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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Notes: This work contains cissexism and transphobia, internalised and otherwise, and people generally not dealing with trans issues in the most sensitive fashion. It’s pretty low-level, as far as that stuff goes, but nevertheless it is there.

Pea: or, the Rediscovery of Howard B. Moon by Culumacilinte

[nextpage title=”In Which Vince Fucks Up, and Subsequently Makes a List”]
In Which Vince Fucks Up, and Subsequently Makes a List

Now I’m gonna say right off, I’m not exactly sure why I’m the one who’s been given narrating duties for this story, ‘cos it’s Howard’s story, not mine. I figure maybe just ‘cos it’s personal? Or maybe it’s just ‘cos between the two of us, I’m the better storyteller, which is definitely true. I won’t even leave anyone dangling this time. Least, not any more than I can help, but fair warning, it don’t exactly have a proper ending. But that’s just life, innit? Hah, that makes me sound well profound, like all my juicy dangling’s just been practice for the real thing, ‘cos real-life stories don’t always wrap up nice and neat.

Anyway! This is Howard’s story. It’s got drama, self-discovery, fashion, good old-fashioned double act action, some adventure, even a little bit of snogging, ‘cos I know you dirty freakshows like that. And me, of course, but I’m gonna try not to pull focus too much.

It started simply.

‘I’m a girl,’ Howard said.

See that? Genius beginning to a story. WHAM right off the bat in with the good stuff. Hooks you right in, don’t it? Right, sorry, I’ll try not to interrupt too much.

‘Course you are, you big girl’s blouse, everyone knows that.’

‘No, I mean, I mean I’m a woman, Vince. I’m–’

‘Hah, no you ain’t, you big Northern bear, just look at you!’

‘–transgender. I’m transgender.’

At that unexpected addition, Vince did look, peering up from his Cheekbone to see Howard’s face crumpling in on itself, the lips all but disappeared under the moustache, and it hit him, too late, that Howard wasn’t taking the piss. He flushed cold. ‘Oh, shit. Shit, shit, Howard, Howard I’m sorry–’

But Howard had already vanished, leaving just the unusually loud crack of their bedroom door closing with ominous finality. Usually Howard was the one who griped at Vince about slamming doors. Vince swallowed, and put down his Cheekbone. Probably he ought to sit and think about the news he’d just been given and figure out the best way to deal with it. That would be what a sensible person would do, probably. Instead, he got up and tiptoed over to the closed door, like any loud or sudden movements might set Howard off. He pressed his ear to the wood, holding his breath. There were the vague shuffling noises of movement within, something Vince thought he could identify as the squeak of bedsprings, but nothing else.

‘Howard, come on,’ he called, rapping on the door, ‘Open up. Howard, Howard, Howard…’

Five minutes later, no response had come from behind the door, and Vince had slid down against it to rest with his knees bent up and staring up at the ceiling like a kid, still trying his persistent best.

‘Howaaaard, I said I’m sorry. You just took me by surprise! Springing something like that on someone, I coulda done with a warm-up. Aw, bollocks, no, sorry, it ain’t your fault, I just thought you were joking. Howard, Howard, say something? I can keep this up all night, y’know.’

‘Go away, Vince.’

‘You are there!’

‘Of course I’m here,’ Howard’s voice snapped irritably, ‘where else would I be?’

‘Look, Howard, I am sorry. We can try it again? And this time I won’t laugh, I promise, I’ll be dead serious.’

‘Will you?’ Vince winced faintly to hear the strained edge to Howard’s voice that probably meant she’d been crying. Howard cried a fair bit, but it was always a great melodramatic production meant for other people to see, often with background music and singing; crying in private was something else entirely, and it gave Vince an uncomfortable twist somewhere in the region of his diaphragm. ‘I tell you– the most important thing probably… ever, in my life, this thing that’s been eating at me for years and years while I try to figure it out. And I think, oh, Vince, he’s my best mate, he’s the Confuser, he’ll understand, of course he will, and what do you do? You laugh at me. You fucking laughed at me, Vince!’

The thing sitting knotted in Vince’s belly gave another squirm, and he identified it uneasily as guilt. Guilt was one of Vince’s least favourite emotions, and accordingly, he didn’t often entertain it. Things generally worked out for him, so he didn’t usually have to bother. This time, though, he’d definitely fucked up properly, and he didn’t even have the excuse of being distracted by something shiny.

‘Howard,’ he tried again, plaintively, and felt the door shudder faintly where Howard had probably just let a despairing shoulder fall against it. Howard’s shoulders did despair like an expert. ‘Just let me in? We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to; we can have a sleepie and try again in the morning, yeah?’

‘No!’ Howard snarled, and there was a sudden thump through the wood that made Vince startle, and then the vibration of hard footfalls back into the main body of the room.

Vince gnawed on his lower lip, and tried a last ditch effort. ‘Can’t I at least come in and get my pyjamas?’

‘You can sleep in your pants!’

And that was the end of that conversation. For a moment, Vince let himself slump down onto the floor, cheekbone pressed uncomfortably against the floor. He couldn’t see much of anything under the door but warm light and the uneven nap of the carpet, and after a moment, he rolled over onto his back and let out a long breath.

‘Well done, Noir.’

Now this is the part of the story where I sat down with some lemon squash and just had a good proper think. It don’t make for very good viewing, and it’s not something I do a lot, admittedly. Now I know a few trans people, but they’re all sort of trendies, and I’ve only ever known them afterwards, once they’ve already done the whole transition thing, so it weren’t ever something I had to think about much. It was weird at first, trying to apply that to Howard, but it was kind of a revelation, the more I thought on it. I could sort of feel me brain putting out little threads like a baby spider just learnin’ how to spin a web.

The thing of it is, as long as I’ve known Howard, she’s always been well obsessed with bein’ manly. Or really, Manly with a capital M. Even when we were kids. Bein’ a maverick, a Man of Action, an explorer, all that stuff. But she’s never been very good at it; always ends up making a right tit of herself. So as I was thinking, right, it kind of came on me that maybe the reason is ‘cos all her life, she’d been sort of trying to prove to herself that she was a man, only she weren’t at all, so she couldn’t ever get it right. Not that ladies can’t do all that action jazz, but then it ain’t about being manly, it’s just being a lady who happens to be a kickboxer or an archaeologist or whatever. And then all that stuff about being touched, maybe that was ‘cos her body wasn’t right with her, and being touched only reminded her more of it.

And when I realised that, all of a sudden I got so sad for her that I just wanted to bust into our room and cuddle the stuffing out of her until she was all right. But I know Howard, whether she’s a lady or not, and that definitely wasn’t gonna make anything better.

Like I say, I don’t do a lot of hard thinking as a matter of habit, so sometimes it helps if I can get all the thoughts out me head so I can sort through them properly. So I thought, here’s what I’ll do: if Howard’s a woman, I’ll make a list of what I can do to sort of help out, by way of apology for being a tit just then. Howard appreciates gestures.

Feeling buoyed by his newly-acquired plan, Vince made himself a fresh glass of squash and pulled out his crayons. All his paper and sketchbooks were in their bedroom, but Howard had left one of her many ruled notebooks filled with aborted attempts at poetry or fictional travelogues out on a side table, and that would do just as well. He frowned thoughtfully at the blank page. One of the reasons he wasn’t as good at thinking as Howard was that all his thoughts usually were pretty content to just bounce around inside his skull doing their own things. They didn’t naturally come in nice straight lines. Still, he could wrangle them when he had to, and after a moment, he carefully put crayon to paper and wrote a 1.

Five items didn’t seem like much for a proper list, but the space after 6. remained stubbornly blank, with nothing occurring to him to fill it, and eventually he gave it up as a more or less complete job. All that was pretty good to start with, at any rate. Definitely better than nothing.

It was tiring work, all that serious thinking, and Vince realised once he’d stopped that his heart was pumping all the way up under his clavicle in anxiety for Howard shut away in the bedroom, which probably wasn’t helping. He frowned, pressing a hand to his chest to feel the insistent, troubled pounding of it. He hadn’t been this worried over Howard even when he’d had to rescue her from Monkey Hell, or when she’d been kidnapped by Old Gregg, or that time Bainbridge nearly cut her head off. Where was the logic in that?

But pointlessly worrying over things she couldn’t affect was Howard’s gig, not Vince’s. He’d have a sleep, and in the morning, Howard would have to come out of their room, and then– well. Then something. So Vince stripped down to his vest and pants, nicked a blanket from Naboo’s room, and curled up on the couch. After a few moments of turning discontentedly, he got up again and crept over to the clothes tree, fishing in the pocket of the jacket he’d been wearing the other day, burgundy leather with wild zebra-print lapels.

Some digging produced his iPod, and Vince returned to the couch, this time with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to fill the fuzz in his head. He was asleep by the opening chords of Starman.

[nextpage title=”In Which Names are Test-Driven, and the Benefits of Living With a Shaman Become Clear”]
In Which Names are Test-Driven, and the Benefits of Living With a Shaman Become Clear

‘Ugh, I can see your testicles. What you doin’ sleeping out here?’

‘Mneh?’ Vince grunted, burrowing his face further into the couch cushions like a sleepy furniture mole. It took a few moments for Naboo’s complaint to register, and then he shoved a hand down for a cursory grope of his crotch, making sure that there wasn’t actually any nutsack escaping from the admittedly quite small pants. There wasn’t. ‘F’ckoff,’ he muttered, not bothering to lift his head. ‘Had a row with Howard.’

Naboo’s eyeroll was practically audible, and Vince flapped the hand that had previously been inspecting his balls in the vague direction of where his voice seemed to be coming from.

‘Leave it, ‘boolio, ‘s not a thing. Big thing. Whatever.’

‘Yeah, well, you’re both still opening today; I’ve got a shop to run, you know; can’t schedule myself around your domestics.’

‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’

More or less content with that, or at least too hungover to press the point further, Naboo shuffled off to his room. Vince could faintly hear the bass grumble of Bollo trailing after asking why precious Vince not in his room, and Naboo’s snort about lovers’ tiffs. He ignored them and snuggled back into the crook of his elbow, easily sinking back into sleep.

He was awakened some hours later by a pair of his own skinny jeans hitting him in the head.

‘Up, Vince! You’re not sleeping away another day; there is business to be conducted. Get some clothes on, I want you downstairs in ten minutes.’

Vince rubbed crumbs of mascara out of his eyes and blinked hopefully up at Howard, reaching up to fiddle with his hair. ‘All right?’

Howard didn’t look especially all right; her eyes were the kind of overly shiny that meant she’d not got enough sleep, and her hair looked even more than usual like she’d been dragged through a hedge. Possibly several hedges. ‘I’m fine,’ she said curtly, and Vince yawned capaciously as he rolled into a sitting position and started to tug on the jeans. An unexpectedly good choice from Howard; they were his grey ones shot through with blue glittery thread, not that Howard had probably put any thought into it when she’d grabbed them.

‘You want me to bring you a cuppa?’ Vince offered, hopping up to do up the button. Howard looked at him squintily.

‘You burn tea.’

‘I can make tea! If I… pay attention.’

‘Mmm,’ Howard hummed significantly, and turned to head down to the shop.

Vince let out an exasperated breath. ‘Oh, come on, Howard, I am sorry about last night. Can we just talk about it?’

Howard’s shoulders framed at the top of the stairway suddenly bent themselves down and in, a hunch like someone had tugged her forward hard by the front of her shirt and she was having to work to stay in place. There was a long pause. ‘Not now, Vince, all right?’

This was clearly not the moment. The trouble was, the moment didn’t seem to come at all that day, or the next, or the next, until Vince had almost forgotten about it. It was Howard who brought it back up, unexpectedly, brandishing the notebook Vince had written his list in with accusative zeal. Well, it was her notebook after all, wasn’t it? Of course she was going to see it eventually. Vince wrinkled his nose.

‘What’s all this about, Vince, hmm? Clothes and beauty tips? You do know that just because I’m– just because I told you that, doesn’t mean I want you… playing dress-up with me, sir. I’m not your little dolly.’

‘I know!’ Vince protested. Ridiculously, he found himself blushing slightly, in some kind of weird delayed embarrassment reaction. ‘I just meant, like, I thought I could show you how to do foundation to cover up stubble, or tailor some of your stuff so they fit properly, like ladies’ clothes. Make you…’ he groped mentally for the kind of boring women’s clothes Howard seemed likely to want to wear, ‘one of those sort of skirt suits like Mrs. Gideon used to wear?’

‘… Oh.’ Howard had plainly been braced for mockery or another row, and seemed not to know what to say to that. Her eyes darted about awkwardly for a moment, before settling on looking back down at the list. ‘Thank you?’

Vince shrugged. ‘Well, it’s what I’m good at, isn’t it?’

Now I know I take the piss outta Howard more often than not, but that’s about stuff that don’t really matter, yeah? Jazz and the unpublished novels she claims she’s got stashed under her mattress– and they ain’t, I’ve checked. But this was something proper important, even I could tell that.

I’m the Confuser, me, but I haven’t ever really been confused on my own account. ‘Spect I’m not deep enough for it, to be honest. Maybe if I had the constitution for all the navel-gazey introspection Howard gets up to, I’d’ve spent loads of time ponderin’ about the gender paradigm and identity vs. performance and all of that, but as is, I just do what I like, and if I bamboozle a few people along the way, well, that’s just a cheeky bonus, innit?

Anyway, what were I saying? Right, I know enough to know that this was proper important to Howard. If it was me, I probably wouldn’t believe it. I’d just think, oh, trannies are probably well fashionable right now, next week he’ll be onto something else. But with Howard, right, she wouldn’t come out with something like that if she hadn’t stayed up nights torturing herself about it for ages. So I wasn’t about to go, ooh, are you sure? Are you really? Just ‘cos, well, that’d be a dick move, wouldn’t it?

Problem is, I’ve never been much good at the whole emotional support thing, and I reckoned I’d probably just fuck things up if I tried to play therapist for Howard. Fashion, though, that’s my area of expertise; I got a BTEC National.

‘I can draw you up some stuff, you can take a look, tell me what you think, it’ll be genius!’

Face twitching like it couldn’t quite remember the right way about it, Howard’s expression grew quaveringly and hesitantly hopeful. It gave Vince an uncomfortable clench in his stomach to realise that it had been ages since he’d seen her looking like that, and he twisted his fingers together. ‘Nothing tarty,’ Howard said, aiming hard for stern and nearly sticking the landing, ‘right? No… sequins or feathers or any of that tat.’

‘Course not.’ Vince bit his lip as he looked up at Howard, half anticipating that she’d storm off again, or go all quiet and broody and refuse to tell Vince what he’d done wrong if he screwed up again, but she didn’t, just kept looking all wary and half-hopeful, little bright eyes only occasionally jerking away from Vince. He had the sense that they’d stepped into a bubble, like the light in the room was bending oddly around them. ‘I’ll do you something well sensible, yeah?’ he said after a moment. ‘You’ll look like the tweediest librarian you could imagine.’

Maybe, he told himself, just with a silk lining or something. A little bit of glamour could hardly hurt.

A few days later, Vince found Howard sitting on the edge of the bath in her pants with one leg covered in blood. He blanched, but she didn’t seem to be screaming or wailing or whimpering about how she was going to die, which was Howard’s usual response to even the slightest physical injury, so it couldn’t have been anything serious. He hooked a hand around the doorjamb and swung halfway into the room, peering into the bath.

‘Bloody hell, Howard, don’t tell me you’ve only been a woman for a week and you’ve already gone and got your period.’

‘Hah bloody hah,’ Howard groused, not bothering to look up. ‘I was… trying to shave my legs, all right?’ She hefted her right hand, and Vince squinted at what she was holding in it.

‘With your beard trimmer? You numpty, no wonder you’ve gone and cut yourself to bits.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m not exactly an expert, am I?’

Her eyes were darting all over the place, classic Howard embarrassment, and there were a few streaks of blood on her forehead where she’d probably been brushing hair out of her eyes. Vince sighed, giving her a wry smile. ‘That’s what I was talking about, beauty tips. You don’t have to go carvin’ yourself up tryin’ to figure all this stuff out yourself; just ask me. Here, what were you–‘ His voice rocketed up into an appalled squeak. ‘Is this Tesco brand soap!?’

Which was how Vince ended up helping Howard shave her legs. He’d stripped down to his pants as well (‘I’m not getting these trousers all wet, am I?’) and joined Howard sitting on the edge of the bath. Under his instruction, Howard had one foot braced on the opposite wall, leg slathered with tangerine-lime scented shaving foam, and Vince was bent over it, drawing a safety razor up over Howard’s shin in delicate, brushing little strokes, chattering away as he did.

‘You’ll probably wanna get ‘em done with that laser treatment, yeah? Least I would; shaving all the time’s a bugger, and you’ve got about two people’s worth of legs here.’

‘You don’t shave your legs,’ Howard pointed out.

‘Yeah, ‘cos it’s a bugger,’ Vince agreed. ‘I have done, sometimes, for an outfit usually, but I’m a right hairy ape-man. Comes of being raised in the forest, I ‘spect. You’re set up right; all your hair’s well delicate.’

He swiped a washcloth from Howard’s thigh all the way down to her foot, stretching forward until his shirt rode up in the back, and then followed the motion with his palm to make sure he hadn’t missed any sneaky little hairs. Muscles twitched under his hand.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Howard said, like an afterthought, and Vince grinned up at her, lifting his hand and wiggling his fingers cheekily.

‘Go on, have a feel; you’re all smooth and silky. You can properly show your Northern pins off now.’

She hesitated a moment, hand hovering in midair like she wasn’t sure she wanted to, but Vince could read the pleasure in her face when she did. Her big hand spread over her newly smooth thigh, and she gave it a satisfied little pat, humming a little in her throat. Vince’s eyes, briefly escaping the control of his brain cell, slid up the short distance from Howard’s hand to the soft bulge of her pants.

‘What’re you– do you know what you’re gonna do about that?’ he asked softly, with a little tilt of his chin. ‘I mean, if you are– if you want to– shit.’

The big muscle in Howard’s thigh tensed. ‘Early days yet for that, little man.’

I couldn’t figure at the time why it was only then that I started feeling a bit, you know, attracted to Howard. Or, well, I suppose it wasn’t only then; I’d had a bit of a crush on her back in the zoo days, but it hadn’t been anything intrusive, y’know? Just like something I’d wonder about every once in a while, or have a little flirt for a laugh. But it was once Howard figured out she was a lady that it really started elbowing its way in when it wasn’t always wanted.

And it wasn’t like she looked any different, at least not in the beginning before she’d done any transitioning (I’m not that shallow, thanks), so it weren’t that. But looking back, I think it’s probably ‘cos she hadn’t properly been herself before, you know? It’d’ve been like fancying someone wearing a mask all the time. But once she started really being who she was, it was like I could see her better too. Which was sort of nice, ‘cos it’s always a bit fun, isn’t it, that first warm little rush of realising you fancy someone, like you’ve eaten too many sweets, but I’m not so thick that I didn’t realise it was bloody inconvenient. ‘Cos, right, Howard had enough on her plate to deal with, didn’t she? Without me perving after her and probably makin’ her clam up and go all weird. That wasn’t gonna help anyone.

‘So I’ve been thinking about names,’ Howard said one evening.

Vince, who had recently discovered that they could get YouTube on their telly, looked up from his idle ogling of Marc Bolan and groped for the remote. ‘Oh yeah?’

‘I was thinking maybe… Tommie?’ Howard offered the name delicately, like it was one of those old books you had to handle with little cotton gloves. ‘With an -ie,’ she added hastily, ‘like it could be short for Thomasina, maybe. I just thought, you know, as it’s already part of my name, it might be… easier to adjust to?’

Vince frowned thoughtfully. ‘Tommie.’ He tried it out, feeling the way the name felt in his mouth and trying to consciously pronounce the feminine -ie at the end. He didn’t know if it was even possible to hear the difference, but that didn’t stop him trying. It was weird, but sort of nice, he decided. It had character, like Howard.

‘I like it,’ he said, with a little bob of the head. Howard practically melted with relief, though she tried hard to look as if she wasn’t, pulling herself up all chin down and chest out like Vince’s opinion didn’t affect her in the slightest. ‘It’s a bit like a tennis player from the 20’s, yeah? One of those cheeky flapper girls, well retro.’

That broke the tension. ‘You are not making me a 20’s tennis outfit.’

‘Aw, go on,’ Vince wheedled. ‘Little knitted cardie and one’a those pleated skirts? You’d look dead cute.’

‘Cute is all well and good for flibbertigibbets like you, Vince; I am a woman of substance and panache; I aspire to greater things than cute.’

It was so like Howard’s old boasting that Vince couldn’t help grinning, only a little disappointed. But admittedly, once he thought about it, a drop-waist silhouette wouldn’t do anything for her figure, so that was probably all right.

The name Tommie only lasted for two weeks before Howard gave up on it. She kept forgetting to respond when Vince shouted it at her, and would startle hugely when she realised she was being addressed. Even then, once she did, her whole face would invariably crease up into a frown and she’d go all melancholy and mopey for ages afterwards. And she didn’t want Naboo and Bollo to know yet, so Vince had to switch between Howard and Tommie depending on whether they were alone or not, which didn’t seem to help matters.

‘It just doesn’t feel like me,’ she admitted eventually. ‘And it keeps making me think of Tommy.’

‘What, cheese nutter Tommy?’

Howard winced. ‘Yyyeah. And that is not something I need at this point.’

‘Yeah, no,’ Vince agreed. There was a reflective pause; he couldn’t resist the temptation. ‘But is it really not something you need?’

He’d already screwed up his face in anticipation when Howard flicked him hard in the forehead. ‘This is serious, you little tart.’ But there was a smile lurking among her crow’s feet; it seemed like it was a relief to be able to let go of the insistence on trying to make the new name work.

‘I know, I know,‘ Vince said easily. ‘You’ll just have to try out a few until you find one you like. That’s all right, isn’t it? It’s like..’ he trailed off, before hitting on an apposite metaphor with triumph. ‘It’s like band names! Yeah? Even Zeppelin and KISS didn’t land on the right names right away.’

Howard quirked an eyebrow at him. ‘It’s not… quite like that, Vince.’

‘Yeah, I know, but–’

‘But you get confused if you can’t think in pop culture or fashion terms, I know.’

Vince grinned. ‘Cheers, Howard.’

In the months that followed, Howard went through a succession of names.The next was Florence.

(‘And you’re not making me a little nurse’s outfit to go with, so put that idea out of your head right this minute.’

‘Why’d I make you a nurse’s outfit? No offence, Florence, but fetish gear doesn’t exactly seem like your bag.’

‘Florence Nightingale? Crimean War? Basically the… founder of modern nursing? Is any of this ringing a bell for you?’

‘What, some old dead Victorian? Nah, I was thinking Florence Welch; do you up something dramatic and billowy and jewel-toned, get you a ginger wig–’

‘Don’t even think about it.’)

That lasted a remarkable three weeks, before Howard gave it up in a huff for Victoria, which she deemed ‘Classy and elegant, like me,’ but that didn’t stick either. The next contender was Margot, which persisted for a fortnight before being dropped in a huff. Vince was privately relieved.

(‘I didn’t wanna say anything, Howard, but Margot Moon? That’s awful.’

‘Yeah, it is a bit, isn’t it?’)

Gwendolyn, Audrey, and Vivian all followed with increasing desperation, like Howard was a kid in a school play, trying helplessly to keep together a costume made out of cardboard and stuck together with Pritt Stick.

It came to a head on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon. Vince was coming home from an especially successful run down Camden Market, arm a-swing with plastic bags, and found Howard slouched over the counter in the kitchen, poking moodily at one of her dull crosswords. He hefted one of his bags, grinning.

‘All right, How– Vivian? You are gonna love this.’

‘Oh, you might as well just call me Howard,’ she grouched. ‘Nothing else works, admit it. I’m rubbish at this!’

Vince wasn’t following. He blinked, doing some rapid reordering of his priorities, and went to deposit his bags in an armchair. ‘Sorry, you’re rubbish at what?’ Howard was rubbish at a lot of things, but she didn’t usually actually admit it.

‘At being trans!’ Howard burst out. ‘I am! I’m a– I was doing research–’

‘Well, there’s your problem, for a–’

‘Shut it, Vince.’ And she looked so serious and worn down that Vince did, biting his lip. Howard sighed, slumping over the counter and finding a sticky spot to pick at with her fingernail. ‘I was doing research, online,’ she addressed the sticky spot, ‘and– everyone I could find just… knew! Right from when they were kids, knew that they were trans, and knew what they wanted their names to be and everything right away. I couldn’t figure it out ‘til I was thirty-five! And now I can’t even pick a name for myself!’

‘Howard…’ Vince tried, but Howard rode over him, sounding increasingly hysterical.

‘And what if it doesn’t ever– what if I’m just a freak, forever. I should go find Old Gregg again–’

‘Old Gregg–?’ Where did Old Gregg come into anything? Vince’s brain floundered in the stream of Howard’s consciousness; she’d clearly been brooding on this all afternoon, but Vince needed a moment to catch up.

‘–we can be freakish outcast transsexuals together.’ She stopped and laughed, an awful, humourless laugh. ‘Except I probably won’t even be able to manage that, will I? Too scared of doctors to even think about going in to ask about surgery or hormones; I’ll just be Howard Moon, the man in a dress.’

Bitterly, she descended into silence, and Vince tried a tentative hand on her shoulder. ‘Howard–’

‘Don’t touch me!’ she snapped, and he all but danced back, snatching his hand away like it had been burnt.

‘Right! Right, sorry, no touching. I just– if you’re scared of doctors, I mean, if you’ve been stressing out over that, you do remember we live with a shaman, yeah?’

Howard’s eyes when she looked up were red around the edges and blank with incomprehension. ‘Yeah?’

‘We live with a shaman, you bumbaclaat!’ Vince reiterated, bouncing once on his heels for emphasis. ‘Who needs medicine when you’ve got magic?’

And slowly, like the neon lights of civilisation burning through the gloomy Yorkshire mist, he could see the understanding dawn. Despair came easily to Howard; the trick was giving her enough of a startle to knock her out of it, and Vince had had a lot of practice at that. He didn’t know about the rest of it; that was a whole tangle of confusing Howardy self-loathing that he reckoned probably needed a lot of time and some properly gentle prodding to work out, but the usefulness of magic seemed like an immediate and obvious solution to that particular problem.

‘Sometimes,’ Howard said quietly after several moments of Vince watching her face shed a good half of its worry-lines, ‘you are a genius.’

‘I’m a gifted child,’ Vince reminded her. Howard’s moustache twitched.

‘Course you are.’

‘And Howard? You’re not a freak, either. Well, you are a bit of a freak, but that’s just ‘cos you’re a jazzy weirdo with well dubious taste and a fetish for stationery, that’s got nothin’ to do with you being a lady.’

‘Thanks, Vince.’

And Vince was pretty sure she meant it.

[nextpage title=”In Which Magical Plans are Laid, and an Explanation is Owed”]
In Which Magical Plans are Laid, and an Explanation is Owed

The problem, of course, with going to Naboo for magical assistance with Howard’s transition was that it involved telling Naboo, which Howard was far from eager to do. Eventually, though, Vince managed to convince her, pointing out that a) Naboo didn’t give a toss about either of their personal lives, and b) she’d have to do it eventually, so it might as well be now. Rip off the plaster in one go, right?

And it was this errand that found them standing in Naboo’s room one night, Howard dressed in a pair of jeans Vince had tailored for her (and rather well, if he said so himself; just a bit of flare around the hems and a bit of padding in the side-seams and any woman would have been proud to have Howard’s legs in those jeans) and one of her terrible Hawaiian shirts, with a lined waistcoat thrown over it. Howard had been nervous to wear anything too obviously feminine before actually telling Naboo, and Vince had pronounced the look classy casual-chic, despite Howard’s refusal to part with the shirt, which no amount of tailoring could render less offensive. Howard’s confession, delivered like a stubborn challenge, was blessedly muffled by the shisha smoke that clung to every corner of the room.

The reaction was not what either of them had been expecting. Naboo barely looked up from his hookah. ‘Finally figured it out, have you?’

‘What?!’ In their surprise and indignation, Howard and Vince were nearly in unison, Vince’s voice cracking.

‘How’d you know?’ Howard demanded after a moment, her voice wavering like she wasn’t sure if she was frightened that there had been some obvious tell, that other people could see it before she was ready to show them, or relieved that Naboo already knew, or angry that he wasn’t appreciating the gravity of the situation.

‘It’s obvious, innit?’

‘It weren’t obvious to me!’ Vince snapped. He felt weirdly annoyed, almost territorial, that Naboo had apparently known that Howard was a woman all along, when Vince, who was her best mate, who’d known her since they were kids, hadn’t had a clue until Howard had told him. Naboo gave him an unimpressed look.

‘Yeah, well, I’m not human, am I? My vision isn’t constrained by your binaristic performance of gender.’

‘Well, ain’t that handy?’ Vince sniped. Naboo ignored the tone.

‘S not bad, yeah.’ He twisted on the loveseat to where Bollo was stood behind the decks in the corner; the gorilla had at least been persuaded to take off his headphones for the conversation. ‘Give us that tenner, then, Bollo.’

Howard looked like she’d been struck. ‘You two’ve been… putting bets on me? On– this is not a betting matter, sirs!’

Bollo shuffled out to press a crumpled note into Naboo’s hand and flopped down next to him, holding out one massive hand for the hookah hose. He grunted. ‘Bollo always say Harold ballbag.’

‘Don’t call her that!’

Naboo’s room, draped in fabric and covered in pillows and cushions as it was, did not facilitate echoes well, but Vince’s shout cracked so sudden and loud into the space that it managed it anyway. It was somewhat to his own surprise that Vince found he’d taken a preemptive step forwards, his hands half curled at his sides in a posture he’d forgotten he remembered from childhood. Naboo, Bollo, and Howard all looked at him in varying degrees of shock.

‘What’s crawled up your arse?’ Naboo wanted to know.

Bollo furrowed his heavy ape brow at him. ‘I been calling her wrong names for years. You never say anything before.’

Vince shifted uncomfortably in his stocking feet, suddenly wishing that he’d thought to plan an outfit beforehand along with Howard’s; this was a conversation that definitely needed a pair of boots. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, feeling defensive for reasons he couldn’t quite quantify, ‘I didn’t know before, did I?’

‘Vince…’ Howard started, sounding uncertain. Vince flushed a little, and set his jaw stubbornly.

‘She’s spent her whole life bein’ called the wrong things, hasn’t she? She shouldn’t– it’s not… funny anymore.’

He could feel Howard’s eyes on him (she’d been right and all when she’d said they were powerful, however tiny they were), and he shot her a quick look that he hoped said shut up, alright? Naboo raised a significant, if bored, eyebrow. Howard seemed to have got the message, at any rate, and a moment later she cleared her throat, tugging nervously at the hem of her shirt.

‘Anyway, Naboo, Naboolio, old… friend. I, uh, that is, I was wondering–’

‘Go on, what d’you want?’

Howard affected a wounded expression, as if they hadn’t come in for the express purpose of asking Naboo’s help. ‘I,’ she began again, this time pulling herself up a little and trying an orator’s voice on for size, ‘for reasons of my own, would prefer not to undergo the… traditional, medical process of hormone replacement therapy. That being said, however, it is still my desire to, you know, transition, and live as a woman. And do that whole… thing.’

Naboo plainly knew what Howard was asking, but he made no move to save her from her floundering, just continued watching with indifferent eyes until she caved. It didn’t take long.

‘Oh, c’mon, Naboo, you must have something! Some lotions, some potions, some… magical oestrogen pills or something, yeah?’

Naboo exhaled a long stream of smoke and handed the pipe back to Bollo. ‘Well, I don’t,’ he began. ‘I’m not strictly qualified. But I know people who are. ‘S pretty basic stuff, actually, sex alteration magic. There’s shamans who could do it all in one go, like that–’ he clicked his fingers, ‘if you want.’

Howard, whose expression had swung so rapidly from doubtful to crushed to jubilant that it had given Vince a bit of a headache, squeaked in alarm at Naboo’s snap and clapped her hands to her torso, as if she expected her body to have been changed right then and there without having been asked anything about it. She slumped a little when it became apparent that nothing had happened.

‘No! No thank you. I mean, good, that’s good, that’s– great, but maybe something a little more… gradual? A person needs time to get used to these things, you know. Doesn’t do to be too hasty.’

‘Yeah, all right. I’ll give Beryl a ring in the morning.’

‘Beryl?’ Vince echoed, unable to keep the slight sneer out of his voice. ‘What is she, a little old Welsh lady?’

Naboo wrinkled his nose at him. ‘She’s a very powerful mage from the planet Zouf, actually. Owes me a few favours.’

For a moment, Howard was visibly torn between falling on Naboo in gratitude and fleeing the room to compose herself. Naboo neatly solved that problem with with another long-suffering eyebrow. ‘Was there something else you wanted, or can me and Bollo get on with our night?’

‘No! Nothing else,’ Howard said hastily, making a jerky move to leave, and then pausing and looking back. ‘You’re a lifesaver, Naboo.’

Naboo yawned. ‘Always am for the two of you, aren’t I?’

Howard took that as her cue to book it, leaving only the imprints of her feet in the deep shag carpet behind her. Vince lingered a moment to give Naboo a hard look. ‘Y’didn’t have to be such a dick about it.’

‘I didn’t have to be such a dick?’ Naboo said pointedly.

Vince felt the vague urge to thump the tiny shaman for that unnecessarily accurate remark. Instead, he nabbed a pillow off the floor and pettishly threw it at him. It hit Bollo instead, and Vince flounced out.

In the kitchen, Howard was in the middle of adding a first and second spoonful of sugar to a cup of tea. Vince’s eyebrows went up; she must be properly shaken up. Unlike Vince, who preferred his tea like weak syrup, Howard habitually steeped hers for far too long, and never bothered with any sugar at all.

He wavered, mouth twisting off to the side, and decided after a moment to take up a position draped over the black and white couch, wiggling down onto his stomach and kicking his feet up childishly. He traced the patterns in the upholstery with one fingertip, keeping a sideways eye on Howard as she fussed around the kitchen.

‘That’s great, innit?’ He lifted his voice to be heard across the room. ‘Imagine what you’ll be able to do with one of Naboo’s shaman pals to help! Just as well he’s not qualified, I reckon; I wouldn’t want him fiddling about with my body; he’d probably muck it up or get distracted halfway through, and I’d end up with a monkey tail, or horns. Imagine that! Mind, I could probably rock horns; the faun look, yeah? Or Pan, you told me about him, causin’ sexy chaos in my wake.’

‘Vince,’ Howard interrupted, turning the syllable into a sigh.

Vince bit off the trail of nervous babbling (though horns, that was a thing to file away in the back of his head) and looked up, stilling his wandering finger.

‘Why are you… doing all this, Vince?’

‘What?’

‘Being all–’ Howard gestured grandly and somewhat alarmingly with a spoon, trying to encapsulate whatever it was Vince was doing, before settling rather lamely on, ‘nice. Understanding.’

‘Oi!’ Vince squawked. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? I’m nice.’

Howard gave him a look and held it for a surprising length of time, until Vince squirmed a little under the force of it. That twisty sensation he’d identified as guilt from the night Howard had first tried to come out to him had returned, climbing uncomfortably up the walls of his stomach, and Vince scowled at it. ‘Yeah,’ Howard huffed, a defeated little sigh like she’d got confirmation of something she’d been expecting. ‘You haven’t really been, have you, lately?’

Now, I told you at the beginning I ain’t much for introspection and all of that, but I’m pretty sure I knew I’d been a bit of a prick to Howard for a while there. I mean, I musta done, yeah? The thing of it was, and I’m not sure exactly when it started, what changed, but Howard… didn’t really seem to need me anymore. Once we started working in the shop, and she found Lester and her other jazzy mates, and got all weird and obsessive about stationery village, and started treating me like I hadn’t, you know, only been her best mate all her life, like I was just some slacker she had to put up with at work.

So I went, well, if Howard don’t need me anymore, then I won’t need her. Simple as that, right? I’m Vince Noir, everybody loves me; I’ve got the entire under-thirty population of Shoreditch as friends if I want ‘em. ‘Scept it wasn’t, really. That trendy lot are all great for a laugh, but they’re not friends, really, are they? And Howard might be a weirdo, but I don’t reckon there’s anyone in the world who really knows me like her, even the weird bits– though don’t you go spreading that around.

So I got all narked with meself for still needing Howard, and it was well easy to be annoyed with her for bein’ all sanctimonious and judgey, and I s’pose I… turned into a bit of a bitch there.

But then when she came out, it was like– now she needed me again. ‘Course, now I’m actually thinking all this out, that makes me sound a bit awful, doesn’t it? Selfish. Like I only care about her when she needs me, but that ain’t it at all. It’s just– I reckon we were both a bit caught up in our own heads before. Howard was dealin’ with all her shit all by herself, and takin’ it out on me, and I was dealin’ with that and probably makin’ it worse by bein’ such a little shit, and it was like shouting under a bridge; everything just gets louder and bigger and more confused, even if it were something dead simple at first.

Now, I can look back now and figure all this out, ‘cos I’ve done some thinking on it since then, but in the moment, I sure as hell couldn’t’ve just come out with all that. Those kindsa monologues are Howard’s territory, not mine. And ‘specially not with Howard’s tiny peepers starin’ me down all wary, like I was gonna change my mind about being nice any day now and leave her on her own. So I just reached into my mindtank and came out with the first thing that felt right, which was this:

Vince swung his legs around off the couch and pushed himself up to walk over to Howard, sticking his hands in the pockets of his skinny hoodie and peering up at her. He chewed thoughtfully on his lip.

‘You remember that time when we were at school, and those boys wanted to beat me up ‘cos they thought I was a queer? We were like twelve, yeah? And you busted in and shouted ‘em down? It was well impressive.’

‘I didn’t really shout them down, though, did I? I shouted at them, and then they called me a queer and beat me up too.’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Vince’s recollection of his childhood was an odd and patchy thing; sometimes he was pretty sure he remembered more versions of things than could possibly all fit together, and each of them with perfect clarity. But Howard usually remembered them too, and that was the important thing. ‘Still, point is, you did that for me, yeah? It’s like that.’

Howard’s expression remained dubious, and Vince pulled a face. There was more to be said, he could feel it itching away at the back of his throat, but he couldn’t actually get a grip on any of the words. Howard had always been better at words than him; Vince had a feeling, and that memory matched right up with it like puzzle pieces, but that didn’t seem to be doing it for Howard. Vince briefly wondered if an apology crimp was a possible thing and if he could start one now, before discounting the notion. That was weird thinking.

He smiled a little, perversely amused when a thought occurred to him, and he knocked a few stripy-stockinged toes into Howard’s shin. ‘They were a bit right, though, weren’t they?’

‘Who?’ Howard’s brows bunched together, not following the train of Vince’s thought.

‘Those boys. We are a right old pair of queers, aren’t we?’ Vince laughed. Howard looked less certain.

‘Are we?’

‘Well, I am. And you, I mean, you’re a lesbian now, right? You ain’t stopped liking girls just ‘cos you are one.’ He paused. ‘Have you?’

‘Nnnnno,’ Howard said, but her eyes were darting all over the place, and Vince squinted at her.

‘Don’t tell me you’ve been gay all along!’ he scoffed, and then paused again, frowning. ‘Er. Straight.’ It was exhausting, this; Vince was used to knowing where he was allowed to tread with Howard, which subjects Howard said not to touch but which were really okay, which ones had to be treated like delicate baby birds. Now he wasn’t sure. Mostly nothing had changed, but occasionally Vince stumbled into a conversational tarpit and ended up feeling like a right tit.

‘No!’ That came with much more certainty, and Howard sighed and took a gulp of her unwontedly sweet tea. A few milky droplets caught in her moustache, and Vince stamped down hard on the impulse to reach a hand out and brush them away. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said deliberately, ‘that I was ever, you know, completely…’

‘The word’s bisexual,’ Vince chimed in helpfully. Howard gave him a narrow look.

‘Bisexual’s a word,’ she corrected rather tartly. ‘Dunno if it’s the word.’

Vince paused, unsure (again) of what to say. That was happening a lot all of a sudden. Howard seemed to wait for a moment, as if hoping he’d come out with something that would make everything clear for her, but nothing did, and Howard suddenly burst into motion, growling and flailing her arms in helpless frustration, far too energetically for someone holding a cup of tea.

‘Oi, you lunatic!’ Vince jumped back out of the splash radius, hopping on one foot.

But Howard didn’t seem to care. ‘Ugh! I just– I like labels, you know me, Vince, I am a big fan of labels. Everything in its place, neatly organised, easier for everyone that way, but I can’t seem to– I just don’t know, all right? It’s hard enough figuring out one thing at a time.’

‘All right, all right,’ Vince said placatingly, holding up his hands. Carefully, after determining that there was no more tea left in her cup that might end up on him, he inched back forwards. This time, he knew what the words were suddenly crowding up against the back of his teeth, but he also knew they probably weren’t the best idea. But self-censorship was never Vince’s greatest strength. ‘It’s me, innit?’

‘Vince…’

But he barrelled on, tone teasing and fond and full of put-on long-suffering, like he had to remind people of this all the time, and somewhere under that, sitting down deep in his chest, burstingly, selfishly curious. ‘Told you, I’m the Confuser; straight blokes, lesbians, no-one’s immune.’

It was probably bad timing, but it did seem to help a bit. The crinkles at the corners of Howard’s eyes made a tiny but perceptible shift from ‘stressed’ to ‘grudgingly amused’, and Vince shifted his weight forwards a little, looking up at Howard through his fringe. Without the heels he lived and breathed in, the height difference was even more pronounced, and something was fizzing in Vince’s stomach and the soles of his feet. He bit his lip.

‘D’you fancy me, Howard?’

Howard’s squinty eyes went even narrower than usual, glittering through the smoky cross-hatching of her eyelashes as she carried on a very visible internal debate on whether Vince was making fun of her or not. Eventually she seemed to come down on the side of not. ‘I’m gonna put a move on you, little man.’

That probably shouldn’t have made the warm, no-signal television fizzing spread up Vince’s spine, but it did, and he bared his teeth, breathless and daring. ‘Go on, then.’

There was a heavy pause, and then Howard gave him the vibrating palm.

Vince shrieked. ‘You bitch!’

And then he was laughing and Howard was laughing, and from there it was a short step to hurling pillows and furniture throws at each other and Vince leaping over the couch and at one point very nearly treading on the dropped mug. They might have continued on for some time, if they hadn’t been interrupted by Naboo stomping out of his room and shouting at them to shut up, some people have actual business to do. It wasn’t very intimidating, but they did shut up, and Howard went about cleaning up her spilled tea.

[nextpage title=”In Which Howard’s Transition Begins, and Much is Made of a Moustache”]
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.

[nextpage title=”In Which There are Celebrations, and a Mistake is not Made”]
In Which There are Celebrations, and a Mistake is not Made

Right, so we’re finally at the bit of the story you’ve all been waitin’ for. And don’t bother lyin’ and tryin’ to say you weren’t; I know what you pervy freakshows are like. You can say you’re in it for the emotional development and whatever else, but nahh, you’re just stuck in for the long haul for the smut. Mind, nothin’ too filthy happens yet, I don’t reckon Howard’d let me tell it if it did, or, like, I’d hafta do one’a them tasteful fade-to-blacks, yeah, like happens in sappy movies. There’s always white curtains blowing in a window somewhere in those scenes, you ever noticed? Like it’s an industry requirement. Wonder if it is. Howard probably knows. But yeah, so here’s the juicy stuff, like I promised. And even if it ain’t that juicy, really, it was still well nice.

‘Christy, Howard, check out your tits!’

The words came tumbling out of Vince’s mouth as he tripped up the stairs, taken too much by surprise to think better of them. Howard jerked around, hands clamped over her chest for a moment before she relaxed. Her face was pink right up to the hairline, but it wasn’t proper embarrassment; she was smiling, like a kid bashfully showing off a painting they were secretly really proud of.

Her moustache twitched, and she looked down at the breasts that definitely hadn’t been there when Vince saw her this morning, giving the tops of them a little brush with her fingers like they might’ve been collecting dust. ‘They are a bit nice, aren’t they?’

Vince laughed with delight and surprise, toeing clumsily out of his Chelsea boots. ‘I didn’t know you were getting ‘em done today, you muppet! You mighta told me. Anyway, I thought you were gonna have to be in bed for, like, weeks afterwards, you said. All those horror stories about bandages that can’t come off and draining fluid…’ He trailed off, pulling an elaborate face.

‘Magic, little man,’ Howard reminded him, still too flushed with pleasure to look properly superior. ‘Only took ‘em about half an hour, and it didn’t even hurt. Well,’ she hedged, ‘it didn’t hurt afterwards, at least.’

‘You still had ‘em knock you out, didn’t you?’

Howard sniffed. ‘I’ve got a sensitive soul, all right? It’s one thing to say that magical surgical augmentation is painless; that doesn’t mean I want to watch it happening.’

‘And that– what, that’s it? You didn’t tell me you were gettin’ ‘em done, you’re not gonna celebrate? This is well exciting, Howard! You oughtta take ‘em out for a spin!’

The look Howard gave him was both dubious and mildly alarmed. ‘I hardly think they need spinning anywhere.’

‘Howard. That’s not what I meant–’

‘I know perfectly well what you meant,’ Howard interrupted, ‘and you’re not throwing a party for my breasts, either. I don’t need all your mates staring at them and… grading them.’

‘I didn’t mean that either.’ Vince rolled his eyes. ‘Even I need a little bit of notice to organise a proper party. Is the Tesco still open?’

‘Yes? Why?’

Vince gave her a glittering grin. ‘Genius. You stay right here, I am gonna go get us some champagne.’

Sounds like the beginning of some well dodgy porn, doesn’t it? Like, ooh, Howard, let’s get some ~champagne and celebrate your new ~breasts, but that weren’t how I meant it, honest! If it was a porn, I’d probably have ended up pouring the champagne all over her, yeah, like they do with ships, which– I bet the bubbles’d feel amazing, actually, all sort of tingly. But I don’t reckon Howard’d go for that; bit messy for her. She’d wanna, like, put down a tarpaulin first or something. ‘

Anyway, point is, I didn’t mean it as a come-on, really. I just thought, it’s dead exciting, we oughtta celebrate! But, well, things happen, don’t they?

By the time they’d cracked open the second bottle, Howard had launched into an enthusiastic retelling of her appointment with Beryl the alien shaman, complete with impersonations of everyone involved. Beryl’s voice, as performed by Howard, was a high, fluting thing with an unconvincing Welsh accent, but her impression of Naboo’s lisping monotone was so spot-on that it had reduced Vince to teary hysterics, laughing so hard that he had to put his glass down so he didn’t spill.

‘And then Naboo said, “I dun’ need to know any more about your genitals than I already do, do I? ‘S bad enough living with Vince, shrink-wrapping his balls into his trousers all the time.”’

‘I don’t shrink-wrap my balls!’ Vince objected through his wheezing, even though Naboo wasn’t there for him to correct. Howard snickered, and then tried to look like she hadn’t, arranging her features into one of her wide range of ‘snooty intellectual’ expressions. It didn’t really work.

‘Y’do a bit, though, don’t you? Always scrunching ‘em up into your jumpsuits and drainpipes and nonsense. I bet your bollocks wish they belonged to someone with a more practical fashion sense.’

‘My bollocks are perfectly happy with me, thank you very much. I can talk to balls, y’know, same as animals; I check in on ’em every once in a while, we have a good old natter ’bout the state of affairs down there.’ Howard looked alarmed. ‘Anyway, anyway, you were sayin’ about the thing?’

And so she continued, with only occasional interruptions from Vince. If nothing else, Howard had a flair for melodrama, and Vince listened in fascination as she described the massive, bubbling cauldron with its luminescent steam over a pink and orange fire (‘Like in the movies?’ Vince put in, and Howard told him to hush), and how Beryl had needed a lock of her hair and a teaspoon of blood to make the spell work. Though she didn’t say it, Vince knew that Howard must have blanched at having to give blood; himself, he put a protective hand to his hair, shuddering a little at the thought of anyone cavalierly chopping out a lock of it.

She described the mystical chanting and the important artefacts (at least she’d assumed they were important; they’d looked like a load of rubbish, but then, that’s magic for you) that had been set out in significant patterns, and how Howard had had to stand in a triangle drawn on the ground while she drank the potion, which had fizzed and sparked like a roman candle that had swallowed a Berocca, and how there’d been pillows strewn all about to make sure she didn’t hurt herself, as– upon Howard’s request– Beryl had made the potion so that it’d knock her out when she drank it.

‘And when I woke up,’ she finished, rather anticlimactically, ‘there they were.’

She looked down at her own chest in immense satisfaction, giving her breasts a brief feel that was entirely nonsexual, more like she was just reminding herself that they were still there. After a moment of thought, her face twisted slightly. ‘Beryl insisted on poking and prodding at them to make sure everything was in, you know, working order and that before she’d let me leave, that was embarrassing.’

‘What, just pokin’ away at your tits?’ Vince wrinkled his nose, but the temptation was too great to resist, and he stuck out his hand to deliver a single, firm poke right into the side of Howard’s breast.

‘Oi, Groping Gary!’ she slapped his hand away, but she was grinning, wide and sort of wolfish, and soon Vince was twisting out of the way, trying to avoid a barrage of tickling fingers to his ribs. He shrieked and cackled and protested, and Howard crowed, and the two of them flapped uselessly at each other for a few enjoyable minutes.

When the tussle came to an unspoken but mutually agreed-upon conclusion, Vince flopped back, breathing hard and grinning, feeling silly and giddy. It took him a few moments to register the feeling of eyes on him, and when he did, he looked up to find Howard staring at him with a strange, intent expression that turned her eyes dark and her face slack. He had a brief imagining of himself as a rare jazz record.

‘Howard?’ he ventured, unsure.

And the next moment there was Howard’s tongue in his mouth, sour with champagne, and the scratch of her moustache, and the squish of breasts against his chest, and it was confusing and brilliant, and Vince couldn’t help himself. He slid a hand down between them and got a good palmful, thumb coming up to swipe over the crest, pressing in where he thought a nipple was likely to be.

Howard gasped, a sort of whimpery, aroused sound that sucked the air right out of Vince’s mouth, and pulled back, looking winded. ‘Wow,’ she breathed. ‘She said they might be more sensitive than before.’

Vince felt dazed, weightless and warm from the champagne, and he wanted nothing more than to find her nipple through her shirt and suck on it until she made that noise again, because he was pretty sure that was the hottest thing he’d ever heard. ‘Yeah?’

Her lips were sort of swollen under her moustache, pink and damp, and Vince couldn’t stop staring. ‘Yeah,’ she echoed.

Howard lunged awkwardly forward at nearly the same time Vince did, and their hands did a weird dance for a moment figuring out where to land until Vince decided fuck it and just ducked in to lick into Howard’s mouth, sucking shamelessly on her tongue, and her hands landed on his back, fingers curling. Howard kissed messy and wet and hungry, and it was fucking hot, no denying it, but she definitely lacked technique. Vince hummed quellingly into her mouth, petting softly at her cheek and along her hairline until sloppy and desperate gave way to something slower, deep and leisurely, all smooth slide of tongues and breathing humid into each others mouths. Howard’s breasts were warm and present against his chest, heaving with her breaths, and her hip soft under his hand. He dug his nails in, and she made another one of those cracked, confused noises.

They were both breathing raggedly when Howard pulled away again, but this time, she didn’t look happily shocked. Instead, a familiar expression of paranoia had crept onto her face, and she swallowed hard and pressed a self-conscious forearm across her chest.

‘You’re not just doing this– because I look more like a lady now.’

Vince felt like pointing out that Howard was the one who’d started the snogging, but he restrained himself. Instead, he just snorted. ‘We’ve gone over this before, haven’t we; you know I’m not straight. I flirted with you before and all, you just didn’t have bosoms to grab then.’

Her eyes were still wary, half-squinted like someone in a tunnel prepared too early for the train to come back out into the blazing sunlight, but she subsided slightly, giving Vince a sideways look. ‘Bosoms?’

‘Yeah, I reckon. You’re too jazzy for tits.’ Vince giggled, which probably wasn’t immensely appropriate under the circumstances. ‘Or boobs. ‘S gotta be bosoms. Or decolletage.’ The effort of wrapping his tongue around a French accent was enough to send him dissolving into more laughter, and he rocked forward, knocking his head into Howard’s shoulder. She was all warm and soft, sturdy shoulders and big bosoms and still smelled like Howard had always smelled, dusty and sort of sweet, like horses or pipe tobacco. The scent was just a little less sharp now, somehow deeper and muskier, something that had been there making it indefinably a masculine smell no longer present. It was nice, Vince thought.

‘I don’t wanna fuck this up, Howard,’ he murmured into her shoulder. ‘I know I do. I’m a right titbox sometimes, and I act out and do stupid shit, and, and– but not about this. You know that, yeah?’ Vince was possibly drunker than he’d thought, if he was coming out with all of this, but in this moment, it felt impossibly important that he communicate this to Howard. ‘You’re my best mate, and I do love you and all. And it… you look good when you’re happy. You ain’t been happy for a while, have you? I mean, you know, before you started takin’ that stuff.’

Howard didn’t answer, just twisted enough to wrap an arm around him, and Vince happily snuggled into the embrace, his hand going to fall on her stomach. Out of habit, he gave it a little rub. Howard swatted at him lightly with one hand and Vince braced to be pushed away, but no ‘Don’t touch me’ was forthcoming, and he smiled a small, a private smile into Howard’s shoulder and kept his hand where it was, petting over her belly like one might do a lazy cat.

‘You’re losin’ some of your tum,’ he pointed out after a few moments of contented, champagne-fizzy silence, and heard Howard snort above him.

‘Don’t get excited, it’s just moved.’

Vince had momentary disturbing visions of fat cells bundled up in coats and headscarves like tragically transient Russians in those novels Howard pretended to like, packing up their worldly belongings into tatty suitcases and bindles. His confusion must have shown in his silence, or on his face, because a moment later, Howard was shaking with laughter under him, the kind of silent giggle that bubbled up from your stomach and turned your face red with it.

‘What?’ Vince demanded peevishly.

‘You’re the one who’s been altering all my clothes, aren’t you? What’d you think was happening?’

And it was true that he’d had to take out most of Howard’s trousers and skirts so they’d fit in her around the hips, and shirts had had to be tailored to accommodate the distinct curve at the waist that hadn’t been there before, but he’d never thought of it as the chub that was already there moving. Somehow that was way weirder than whatever he’d thought was going on. He wrinkled his nose. Howard laughed again and reached down to ruffle his hair, something she’d not done in years, which left Vince feeling so baffled and warm that he didn’t even protest the damage to his coiffure.

‘You should sleep with me tonight.’

The words came out with the certain carried-along-on-their-own-momentum quality of someone drunk enough for the barrier between internal monologue and speech to have crumbled somewhat, so casually that it took Vince a moment to process them. Even once he had, he had to take a second, face crumpling around confusion. That couldn’t be right, could it? Maybe his ears were more drunk than the rest of him.

‘You what?’

Howard looked guilelessly down at him for a moment, before suddenly realising how her words might have been construed, and immediately blushing furiously. ‘No! Not like sex, I just meant–’ She pulled a face, groaning and letting her head fall to the side so that her hair fell across her face. Vince leaned up a little to blow at it, sending a few messy curls fluttering up and baring a slice of eye and nose. The eye swivelled to look down at Vince.

‘I just meant, well, this is sort of nice, isn’t it? I thought we should– we could… do more of it. Just in my bed. Or your bed!’ Her voice squeaked. ‘Hell, I need more champagne.’

Vince laughed as Howard leaned clumsily over him to grab the mostly empty bottle. ‘You sayin’ you wanna have a little cuddle and a sleepie?’

For a moment, Howard looked like she was going to hedge and apologise, but then Vince felt her squaring herself under him, and she tossed her hair a little to get it out of her face. ‘If you think you’re up for it.’

Vince grinned, sunshiney champagne happiness bubbling away in a spot just under his lungs. ‘I’m a champion cuddler, Howard. You won’t know what’s hit you.’

They didn’t immediately make a move to relocate to the bedroom; they stayed contentedly on the couch for a while yet, finishing the last bottle off. A couple of times, glancing up at the soft spur of Howard’s chin, Vince pondered going in for another kiss, but decided that if they were going to be sharing a bed, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to let himself get too worked up.

When they finally did get up, with some effort, Howard insisted on changing into her pyjamas in the en-suite loo, though she shouted her drunken bafflement about what she was supposed to do with her breasts through the door. ‘What do I do with my… bosoms when I’m sleeping? Y’don’t wear a bra when you sleep, do you?’

‘I dunno! Just let ‘em do their thing.’

‘Won’t they… flap?’

Vince laughed too hard at that to answer, and then got tangled in his skinny jeans and fell into the side of his bed, where he lay for a moment trying to compose himself. He didn’t ask what Howard had decided to do about the problem of wearing a bra to bed when she finally emerged, buttoned up neatly in her old stripy blue pyjamas that looked like what Vince imagined people probably wore back in the Forties. Vince himself was in loose pyjama bottoms and a Cockney Rebel t-shirt too old and thin to be worn in public anymore.

When they crawled into bed together (Vince’s bed, it being the bigger of the two), they fell easily into position with Vince curled up against Howard’s back, snuggled into her. She was still taller than him, though not by as much as she had been, but Vince didn’t mind playing big spoon. It was nice both ways, he figured. He giggled sleepily against the back of Howard’s neck, and she twisted to try and crane a look back at him. Her hair brushed ticklishly against his face, and Vince wrinkled his nose.

‘What?’

‘I feel like a tiny monkey, all clingin’ onto your back, ooo~’

‘You are a tiny monkey.’

‘’M not,’ Vince retorted, sleepy and silly-drunk.

Howard was smiling, Vince could hear it in her voice. ‘Yeah you are. What was it, that daft song– Monkeys stole my face, took me down to another place, now I’m leader of their race…’

Vince might have been one of the great frontmen, but Howard had a proper set of pipes on her, and even like this, her cheek squished into the pillow and voice a rough, sticky murmur, she made that silly old pop song sound like a real, eerie adventure. The kind of thing you’d shut up for around a campfire and let it give you goosebumps. Vince let out a breath, surprised that she’d even remembered it. The song, not the story; Howard loved his stories, or she’d used to, anyway.

‘That was ages ago!’

‘’ve gotta… intricate filing system up here, Vince.’ The hand that wasn’t tucked under her head lifted in a languid, imprecise wave, fingers twiddling vaguely in the direction of her own head. On an impulse, Vince reached out and caught it, bringing their loosely linked hands down to rest against Howard’s stomach. ‘Like a library. Or an elephant.’

‘An elephant in a library,’ Vince suggested. ‘That way if it forgets something, it can just look it up; double your memory power!’

‘Library elephant~’ Howard ventured, just enough of a suggestion of a melody under the words for Vince to pick up the cue, and so he did, vowels snagging in his throat on half-swallowed laughs.

‘Library elephant

Bookshop elephant

Sartre and Dostoevsky

Gettin’ stuck into some theory

like a bramble-burr, ooh!

Existentialist pachyderm

Big fan flappy ears,

Set a stir, set a gust

Paper-printout blizzard in a printing-press wood

Really should just–’

‘–get an… e-reader?’ Howard finished awkwardly, their momentum suddenly faltering, and Vince grinned open-mouthed against the back of her neck, falling into a brief, silent laugh. He felt the way the little hairs there lifted under the gust of his breath. It wasn’t the best crimp they’d ever done, but they couldn’t all be, and that wasn’t the point of crimping anyway, really.

He gave Howard a little nudge in the back of her legs with his knees. ‘That what’s goin’ on in your head? No wonder your brain’s such a muddle, you got elephants trampin’ all over your mental libraries.’

Howard exhaled a wry little laugh and shifted back a bit, pressing more firmly into Vince. ‘Mmm, you’ve discovered my secret.’

They didn’t speak for a while after that, just lying there in silence together, breaths gradually steadying out and synchronising. Vince could feel his limbs melting slowly and warmly into the bedding, his eyelids weighing ponderously against the little prickle of sleep behind them.

‘Y’look good, Howard,’ he murmured as he felt unconsciousness beginning to get a real clingy clutch on his brain. ‘Properly good. ‘n the bosoms… suit you ‘n all. ‘m happy f’you.’

Howard might have said something in return, but Vince wasn’t awake to hear it.

He woke fuzzily to a series of conflicting sensations that took his brain more acuity than it was ready to spare just yet to sort through. The first was warmth; sunlight-warmth from the open curtains and squishy, comfortable heartbeat-warmth from Howard, who had shifted in the night and was now curled around him, crammed up against his back. The second, creeping stealthily around the edges of his awareness like a horny tomcat in an alleyway, was the sickly, uneasy pulse of a hangover headache. Vince loved champagne, but he always forgot about the wretched hangovers it made for until he was in the middle of one.

The third, which became immediately obvious when he shifted to twist onto his back, was the fact that his dick was hard. The lazy, white-noise tickle of early morning arousal warred weirdly with the queasy, stuffed-head hangover feeling, and he frowned vaguely down at the tent in his jammie bottoms. You’d think the two might cancel each other out, but no, here he was left feeling both ill and kind of turned on. Still tucked up against him, Howard shifted, grumbling incomprehensibly as she made a first sally in the good fight into consciousness, and Vince froze.

Now, it weren’t like Howard hadn’t seen her fair share of my morning wood over the years, and the the other way ‘round. It’s kind of inevitable when you’re best mates with someone for so long. And you live together. And… you share a room. It happens. And it hadn’t ever mattered before, ‘least not to me, but now– then?– it was different all of a sudden. I didn’t want Howard to freak out, you know? Or think I was trying to have it on with her or something. Even though, you know, a morning stiffy’s a morning stiffy, and I wouldn’t have wanted to have sex on a hangover anyway, but Howard’s got a way of always leaping to the wrong conclusions.

It’s usually her job to overthink things and get all frozen up with it, but I had a bit of a go at it just then, ‘scept I was too sleepy and muddled still to make all my overthinking make much sense, so it was mostly just like a load of little confused people running around in circles inside my brain. The thing of it was, the night before had been… genius. It’d been easy and fun and we’d kissed and I’d got to sleep with Howard and have a proper cuddle like I’d wanted to do… basically forever, and I hadn’t planned for none’a that, and I reckon I was probably a little afraid that now she was sober, she’d regret it right away and kick me outta bed and never want to talk about it again and I’d’ve screwed it all up.

‘Cos I hadn’t planned anything, like I say, but I’d sorta known that if I ever was gonna put a move on Howard, she’d want something dead romantic. Wooing, right? Like they do in all those boring old black and white films. Poetry and ~gestures and stuff. And I ain’t much good at that sort of thing, but I thought, you know, I could give it a go, someday, when the timing was right. Errol Flynn was well dashing and romantic, I could try and channel him, Howard’d probably appreciate that.

‘Scept I hadn’t waited for the timing to be right, I’d got tiddly and had a grope while we snogged on the couch like teenagers. I’m… not great at thinking these things through in the moment, admittedly. So now I just had to hope that I hadn’t mucked things up six ways to Sunday and now I’d have to sort everything out again. It was well stressful, lemme tell you.

Next to him, Howard groaned as her own hangover hit, levering herself up on one elbow to peer blearily at Vince. Her hair was a ridiculous tangled floof (between the two of them, Vince couldn’t help noting somewhere in the back of his head, the volume of their collective bedhead had got to be a thing of wonder), falling halfway over her face, squinty, sleep-cloudy eyes peering out from under it like a bear waking up from its hibernation.

‘Ow,’ she pronounced eventually, bringing her spare hand, the one attached to the arm that had been flung across Vince’s chest, up to dig the heel of it into one eye. Vince tried to subtly slide a hand down to cover his erection. ‘S it morning?’

‘Yeah,’ Vince said, and grinned as genuinely as he could. ‘All right, Howard?’

He’d been aiming for guileless and cheerful, and he hit it well enough, but the problem was that Vince was not what anyone would call a morning person, and rarely disposed to be quite so sunny immediately upon waking. Howard’s eyes, already faintly swollen from sleep and drawn into slits against the morning sunlight, narrowed further.

Vince’s smile grew brittle around the edges, and he shifted a little, bringing a knee up to try and hide the problem. Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect; Howard’s gaze dropped down and Vince could practically feel the moment it snagged on his crotch, and then they were both just lying there like idiots staring at the outline of Vince’s dick in his stupidly loose pyjama bottoms.

‘Um,’ said Vince. ‘Yeah.’ Normally he’d distract Howard with charm and teasing and play it off like it was nothing, but it was too early, and he was too hungover, and this was it, any moment now Howard was going to start blushing and her mouth would go all thin and she’d tell Vince that she thought he’d better leave, and he’d’ve fucked everything up because of his stupid cock.

Instead, one of her eyebrows slowly went up, little creases accumulating on her forehead in its wake, her mouth twitching off to the side. ‘Looks like someone’s all right, at least.’

Vince’s eyes hopped up from staring awkwardly at his crotch to meet Howard’s gaze; her eyes were gummed with sleep, but twinkling with amusement. For a moment they just stared at each other, and then Howard was chuckling, slow at first and then helpless, and it caught Vince down in the pit of his gut and flung him up into the air, nerves and relief and delight ricocheting off the walls of his throat as he cracked up. It made his headache worse, but he couldn’t seem to stop.

‘You dick!’ He thumped Howard in the sternum, still laughing. ‘I thought you were gonna freak out on me!’

‘Ow, ow, hey!’ Howard rolled away, flapping ineffectually at Vince’s hands. ‘What’s that, you hit me when I don’t freak out on you? What’s the logic in that? Ow, fuck, no.’ She flopped back onto the bed, squeezing her eyes shut hard and digging both hands into them. ‘Nneh, I’m too hungover for this; I need about a gallon of tea.’

Vince’s headache was still fully in evidence, the faint dizziness of a hangover curled around his spine, and his erection stubbornly unabated, but the tense, wound feeling that had been growing in his stomach and along his shoulders had suddenly dissipated. He let out a breath, falling back with a little bounce next to Howard. After a moment, he gave her a little nudge. ‘You go make yourself a Resolve, yeah? I’m gonna go take a shower, we can take the day off for feeling sorry for ourselves.’

‘The shop…’ Howard started, and Vince waved a sloppy hand.

‘If you’d had proper surgery instead of magic, you’d’ve been off work for weeks, yeah? Naboo can spare you a day.’

He wasn’t expecting the touch of Howard’s hand on his stomach, and he startled a little, looking down at it. Not a poke or a prod, just a touch and a little rub, her hand laid out flat over his belly like he always used to try to do to her, and he blinked up at her, nonplussed. She looked like a wreck, frankly, but the fondness lurking in the lines around her eyes made Vince’s stomach swoop.

‘Should I order in a curry?’

Vince groaned. ‘Oh my god, you’re a genius. Please.’

The heavy warmth of Howard’s hand lifted away, and Vince laid there for a few moments before remembering that there was a bottle of paracetamol in the cupboard in the bathroom, which made for an excellent motivation to go take that shower. After pain pills, cold shower, and a quick wank, he felt much more human, even if he did still have to wince as he towelled his hair dry.

Naboo did grouch at them later about not manning the shop, but he didn’t press the issue, which Vince counted as a victory.

[nextpage title=”In Which There is an Adventure, and Howard Becomes a Woman of Action”]
In Which There is an Adventure, and Howard Becomes a Woman of Action

Chapter Notes: The final chapter! It’s been a journey. Thank you all so much for your enthusiasm and support for this fic; I never imagined people would love it as much as they have, and it makes me stupidly happy. Alllll the love for trans!Howard, WHO IS MY BABY.

Now, most people in their stories of gender and self-discovery and all of that, there’s certain sorts of trials and tribulations you expect, yeah? Maybe they have to come out to their family and it don’t go well, or maybe they get beat up by arseholes on the street, or maybe they’re dating someone who don’t take it well and they have to have a whole, ooh, am I gay now, am I straight, what does it meeean? thing. That sort of stuff.

Not me and Howard; me and Howard went and got trapped in another dimension. ‘Course, that doesn’t have anything to do with her being trans, but it doesn’t always, does it? Sometimes mad shit just goes on happenin’.

‘This is all your fault!’ Howard hissed, the back of her head pressing into Vince’s as she craned around the pole they were tied to.

‘Well, I wasn’t to know, was I?’ he shot back. ‘Never been to this dimension before, have I? I didn’t exactly have time to brush up on the etiquette beforehand.’

‘I always said you’d be mistaken for a witch.’

‘Yeah, in the Forties!’ Vince protested. ‘Not in… weird alternate mirror dimensions!’

‘I can’t believe they thought I was your familiar!’ Howard continued on behind him, sounding aggrieved. ‘I’m a person, not an ape!’

Vince shrugged, and then winced as the motion tugged on the rope around their wrists. ‘They ain’t always apes, familiars. And Naboo’s not a witch, he’d probably be well narked if he heard you calling him that. Witches’ familiars are usually cats and things, aren’t they?

‘Oh, great,’ Howard griped. ‘Like that’s much better. Not even mistaken for a biped.’

‘S alright, innit? Cats are well sexy, Howard, y’could do worse.’

That gave Howard a little pause, and Vince could practically see her face working through the reactions, twisting around as she tried to work out whether she ought to be flattered or offended. Even though they were tied up awaiting execution at the hands of a load of tiny hairy people, Vince couldn’t help his smile.

Hairy wasn’t entirely correct, though. The stuff the people were covered in was more like furry, grey-green moss. It looked dead soft, the kind of thing Vince might have taken a lazy afternoon nap on when he was a nipper if he’d found it growing in a sunny hollow or the vee of a comfortingly knobbly old tree. Then again, it also looked like the kind of thing that might just grow right over you while you were taking that nap and swallow you up, so maybe not.

‘Though they ain’t exactly human,’ Vince said, casually following the tail of a thought out into speech. ‘So maybe animals aren’t their idea of what a witch’s familiar looks like. Maybe it’s just tall Northern ladies with mad hair and moustaches.’

Howard twisted, elbowing him as much as she was capable of in their position. ‘I think I preferred cat.’

‘Rrrrow,’ Vince miaowed, fake-sexy like it was Hallowe’en and he had on ears and a catsuit. Howard choked audibly.

Honestly, it was her fault they’d ended up here, wherever here was, in the first place, even if it was Vince who’d got them tied up for being a witch. She was the one who’d tripped and fallen through one of Naboo’s mirrors, though what Naboo was doing keeping dimensional portals open and unprotected where anyone who happened to be snooping around his room (not to mention certain shamans and gorillas who made a habit of getting blazed off their tits) might fall into them, Vince didn’t know. Didn’t seem like very safe business to him.

And now they were trussed up together, one on either side of one of a large circle of wooden poles, ankles bound and wrists tied together at their sides. Howard had tried to wriggle free when the moss people had gone off and left them on their own, but had only succeeded in giving them both rope-burn.

‘Now, witch! You and your demon-consort familiar!’

Howard started hugely at the voice, a tug that knocked Vince’s head against the pole, and he winced. ‘Ow, easy.’

The leader of the moss people had returned, with a cadre of other shapes behind them. They had no real facial features that Vince could see, but an oddly familiar American accent issued from somewhere in there. ‘Now it is time for you to die. Have you repented of your crimes?’

‘We ain’t committed any crimes!’ Vince protested.

‘Silence!’

‘What, you asked!’

‘Silence!’ they snapped again. A jerk of the head, and one of the other moss people shuffled over, pulling out a knife and roughly cutting the rope that bound him and Howard to the pole, jerking them stumblingly over to face the crowd. Vince focussed on trying not to fall over, and shot a nasty look at the leader as he rubbed at his raw wrists.

‘Now!’ barked the leader, ‘your lying eyes will be gouged out and then preserved and displayed as a warning to others. Yours especially, witch, will make a very fine trophy,’ they added leeringly, and Vince sneered at them. Not that that did any good, but he could do without being perved over by plant people who wanted to kill him.

‘And then,’ they went on, ‘you will be killed and reconstituted into fertiliser. Do you have any questions?’

Normally, this was the part where Howard would start cowering and clinging to Vince and whimpering about Don’t kill her, she’s got so much to give! Vince knew the script. Except this time she wasn’t, and Vince glanced over curiously. She’d drawn herself up, chin lifted and jaw working nervously, and there was a strange expression of clarity on her face. Her eyes glittered under the alien stars.

Perhaps feeling Vince’s gaze on her, Howard’s eyes darted over, meeting Vince’s in a look heavy with significance. She looked like she was trying hard to communicate something to him without saying anything, and Vince shook his head, eyes wide in silent speech for I’ve got no idea what you’re trying to say.

Howard looked briefly exasperated. ‘Distract them!’ she hissed out of the corner of her mouth. Vince’s brow furrowed.

‘What? How?’

‘I don’t know!’ Just… buy me a minute, okay?’

‘Before you kill us!’ Vince burst out wildly, no idea of what he was going to say next. ‘Um. You should know.’

‘What?!’ snapped the leader.

‘We die very… messily,’ Vince ad-libbed, not sounding even remotely convincing to his own ears. ‘Yeah, um, our species, we… combust? When we die? Boom, big fuckoff explosion, meat and guts and shit everywhere, it’s well nasty. So, I mean, if you’re gonna kill us, you’ll probably wanna put down tarps or something? Definitely cover yourselves up, at least. I’m just thinkin’ about you, here.’

The leader paused uncertainly. ‘Lies! You expect us to believe you?’

Vince widened his eyes, offering a hopeful smile. ‘Go on, mate, look at me; you think I could lie with this face? Honestly, I’m, um, you know, just tryin’ to– one last good deed before I die, yeah?’

He could feel the jiggling nudge of Howard’s elbow against his side as she rooted in one of her pockets, and then suddenly she was shouting ‘Hai!’ like she’d been watching too many old kung fu movies, and the air was an explosion of white. Vince choked, stumbling back and squeezing his eyes shut.

‘Oh, shitnuts, it burns!’ the leader was yowling, and behind them a whole chorus of the other moss people, hissing and shouting over each other:

‘Ow, ow, bugger!’

‘Get it off, what is it!?’

‘Mommyyyyy!’

‘Run away!’

‘That’s right!’ Vince coughed, throat still too dry to manage a proper shout, but having a valiant go at it anyway. ‘You better run! Told you I was a witch, didn’t I?’

And then he doubled over to hack up a glob of disturbingly chalky-looking phlegm into the blue grass. He wrinkled his nose. ‘Ew.’

When he unbent himself, the powdery cloud had dispersed, and it was just him and Howard, alone in the circle of posts, casting dim shadows under the starlight. The moss person with the knife had dropped it in their haste to flee, and Vince hopped over to it clumsily, bending to saw through the rope around his ankles and then tossing it to Howard. Howard looked like she’d run afoul of a particularly vicious baker, dusted white from her hair all the way down her shirt, her expression pleased and baffled under the patina of white. ‘It worked!’

Vince laughed, more from relief than anything. ‘What worked? What was that?’

‘Baking soda.’ She hefted a little orange box in one hand, and Vince blinked at it, uncomprehending.

‘Baking soda?’

Howard cleared her throat in that way she had, somehow both self-important and self-conscious, and ran a hand through her hair, shaking loose another small storm of powder. ‘You recall my brief stint as an amateur naturalist?’

‘Nnnnnot really, no,’ Vince said without much guilt. Howard had tried on so many improbable vocations over the years, Vince could hardly be expected to remember all of them.

Howard sniffed. ‘Well, I recalled from my research at the time that baking soda is a safe, simple, and cost-effective way to get rid of the plague of unwanted moss in the domestic lawn or garden.’ The rote-memorisation quality to her voice faltered slightly, and she shrugged. ‘And I thought, well, they look a bit like moss, it’s worth a try.’

‘And you just happened to have a box of baking soda in your pockets?’ Vince bent again, peering incredulously. ‘How big are your pockets, even?’

Howard patted with satisfaction at pockets which definitely didn’t look big enough to have held the carton of baking soda. ‘Always pays to be prepared, Vince.’

Vince shook his head, a breath hissing between his teeth. ‘Girl guide gone mental, you are.’ Despite her evident pleasure, though, Howard was still looking rather baffled, and Vince laughed up at her in sudden, unexpected realisation. ‘Hey, Howard! Check you out! You’re finally a proper Action Hero!’

‘I am?’ Howard said, blinking, and then, ‘I am! Hah! What’d I always tell you? Monsoon Moon, comin’ atcha like a beam, like a ray, like a… botanist!’

Vince snorted as Howard delivered a series of flailing karate chops into the night air, but she subsided into stillness soon enough, looking down at her hands as if she’d never seen them before, curling them up tight and then spreading her fingers out in a fan.

‘I am,’ she repeated, and her tone was so quiet and wondering that for a moment, Vince felt like he was intruding on something intensely private. Howard’s eyes were very bright when she looked from her hands over to Vince, her cheeks drawn tight into a wobbly sort of smile. There was a smudge of baking soda in her moustache. ‘Picked a good time for it,’ she murmured. ‘Finally. Saved your arse.’

Vince chuckled, but it caught weirdly under his collarbone on the way out, like his throat was a mostly-empty tube of toothpaste. He swallowed. His face was threatening to do something weird, he could tell; there was a brittle, crackling feeling sneaking around his mouth and nose, and he drew in a sharp, fortifying breath. That wouldn’t do.

‘So now that you’re officially an Action Hero…’ Vince sidled into Howard’s personal space, letting one side of his mouth quirk up in a smirk (a much more acceptable thing for his face to be doing, under the circumstances). ‘You know what happens at the end of a proper Action Hero adventure, don’t you?’

Howard levelled a wry look at him, but Vince could see she was still buzzing, adrenaline and victory and sudden surprised self-awareness.

‘Well…’ Vince bit gently down on his lip, feeling the stretch as he let it slowly out between his teeth. ‘They get the girl, don’t they?’

An eyebrow got involved in Howard’s expression.

‘And I know I’m not exactly a girl,’ Vince went on. ‘But close enough, yeah?’

Howard had drifted closer as he spoke, her eyes warm, curious little slits, and Vince cocked his chin up in expectation of a kiss, but it didn’t come. Instead, Howard paused bare inches away, and hummed thoughtfully.

‘Mmm, I dunno, Vince. If I’m a real Action Hero now, I might be entitled to someone prettier.’

‘Prettier!? Watch it, cheeky; there’s no-one prettier than me.’

Howard’s face finally split into a wide, genuine grin, and she bent neatly to smack a chaste kiss against Vince’s mouth. He smiled, private and close-lipped, lifting his arms to hook around Howard’s neck, hands insinuating themselves into her hair and finding a curl to twirl ‘round his finger.

‘Mm, no, a proper one,’ he murmured. Howard obliged.

Vince felt the pause and querysome little noise Howard made into his mouth before she pulled out of the kiss to look around them, frowning vaguely. ‘How’re we gonna get home? It’s not like there’s a mirror for us to walk back through.’

Vince shrugged carelessly. ‘Naboo’ll show up eventually, won’t he? He’ll show up all bent outta shape that we were goin’ through his stuff and haul our arses home like he always does. You can rely on Naboo.’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

Howard’s arms swung aimlessly at her sides as she tipped back on her heels to peer up at the sky. Now they weren’t trussed up about to be horribly murdered, Vince was able to appreciate that whatever planet or dimension or alternate universe they were on or in was actually pretty gorgeous, all mad kaleidoscopic night sky and weird feathery purple trees and mesas and palisades behind them, glowing a soft cadmium orange.

It wasn’t exactly romantic, Vince thought, but it was pretty close. Beautiful scenery and a starlit sky, even if nothing was the right colour and they were covered in baking soda. He dropped into a squat, leaning back to sit with a little ‘oof’, stretching his legs out in front of him and bracing himself on his arms to look up at the sky. The moon was out, but this one was sort of yellowish, and had no cheerful, simple face looking back.

‘Reckon we should probably just stay where we are, yeah?’ He lifted his voice. ‘Make it easier for Naboo to find us when he comes looking. No sense in going wandering off and probably gettin’ caught up in some other nonsense.’

He felt a bit like a teenager. Not the way he’d ever really felt himself as a teenager, but the way teenagers in American films felt, sitting in cars and trying not to be too obvious.

Howard’s mouth twitched in a way that said she knew what Vince was doing and wasn’t sure whether she ought to call him out on it or not. Vince’s eyes flicked from studying the unfamiliar constellations to give her his best innocent look, and she huffed a little laugh through her nose.

‘A very sensible suggestion.’

They pulled hastily apart when Naboo finally arrived some time later, Howard scrambling to her feet and wiping the back of her hand over her mouth, tugging at the hem of her shirt like they’d been doing worse than just having a bit of a snog. Vince, a little flushed but unabashed, stayed where he was, half propped up in the long grass. Naboo left Bollo to struggle with rolling up the carpet, and clumped over, looking unimpressed. Vince nodded affably up at him.

‘Alright, Naboo?’

‘What, this is it? No catastrophes, you haven’t been locked up or violated by monsters or anything? Y’just decided, oh, you really needed to get stuck in an alternate dimension so you could mess around? Couldn’t’ve done that in the dimension you were already in?’

‘Nah, we got nabbed almost as soon as we got here. All set up to be killed by the locals, but Howard pulled out the magic, last minute, wham, ran ‘em right off. Aw, you should’ve seen it, dead impressive.’

‘Howard pulled out the magic,’ Naboo repeated. His dark eyes were inscrutable as ever, but his tone was just doubtful enough to be vaguely insulting. Or it probably would have been insulting, at any rate, if it hadn’t been so entirely understandable.

‘I did, as a matter of fact,’ said Howard, giving her stomach a little brush with her fingertips, and Vince looked over at her, quiet and curious. He knew well enough what Howard’s boasting sounded like, desperate overcompensating bluster, and this wasn’t that. She still sounded proud, but it was the sort of pride that didn’t need anyone else’s affirmation to make it real. Vince pressed his knees together, squirming a little on the spot.

For an impossibly long moment, Naboo just studied Howard impassively. Then, seeming to come to a decision, he nodded. ‘All right. Well done, then.’

Both Howard and Vince blinked. ‘Well done?’

Naboo shrugged. ‘Well, you had to grow out of being a total useless coward at some point, didn’t you?’

It was the worst kind of backhanded compliment, but coming from Naboo, it was practically ringing praise. Howard’s face convulsed awkwardly, and then a smile fluttered across it as if blown there by a hesitant wind.

Vince grinned outright. ‘Cheers, Naboo.’

Bollo, out of breath and hauling the rolled-up carpet, trundled up behind Naboo, and gave Howard a nod and a grunt. ‘Howard learning.’

‘Learning what?’ Howard wanted to know, but Bollo just shook his head.

‘You see.’

Naboo grimaced, wrinkling his nose. ‘Right, are we done being all lovey dovey here? ‘Cos I think that’s about as much sincerity as I can handle.’

And at that, Howard laughed, a real, proper, fond laugh that creased up her face and left white lines of baking soda in all the laugh lines, and ambled over to clap Naboo on the shoulder. ‘You know, Naboo, I think we are.’

Naboo pulled away, the nose-wrinkle spreading out to encompass his entire face. ‘All right, all right, we’re all proud of you. Now I wanna get back. Come on, Bollo, get the carpet out.’

‘I just finish rolling it up!’ Bollo protested, and Naboo looked at him flatly.

‘Did you want to hang around here any longer than we have to?’

And, grumbling, Bollo assented.

Howard was terrified of flying on planes, but for some reason, Naboo’s carpet had never bothered her. Fewer mechanical parts to potentially fail and send them all plummeting to a horrible death, Vince supposed. So she didn’t cling to Vince as they flew back, and Vince didn’t hold her hand for comfort as Naboo and Bollo bickered over directions. After one of their near-death adventures, Vince was usually fizzing over with energy; he’d want to go out dancing or something to wear out the giddy adrenaline left over. Now, though, there was something welling up from under his lungs, but it wasn’t the usual bouncing zip. It was a warm feeling like a throatful of hot tea that made him feel curiously grounded, for all they were hundreds of feet in the air.

He leaned over to knock shoulders with Howard, and bit his lip around a smile. ‘You are gonna have to teach me how you do that with your pockets. I could well use that; you’ve seen how tight my trousers are, I can’t fit hardly anything into my pockets.’

Howard just tapped her nose with a finger. ‘Tricks of the trade, Vince.’

‘What trade? The having-too-many-pockets-and-keeping-enough-stuff-in-them-to-build-a-Spinning-Jenny trade?’ Vince wasn’t actually even sure what a Spinning Jenny was, but he remembered the name from one of Howard’s lectures.

‘Ahh, but I could build a Spinning Jenny if I had to, if the circumstances called for it; you’d not be laughing then.’

The wind stung Vince’s eyes, but he grinned anyway, leaning playfully in. ‘Oh, really?’

‘If the two of you are gonna start snogging back there,’ Naboo called over his shoulder, ‘I will have Bollo shove you off the carpet.’

Vince didn’t see as that deserved a response, but Howard harrumphed. ‘Of course we’re not; Vince might be prone to such reckless behaviour, but I am well aware that that would contravene safety regulations.’

Vince was pretty sure there weren’t any safety regulations for flying carpets, and that even if there were, Naboo had probably broken all of them by now, but Howard’s tone was so deadpan that Vince honestly had no idea whether she was joking or not. Her hair was whisking about all over her face and her eyes were all squinted up underneath it, but there was a definite twinkle happening in the midst of all the crow’s feet, and suddenly Vince was smiling so hard it hurt.

He kept on smiling all the way home, even when Howard squinted suspiciously at him and demanded to know why.

So, that’s it! More or less, for now. I thought that seemed like a pretty good place to end things, anyway. Narrative and all that.

Now, the thing about Howard is, she likes to take things slow. Always has done. I’m the one always throwin’ meself in at the deep end and just goin’ with the flow. (Howard’s pointed out that that’s a very jazzy outlook; I’d point out that Howard is a filthy liar.) Howard prefers to sit down and research for ages and ages, and doesn’t end up doing anything half the time, for all her banging on about being a Wild and Impulsive Woman of Action. So that’s how she’s doing this, taking it slow.

She hasn’t picked out a new first name, doesn’t even know if she’s gonna, yet, but she figured she could handle the baby step of changing her middle name instead. Which, fair enough, Tom and Jerry were rubbish middle names. Mama and Papa Moon are generally pretty boring and sensible (in a good way! Howard’s mum always gave me biscuits when I were a nipper), but I always wondered what that was about. So now it’s Beatrice. Howard Beatrice Moon. It’s got a ring to it, yeah?

Still, it’s pretty wicked seein’ how happy she is now. Not all the time, mind; like I said, this ain’t a proper ending to the story, but loads more than she had been for ages. Sometimes we have a bit of a cuddle and a kiss, and that’s well nice, and sometimes Howard freaks out and we have to stop, but sometimes she doesn’t. And sometimes I call her Bea, just to see the way her little crab eyes crinkle up when she smiles.

Culumacilinte
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