THE LAST MONK 10

Betty is adapting to normal life, slowly and with difficulty

THE LAST MONK

10

It was later that day when the Sergeant, Amy Lovelace who preferred me to just call her Amy, came to take me to a place called Crooked Gates where I was to have a room all of my own. Not a cell. Nothing as squalid as that, but a comfortable room with what I was told was called a television in one corner. But the wonder of it is she took me there in her or his car.

Yes, I was beginning to understand the gender thing and that people like Amy were female, or women. And so, apparently, am I, despite a lifetime of being led to believe I was a man and not a woman.

But back to the journey taking me to where I was to sleep. I had no idea what a car might be, but it moves along roads taking the person sitting behind what she called a steering wheel from where that person is to where that person wants to go, together with anyone else in the car. I wonder if the monks who filled me with knowledge of the world knew about cars?

Crooked Gates had once been, I was told, a rather fancy home for the well to do, whatever they might have been. It was a very large building, I could have fitted two or maybe more of the monasteries where I had lived into it, and there were no crumbling walls, no dripping ceilings.

My room was clean, had a large window that looked out onto a field where I saw people playing a game rolling a ball about. I was beginning to get used to there being people and not just a few monks in the world. I was, in fact, discovering that any world with only three rather grubby monks in it was far from being normal. It had been, in fact, unusual, yet it had been all I had known and trying to adapt to anything different was hard.

There were two beds in my room, which was just as well because Amy was staying with me, and after the discovery of there being a wide range of people just about everywhere I was pleased because she was already a familiar figure to me

And it would come as no surprise if I mention that I discovered what Amy wore under her uniform, because that’s what it was, a uniform She told me as she undressed and folded it neatly that it was, a female police sergeant’s uniform with three stripes on the shoulders to signify her importance. But when she said it was time for bed she started taking her uniform off, and underneath the outer clothes she wore some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and they were so clean! Whereas, when I stripped my two-piece off I was aware of how very different my boxer shorts were to her lacy underthing's. And how unclean

“We’ll get you something like these tomorrow,” she told me, “when we go shopping.”

I didn’t like to show my ignorance by asking her what shopping was, so I let it rest and climbed into my bed, naked.

“Don’t you have a nightdress?” she asked, and that annoyed me because she knew exactly what I had and there was nothing like what she pulled over herself anywhere near the tiny collection of items that had been brought with me from the monastery. I had a spare tunic, and a tie that I hated and found to be uncomfortable, a woollen jumper with holes in the elbows and rtwo pairs of boxer shorts, both well rorn, and that was that. Nothing like the diaphanous nightdress that she was pulling over her head and shoulders.

“We’ve quite a lot of shopping to do tomorrow,” she observed, “but until then, goodnight, Betty.”

And somehow the light in the room dimmed and she was lying in her bed.

“Goodnight, Amy,” I said.

That was the first time in all my life that I have ever wished anyone goodnight.

I woke next morning to see that Amy had already dressed in her uniform, a skirt which made her look like a man by my previous reckoning, and a blue jacket. She looked nice.

“I’ve done something I hope you won’t mind about,” she said, “I’ve got my husband to bring one of my old dresses. We’re about the same size as each other, so it should fit you. If you weren’t such a sleepy head you might have met him, but he had to go straight away. He teaches at rhe primary school and can’t be late or the kids will run riot!”

“He’s here?” I asked.

“No, silly, I phoned him. On my mobile,” she said with a smile and holding up a small plastic object indicating what she meant by mobile..

That was my first meeting with any kind of telephone, though thinking about it I must have heard several instruments making unusual and to me fascinating noises whilst I was in the police station yesterday.

Anyway, we had breakfast in my room and I’ve never had a meal like it, and it’s probably the first time my early morning meal consisted of more than bread. There was even meat, for goodness’ sake! Stuff that tasted delicious and that Amy called bacon.

Amy dressed me in what she described as an old dress of hers, but it was far from being old, smelled really nice and when I wore it it felt nice too. There was nothing like a coarse black habit that I was used to, but what she called a dress, thin, pretty with images of flowers on it, but I wondered how anyone kept warm in winter with just that on. My chest bindings were long gone, but she also provided me with what she called a bra, which apparently made allowance for any unwanted swelling I might experience.

It was then that I looked at her and noticed for the first time that she had most pronounced swellings herself, and for a moment I found myself wondering how on Earth she could stand them, and then wondered how come I hadn’t noticed when she undressed for bed last night. I didn’t think I’d want anything like what she had.

“Do you like taking a shower?” she asked out of the blue.

“What? Of rain and getting wet?” I asked looking out of our window to assure myself that it wasn’t actually raining at the moment.

“No,” she replied with that almost continuous smile of hers, “instead of a bath. Let me show you.”

And we went into the toilet room that she said was called a bathroom, and she showed me inside an opaque cubical that I’d noticed and wondered about. And she turned something that made water descend, almost wetting me where I stood. Giggling, she stopped it.

“When we get back,” she said, “you can have a shower before putting on your new clothes. I find showers better than taking a bath.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to work out how that would work.

We left my room soon after that, to, she said, go shopping, and it was then that I was to discover how people obtained their clothes.

As for my past, my life at the monastery, I was used to cast-offs or remnants of the rolls of black material that the monks had and what they cut their own habits from. They didn’t have to do it very often, I knew that because sometimes the smell from them became very unpleasant. It was then that the roll was brought out and one or more of them cut squares from it, and then shaped what they had cut out in order to be able to wear it.

Sometimes, of course, we all took a bath in the old days, not a shower like the one I had been shown by Amy but containers filled with water. We had an order for climbing into the water and cleaning ourselves, starting wit Celestial, and when he was finished moving on to Colonius and then August, and finally me, and I used to observe that by the time it was my turn the water was none too clean, and usually very cold. But it was good, in those days, to feel clean even though I usually had to dress in a dirty habit! But that didn’t worry me. Nobody had shown me a shower and that old bath with its cold water was all I knew.

“Come on, Betty,” called Amy, breaking into my memories, “it’s time to go shopping! It’s time to get you some nice new togs!”

And she led me out to her car.

© Peter Rogerson, 14.08.23

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