It was a hot stormy night. The tepid air
from the fan blew over his balloon-like bulk as he sat at his desk like some
giant pupa about to hatch, his great rolls of fat palpitating when he breathed
or moved. Nana Mouskouri sang softly to him in the background as he worked. Arthur
J Havealot, Media Mogul and Movie Magnate, was a hard man; and she was the only
one who could melt his heart. He watched the dirty red flames in the distance
flickering against the darkening sky. A pall of smoke hung like a shroud over
the twinkling lights of the town down below.
He was in his Penthouse suite. Founder of
the Havealot corporation, owner of the Havealot High Rise building, the Canning
factory, and nine tenths of the town. He was the wealthiest man in the country,
with the swankiest apartment at the top of the world. He never went out, having
no real need to; and having many enemies he would rather avoid, he spent all
his time up here.
But the trouble with living and working in the
world’s highest building is that you don’t often get to see the ordinary people
walking below in the street. Your view is mostly of distant things…buildings
and suchlike, and any people you might see are as small and insignificant as
ants…and usually just as busy, which was good for profits.
Although he was never seen, and never spoke
directly to anyone but a few select staff, he wielded immense power and
influence through his newspapers and TV channels, controlling what people
thought and did and bought, who they voted for and what views they held on any given
subject. But bit by bit he’d gotten out of touch with life….printing things
about people he never knew and never met…and eventually didn’t care about……just
watching and directing their lives from his ivory tower.
He broke out another cigar and lit it from a
ten dollar bill. A practice he had continued after making his first million. It
was like a lucky charm to him. It brought him continued good fame and wealth.
The end of his cigar glowed against the light of the fire on the horizon…the
black cigar smoke mingling with that in the evening sky.
He was being kept abreast of events, as per
usual, by his staff, who sent in a constant stream of moment to moment information.
Distantly watching the drama unfold, he had no idea that he was the direct
cause of the conflagration now beginning to eat up the town. ‘Irresponsible reporting’
was a phrase that applied to lesser mortals, not to him. Once chaos took over,
it became ‘their fault’, not his. It was his job to ‘stir up the people; get
things done’. That is what they wanted…action. ‘Inciting a riot’, on the other
hand, was what mob leaders did, and this mob had set fire to the administration
building of the local jail once they found that their bird had flown the coop.
Fire engines fought desperately to stop the fire spreading to the rest of the
prison. Measures were already in place for the evacuation of prisoners should
that happen, and all this because Ronald, AKA Ronetta Watts, had escaped from
his cell and was nowhere to be found.
Ronetta sat in the bath at the City Limits motel.
The first one she’d had since she was a kid. They had come here first just in
case her mother had stuck to the original plan. They had decided to wait an
hour or two then go. Then she would take him to where she thought Joshua was. After
that, who knows? The plan was he would bring her back here to catch the
Greyhound bus to Tipperary.
She lay back in the steamy water and thought
about jail. She felt she’d rather die than go back there; now that she’d given
herself the dream of freedom, and the freedom to dream. She never knew how much
she had hated jail until she was out...how much she’d hated all the things
she’d had to do to survive. But with a bit of luck that was all over now. This
was a new life…with a new her. She looked at herself. She was fascinated by the
way her body looked underwater – the strange angles of her legs and feet, and
how it accentuated her curvy hips and her breasts and belly. She looked
beautiful and she felt beautiful.
She could hear Samuel pacing up and down in
the bedroom next door. She had mixed feelings about him and couldn’t settle on
any one particular emotion. It had started off with her just using him to get
what she wanted – like she used all her men. But he had been different; different
from the other prisoners and different from the other wardens who had lusted
after her. He was so……innocent and sincere. And then there was the fact that
she now believed he had really fallen in love with her; and that was a whole
new experience for her. It put her thoughts all in a tangle. She didn’t know what
she felt…what she wanted.
Things were in such a state of flux that she
had to entertain many different scenarios all at once. Some involved leaving
him behind; and strangely she felt very unhappy about that. In others she saw
them escaping together; and that felt scary because she didn’t know if she
wanted to live with him, or if she even liked him. She was attracted to him,
sure, but she didn’t know if she liked him. Everything had happened too
quickly. How could she know? And then there was a huge problem on his
side to contend with. She feared that he didn’t fully understand the
implications of the word ‘transvestite’.
In every respect but one, she resembled a
woman. She was beautifully proportioned with small hands and feet, and big hips
and bosoms. She had a delicately feminine face with a small pert nose and no
visible Adams apple. There were absolutely no physical signs whatsoever to
remind people that she was a man. With one exception - which was always well
hidden - she was more woman than most women you’d meet on the street. A lot was
due to the oestrogen pills she took. She put on weight in all the places that
women put on weight…thighs and breasts, and her beard had practically stopped
growing. Samuel had fallen so completely for the woman side of her that she was
dreading the moment of revelation. Whichever way this whole thing went, he
needed to know and see the whole truth about her sooner rather than later. She’d
seen it all before. The shock…the incredulity…the embarrassment, the quick cover
up by both parties…the awkward excuses and the hurried goodbyes. Once or twice
there was anger, even though she was always clear about her gender and made
sure they knew ‘she’ was a ‘he’. But knowing and seeing are two very different
things; a fact which Samuel was going to find out. She knew he had forgotten
this in his headlong rush to fall in love with her. There was no avoiding it
though. She wanted to get the shock over and done with, because once the
clothes come off there was no escaping the fact that she was one of God’s in-between
creatures.
“Samuel…”
she called. “Would you be a dear and come and soap my back for me?”
In the next room Samuel was looking out the
window at the helicopters and searchlights sweeping the sky…the faint sound of
sirens and the red flicker of flames on the horizon coming from the direction
of the jail. He could only guess at what was happening there, but he didn’t want
to give it too much thought. And as for this motel, although you’d have thought
this would be the first place the police would look, they would have thought
that too. Anyway they had their hands full at the moment. Samuel had hidden the
car behind an old shed some ways away and registered them as Mr and Mrs from
Malvoli Heights.
He heard her call from the bathroom but
didn’t bother answering. He felt she was just being cruel now, asking him to do
something like that. He was in a lather of self-hate and his heart was pretty
much ripped to shreds as it was. There were two aches inside of him. The one
that hurt the most was Clara. The things she had said cut him like a knife. She
might as well have stabbed him with the real thing…it would have been less
painful. That she could hate him so much broke his heart. He knew he wasn’t a
perfect husband…but who was? She wasn’t the perfect wife if it came to that.
Alright, she had been very upset…under a terrible strain…and drunk, but even
so, it didn’t hurt any the less. Something had broken inside and there was no picking
up the pieces. He would never forget the words she had said. They would always
stand between them. He would always know that’s how she felt about him. He knew
their marriage hadn’t been the best, but they had been a support for each other
over the years. They’d had children together…good times. And she was all he
had. He couldn’t conceive of a life without her or the children. This crisis
had smashed them to pieces. He’d lost his son. He’d lost his daughter after
that incident at the church…and now he’d lost his wife. He felt very sorry for
himself. He had no reason to carry on. He didn’t want to. He didn’t really want
to live. And then added to the whole damn mess was Ronetta; who had bewitched
him. He could think of it in no other way. He knew he was under some sort of
crazy spell. He also knew that anyone who knew about it, and by now that was
everyone in the prison – colleagues included – were laughing at him up their
sleeves. Whereas previously he had strutted around the place like Mr Bigstuff,
now he was a joke, his life and reputation in ruins. There’s no fool like a
big-mouth fool. Not only was he a fool to love her – but he was a fool to think
that she’d ever in a million years have looked at him other than as a means to
an end. And that’s all he got. A look…to taunt his broken heart.
So there was pain on both sides of his heart
and nothing to look forward to. Even though he deserved everything he got…it
still hurt. No one loved him – no one wanted him. He felt like jumping off a
bridge. He couldn’t carry on bothering to live or do things – there was no
point – except that he wanted to find Joshua….if Ronetta was right about where
he was. That was the only reason he carried on, but even so it was with half a
heart.
“Darling…” Ronetta called from the bathroom;
another insincere arrow through his heart. He would rather have her be honest
with him…but she still needed his help…for a little while longer. Otherwise she
had what she wanted, and he wasn’t included in the package. She was just
throwing him a bone to keep him sweet. He had no expectations of seeing her
after this. She didn’t get out of jail just to get stuck with a jailor…for
that’s all he knew how to do…keep people prisoner. She would tell him where his
son was and he would never see her again. She was taking the Greyhound out of
here and he wasn’t going to be on it. She had a plan. Women like that
always have a plan. She had money (carefully saved up over the years) and she
had a plan. He had nothing and nowhere to go. Ronetta knew what she wanted; and
Samuel wasn’t one of those things. Neither was going back to jail. He couldn’t
blame her. He thought again of the cell he had rescued her from. Damp and
bleak: a stained, open toilet bowl in one corner…sans seat, a rusty tin sink
for her to wash in, a cup, toothbrush, a small cupboard for her clothes and
make-up, and a single bed with a coir mattress. No place for a lady. It made
him ache to think of her there.
“Got everything?” he had asked what seemed
like years ago. That was the one moment he had felt like a dashing knight in
shining armour actually rescuing his princess. He had been unable to find his
keys that morning, so he’d had to improvise on the plan. Luckily for him,
rumours had reached the prison concerning the intention of the local populace
to break in and free Ronetta. Under the guise of moving her to a safer place he
had got the co-operation of his colleagues to spirit her out of there. They had
even offered him a police car but he had convinced them of the need to be
incognito. He had collected her from her cell and given her a helping hand with
her bags.
They had been just about to go through the
security gates at the end of the processing hall when he had glimpsed a sea of
twisting bodies trying to force their way through the entrance lobby.
“This way,” he said, grabbing her arm and
starting to run, her soft flesh melting under his firm grasp.
“I’m glad you came,” she whispered in his
ear and stumbled against him on purpose. He’d put his hand out to steady her
and she’d lingered under his fingers. Even in that mad rush he had been that
close to kissing her. He hungered for her from the bottom of his being; a
ravenous need…a primitive urge that no brain could rationalize or deny, an ache
of animal desire. And yet he knew that to her he was just a fool. A stiff,
stodgy, old fashioned, conservative, ignorant, working class fool. What would
she ever want with him? Which brought him back to the present moment.
“Would you be a dear and come and soap my
back for me?”
Without thinking he turned to answer her
call and caught a glimpse of himself in the full length bedroom mirror on the
wall. The flames from the prison-fire played across the left side of his face,
and the flashing neon sign of the motel splashed across the right side. For a
moment he could not tell what kind of creature confronted him; a foreboding,
two-faced mythological monster who had been lying in wait for him. The face in
the mirror gave him an evil smirk of triumph, and behind him the room melted
into gleeful glimpses of the Halfway to Hell Motel. For a moment Samuel could
actually see himself and Ronetta entwining on the bed behind him…naked lust
thrusting them together. Then the image spoke to him.
“And
you know that will never happen, unless you go in there and take what is yours.
You know she’s playing you for a fool. You know she’s just using you,” said the
voice in the mirror. “But I suppose she’s the one with the balls after all.
You’re just a patsy. What a joke. Big brave macho man Sam…wiping another man’s
arse and helping him to escape with tears in your eyes…. ‘please don’t leave
me’…. ‘I love you’……Can you hear yourself? Why don’t you wait till she tells
you where the boy is then drag her sorry ass back to jail (after giving her a
good going-over of course). And back in jail at least you’ll be able to organize
some regular sex with her. That’s what you want isn’t it.”
Tears sprang to his eyes. He knew he would
never be man enough to do anything except let Ronetta walk right over him. She
was much too strong for him. He would do anything for her. He was a sham of a
man. When it came down to it he was all mouth and muscle and no courage.
The face in the mirror faded and the sounds
of her splashing in the bath reached out to mock him.
