12. TIME IN A CELL

Ivan Bramble can't see the end of his nightmare...

Ivan didn’t like the cell he was sent to once the Inspector had asked a few meaningless questions and he’d given even more meaningless answers. Neither men had a clue what was going on, but the Inspector was confident of his facts whereas Ivan Bramble was most unsure of his ... just that he believed with unshakeable certainty that he hadn’t been killed

The cell was a mean little room with bottle-bottom windows that looked out onto the street at the level of the feet of anyone chancing to pass by, and her couldn’t think of any possible reason for his being there. True, his explanation, a schoolmaster who woke up to find that he’d contrived the impossible and swapped genders overnight, was difficult to believe, but would he have invented such an explanation if it hasn’t been true? He was Ivan Bramble. He’d done all the things Ivan Bramble had done in his life, but he couldn’t prove it.

“Ask Maureen. She’ll confirm it,” he had said after he’d provided a lengthy description of a particular holiday the two of them had taken, a few years earlier when everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, even down to them arriving at midnight at a hotel which turned out to have double-booked the room they’d paid for and the weather siling down outside.

“She days she doesn’t know who you are,” grunted the Inspector, “and I’m not wasting precious police time bringing in a grieving woman to answer the preposterous questions of someone who claims to have had sex-change surgery over night.”

“But I was teaching punctuation on Thursday, and it’s only Sunday now,” he had said, but the feminine lilt in his voice hadn’t helped, nor had the exasperation on his face or the way he was no longer showing advanced signs of male-pattern baldness.

“You’d be best advised to come up with an explanation that works,” Piggott had said gruffly. “Meanwhile you can spend a couple of hours in a nice warm cell courtesy of the British taxpayer and think about making sense.”

So here he was, and because the subject was murder he was in a female cell on his own. They obviously thought that a desperate murderess might make short work of any companion inmates. The room smelt of a parade of previous occupiers, mostly women who had been unfortunate enough to be caught doing very little wrong and locked in there as a demonstration of what cells were like. It was unpleasant, and some had pissed their pants despite the presence of a solitary toilet in one corner. The aroma persisted, mixed with bleach and sweat.

How the hell could I have murdered myself when I’m here, alive and as well as anyone would be in a dive like this? That was a dominant thought that coursed through his mind until he thought it might send him crazy. The situation was so ridiculous that nobody would ever believe it.

In fact, his entire life had become absurd, and he started blaming himself for not seeking help yesterday when he’d first noticed that his penis had changed into a vagina and he had breasts. But who would have believed him then? How could he have broached the subject, and to whom?

His mind returned to events shortly after his arrival.

They’d taken a sample of his DNA on what looked like a cotton-wool bud from inside his mouth, rubbing it against his inner cheek until they were sure enough cells had been collected for them to be able to deduce who he wasn’t.

But even then, if the DNA turns out to be mine, which it’s bound to, they’ll not believe I’m who I say I am but assume that something’s gone wrong with their testing, he thought. They’ll probably insist on repeating the whole silly exercise until they get it right!

It had been morning when they’d collected him from his flat. He’d only just got dressed, in female clothes to go with his female body, and now it had started to grow dark outside his cell, and a feeble light came on, a single light encased in a reinforced shade that made it dimmer than ever. And he sat on a bench in the cell and couldn’t help weeping.

He had never been a cry-baby; even as a boy, when he’d been clouted for doing something unintentionally stupid, he’d managed to keep tears at bay. But back then, and ever since, he’d not been in such an impossible position. He was the physical evidence that what he said was true, but even he found it hard to believe, so how could he expect anyone else to be anything but cynical when he tried to tell them what he knew to be the truth?.

Genders are set before birth, he thought, and don’t change at the drop of a hat during a person’s life…

Of course they don’t!

But mine has!

He was well into a mental exploration of what might have gone wrong, maybe something before his birth had interfered with the normal process in his body, maybe it had something to do with him being one of triplets … they’d said that, hadn’t they? The thief next door had been one of the three, and somewhere there was another, so maybe something innately female had transferred itself into his blood and had remained dormant for forty nine and a bit years, ready to erupt and change him over night into the woman he’d become. He was just pondering on the probability that it might, heaven helkp him, be permanent, when the Inspector returned.

He was led back to the interview room, and the Inspector was surly. The day was well on, he’d promised his wife a trip to a garden centre and instead here he was grubbing about with a female fantasist who’d killed a perfectly decent schoolmaster for no reason that he could fathom

It was then, when they were sitting comfortably and the darkness outside started looking a smidgen less threatening, that everything started changing at once.

A second officer rushed in without even knocking and handed Piggott (Ivan wasn’t going to mentally refer to him by anything more than his surname) a sheet of paper, and Piggott looked as if he was about to burst into tears himself as he read it.

Then he looked up at Ivan and snarled “You can bugger off, Miss or Mrs Bramble or whoever you are, but this isn’t over, not even a little bit over so don’t go out of town, and I warn you I’ll be back for you as soon as ever I can be,” before rushing out of the interview room after the constable, almost in tears.

The day might suddenly have turned brighter for Ivan Brambke, but it was still stygian black for Inspector Piggott. And the Garden Centre would have been long closed by now.

Ivan looked around him. The door to the interview room was open and he’d been told he could go, or bugger off, hadn’t he? What can that sheet of paper said that caused so much grief to Piggott and so much sudden relief to him? Was it the proof of his innocence? Of his gender even?

He went to the reception desk and demanded his shoes (they’d taken them off him in case he used them to either escape with or as a means of self-destruction), and then, properly shod, went out into the dark December air.

It was cold, but he didn’t really care. For the moment he was free.

© Peter Rogerson 22.12.18