7. A DAY IN A SKIRT

It's never easy being a girl...

Ivan Bramble was almost shocked by the speed with which he had adapted to being Evana Bramble, even down to the far preferable matters of the toilet.

And now that I’m like this there’s no chance of a stray stream going astray, he thought, with grim satisfaction and even grimmer. acceptance. So he pulled a jacket on, one that might look unisex to the untrained eye, and prepared to go out.

To start with he had been very self-conscious when it came to stepping out actually onto the street. He knew that he looked all wrong. Besides hisown jacket he was wearing one of Maureen’s skirts, one that had somehow got mixed up with his own clothes when he’d angrily walked out of the family home, and he’d never worn a skirt before. Very few men have. He consoled himself by imaging that he looked quite fanciable, but he was nearly fifty and nobody would ever fancy him again, not at that age and even it he did wear a shortish skirt and have long blonde hair.

Though me legs are quite nice, he thought as he glanced down at them. Maybe Roman soldiers in their short tunics had legs as half-way decent as mine...

He hadn’t walked far when he started feeling almost comfortable with himself. Nobody was looking or staring at him, nobody was taking a blind bit of notice of him. Being a woman, it seemed, was quite an ordinary thing to be.

It wasn’t until he got to Josh Marks, the ladies lingerie shop, that he experienced any difficulty with his mysteriously changed gender, and that difficulty resided in the simple fact that it was Josh Marks who served him … or served her, as had to accept that the case now was. Josh Marks was the owner of the shop and if he had female assistants there weren’t any in evidence when Evana stopped by.

Before then he’d had no difficulty with the chip shop and the offensive woman who had been so unpleasant yesterday. In fact, she had smiled and commented on his/her lustrous hair and even asked where she got it done.

“Oh, I come from out of town. You wouldn’t know it,” she had replied vaguely.

“I might,” suggested the female fish fryer, “I do sometimes venture away from my cod fillets!”

Evana had thought quickly and came out with, “then I’ll mention a sweet little place, er, Tissues, the premier hairdresser in Pinkleton where I come from.”

She knew there was no such place as Tissues and she very much doubted if there was any town called Pinkleton, so she was sure her lies would never catch her out. Or probably not.

“I think I know it,” murmured the frying lady, still smiling, and Evana (as she called herself, even in her own head), left the shop sighing her relief and still not thinking many appreciative thoughts of the woman who’d served her.

Now she was in Josh Marks small lingerie emporium and she knew exactly what she wanted. She’d even gone onto the Internet and found out how a woman determines bra sizes, had measured herself as best she could without a second pair of hands to hold things like a tape measure in the right spot, and knew exactly what she wanted.

Until Josh Marks decided that she didn’t. Josh Marks, it turned out, was a hands-on dealer in ladies frilly things, very hands on and his stock was invariably very frilly.

This guy’s just got to have some sort of fetish, thought Evana as he approached her with a tape measure, almost brushing aside rows of underwear as he went, as if they were cobwebs. Her opinion was reaffirmed when he informed her that all ladies think they know what size they are, but they usually get it wrong. It wasn’t the words so much as the glint in his eyes that confirmed her first opinion.

“It sometimes takes a man to know these things,” he had almost hissed. “Take Lady Penelope Crotchet, for example, and why wouldn’t you want to?” He paused because in his mind taking Lady Penelope Crotchet was a joke, though Evana didn’t see it. So after a pause in which a giggle may or may not have been inserted, he continued, “Lady Penelope, or Penny as she likes me to call her, is never quite certain whether it’s a C or a C+ cup… We do a special range of slightly varying sizes for the lady who demands comfort above all things… A lady must have things … er … properly balanced!”

And he proceeded to witter on about comfort. How he understands the delicacy of ladies “particular tissues” and the need for them to be encased in garments that exactly matched their contours. And all the time his eyes roamed over her as though he were seeing a brand new land for the very first time, and wanting to settle in there, maybe build himself a little shelter...

“You see, I do understand,” he said, and quite suddenly and out of the blue he contrived to stroke her left breast, quite deliberately and without taking his eyes off her face for a moment.

So Evana said the first thing that came into her head, and it had nothing to do with lingerie.

“I’m an undercover cop,” she said, remembering a piece of dialogue from Midsummer Murders, “and you’re nicked!”

“Why, what have I done?” he asked, all blithe innocence and small-boy charm, and he went on, “I didn’t, did I? I mean I couldn’t have… Or rather I shouldn’t have … did I touch your left delicate tissues? Quite by accident, of course, you must understand that, so there’s no need to take this any further … I’ll tell you what, forget the incident and I’ll let you have one or two of my more, shall we say exclusive, brassieres as a token of my sorrow...”

Sorry that you touched it or sorry that it’s what it is? She thought.

“One or two?” she asked, with an almost tearful catch in her voice.

“Well sweet lady, I would make it more but then you might suggest it was bribery, and nothing could be further from the truth,” he burbled. “I tell you what, take three and we’ll call it evens. What do you say to that?”

Had Evana not noticed the prices on the tickets of the bras in question she might well have carried on with the deceit and maybe even marched the perverted Josh Marks to the nearest police station and reporting him for molesting her, but they were expensive. Very expensive.

“Okay,” she said, “wrap them up.”

And she was only too happy to get out of the shop with her bag of three very expensive brassieres and the assurance they were exactly the right size to splendidly caress her “particular tissues”. And she also made a mental note not to visit the Marks emporium again., unless and until she reverted into being a man again.

It was later that afternoon that she discovered the absolute truth about life as a woman not being all a bed of roses, in fact not even being as pleasant as a thorn from said bed of roses. It had a dar and tasteless underbelly.

The “Squire’s Head” public house was open and old habits die hard, even when you’re a man in the body of a woman yet still believing that a pint of the best must be possibly the perfect cure for being mishandled by a man who spends his entire life, it seemed judging from the way he had targeted her, measuring breasts and enjoying it as if it was an addiction.

When she had been he, she had liked the “Squire’s Head”. It wasn’t so far from the town centre and consequently not so far from his flat or, before his separation from Maureen, from the old family home. In other words it had been ultra-convenient.

So he sat in a quiet corner with his pint and started mentally summarising his day. It wasn’t an easy task. It’s not every day that a person changes sex spontaneously in his sleep and can’t do anything about it. In fact, he’d never heard of it before, and he was sure that he’s heard of most things.

“You look as if you could do with a lass to take away your heartaches,” murmured a gruff voice in his ear.

He looked up, and froze.

It was Eddie Toothbalm, and he was the notorious bad boy of form 5y, an equally notorious class that collectively wouldn’t get interested in anything to do with verbs and nouns, and to whom the word adjectives raised a riot.

And he was very secretively managing to put one arm round her shoulders and very deliberately twanging her bra strap against shoulders that simply weren’t used to it...

© Peter Rogerson 17.12.18