woman, for giving birth was so more emotional, personal.
So, we had Kaz, and Sally, and Nana (“Great grandma. Bugger a hell”) of course, and Hilda, and Barbara and Audrey, and then Tessa insisted on coming up and was even soppier than Kaz, which was a new and very real bond between them. Neither could, both yearned. And then there was Sid.
Sid was almost as bad as the girls, but he would never say, and I could never work out, whether he was suffering some sort of maternal impulse, combined with a similar sense of loss to that felt by Kaz and Tessa, or if it was just another aspect of the love I realised he felt for me. I wasn’t just the one who got away, I was the one I suspected he saw as living the life he might himself have had.
The boys, though, were no surprise at all. A double act in so many ways, they balked together at nappy changing but delighted n bath time. Wyn…
Wyn, and Tom, and Brian were so much alike. All three were hard men, used to physical contact in a sharp and brutal way, and yet the way they held little Stevie, or Karen, was enough to make me cry. Big hands, tiny children, utter and perfect gentleness. Was this how it was in all families? I wondered if my own father had held me so lightly, so tenderly, and there were a couple of dark times where the loss of both my parents tore at my soul and I just had to cling to my wife, who needed no telling.
All of this time, I had been fighting with the powers that be to allow me access to my medical records, but I kept hitting a number of very solid brick walls. Firstly, the local health authority made noises about ‘confidentiality’ and I took that to mean that they interpreted the doctor’s rights to privacy to be above mine. More importantly, it seemed, when they admitted what little they did let out, that somebody had burned a lot of records in several locations. I had seen the partly-burned evidence at the trial, but the arson was widespread and not just limited to my own files. Eventually, under Roger’s relentless prodding, they had to admit that much of the material was simply not there. Mitchell had, apparently, cleared his desk before escaping. It seemed that I would get no answers until the bastard was run to ground.
As the years went by and our twins became real people, Tom was still working to find him, and I was deeply touched to learn that it wasn’t as an employee of Brian that he did so, but at his own behest and in his own time. I lay in bed one night with Em and tried to put my thoughts into words, and she just slapped my arm.
“Husband, dearest, any more false bloody modesty and you will sleep in the spare room. You know damned well why I married you, and all they are doing is for the same reasons”
“What, they wanted to hear me snore?”
Slap. Emily is a woman of her word, but she relents very quickly when caressed the right way. So I did, and we did, and I was nearly late for school. That was our little nod to convention, the big butch breadwinner returning home with the fresh meat after the day’s hunt. So I hardly looked like a macho barbarian hunter, so what, I had to face schoolchildren for a living, and surely that gave me club membership?
We took a few days off for yet another party, when we descended on Boot again for the christenings that Barbara and Nana insisted on, and I thought that as a group we were probably doing for Arthur what I had done for Dave, as one way or another he seemed to have a really steady flow of funds arriving from us.
Two children left us relieved of one dilemma, that of accidentally insulting someone by leaving them out of the godparent circuit, and it wasn’t till we sat down together and drew up the list that Em and I realised that there was only one ‘normal’ person on it. Three gay men, one transsexual woman, and Hilda. We had dithered over Tom and Sally, but they were so wound up in planning their own family that we decided to spare them. We also waited, with a real and slightly nasty dose of schadenfreude, for their hollow faces and bloodshot eyes when they finally got there.
It was a good day, though the Lakes weather gods had obviously cleared off to Magaluf on a cheap package, because half of the year’s allocation fell on us that day. Arthur had prepared, and we had the marquee of marquees to dance and drink in, as Young Arthur cast a careful glance over Wyn before being hauled back onto the dance floor by the Ravenglass girl he had at his side.
I felt odd at times. Karen, little Karen, more than Stevie, would grasp at me as if I was her mother, trying to get me to feed her as she pawed at my breast, and there were times…
No. It was all the time. I had no wish to be a woman, I have never, since my early boyhood fantasies, considered it as being anything that I wanted. I was emplaced in this body, tied down while it was grown over my soul, so unlike Tessa as she was then, but. But. Each time I watched Emily feed one or both of our children I wished I could share the intimacy, share the load. I have read of sympathetic lactation, but that never happened to me. I just felt my own breasts ache with the need to suckle my twin darlings.
I ran that past Val, and she just said “Intimacy, Steve, and love. They are your flesh, as much as they can be, and you are jealous of Em’s bond. It’s all normal, for any loving father, but because of the damage to you it tugs harder. Look, if it helps, you might try letting them have a suckle, but I would be sure, if I were you, to give them back to Em when they start teething.”
No, nice idea, but no. My body image was screwed up enough as it was, and that would send me over the edge. I stayed with the bottle and the burping.
They grew. They walked, at last, and there were first words and first tantrums, first tears of anger followed by tears of apology, as our little pieces of flesh became little human beings. It all happened so fast!
Professional criticism, that was what it was, not smugness, when we first dropped the par off at the infant school to be looked after by teachers who couldn’t possibly be up to Netherhall standards. If they had been, they would have been there alongside us, mature individuals n our thirties producing the leaders of tomorrow…what a load of crap teacher training colleges talk. We were two ordinary people who loved to see the expression on the faces of young people when the fire was lit within and the glow shone from their eyes, and Stevie and La’l Kaz were simply another two setting out on that road.
1989 brought a surprise, during half term break, when Roger and Simon appeared on our doorstep totally unannounced, Wyn and Tessa close behind.
“Darlings!”
Simon was in full flow, but rather than his usual exuberance there was an edge to him, a real light in his face.
“Can you possibly get someone to take the two little ones? We have a journey to make!”
Once in, he could hardly sit still as we fed them what we could, and he relaxed only slightly, Roger clinging to his hand and smiling like a maniac, as Tessa smirked.
“We are taking you on a boat ride. You will need best bib and tucker, and bring camera and dancing feet! Now, do you have Sid’s number here?”
Sid had a passport, it turned out, and Tom and Sally took the pair, and we still had no idea of what was going on. The next morning, we were off in two cars along the Military Road (“Slower, but so much more delightful, my dears”) to Newcastle, and then the Tyne Commission Quay for a ferry to Esbjerg in Denmark. It was truly odd, how the two boys could gush so freely yet remain absolutely tight-lipped about what they were up to.
We ate well on the boat, a full Danish buffet of open sandwiches and sea food, before retiring to our cabins for the crossing. I actually got a chance to talk to Wyn on the rare occasion he wasn’t being wrapped by Tessa.
“Yes, I know exactly, Steve, just like I know about you, and she is more of a woman than all of the slappers that chased me through college. That is all I am saying on that aspect, but there are things about this trip I, we, have a deep interest in. Just go along with the boys, and you will understand.”
I couldn’t draw him any more, so I gave up and drank the Carlsberg before retiring to our bed to listen to Sid snore on the upper berth.
We arrived off the industrial port, and after Roger had found a street map we worked our way past odd little sausage stands and quirky houses to a large carpark by a government building. Locking the cars up, Roger led us into a shopping area where we grabbed a rather greasy meal while awaiting Simon. He was back in time to have some of Roger’s gigantic round beefburger thing, but none of the beetroot, his face beaming.
“All set, loves, all set. Now, off to the little boys’ and girls’ rooms for posh frocks. Chop chop!”
What the hell was getting him so wound up? It was made worse for me by the fact that Em had obviously worked it out, and was giggling happily with Tessa at my confusion. Glad rags on, we headed back to the government building, and after a short wait a Dane in a sort of college professor’s gown led us down a long corridor as Tessa handed me two small boxes.
The ceremony was in both Danish and English, and I had worked it out by the time I handed the rings to my two friends as their civil union was solemnised in the first European country to allow such things, and the newly legal couple kissed as the world suddenly became a much better place.
CHAPTER 46
I was still in a complete mess when it was all over. Clearly, this had been something they had been planning for a while, and as my balance returned I began to wonder what the hell they had needed to do to be able to walk into what added up to a local council building and get married.
Property ownership? Business links? Proof of ancestral Viking rape? We were straight out of the room, and after some ritual photography the boys got us all loaded and onto the road North... It was a sequence of small villages, farms and rolling land that never got very high but kept undulating, with red and white seemingly everywhere, even on the road signs. We finally rolled into a small town called Viborg, which looked pretty awful as we entered, all industrial units and concrete, and then suddenly we were perched above a long lake, a miniature twin-towered cathedral dominating the view.
We parked up some distance from the actual centre, and the boys took us for a walk. It was gorgeous, the buildings all low-rise, the square grey-roofed towers of the church appearing and disappearing from view as we passed little alleys, until we ended up somewhere called Nytorv, where Roger gathered us all together.
“Now, the Danes are odd people. Their fast food is atrocious, very unhealthy and radioactively colourful, but there are still delights to find. This is one of them….fish, served very nicely. Lunch, and then onward and upwards!”
He was right. Well, he would have been if Em had actually liked herring, so we ended up getting her a burger anyway. I was still in a whirl, as the day before we had been happily sat in our family home, and now here we were in a foreign country with no idea of where we were going. The lunch was nice, the Danes seemed comfortable with two men holding hands, everywhere was clean, but where the hell were we going?
Slightly faster roads took us on to another larger town, Aalborg, and without stopping we were onto smaller roads again. Hirtshals (I think) and then a tiny place called Skagen. There were dunes, covered in ceaselessly waving marram grass and low scrub, which made Emily giggle with all the signs saying “klit”, and pine hedges as windbreaks, with occasional fields of wheat. The town was another little complex of streets with the industry on the outside, but we were led past that to another area of dunes, where little yellow houses with red tile roofs squatted low against the wind. One of those turned out to be our destination. I was tired now, lost and still confused. Roger gathered us all together outside one of the larger cottages.
“Welcome to our little home from home. Now, Simon, love, me first!”
As Tessa unlocked the front door, with a grunt he picked his partner up and half-staggered across the threshold, the two of them laughing madly. Simon, in turn, dragged him back out and returned the favour, and that was how, it seemed, gay men respected tradition. Also, traditionally, as Brits Abroad they had packed proper tea, so no theft was necessary. We settled into the surprisingly roomy cottage, with a sofa bed in the living room and an aga type affair in the kitchen, and sipped as Simon explained.
“It’s all been a bit of a rush, my dears. I have been doing work over here off and on for years, and Roger and I fell in love with the country. I mean, there’s no climbing at all, and the wind never drops, but the skies, and the seascapes…..oh, this place is like St Ives, full of artists, and…”
He looked across at Roger, a little sadly, it seemed. “We are getting on, my loves, and you never say so, but we aren’t what we were when we first met you. The thought of looking up at our favourite places and knowing we were past it…not an attractive thought.”
Roger chipped in. “This country has been sweet to people like us for a long time, and it doesn’t have the problems of somewhere like Amsterdam, or all the tourists in Sitges, and although Jylland is a bit behind the capital this place is special. We’ll show you some of that tomorrow, but what we thought was that we could make this our little place in the wind for our golden years. We’re on that mad rush to 60 now, Stevie, and this is to be our little hobbit-hole as we catch up with Mr Baggins”
Simon added “We have been watching the news with some interest, and once they announced the new laws, I had a friend make the arrangements, and we went onto a waiting list. Someone cancelled, Poul rang me in a hurry, and, well, Stephen my dear, neither of us could think of a better man. We just couldn’t be sure the gig was on till we got here. It was, and you and darling Em were there for us…”
And he was crying, his new husband pulling him close. Sid was in tears too, turning to me.
“All those years, Steve, all those years the bastards stole from us, years of being free to love, free to be human, oh, fuck it”
He went over to the boys and wrapped them both up as Em crushed my hand and Wyn found something in his eye. The tears eased, and Roger spoke in a very flat voice, emotion wound as tight as a fiddle string.
“Just think, love, if anything happened to one of us, the other had no claim, not even to discuss medical treatment. Nothing. No existence in law, just another poof in London. We have had to sign contracts together even to cohabit, so the place couldn’t be seized if one of us died. We were lucky, we never suffered as Sid here did, and thank Christ never, ever like you, but we have walked a tightrope all our lives.
“Just think back to you and Emily getting together, and imagine what it was like for us, and boys like us. Sod it, Tessa darling, the Bolly”
A bustle later, a bang, and their favourite fizzy tipple was served.
“My dear friends, Cousin Tess, darling Simon the love of my life, I give you a toast: gentlemen of England---FUCK YOU!”
“FUCK YOU!” in loud chorus, then some more conventional toasts, and I remember making love to my wife, sort of, and then sun through the window. I really had to cut back on that stuff; they were going to kill me.
It was a subdued wedding breakfast, which confused me. When was their honeymoon to be? They were sharing a house with two other couples and a single man; they were unconventional by definition, but this was pushing it. We ate our toast in a smiling silence, little glances around the table as Em fed herself one-handed, the other on my knee. Simon broke the warm mood.
“We have a plan for today, and somewhere special to go, and a friend to meet. Rig for the day is walking kit, and perhaps ladies may indulge in their best bikinis, for we shall most certainly get very, very wet! Once dressed, we are into Skaw-en”
That clicked, finally. ‘Skagen’, as it is spelled, meant nothing to me, but I knew from my geography classes where The Skaw was, and what made it special.
We dressed, and yes, I knew what was to come, so on with my bikini under my walking trousers, and the boys led our car down into the centre, not far from some surprisingly large docks. We parked, and headed to a shop painted blue and white near the harbourfront, called “Sjá¸huset”, where a tall, lean man with a grey ponytail and greyer beard all but threw himself at the boys, hugging and kissing them both before pulling at their hands to see the rings. I assumed he knew them.
Simon brought him over. “Per, this is my great friend Stephen and his wife the delicious Emily, Tessa you know, Wyn is her current flame, and this is Sid, who I told you about”
As Per shook our hands in turn, I thought, oh you old sods, matchmaking! They didn’t seem to be far off the mark, either, for the two were clearly looking each other up, down and sideways. Roger called us to order. “This is Per’s gallery, so he hopes you have brought plenty of money. Per is going to lead us on a little walk, in a while, and from the way Steve is smiling he has worked out where. That school of yours is a good one, Stevie!”
Per got into our car, with Sid, of course, and directed us out to Grenen, and I told Em to get down to her swimming costume as we walked out along the sandy path to where the long spit led out between the Skagerak and the Kattegat, the water a different colour to either side, and the waves dancing in opposite directions until they clashed over the very end of Denmark, and realisation hit me.
This was me, this was my place. Driven not by wind or tide, but by an evil old sod, I had still ended up at a crossroads. I stood at my own little Skaw, where I could see both sides of humanity. That was my place, not fish, not fowl, but both. I could be who I wanted to be, as much as my anatomy would allow, and it was of no business to anyone but my family, and I could define that however I wished.
I stood with part of that family, laughing as waves hit us from both sides and the gulls sent their heartsongs of crowded loneliness.
CHAPTER 47
I was calmer by far when we returned to Maryport. The trip had moved me in so many ways, moved me profoundly.
I had been changing slowly over the years, as love and friendship, and parenthood, had brought me through the long nights and terrors from the past, and now I realised in my soul what the back of my mind had already worked out.
I was loved. I loved. I was a parent to two who loved me unconditionally and totally, a husband and lover, a grandson and stepson and son in law, a friend and a teacher. The old saying could never have been truer, that I had blessings I should count. So I had tits, that Em told me were just starting to sag a bit (her excuse for ‘perking them up’ in bed), but they were mine, part of me, and as long as my wife loved them I could live with them. My body was as healthy and fit as it could be, and it could run as well as ever–I could run as well as ever, for my body was me, and I was it. That was part of the sea change that Grenen had wrought in me, the realisation that I was neither driver nor passenger, just me. Call it acceptance, call it resignation, but I remembered the tramp outside the court and knew exactly how lucky I had been.
The stories that Em occasionally showed me were so wide of the mark, with their men ‘embracing their femininity’ as it always seemed to be phrased, but this was nothing like that. I didn’t start wearing lacy undies, or skirts, or make-up, I just stopped worrying quite so much. I mean, a bit of gynecomastia, what was that between friends?
I settled back into my life and its many roles, and I was happy. Then we lost Iain.
It was a happy day, when he finally married his Viking long jumper, and once more Arthur pushed the boat out for us. It was almost as if we had a timeshare arrangement on the pub and the church, and there was a sense of familiarity to everything. Hildi was blonde, of course, to Em’s darkness, her eyes a pale blue to my love’s sparkling green, and her skin a clear tan to my darling’s freckled pink and white, but she still managed to look beautiful. I know what beauty is, it smiles at me each night and wakes beside me in the morning, and I see it as I feed my children. I made allowances, though, for Iain’s sake, as he stood beside his father and a college friend awaiting her entrance.
My brother honoured me by treating my family as his own, and if ever a phrase could encapsulate how we had been torn apart, that was it. Audrey and Kieran were his parents now, the bond deep and true, but all three extended their hands to my group of friends and allies. So, Tom and Sally were there, their three together with our two in pretty dresses or miniature suits, and the boys, and Tessa and Wyn. Sid too, and Per, who seemed to spend a lot of time looking for paintings and other stock around North West Cumbria, specifically a small local library. Tessa was hilarious, as once she saw all the male relatives that had come over from Akranes I could almost read her mind.
“Nope, must not salivate over the beefcake, got one, don’t need any more, be good, don’t drool”
Brian, of course, and Karen, who still looked lovely at fortyish (she wouldn’t admit to it), and as we took our seats, she whispered “We have to talk later, us and you two”
The music started, and Hildi came in on the arm of her father, and I finally admitted to myself that she did look almost as good as my wife and my goddess, and it all went as these things do. Women, including Nana, cried, as rings were exchanged, a veil lifted and a kiss given. I had lost my brother, in a way, because he was moving out to Iceland with his bride, taking up a sports teaching post at a school in Akranes. His feel for words matched my own, and half the time they chatted it was in something foreign.
Young Arthur had rigged his trap with flowers again, but it was a different pony, and they went off up the farm road a bit quicker than we had, Hildi’s laughter tinkling behind. I noticed just then that Per and Sid were holding hands, and Roger slipped me a quick grin.
There was a little bit of tension when Per spoke to Hildi in Danish, and got his answer in English, but that evaporated quickly once the speeches started and the food hit the plates. Some more of Iain’s Loughborough friends had formed a group, and that made a pleasant change from the disco that would normally have played. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but the charts in the Eighties were filled with utter dross, and as I had lived through all of the glory years of the sixties and early seventies, I knew what real music was.
The only fights this time were among various younger guests trying to pull the unattached blond(e)s. I was OK, I prefer dark curls, and green eyes, and she would probably kill me anyway. Then, the newlyweds were off in the taxi as the rest of us settled down to a serious party.
There was time afterwards to spend a few days with Nana, which was something she now seemed to live for. Stevie and La’l Kaz loved it too, as she spoiled them ceaselessly, and took them on little adventures around the easier local fells. The boys, Tess, Sid and their two friends were there as well, and so were Brian and Kaz.
She took me and Em aside the morning after Ian had left us, clearly nervous, as Bran held her close.
“Steve, Em, we have something to tell you. I’ve been working with that doc I introduced you to, and, well, shit, it looks like they can do something now. New techniques, new kit.
“I’ve got eggs, and they are apparently healthy. It’s the attachment to the womb that seems to switch off each time. That’s the problem. t seems that we can do the IVF thing, but we can’t get anything to stay in me.”
She was shaking, but Em just hugged her and smiled.
“So you were wondering…..and the answer is, yes, of course I will”
Karen grabbed her, tears starting, and I knew I had missed something important for at least a minute. Then it hit me. There was no alternative, I had to make it a joke.
“Do you want full bawd, Kaz, or just a womb with a view?”
Surrogacy, kept within the family. Once more I understood how deeply I was loved, as something I couldn’t offer myself was given without question by my wife to my saviour. Perhaps it s now clear how the importance of my deformities was slowly but steadily evaporating. Loved, loving, given and giving.
Twelve months later, and Brian had a son, Karen another reason to love life, and Em an even bigger place in my heart, if that had actually been possible. I couldn’t imagine any way that life could be better.
Tess and Wyn had their own wedding dance in Skagen, a year after the birth of Brian Stephen Dennahy, and of course we went, as a mob, and Per made a joke about returning the favour of the Viking invasions as he held his own lover round the waist, and that made me think of waste. They had laid waste to Sid’s mind, they had tried to cut his soul away from him, but he had somehow, like me, held onto the humanity he prized, and now it looked as if he was finally getting a reward for the pains of his life.
So we danced, and we loved, and we walked again to that edge of two seas, and I held my family to me as other lovers embraced. Brian and Karen dangled their son’s feet in the water, and my darling simply smiled at the sight. How could this ever get better? Blessings well and truly counted, listed and delighted in.
The next day, the phone rang at the dune house, and it was Tom.
“Steve, we’ve found that cunt’s records”
It seemed that Mitchell had packed everything up and put it all into a storage container, which had sat ignored at the back of a warehouse for years. The building sold off, the new owners had started clearing it, and out of curiosity broken into the box. Totally by chance, one of the workers had read either my book or one of the newspaper summaries, and recognised my name, and the bastard’s.
“He wanted paying, Steve, but not that much, and at least he had the good grace not to go straight to the bloody papers. Sorry to ask this, but I’ll need a sub to cover it”
“Tom, you daft bugger, of course. It’s me that should pay, not you. Have you looked at them?”
There was silence for a while. Then, in a flat voice, “Yes, I have. I’ve set Sally to copying them, but I really think they need to go straight to the police. The man is as mad as the Cunnighams”
“Do it, Tom, do as you see fit. and Tom…”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. I love you, Tom”
CHAPTER 48
Tom had a stack of neatly-bound files waiting for me when we got back, but Em took my arm.
“Not now. We have had good times, let’s not spoil a memory by diving straight into that again. I’ll sort out a weekend when the kids can stay with my parents, and then we can have some privacy. OK love?”
That made sense in a lot of ways. I had a presentiment that there would be more than a few emotional moments, and I couldn’t see how it could ever be explained to the children. Tom had passed the originals on to the police, as we had agreed, and I had tried to pay him back for the money he had shelled out to the shopfitter. He had refused point blank.
“Give my three a break at your grandmother’s, that’ll do me. They love it there, Steve, and this has been part of my life for so long I want it over as much as you. So just take a present from a friend”
The weekend came, and we had guests. My step-parents, Sid and Tom were there to help, after Em had dropped the twins off, and I sat in our dining room with my supporters staring at seven full ring-binders of photocopied documents. Tom put a hand on my shoulder.
“Something you should know, my friend. You are not the only person in these records. Take it slow, we have all weekend and you have people here who love you”
I was shaking, and Sid came forward to take my hand, and that made me laugh. All those years ago, that had been the accusation, ‘holding hands with an old puff’, and here we were, doing exactly that. My life had filled with gay men, a transsexual woman and more love than anyone could hope for, and none of it had ‘infected’ me. I looked up, and all I saw around me was that love, that concern. Mitchell, the Cunninghams, all of them, they had lost and I had come out the winner.
Fuck them all. “Right, let’s get at it”
Tom and Sally had broken the documents down into seven bundles. One was of correspondence, one of a number of legal documents, one a journal, and the other four were medical records and associated documents. Four. There were, somewhere, three other victims, and in my profound atheism I still said a little prayer for them, that they had escaped the Cunninghams and any of their ilk. I started at the letters, which went back into the Sixties, and there was a steady stream of letters from somebody called Money. I remembered Val’s comment about him, and had a glimpse of where this might lead.
Mitchell had been obsessive, keeping copies of his own letters, originally carbon, and it was thus possible to follow it almost as one would a conversation. That was how it came across, too, as the letters moved from respectful queries about Money’s published work to chatty exchanges about social matters. Money referred often to John/Joan, clearly not a real name, and how it was working out exactly as predicted. He referred to the child as various things: proof, verification, experimental evidence. He never, ever spoke about it as a person or anything other than what could have been a piece of laboratory equipment. Part way through, John/Joan became Bruce/Brenda.
Then came that first letter about me.
“Dear John
I have had the most wonderful stroke of good fortune, as a subject has been presented to me that will serve marvellously for our purposes. He is a stunted child, and I suspect some pituitary deficiencies are behind that, but he has been butchered by some terribly done surgery to cure an infantile inguinal hernia. Both testicles have adhered to the inguinal canals as a consequence, but that gives us the opportunity I have sought.
“I spent some considerable time interviewing the mother, and all evidence points to the child being a passive effeminate homosexual. Clear focus on clothing, colours and styles, and he showed a morbid interest in the old April Ashley scandal. I do believe I have my subject. The testicles may be saved, they aren’t too far gone, but in this case removal will make her---for that is what she clearly will become–development far easier and better for her future presenting as female. We live in exciting times, John!
Yours, as ever, Harold”
There it was, the key to everything he had done, in one flippant letter. A subject. Passive, effeminate homosexual. If I ever found him, was my thought, he would find out how passive I was.
I realised I had been weeping for a minute or two, Em’s hand stroking the back of my neck, and I took a minute to walk out into the back garden and just breathe as she held my hand. She had been so right, there was no way we could safely explain this to two children. I wound myself back up, kissed my wife and went back to it.
The letters continued in similar vein, detailing what were treated as opportunities in an offhand way, opportunities such as my father’s death, and my mother’s descent into alcoholism, and then her simple, cold assignment of Mitchell as my legal guardian “in case of…”
No next of kin, no Nana, just the ‘family doctor’. Bastard.
We worked through the rest of the letters as they switched from banality to cold and dispassionate descriptions of what he was doing to me, the hormone injections he had suggested were to make me grow, the clinical description of puffy nipples and skeletal changes, and then there was a letter with some actual emotion showing, but only for himself, as he detailed my mother’s final collapse and my assignment to the seventh circle of hell. Then…
“Dearest John
The subject has been placed into a care home run by some acquaintances of mine upon the final incapacity of her surviving parent. I have decided that when I publish she will be referred to as Adam/Annie, as she is the first of my subjects to actually present clear opportunities for verification of your hypothesis. Obviously, when I do publish, it will be as ‘Experimental Verification of the Money Hypothesis in Gender Assignment’. We do live in exciting times!
Yours, Harold”
“John
She is showing great progress in her development, but it is going to be difficult to arrange a penectomy and/or vaginoplasty just now, for various silly legal reasons. She has responded exactly as I–we-predicted, and has become an enthusiastic practitioner of anal intercourse, so much so that I have had to perform a number of small procedures. Whether she will move on to more conventional heterosexual congress at a later date is, of course, moot if I am unable to allow her the opportunity.
I have a second subject now, which I shall refer to as Betty/Bill, for the father is desperate for a son, and after explaining your theories to him I have received consent for an infantile hysterectomy and associated procedures. This child is relocating to Spain, so I should have a lot less bureaucracy to contend with. There are two more in the pipeline. Exciting times!
Harry”
“John
I do not understand why I have received no replies to my last three letters. I would be grateful for the courtesy I thought our friendship entailed
Harold”
The letters dried up, and I understood that even an old bastard like Money had to draw a line somewhere, and as Mitchell had moved on to more and more extreme ‘experimental verification’ the American had done his best to cut any ties with my friendly lunatic. That first file was hard, but the second, the one about ‘Betty/Bill’ was just as bad. Dry, clinical notes, fancy words, and a Spanish death certificate copied into the file as the little girl had died under the knife. I knew Spain had had its problems, under that old Fascist Franco, but surely even in such a place there would have been a doctor with the honesty and humanity to ask why, or even to say no? Even in a country where they officially strangled prisoners to death?
I came close to breaking point at that one. “Tom, I don’t want to see the other cases. Let the police deal with that, this is just about as far as I can take this”
“You want me to clear this away, Steve?”
“No, not yet. I still have to read my own”
It was exactly as the letters had said, but in the same style as the little girl’s. My life rendered into a series of technical terms, prescription records, medical notes, all so banal. It was like the records from Mengele and the rest of that exercise in industrial processing of human beings; the literally clinical phrases detailing cruelty and abomination. Somehow, the complete lack of passion made everything so much worse. ‘Subject’. ‘Experimental verification’. ‘Post-operative demise’.
There was more horror in those words than I could cope with, and I realised that the old cliché about it being better not to know was spot on. The nightmares came back that night, and stayed with me for a month until Em’s patience and the laughter of my children chased them away.
Life. It had been there for the taking, in both senses. Mitchell and the Cunninghams had done exactly that, in one way, and I had done the other. Mitchell had got one thing, though, and that was his experiment. Here I was, a walking, talking rebuff to him and his Yank mentor, the proof that, in Val’s words, Money was talking out of his arse. I had found my answers, too, but they gave me no peace. Life isn’t a novel, things don’t just tie up in neat little scenes of resolution. Life doesn’t stop at the last page, you can’t end-read it. It just has to be lived.
The police spoke to us all, of course, and the Spanish authorities melodramatically issued an arrest warrant for my doctor, and very quietly jailed a particular surgeon for life. They had their own Castle Keeps, too, and as the stories came out about priests and cover-up the press went through a series of feeding frenzies that left me being doorstepped regularly. I was the survivor, I was the authentic Eurydice that hadn’t been lost at the exit.
Then, in 1997, Milton Diamond revealed exactly how far up his own arse Money had had his head, and the whole edifice of his pompous bullshit came crashing down as the world heard of how poor Bruce, now David, had been warped by the old bastard. It was clear his only saving grace was his abandonment of Mitchell, but I rather suspected that that was more out of self-interest than human decency. You can never polish a turd.
Then it came. We were a large and happy family, now, and in the new century, on August the fifth, we celebrated our twins’ sixteenth birthday. Everybody was there, every fellow human that we loved, Nana still with us even though she was finally slowing down as her joints stiffened. The twins had their own friends, of course, and we had a little swarm of Norse invaders from Akranes, and where else could we celebrate it but in Boot? Arthur was gone, now, but Young Arthur and his mother kept shop in the same old way, with one small change.
They had put together a photo wall, where clippings and pictures of happy or notable times were there for all to see, from newspaper reports of our run to the crag to party photos. We were far from the only people up there, of course, but we made quite a large proportion of them. It was one more gift of happiness, one more chip away at the nightmares and pain of my past.
We sat out in the sun, Nana in pride of place as the matriarch of our clan, as the band played and the kids boogied, and lovers sat with a drink, and a smile, and each other.
Young Arthur came out of the pub in a hurry. “Steve, you’ve got to see this!”
We ran into the kitchens, where a TV was showing the BBC news channel, and I watched as it all finally ended.
“The demolition of the flyover was interrupted when human remains began to emerge from one of the pillars. A police spokesman said that it was too early to say for certain, but the death is being treated as suspicious. Identification documents have been found, but the name of the deceased is being withheld until next of kin can be informed”
There it was, and as the inquest proceeded over the next few days we finally had an answer.
It was, of course, Mitchell, who had finally understood the wisdom of choosing your friends with care, his head smashed in with what the pathologist said was probably a ball-peen hammer.