Pea: or, the Rediscovery of Howard B. Moon

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A narrative, conveyed with the assistance of Vince Noir, of how Howard Moon realised she was a woman, and what was done about it.

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In Which Howard's Transition Begins, and Much is Made of a Moustache

Contents

In Which Howard’s Transition Begins, and Much is Made of a Moustache

Chapter Notes: This chapter also contains a tiny bit of violence, incidentally described.

The potion Naboo’s friend Beryl (who had, in fact, had a Gwynedd accent, but otherwise looked very little like any Welsh woman Vince had ever seen, being bright orange and having spines along her cheekbones) had hooked him up with was a minty-green affair that Howard said looked like wallpaper paste and which smelled bizarrely of liquorice pastilles and fried kidney and onions. It wasn’t exactly a hormone treatment, Naboo explained. Instead, it took Howard’s own mental image of what she wanted to look like, and gradually changed her body chemistry to reflect that. Mostly pretty low-level stuff, since Howard had wanted to take it slow; any big changes (here Bollo had made a lewd gesture to illustrate, and Howard glowered at him through her flush and snapped that she didn’t need his commentary, thank you very much, nor Naboo’s) she could get done with a spell.

She took the potion once a week with breakfast, and every time, Vince had to bite back the urge to ask if he could try some. It smelled rank, of course, and tasted it as well, if Howard’s expressions when she drank it were anything to go by, but he was just so curious. He restrained himself by reminding himself that if he got any better looking he’d probably cause accidents, and that he didn’t mind how dark his facial hair was or his stubby fingers or his footballer’s legs, really he didn’t. Well, only a little, anyway, and Vince didn’t have his priorities that much out of order.

The changes weren’t obvious at first, until Vince looked up at Howard over his Coco Pops one morning and realised with shock that her face was different. The actual bone structure of her face had changed; her cheekbones and browbone imperceptibly higher than they had been, the brows themselves more finely sculpted, the line of her jaw gentler. Vince swivelled abruptly to get a profile view, eyes skipping down over the slopes of her nose and throat, suddenly seized by delighted fascination. He’d known Howard’s face forever; he could draw the lines of it with his eyes shut; now he’d have to learn it all over again. Something about that thought was unaccountably thrilling.

‘Can I help you with something?’ Howard’s sardonic voice cut through his thoughts and Vince startled; he hadn’t realised he’d been caught out. He looked back up, meeting Howard’s eyes (and they were the same as ever, the warm, glittery little shrew eyes) and hastily arranging his features into false innocence.

‘Yeah, didn’t Naboo say something about getting a shipment in today or something? I weren’t really listening.’

And Howard heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes– ‘Honestly, Vince, are you incapable of retaining any information if it isn’t sufficiently bedazzled? I don’t know what you’d do without me.’– and launched into a recitation of Naboo’s instructions to them, just as Vince had known she would.

Her clothes started to hang differently; Vince had to take things in in the shoulder and out at the hip and up at the hems, and her hair, which was growing out, had taken the mussed curliness it had always had to its logical conclusion. And that had to be magic, Vince thought. He was pretty sure Howard’s hair, no-matter how long it was, would never before have been persuaded to tousle in quite that supermodel-just-rolled-out-of-bed fashion before. The moustache stayed, though. Vince wondered about that, but he had enough sense not to ask; Howard would only think he meant that she was doing it wrong or something, when really he was just curious.

The biggest changes weren’t any of the physical ones, though. Things that Vince had always thought were just part of Howard– the perpetual hunch of her shoulders, the twitchy fingers, the darting nervousness of her eyes, the constant air like she was bracing for something– he realised now weren’t at all. And maybe Howard hadn’t known it either, maybe she was discovering it right along with Vince. He caught her in their room sometimes, practising her femme voice in the mirror; he always left sharpish, but even those brief instants were enough to see the way Howard looked at her reflection. Like she was recognising herself for the first time in her life.

She looked… happy. Even when she wasn’t doing anything in particular that might make her happy, she seemed content, sort of loose. Vince started to find her actually lounging around the flat, instead of sitting like a lego duck all the time, or overhear her singing in the shower. Which was actually a bit annoying, given that Howard almost always took her showers hours before Vince had even got out of bed. The whole mood of the flat seemed to change with her, a tension Vince hadn’t really registered before suddenly gone and leaving him feeling like he had fizzy pop in his veins.

She started wearing the clothes Vince was making for her more often too, just hanging about the flat in them. It wasn’t just tweedy skirt suits and blouses either, because whatever librarian fantasies Howard had about herself (and Vince reckoned he got now what Howard’s thing for Gideon had really been about), Vince knew her, and she was a right scruffy old slob down at the heart of her. There were cute little shorts so she could show off her legs, bright dashiki tops, corduroy trousers that actually fit. Vince discovered that she looked surprisingly good in magenta, and that mascara and a sweep of eyeliner (even the boring kind that suburban mums wear) did wonders for her eyes.

‘D’you want me to tell people?’ Vince asked one day. It wasn’t something he’d thought about, it just suddenly happened upon him and the words jumped out of his mouth. But it seemed like a pretty good idea, so he didn’t bother regretting them. ‘About you, I mean.’

Howard stilled where she’d been sitting and fiddling with her guitar, and for a moment that familiar old tension returned to her face, drawing taut lines that Vince hadn’t properly realised were gone until suddenly they were back. He wanted to put his hands on them and smooth them away. ‘What people?’

‘Just, you know, my mates and stuff.’

She snorted. ‘Do your mates care about my gender? Pretty sure most of ‘em think I’m your dad; now they’ll think I’m your… confused auntie, what’s the difference?’

‘Well, yeah,’ Vince admitted, and Howard rolled her eyes.

‘Oh, thanks, cheers for that.’

‘No, but I mean, if someone comes into the shop, I just thought– it might be easier if they already knew. For you. So you don’t have to explain every time.’

That gave Howard pause. It looked like that was something she hadn’t thought about, but Vince knew that she must have. Howard thought about everything, and most of all what other people thought of her, how she ought to act around them. When they’d been kids, Vince had been awful at that, but Howard had known all the little unspoken rules and was always painfully conscious of it when she broke them. More likely, Vince thought, she’d been so braced preparing awful stilted defensive speeches that it had never occurred to her she might not have to. But the lines were smoothing themselves away now, no work from Vince’s hands required, and her brows scrunched together in something that looked uncomprehending, but glad.

‘Yyyyeah,’ she said, slowly. ‘Yeah, all right. That’d be– that’d be great, actually, Vince.’

Vince gave her a glittering smile– ‘Genius’– and waltzed off to go compose an e-mail.

It took him some time to figure out the best way to phrase things, and to go through his extensive list of contacts to see if there were any whom Howard probably wouldn’t want knowing. He didn’t think there were, they were all just his Camden mates; musicians and club promoters and trendies, and, as Howard had rightfully said, most of them hardly knew who she was in the first place. No-one whose opinion Howard really cared about, who would have merited something more personal than a mass e-mail. The final result, when Vince was eventually ready to click send, was fairly short, and not nearly as eloquent as anything Howard wrote would have been, but he felt it got the job done.

‘IMPORTANT ANNONCEMENT,’ read the subject line.

‘Howards a lady now. Well she was always a lady but thats not the point. Google transgender if u dont know wat that means. Shes still called Howard for now but that mite change in the future, I dunno. Guess I’ll let u kno if it does.

And if any of u wanna make a thing about it, I WILL tak to Johnny Rhythm and make sure u never get into any club in London ever again. Also Im mates wiv a leopard and a gorilla and they cud rip ur arms off if I asked em to. Just something to keep in mind

Cheers,

Vince xxx’

Bit blunt, maybe, but it worked and all! That’s one’a the benefits of having shallow mates. Give ’em news like that, and they’ll just go, oh, all right, then, and get on with things.

Least, it mostly worked. There was this one time, though, later on, these kids came into the shop, snotty little chavs, and they were hassling Howard about being a bloke in a dress, all ‘Nice legs, sweetheart’ and ‘ooh, looks like lady needs a shave,’ and all that. And I came down from the flat in the middle of all this, right, and I fuckin’ went at ‘em, lemme tell you. I ain’t a violent man by nature, but I got me Chelsea boot off and wham, nailed one of ‘em right in the face with it. Cut his forehead right open on the heel, blood everywhere, it was well nasty. They nicked off right quick after that. Don’t reckon they were in my e-mail contacts, though; I might know a lot of people, but I do have some standards.

The people I did e-mail, though, there was this other time this girl, Chartreuse, came in, and she was eyein’ up Howard’s skirt, this well classy burgundy pencil number I’d made her, with just like a tiny subtle polka dotty thing goin’ on. And you could see Howard getting all twitchy, thinking she was gonna have a go at her for it, but instead she just goes, ‘I love your skirt! Where’d you get it?’

And Howard weren’t expecting it, so she just went all pink and stuttery for a minute before saying that I’d made it, and Chartreuse just went, ‘Man, I might’ve guessed; you can never find anything that fits that well in shops, can you? You’re so lucky you’ve got a friend who’ll make you stuff.’

Left Howard all sort of flushed and pleased for the rest of the day, right quiet about it but you could feel it just comin’ off her in waves. It were good, I think, for her to hear from someone other than me, so she knew it wasn’t just me bein’ nice or telling white lies, you know?

Anyway, wow, I got well sidetracked there, sorry about that.

Vince was in the process of putting a new lining into an old jacket of his when a shout suddenly came from the bathroom, followed by a reverberating clatter and crash that momentarily crested over the Ladytron he was bopping his head to.

‘Howard?’ Vince lifted his voice. ‘Howard, you ain’t got trapped in the shower curtain again, have you?’

When no answer came for a few moments, he wrinkled his nose and got up from his sewing machine to investigate. Just to make sure Howard hadn’t managed to slip in the shower and knock herself out or something.

Howard was upright and conscious when Vince opened the door, but the bathroom looked like a bomb had hit it. All of Vince’s beauty products which usually adorned the vanity were scattered across the floor like a sonic boom in a Lush store. Bottles of scent and hair gel and strengthening cream, cans of hairspray and tubs of mousse, hairbrush and flat iron, his entire makeup box upended and little tubes of lipstick and flat discs of eyeshadow and foundation-stained sponges left to spill where they would, and Howard standing there in the middle of it. Vince briefly saw red.

‘Oi, what’s this?!’

‘Sorry,’ Howard whimpered miserably, and Vince’s gaze jumped up from the carnage on the floor.

As soon as he had a second to actually look at her, the red evaporated and curled away like tissue paper caught in a flame. Howard was bent over the sink with her hands braced so hard on the edges that her knuckles splintered white, the veins in her forearms standing out. She’d pulled her hair back into a messy little ponytail and slathered her face in shaving foam, but the razor lay on the floor in the corner, a smudge of foam on the wall where Howard must have thrown it. Her eyes were red and swollen, and there were drippy little streaks in the shaving foam on her cheeks. Vince swallowed.

‘Shit, Howard, ‘ve you been crying?’

‘Shut up,’ Howard sniffed, glaring at him damply. ‘It’s easier now, that’s all.’

She’d told him about that before, something about oestrogen and stress reactions, but Vince hadn’t really understood it. ‘What’s goin’ on?’

‘I can’t,’ she said helplessly, gesturing weakly at her chin with one hand, and then ducked her head, growling in frustration as her eyes welled up again. She squeezed her lids shut hard and sniffed fiercely. ‘I was gonna– but I couldn’t, Vince, I just, I couldn’t.’

‘Hey, hey.’ Vince found himself moving as if on automatic, taking Howard by the wrist and dragging her over unresisting to sit on the toilet. She slumped there, breathing hard and deliberate through her nose in an attempt to calm herself down.

‘Let’s get you cleaned up.’ Vince crossed back to the sink, wringing out a washcloth under the tap. ‘And then you can tell me why you’ve trashed all my stuff.’

‘Sorry ‘bout that,’ Howard muttered again, but Vince shook his head.

‘Nah, ‘s all right.’

As he gently mopped Howard’s face free of the shaving foam, Vince was struck by the sudden memory of having done this before– or not this exactly, but something very like it. It was back in the zoo days; Howard had managed to offend some of the lemurs; they’d scratched her face up good and proper, and Vince had had to clean it up for her. He remembered perching on the arm of the tatty couch in the zookeepers’ hut, easing bits of grit and lemur fur out of the cuts on Howard’s face with a warm damp rag, chastising her for her manners. She’d whinged about the sting when he’d dabbed mercurochrome on them, and maintained that it was the lemurs’ fault; her manners were perfectly fine, thank you very much.

Howard’s face was all pink and soft once Vince finished wiping it clean, and it was odd Vince hadn’t noticed before, but there wasn’t any stubble on her cheeks or chin. He’d thought maybe she’d just taken his lessons in applying foundation really to heart, but there was nothing there that needed covering, just fine, soft vellus hairs. Sort of peachy. The moustache was still there, though, and the little soul patch nestling under Howard’s bottom lip, the hairs soft and dark and wet.

‘So,’ Vince said, and Howard sighed heavily. There was a little shudder in the exhalation, but the tears had stopped, and her breathing had mostly steadied out.

‘I haven’t had to shave, really, since I’ve been on that stuff from Beryl,’ she said eventually, with another abortive gesture of one hand. ‘All my facial hair’s just… stopped growing.’

‘I noticed,’ Vince murmured. ‘‘S soft.’

‘My legs and arms too; I mean, it’s still there, but there’s less of it.’ Distractedly, she swiped damp fingers over her own forearm, and Vince’s eyes followed them. It was true, he saw; Howard had never had much in the way of arm hair, but now what was there was markedly finer, little cornsilk wisps over her few scattered freckles.

‘And I thought the moustache might just– fall out or something, but it–’ she broke off, shaking her head. ‘That was gonna be it, Vince, don’t you get it? The big thing, the final step, but I… I couldn’t do it. Stood there in front of the mirror all lathered up and I just froze.’ She pulled a mountain-climber-in-a-high-wind face, contorting her hands into claws for a moment, and then slumped tiredly. ‘The fuck’s wrong with me? I ought to hardly be able to wait to get the thing off my face, shouldn’t I?’

Vince gnawed on his lip, fiddling with the washcloth. ‘Well,’ he tried, ‘do you– why couldn’t you do it? I mean, why don’t you want to get rid of it?’

Howard blinked like that hadn’t even occurred to her before, and went quiet for a very long time. Vince fidgeted. ‘I,’ she started, and then stopped again, frowning. ‘I… like it,’ she said eventually, hesitant like Vince might be grading her on her answer and she wasn’t sure it was the right one. ‘I’m… proud of it. Took me ages to grow.’

And just like that, something clicked into place in Vince’s mind, and he nearly laughed, a little huff of realisation jostling against the back of his teeth. ‘Howard, you tit. What’d Naboo tell you about that stuff you been taking?’

‘To… take it once a week?’

Vince rolled his eyes. ‘Gets into your head, he said, didn’t he? Changes you up so you look like what you wanna look like inside! If you wanted rid of the moustache, it would’ve fallen out straightaway, wouldn’t it?’

Conflicted hope welled in Howard’s eyes for a moment, and something snagged in Vince’s chest, before she visibly shoved it away. ‘Don’t see how that makes it any better. Couldn’t ever manage to be a proper man, now I can’t be a proper woman either, even in my own head; whoever heard of a woman with a moustache?’

‘There’s loads of women with moustaches!’ Howard gave him a look, and Vince relented. ‘Ok, not loads, but some. It’s got nothing to do with proper, anyway. Havin’ a moustache doesn’t stop you bein’ a woman. You’re a woman, you’ve got a moustache; simple as that, innit?’

Except that nothing was that simple for Howard, and Vince knew it. It was like the inside of her head was one of those mad carnival mirror houses, reflections reflecting reflections and getting all twisted and stretched and strange. He blew out a frustrated breath, and then smiled, for Howard’s benefit. ‘Aw, c’mon. We can confuse people together, it’ll be genius!’

Howard still didn’t seem convinced, but her eyes had narrowed a little in grudging appreciation, and a pocket had appeared just next to her mouth, which seemed like an improvement. ‘That’s all well and good for you, isn’t it? You look like a beautiful lady half the time anyway.’

Vince shrugged. ‘Didn’t have to, though, did I? You remember when I was a kid, Howard; half the school thought I was a girl. And sometimes I got shit for it, and sometimes people fancied me ‘cos of it, and sometimes it were just whispers in the corridors: ooh, is it a boy or a girl? Which lav does he use? Coulda gone the other way, though, couldn’t I? Made it easier for them. Coulda made myself dead manly if I’d wanted to; played footie, cut my hair, grown a beard. I know I’ve got a weird face, but the androgyny ain’t built in.’

Howard’s eyes on him had grown sharp, and Vince felt a weird twist of self-consciousness. ‘Point is–’ shit, what had his point been? All that had come bubbling out and Vince had lost track of it.

‘It wouldn’t have been easier?’ Howard suggested softly.

Vince wasn’t sure when this conversation had become about him too, and normally he wouldn’t mind; he was a narcissistic budgie of a man, as Howard was fond of reminding him, and nothing wrong with that, but now he felt off-kilter. ‘Somethin’ like that.’

‘For the least sensible man I know, Vince,’ said Howard after a moment, and now there was a definite warmth there, quivering under the edges of her voice, ‘you are sometimes surprisingly sensible.’

Vince screwed up his nose. ‘Yeah, whatever.’ He bounced on his heels a little, intentionally dragging the conversation out of the weird turn it had unexpectedly taken. ‘But seriously, Howard, the moustache’ll look good! You’ll be like one’a them bearded ladies in Victorian freak shows, yeah? Well intriguing.’

Howard lifted a hand to smooth her thumb and forefinger over her moustache, thumb dashing free a few lingering droplets of water. ‘Intriguing? You think?’

‘Yeah, ‘s dead glamorous, that sorta thing, innit? And all in sepia, right up your alley.’

‘You do know that people didn’t actually live in sepia in the Victorian era, don’t you?’

‘Sure they did, everyone knows that. Everyone goin’ around trying to make the best of nothin’ but shades of brown, ugh. Imagine when they hit the Sixties and suddenly everything turned colour; people musta gone mental!’

He laughed at the thought; Howard looked almost physically pained. ‘Vince– Christ, I’m gonna have to put together a lecture on the history of the camera–’

Vince laughed again. ‘I know, Howard, it’s okay; I was just jokin’. You must be feeling better if you’re threatenin’ me with lectures. Yeah? Don’t feel like smashin’ up any more of my stuff?’

‘Ah.’ Howard did look a bit embarrassed now. ‘Yeah, no. Sorry about that. I’ll pick that all up.’

Vince’s eyebrows went up. ‘Like hell you will; all this stuff’s got an organisation system you don’t know anything about. Yeah, yeah, and you can shut up with your eyebrowing; I got priorities, ‘s all. This stuff’s important.’

‘Course it is.’

‘And you’ve got your own makeup now, you ain’t allowed to judge.’ Granted, Howard’s makeup collection currently consisted only of brown eyeliner, brown mascara, foundation, blush, a tube of modest lipstick, and a single pat of green eyeshadow because Vince had convinced her it’d look good on her, all kept in a shoebox, but the point remained. And Howard was smiling now; wan and tired and small, but it was a real smile, and she still had her fingers on her moustache, stroking over it distractedly like she was re-evaluating what it was doing on her face.

‘Mmm,’ she hummed significantly, with a look that suggested she was reserving the right to judge Vince’s beauty habits, regardless of any hypocrisy it might beget on her behalf. Vince shook his head.

‘You know, it’s probably a good thing you’re keepin’ the old Moon mocha monstrosity,’ he added. ‘It was always a bit sad for a bloke’s moustache, but it’s well impressive for a lady.’ Howard’s tired smile cracked a further degree, and Vince jerked his head at the door. ‘Go on, you’ve gotta be dead knackered after all that; go have yourself a lie down, let me get about my business. I feel like you! Cleanin’ up after one of my strops. Christy, that’s alarming.’

Howard’s moustache twitched. ‘Careful, Sunshine, you’re showing signs of maturity.’

Vince shook himself in an exaggerated shudder and dropped to the floor to start gathering up his scattered tackle. ‘Ugh, I hope not. Go on, move your pumpkin arse; I don’t need you witnessing my humiliation.’

She lingered in the doorway for a moment before seeming to come to a decision with a nod and a soft ‘Mm.’ Vince heard her footsteps pad out into the living room, the flump of her body falling onto the sofa, the buzz of the television being flicked on.

He felt tired as well, suddenly, though not in a bad way. It was almost like the way you felt after a night out clubbing, worn out and sore but satisfied, except it was all in his brain, not his muscles. Part of him wanted to lie down, just for a moment, to put his cheek to the cool of the tiles and just breathe for a while until they’d grown warm from his body heat. Maybe once he’d cleaned up all this mess. Or maybe he’d go and join Howard, have a little sleepie on the couch to one of her boring documentaries, or see if he could badger her into putting on Colobos the Crab. Yeah, that sounded better.