2. THE PIERCED HEART

Is it possible for a thirteen year old boy to do this?

It was while he (or somebody that for some inexplicable reason he seemed to have become) was having a baby in the maternity wing of Brumpton General Hospital that Albert Tench got to appreciate the actual and very real pain of childbirth.

He’d known pain before. Playing rugby at school was one of the occasions that sometimes precipitated pain, and a year ago he’d even had a fractured femur as a consequence of an awkward fall. But that fall and no amount of violent tackles could hurt him anywhere near as much as that baby descending into the world did.

He tried shouting, screaming even, and got the shock of his life when he discovered that his voice was all wrong. Instead of the newly broken teenage boy’s throaty roar he managed a piercing scream in the soprano range. It shocked him, but not quite so much as the dawning knowledge that he was having a baby.

He pulled his hand firmly away from the manly hand that was holding it, and scowled at the short cropped head of the man that was standing and staring lovingly at him.

Then he screamed again. He had to.

And he pushed. He could feel something moving, something that nothing in life had prepared him for, so he pushed again.

There was a sudden silence followed by the unmistakable sound of a baby crying and a whole orchestra of gasps and cooings, and a voice that he almost recognised shaking with emotion and close to weeping and then saying the words that would haunt him forever.

“Welcome to the world, little Miranda.”

Little Miranda?

Miranda?

That was his girlfriend, surely. Or the pretty but slightly irritating mini-skirted owner of a brand new watch who told everyone they were an item and he was her boyfriend.

Tears started flowing. Real tears. But rather than being the tears of angry confusion that suffused his body they felt exactly like tears of joy. And pain. Joy and pain, pain and joy.

A nurse was fussing around him and what looked exactly like his liver was carted off in a stainless steel dish, parts of him that were so female that’s what they had to be were cleaned and wiped and he stared in horror at the little bundle of new life that was thrust to his breast by what looked like a smiling fresh-faced nurse…

His breast?

“Let’s get it straight,” he thought, “let’s put things into perspective. I was riding along on my brand new racing bike when my front wheel caught a brick or rock or something and I shot into the air, over that little wall and under the wheels of a dirty great industrial tractor on Christmas day. And my very last memory of that was the sound of my skull caving in. And then, straight away and with no time for an ambulance to take me or a paramedic to put pipes into me, I woke up here having a baby called Miranda.”

“Can I hold her for a moment?” asked the man who was still trying to hold his hand, and he looked into the eyes…

into the eyes of the dreaded bully who was Miranda’s wrestling father, the man who rumour had it was going to try to marry his own mother so that Miranda and he might share naughty intimacies when nobody was looking, being in the same house as each other and it being after dark with rain outside…

“Here you are,” he said in his new girly voice, and he let the man take the wonderful bundle of joy from his arms.

And from that moment on, the nightmare became an entrenched reality. He was Caron Tinkle, mother of Miranda Tinkle, and known only to him was the deeply entrenched memory that Miranda Tinkle was his very suggestive girlfriend, aged thirteen.

And it was when he was changing her nappy that very first time that he knew he must be going stark raving mad. After all, he was only thirteen himself and much too young to have a baby and as uncertain as could be about how to go about caring for one. And he had breasts that the baby wanted to share. Rather nice breasts, true, but his?

He shouldn’t have breasts, should he? Not even Miranda aged thirteen had much in the way of breasts, though he knew she wore a bra because she’d told him. It was the sort of thing that the thirteen year old Miranda liked to confide in him. She’d even mentioned periods once, though he wasn’t sure what they were.

As far as he was concerned, life had become a nightmare that was only interspersed by stages.

Like the stage of spontaneous smiles from Miranda. Then the stage of almost saying mama or dada, then the stage of actually saying such erudite things. And every stage was cheered on by daddy Mervyn (that was his name and the shame was he didn’t discover it until after his daughter had been so painfully born).

The breast gave way to the bottle, then to little dishes of horrible fruit or vegetable messes, to the first crust, to a proper baby cup instead of a bottle, to crawling, then walking then running, and all the time Albert Tench was her mother. Caring for her, wiping her nose, taking her to nursery, then to school sharing her triumphs and disasters, until he remembered with one heck of a shock that at age thirteen Miranda’s dad was a single dad and that something unimaginable (because it was unknown) had happened to Caron.

Mervyn lost interest in carnal behaviour with Albert, from the time Miranda had been born, actually. He tried to explain it to Albert, but explanations of that sort are never easily made.

“It’s not you,” he would say as he pulled on his pyjamas, “I don’t know what’s happened to me, it must be a stage I’m going through, just like darling Miranda is going through stages...”

Albert could have told him, but it was awkward and he probably wouldn’t understand. After all, Mervyn had married Caron, a buxom and very physically demanding woman, and she had morphed into Albert, the same body but with Albert’s mind and Albert’s inclinations and Albert’s minimal demands.

Mervyn started changing in other ways. It may have been any one of the frustrations that flesh is heir to, but he spent more and more time at the local pub and managed to sink more and more pints of best bitter. Then he developed an interest in hurting people and entered contests at the town hall, wrestling contests in which he inflicted degrees of pain on other men when they weren’t inflicting similar degrees of pain on him.

In short, Mervyn, who had always been a tad short-tempered, showed signs of becoming a murderous bully. And it all came to a head one evening in July when he returned home after a battle with Blood-bath Bert, one that he was meant to win (or so the script said) but one that he lost.

Miranda was sleeping over at a friend’s house and his wife (he still thought of her as Caron and not Albert, ignorance being a wonderful thing) was watching Midsomer Murders on the television, and the sight of all that blood on the streets of Midsomer Worthy had an unfortunate effect on him.

“What you watching that muck for when you could be doing it with me?” he slurred. He’d not only lost his bout, he’d also lost his non-existent battle with temperance and sunk even more best bitter than was normal even for him.

Albert felt peeved. “It’s something for me to do when I’m stuck here on my own,” he growled in his lady voice.

“I’ll show you summat to do!” growled Mervyn, and he grabbed hold of a fruit knife from the fruit bowl and leapt upon him.

Something inside Albert simpered no not again as the knife, short and thin and sharp but none the less deadly for that, was forced with deathly accuracy right into his chest and as far as his heart.

For a moment it hurt like hell, but then everything went blacker than sin because it was very late at night indeed and he was carefully edging the coach he was driving onto a cross channel ferry in Dover.

© Peter Rogerson 02.05.19