Spacetran             by: Beverly Taff

 

Chapter 8

I arrived to find Beverly back in her now familiar seat in the village hotel being amused and entertained by her newly found she-male and transsexual friends. All trace of the anger and frustration from the afternoon's encounter seemed to have evaporated as the group discussed dresses and bridal outfits for the forthcoming wedding. They welcomed me with open arms and eyed Beverly enviously before congratulating her once again at having discovered such a wonderful companion to share her life.

"And a ‘lipstick lesbian’ to boot love. You’re a lucky girl Bev."

"We’re both lucky girls." Chirped Beverly as she made room on the settee for me to squeeze in beside her.

As we sat and chatted a waitress supplied us with drinks and we spent the rest of the evening being introduced to other residents of the village. Beverly positively blossomed and I hugged myself with silent satisfaction as I watched her circulating freely amongst the she-males, transvestites and transsexuals who regularly frequented the bar. She even spoke to a couple of gay guys who had wandered in and when I queried her about it later she just shrugged easily.

"I didn’t feel threatened Ruby. In fact I didn’t feel threatened all night. This village is a terrific place; it’s like therapy. In fact, I’m going to buy a flat here."

"I thought you wanted to live in my cottage in New England."

"We can have a pierre-de-terre’ in Manchester can’t we. It only takes a few minutes to travel across in the Albatross."

I had forgotten of course. The Albatross had reduced the whole world to a village. I still hadn’t adjusted to the concept and I grinned to myself as I contemplated the grief and heartache it would bring to immigration departments and nation states when world citizens could live in Africa, work in Europe, lunch in Asia and club the night away in America or Australia. I grinned at Beverly and hugged her tight as I finally grasped the portent of her remark to the Spanish captain in the cabin of the Albatross. ‘I’m an Earthwoman and this is Earth!’

I smiled as I replied.

"Whatever you wish Beverly. With the money I make from the prosthesis business and your income from development of the anti-gravity engine we’ll be able to afford an apartment in every city."

"I’m not that greedy. It’s just that I like it here."

"D’you intend keeping your transvestism a secret?"

"Originally I did, yes. I felt so threatened, but this place is so cool and people are so friendly. Anyway it’s no matter now. One of those two transsexuals at the bar is lawyer and she’s dead keen to see a trannie make it to the top of the business world.

She say’s that once one of us has got a toehold in the industrial world they won’t be able to sack us from our jobs when we ‘come out’."

"I’m not sure I follow."

"You can be dim sometimes Ruby. Just think if the company that builds the space ships is owned and run by a transvestite and a lesbian, then the whole work force can be what they like. It’ll be like an umbrella to shelter any person who has any ‘problems’ with his or her sexuality. There won’t be any sexist or racist or fascist bastards to persecute anybody for being gay or lesbian or transsexual or transvestite or anything. Just remember how you were made to feel vulnerable and threatened when you came out as a lezzie at the FreeThinkers Journal; and that’s a liberal intellectual organisation!"

I thought back to exactly that time. How people made snide remarks behind my back how hushed conversations were shut down when ever I approached; how little sniggers and titters followed my every step. The worst of it was that up until my fall-out with my boyfriend, I had still had some bisexual leanings. It had wounded me deeply to learn that the one boyfriend I thought I could rely on for support had betrayed me and rejected me out of hand when I had ‘come out’. It had made my life a hell.

Strangely in my own factories, I had not adopted Beverly’s ideas and instigated a ‘positive discrimination’ policy towards gays etc but I had done something similar for maimed, disabled and paralysed individuals. I realised I had been slightly remiss in not doing as Beverly intended and I felt mildly guilty. She had shown me the light. I hugged her tight to me as I whispered to her.

"So you intend to employ only gays and trannies and suchlike?"

"Oh gosh no!" She smiled. "I intend to employ people on merit first. I’ll have to if I’m to maintain standards of workmanship and stuff. Look how well made Albatross 2 and 3 are. It’s just that there will be a positive discrimination towards gays and trannies if there’s nothing else to choose."

While Beverly spoke the transsexual lawyer rejoined us and we hammered out some important questions. As the evening passed our discussions became more open until it almost became a public meeting. The lawyer was adept at handling such events however and things progressed smoothly. By midnight we were ready for bed and the lawyer studied us enviously as we made our excuses. In fact many envious but grateful eyes watched us depart. Our ideas became common knowledge amongst the clientele and the news was discussed long after we had gone to bed. Out of the fifty or so genderdisphorics in the small hotel that night about forty had lost their jobs because of their sexuality. Most had lost their marriages and the remainder had been unable to find a job. Many were going home to a lonely flat with no companion. Many were capable, intelligent, imaginative people who had lost good jobs in high places and were now reduced to low paid menial jobs in the service sector.

Beverly’s policies would change all that and if it was multiplied in factories around the planet the social implications were enormous.

Contrary to general preconceptions about extrovert gays, we found that the one thing we could rely on in the village was discretion. Beverly’s secret transvestism was not going to get out until the legal structure and control of the company was bound up and watertight. Nobody was going to use her sexuality to have her declared insane or incapable and thus deprive her of her ownership of the rights to antigravity and space warping.

We woke the next morning expecting to find the town alive with reporters and gutter press looking for some obscene angle to our forthcoming marriage but we were pleasantly surprised to find all our arrangements still a secret. The village community could be tight lipped and protective when it wished and we were grateful to it.

Beverly and I got married in a quiet, little inner city chapel attached to a mission hall in central Manchester. Even the visit to the registry office attracted little attention although the lady registrar was only convinced of Beverly’s ‘true’ legal sex after personally witnessing a medical examination with a lesbian gynaecologist attending.

Even then the gynaecologist was asked to prepare and sign a document attesting to Beverly’s ‘true’ condition. It was the one single unpleasant indignity that Beverly was forced to suffer and although it hurt her deeply it was a price she was prepared to pay. The registrar had the decency to apologise after explaining she was required by law to make certain the wedding was legal. She backhandedly complimented Beverly by observing that she looked far too much like a woman to ever be accepted as a man. We left to indulge in a wedding bash of truly earth-shattering proportions as virtually the whole gay village turned out to celebrate. It was only because of the tumult in the village that the press picked up the ground waves of some auspicious earthshaking developments. It was all too late however. By the time their gutter vultures had arrived, Bev and I were off to my cottage on our honeymoon. We left a very murky trail because we travelled via Switzerland and France to pick up Cold Albatross and warp to America in secret.

After spending a couple of weeks at my cottage we left for several months amongst the Amphs enjoying the company of our numerous children. We finally left the Amphs to resume our work on Earth but happy in the knowledge we were never more than a couple of ‘days’ warp time away from our children.

Six months later the first commercial space ship with a gravity engine was built in Manchester and departed from Liverpool for the planets.

We discovered that the huge ‘ship sized’ spacecraft were better handled from large open stretches of calm water because of the supportive equalising forces of water-borne buoyancy. During launching and landing the hugely disruptive forces of accumulating and dissipating anti-grav were best discharged over the same calm ‘displaceable’ water.

It was a spectacular sight to watch the mighty spacecraft imprint a huge ‘footprint’ into the water as they commenced or ended their journeys.

Liverpool, with its wide river Mersey, was the nearest suitably large area of calm water. Many old grandfathers revisited their youth by taking their grandchildren down to the banks of the Mersey at The Pier Head to relive the sight of ‘The Big Liners’ once more docking in the river. Our activities also brought a new lease of life to the old derelict Manchester Ship Canal as the spacecraft ploughed to and from the building and repair yards at Trafford Park for maintenance.

Our new venture had returned prosperity to two large depressed cities. One were the space ships were built and the other were they were docked. It was Beverly’s way of saying thank you to those two old rival cities for saving her life and sanity. Once, long ago when she was a child beggar on the streets of Liverpool and again in the gay village of Manchester. I had never thought of her being a philanthropist but then there were still many sides to my wounded partner I had still to discover.

The final seal of bliss to our marriage was when I discovered I was pregnant to Beverly. She was ecstatic at becoming a father and yet hugely envious of my condition. It was my first real insight into the duality of her transvestism.

Each night she would fondle my growing lump and squeeze as close as she dared in an attempt to somehow assimilate my condition to herself by proximity. I never realised just how much she envied women until that time. The final delight was discovering it was twins. That particular night as I whispered the news into her ear I suddenly realised how I could alleviate her envy. I suggested that she share in the breast-feeding of the twins. She let out a squeal of delight and her mood improved immediately.

Some months later after she had started taking the hormones to stimulate her milk she visited me in the hospital and secretly revealed the damp patches inside her nursing bra. She had timed her dosage to perfection for the following night my labour pains started and I was delivered of the twins in the small hours of the morning. In the privacy of our private ward our lesbian gynaecologist friend helped us to breast-feed the twins while I recovered from the delivery. Three days later we were released from hospital and returned to the cottage to commence our new life as a family. Every day we could be found sharing in the secondary delights of motherhood as we sat facing each other sharing blissful smiles and each nursing a suckling twin in our arms. Beverly’s happiness was complete.

THE  END 

 

 

If you enjoyed this story I have two other stories.

One is called Mindful.

It is a somewhat dark Cathartic novel that explores other aspects of abuse in care.

This book was written some years after Space Tran but several years before the publication of the Waterhouse report. This was a public investigation that was commissioned by the British government to explore abuse in care in North Wales during the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Again, ‘Mindful’ is a Sci-fi fiction Novel that follows the progress of a Transvestite child (Ian) who is diagnosed as a Paranoid Schizophrenic because nobody realises that the voices he keeps hearing are in fact other people’s thoughts.

His transvestism leads to his being abused and they experiment to research his sexual development. He is given the option of a male or female form and chooses a she-male form and this causes him/her to become an ‘off the wall’ dysfunctional child.

With the advent of puberty his/her (Ian-Iona’s) schizophrenia finally reveals itself to be other peoples thoughts and he/she realises he/she is telepathic. Because it happens between him/her and an autistic idiot-savant mute whilst in a psychiatric ward, nobody learns of her telepathy and she is able to utilise the other patients as ‘cannon fodder’ to develop her mental powers.

Iona utilises her telepathy to finally prove her sanity and is released into the community.

She meets old acquaintances and tries to develop a normal life but events overtake her. Two female friends have telepathic children by Iona and she is forced to escape after British Authorities begin to suspect something is afoot.

Iona ends up cast ashore in America, USA and falls in with a deaf lesbian artist who rescues her from drowning in the surf. The artist and another lesbian friend end up having telepathic children by Iona and once again she is forced to flee. The chase continues and she ends up saving her children from the laboratory bench by destroying the research base in Nevada. Her attack on the base brings down a holocaust of firepower and she uses this to end her own life. (Or does she?)

Her final apparent suicide is the dark side of abuse in care.

There are thirty-five chapters to this book and in truth I am hoping to get it published as a proper book one day.

 

To this end, and after a brief chat With Teddie Sue I have decided to next present another much more light-hearted novel called ‘Mares Tales’.

This novel explores some very perverse themes and really demonstrates how ‘off the wall’ a single individual can get.

God alone knows where this one came from but if there is a really weird side to my personality then this explores it.

It includes, Bondage, Amputees, Surgery, Hormones, Girls Schools, Discipline and lots, lots more.

The novel was actually turned down by Echo publications so that shows how weird it gets.

On Teddie Sue’s advice and because everybody must be tired of my dark side I have decided to next offer ‘Mares Tales’ for your digestion.

See you in few weeks with chapter 1 of Mares Tales. The novel is already completed and there are 32 chapters.

Regards,

Beverly Taff.

 

 

© 2001
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