All stories

The car was hot and the social worker’s breath smelled of coffee overlaid with breath mints. I felt very small rattling around in my seat as we swooped through country lanes.

Helen, my social worker, flicked a look at me before turning back to the road. She took in my cheeks still pink from the morning’s scrubbing, my shabby but clean skirt and jumper, my neat pink woollen mittens. She had worked hard to get me presentable, so I could tell she really really wanted this one to work out.

“Won’t be long now,” she told me, pointlessly. “Remember to smile and be polite. Mr and Mrs Chapman are a little older than some of the people you’ve stayed with before. They’ll appreciate good manners and good behaviour. If you’re good, things might turn out nicely.”

I didn’t say anything. What she meant was that, if I was good, this older couple, this final shot, this last chance saloon, might actually want to keep me and I’d be out of Helen’s hair for good.

“You’ll stay for three nights and then we’ll see how things are.”

Helen turned off the narrow road and into a neat little village where all of the houses were matching little bungalows, painted white with pretty curtains at the windows. The village school had a painting of a merman and mermaid on one of the walls.

“How lovely!” gushed Helen over-enthusiastically. She eyes me sideways, anxiously, but I smiled to show I was pleased with the place where I might, if I was very good and very lucky, get to live.

As we pulled into a driveway indistinguishable from all the others I had made up my mind. I would try my best to make Mr and Mrs Chapman like me. It wouldn’t be like before. This time I really wanted to stay.

Before we reached the door it had opened and a man and a woman had stepped out to meet us. They both had huge smiles plastered on their faces but when I stepped forward, the smiles faltered and froze.

“Hello, I’m Alex. Nice to meet you,” I smiled and held out my hand. Nobody took it.

“This is Alex?” said the man to Helen, pointing at me.

“Yes. She’s very excited about coming to stay with you. Aren’t you Alex?”

But the man interrupted before I could answer.

“But we thought Alex would be a boy. We were expecting a little boy.”

We stood in an awkward tableaux on the driveway. Mrs Chapman broke the spell.

“Well she’s here now isn’t she. Let’s all go inside for a nice chat.”

In the living room a banner was strung up on the wall: “Welcome home Alex!” It was blue. It had pictures of cars on it.

“It’s nothing binding,” Helen was saying now, speaking too quickly. “Why not see how the weekend goes? We can have another chat Monday when I come back?”

“We can’t send her away now, George,” whispered Mrs Chapman. “Let’s see out the weekend. See how we get on?”

Mr Chapman gave a tight, grudging little nod and Mrs Chapman led me upstairs to see the room that might have been mine if I had been a different kind of Alex.

‘Fuck me…’ Rowan exclaimed under her breath.

Adam Wilkins had just climbed into the lifeguard’s chair at the Grimley & Burridge Community Leisure Centre swimming pool. She knew he would, it was precisely why she’d chosen to spend her break in the gallery seats opposite. She took the flask from her bag and poured tea in its plastic cap-cup to steady her quivers. Its steam clouded her glasses so she clamped the cap-cup between her knees and wiped the mist from the lenses with her mittens.

Rowan had been using her breaks to gawp at the Speedo-clad Adam Wilkins since the day he’d been hired. It was chilly up in the gallery, in contrast to the greenhouse temperatures at pool level, but it was nothing a scarf and a woolly hat couldn’t fix. Today, she was working on a fantasy involving him as a merman but found herself stumbling over logistics. If he were fish from the waist down, where would the cock go? Rowan really needed there to be a cock.

It was this thorny issue she was mentally thumbing over when tragedy struck. Her gaze had drifted for the shortest of moments and there’d been an eclipse.

Adam Wilkins had climbed down from his perch, grossly neglecting his duties and endangering the lives of both the pool’s current occupants: a dangerously pregnant lady and a body of indefinable gender which seemed to be composed entirely of wrinkles. Blocking Rowan’s sight of the now fully elongated Adam Wilkins, was a very unwanted addition to the scene.

Rowan shot death rays from her eyes. First, she aimed them at the offending object’s feet. One sat flat on the ceramic floor and the other was raised at the heel making everything above it angle and curve in a way that was so disgustingly, confidently, beautifully, feminine that Rowan wanted to set it on fire. Rowan lifted her mind laser along the spine before letting it slash across the shoulder blades which appeared to create the perfect cantilever balance to what were presumably a pair of nonchalant bastard breasts currently hovering under Adam Wilkins’ chin like buttercups testing if he likes butter. And Rowan just bet that Adam Wilkins likes butter! Finally, Rowan concentrated her fury on the mass of hair which looked as if its sole desire was to waft around blocking people’s view of Adam Wilkins while being completely impractical for swimming.

In a bid to calm herself, Rowan dumped a couple of mints into her mouth. Half a second later Adam Wilkins and the swimsuit encased blockage both laughed and Rowan bit down hard.

‘Fuck me!’ she yelled as the boiled sweets cracked the enamel of at least one tooth. This time it wasn’t under her breath. This time it echoed off the glass roof and earned a pointed tut from the baby oven. Even the five-foot genderless testicle stopped swimming its length to look where the profanity had come from. Adam Wilkins didn’t flinch though, nor did the creature concealing him.

Rowan stuffed her flask into her bag with enough force to reheat the tea and stormed back to reception. Somebody was going to be cracking their shins against the exit turnstile when the thwarted receptionist forgot to press the release button in a short while.