Chapter Text
September, 1939
“What’s your name, then, son?”
“Pe-er-” “Peter? Right, this way then.”
The scrawny 23-year-old nodded and shuffled towards the long queue of boys the man had gestured at. Peter, the newly named one, was wracked with all sorts of emotions, none of them remotely good. The recent National Service Act required all men aged 18 to 41 to register for service. A full conscription of men soon after Britain’s declaration of war on Germany could only mean that the looming threat had finally arrived. It was now time for the next generation of Britain’s men to bear witness to horrors immeasurable in brutality.
Peter stole quick glances at the men around him, towering figures of all sorts and shapes around him. A small group were laughing and jabbing each other in the ribs, miming holding rifles and blowing each other’s heads off. Many were dower, staring vacantly at the back of the person in front of them or down at their feet. Their dread resonated hollow within Peter’s chest. They most likely remembered tales told to them by their fathers about the war to end all wars, yet here they were, doomed to experience the pain that had left good ol’ dad shaky and numb.
Peter could vaguely remember the face of his father if he tried. That voice, however, rang clearly in his ears like it was yesterday.
“PEGGY!” A voice bellowed from another room.
She scrambled to her feet and looked towards the sound, despite not doing anything he would usually consider naughty. She called back, trying to keep her voice steady, “Yeah?”
“Go play outside fer a mo’!”
Her mother’s voice distantly added, “Lizzy’s got some rag dolls her mummy made, y’know!”
Peggy sighed, driving her foot into the floor a bit to quietly burn off some anger. “Alright!” She called back, hoping the fake enthusiasm injected into her tone would be enough to deter any accusations of being attitudinal.
Scraping a few marbles off the floor where she’d been sitting, Peggy shoved them into the pockets of her coat before taking it off the hanger and throwing it on. She started towards the door, opening her mouth to make up some lie about where she’d be going before quickly shutting it and just continuing out the door. They wouldn’t mind.
She stood for a moment, rocking back and forth on her heels and fumbling with the marbles in her pocket as she considered where she could wander off to. There wasn’t much to do in Manchester.
It wasn’t one of the “posh cities” that her parents would talk about wanting to visit. Every time they brought up one of them — London, New York City, Berlin, Los Angeles — Peggy would beg desperately to hear more, yearning to visit them if only in her mind. Beautiful parks, theaters for music and movies, boutiques full of the most modern fashion, all things Manchester sorely lacked. Her hometown seemed to be constantly under construction, full of ugly industrial buildings, and clogged with loud cars.
As a glaring display of how barren the town was, those construction sites had turned into places where the more adventurous and oftentimes rebellious kids could play — Peggy, of course, being one of them.
Something about the massive piles of materials captured Peggy’s imagination. It appealed to her, the idea that what looked like rubble would be meticulously organized, brick by brick, tile by tile, joined by iron and mortar to create a final, functional structure. In fact, one day, after making sure no workers would see her, Peggy snuck onto a construction site and nabbed a few things for a project of her own: a makeshift swing.
Consisting of a wooden slat for a seat and two pieces of rope that were sloppily nailed to it, Peggy’s swing was hanging proudly from one side of a streetlamp’s ladder bars. She wondered if other neighborhood kids had gotten any fun out of it. Her head lifted, eyes shining with a sudden zeal. Why not go check?
Peggy was just beginning her strides towards the street corner when her ears picked up a distinct sound.
“I mean… it’s just not right, is it? Margaret… being like that.”
She stopped dead in her tracks. The words, unmistakably said in her father’s voice, were coming from a window that had been left open just a crack. She inched closer, ducking below the windowsill to eavesdrop without being spotted.
“Might become one of them women who like women, if you know what I mean.” There was a long stretch of silence after those words. Peggy could visualize the faux-baffled look her mother would be wearing, the one she always put on to avoid her husband’s wrathful tirades. Playing dumb.
“…I don’t know,” she finally settled on. “She’s probably jus’ lookin’ to follow what the older girls are doing. There is that little group of- well, I didn’t even know they were girls at first, but- I hear they’re calling themselves tomboys.” Peggy cocked her head to the side at that. Tomboys.
She had seen the small gang of girls before — tall with short, boyish haircuts, always in loose-fitting pants and tight shirts with high collars. She couldn’t deny that a strange, excited emotion filled her chest whenever she walked by them. Always unsure whether it was fear, admiration, or something else entirely, she usually tucked that thought away soon after getting out of eyeshot of them.
Her father scoffed, drawing her attention back, “It’s a bloody mystery, isn’t it? She’s a man and a woman. Can’t tell what she is. If she wants to be a man so badly, she should work a man’s job. Would bring in more money than a stint as a teacher or a little maid. Hell, she can barely keep her own room clean, she’d make a shit maid.”
Peggy clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. “She’s twelve, Arthur,” her mother contested flatly. He made a noncommittal noise in response.
At the sound of the conversation’s dying, Peggy tentatively stepped away from the window, then broke into a full sprint for a few blocks before skidding to a stop at the site of her prized swing. After yanking on the ropes to test if it could still hold her weight, she eased down onto the plank of wood, smiling to herself when her feet dangled below her.
A man’s job.
It wasn’t a half-bad idea. If she could manage dressing up like a boy, she might be able to land a quite well-paying job, and lord knew her family needed that.
The image of her mother yelling, through tears, at a man half-conscious from exhaustion vividly entered her mind. Her words echoed, “It’s not enough, Arthur! You know it isn’t!”
That was the day Peggy had started pickpocketing. It wasn’t anything she was proud of, but a voice in the back of her head told her that “Mum and Da won’t be mad”. Sure enough, when she came home and silently dropped a few coins on the table, her mother had looked up from the dish she was cleaning and gave her daughter a look halfway between sorrowful and relieved. Without saying a word, she had scooped up the coins in her hand, slipped them into the pocket of her apron, gave Peggy a short nod, and went back to cleaning.
She was good with her hands, she figured, so any job that required more of a deft touch and less brute strength could work, as long as she passed as a bloke.
The next time Peggy spotted that same group of girls — the tomboys — rather than ducking her head and rushing past, she allowed her gaze to linger. One of them caught her eye, smiled, and gave her a short nod. Peggy’s face lit up in a wide grin and she nodded back madly, surely looking like a bobblehead. The tomboy chuckled and waved as Peggy shoved her hands in her coat pockets and hurriedly rushed off, the adrenaline not wearing off until she was a few blocks away.
Her body thrummed with excitement; she could swear she felt each pump of blood from her heart racing through her veins. She couldn’t identify what brought her to react like this, but she did know that it felt good. More than that, it felt extraordinary. Even just locking eyes with one of them felt like a live wire, an instant connection that jolted Peggy’s brain with hot, crackling electricity.
Inexplicably, instinctively, she was drawn closer. Maybe it was envy, or a yearning for rebellion against her parents, or a likeness between them and her that was immediately understood but couldn’t be defined.
Or, it was their hair.
Hair had always been somewhat of a sore spot for Peggy. Ever since she was a baby, her hair had always been a slightly odd color. Her father’s near jet black and mother’s warm, dirty blonde had resulted in what Peggy found to be a terrible hue. It was a dark, ashen brown, near greyish. One of the more snide popular girls at her school had remarked that the color reminded her of an old wooden table covered in dust. This, of course, led to an ongoing joke of girls running a finger over her head, trying to see if any of the dust would come off.
One day, when her patience had finally worn thin, she nicked her mother’s feather duster before going off to school. The moment when a girl “checked” her hair once again, Peggy chirped a quick “Oh!” Then, leaning down, she pulled the duster from her bag and daintily brushed at her head with it, her eyes closed and expression soft, as if it were something as normal as powdering her face.
The classroom burst into laughter, which only heightened when Peggy offered the duster to one of the girls while mentioning that, “You look like you could use it as well, Nora!” Nora did not take kindly to that.
Peter smiled at the memory, a soft, small thing that didn’t quite reach his eyes. He was so different now. Worse, the ever-present voice in his head chimed. He sighed and rolled his shoulders back, resolute. At least he was happier. If it took being worse in the eyes of others to be happy, so be it. He just hoped that someday he wouldn’t feel like such a liar.
The young girl he used to be was so chipper, a real social butterfly, loud and adventurous and prideful. But at some point, everything seemed to shift out of her favor. One by one, the things she loved, the behaviors she displayed, the way she was, it all suddenly became odd. It was all unfit for girls, unladylike to the point of being off-putting. So, she withdrew until she could become someone who could exist comfortably, acceptably.
His hand fidgeted idly with his now much shorter hair. Perhaps it was the length of his hair that had truly bothered him, not its color, like Nora would’ve had him think.
All cropped so short that the nape of their necks were clearly visible, the tomboys’ hair maintained their inescapable allure to Peggy for years following their first meeting.
As soon as she turned fourteen, that’s when she’d do it. Fourteen, fourteen, fourteen, that’s when she could cut her hair.
At least, that’s what she told herself when she’d finally decided on it at thirteen. In reality, she’d still need to wait until school let out. School wasn’t required for children over fourteen, so she could safely chop her hair off without needing to endure appalled stares from classmates.
In the roughly two years since that prolonged glance at the small gang of tomboys, she’d managed to say more than a few words to them, a fact that would’ve floored the twelve-year-old version of her. The first time she’d approached them, the tomboys gasped and cooed at her like they were beckoning a wild fawn. To be fair to them, Peggy had been incredibly flighty, being all too familiar with the faux-niceness that came with girlish bullying. Boys would row with pushes and punches, which Peggy was admittedly jealous of, figuring she could likely hold her own in a quarrel against most girls her age.
During the months following her first approach, the tomboys welcomed Peggy with open arms. Mainly in their late teens and early twenties, they turned out to be a group of artists and activists, people who turned to striking and protesting in the face of the chronic, widespread poverty that riddled England. Fritz, the German one, appeared to be the most knowledgeable, having fled her home country after her art was deemed degenerate. Together, they financed and ran a small, independent newspaper that featured anti-fascist messaging in all forms: stories about those that society ostracized, experimental poetry, information about strikes and how to join a labor union, even promotion for local art galleries and musical performances.
Of course, Peggy thought everything they did was brilliant, but more than anything, she thought they were right.
This turned out to be a roadblock when they started to warn her about living a life like theirs. Somehow, the always right was suddenly, shockingly, so wrong.
“Are you sure?” Gene asked, her voice pitching up a bit. It felt like being talked down to, like she was being treated like a child. She nearly shattered right there. Peggy treasured the fact that the tomboys never did that to her. They dumbed nothing down, they answered her honestly, and above all, they respected her like an equal.
Gene, now her first roadblock, had been assigned resident hairdresser after originating the cropped haircut the tomboys wore. Peggy had been there a few times when Gene had given one of the others a trim, watching blonde or brown locks fall to the floor of Gene’s dingy flat with a silent, roiling jealousy.
“I just dunno, Egg,” Gene glanced down and away, fidgeting a bit with her shirt cuffs.
Egg was the nickname they’d given to her soon after she was able to force out her first few words to them. It worked; it was part of her parents’ nickname for her, it was small, deceptively tough on the outside but soft on the inside, and, Peggy now realized, innocent. Pure. Maybe they had always thought she was too young.
Peggy bristled, a bit shocked that they didn’t think she was smart enough to know what she was getting into. She’d joined them at pickets and protests, handed out their newspapers on street corners, drank with them, stole for them for God’s sake, but this is where they drew the line?
“Alright! Alright then, fine. Tomorrow, ‘round five. My flat. Don’t be too late, Egg.”
Ah. Perhaps she’d been saying all that aloud.
The next day, Peggy showed up twenty minutes early, only able to bear dawdling outside for five more before bursting through the door to Gene’s dingy flat. Gene, who was predictably still getting everything ready, rolled her eyes, but still smiled fondly at the face brimming with excitement that greeted her.
“You sure about this?”
Peggy whirled around to see Fritz leaned against the wall, a lit cig between her fingers. The elder squinted at her, brows furrowed, as if focusing enough would allow her to see Peggy’s intent. Gene shot Fritz a look before continuing to rifle through her makeshift hairdresser kit.
“Life’s different for us, y’know,” Fritz cautioned.
“Did you just come here to talk me out of this? Or did the bender you were on last night leave you to wallow ‘ere at Gene’s,” Peggy countered. Fritz didn’t reply to her jab, only took another puff of her cigarette and shook her head a bit before walking off towards the kitchen.
Gene finally finished readying her tools and motioned for Peggy to sit on the wooden stool that she’d dubbed her barber chair. For a split second, when Gene’s scissors opened around a thick chunk of Peggy’s hair near the nape of her neck, Peggy thought of Fritz’s words. She thought of how Agnes, a tomboy she’d only met through stories, had been institutionalized by her parents for recognizing her own boyishness. She thought of the encroaching fascism from Fritz’s own homeland. She thought of the disapproving glare of her father.
Then, the scissors closed with a firm snap, and Peggy felt happier than she’d ever been.
In the mirror in front of her, she spotted Fritz wander back into the room a few minutes later, shoulders high and jaw clenched. The haircut had started to take form. Fritz spared a glance at her, eyes filled with something alarmingly close to malice.
The wide grin spread across Peggy’s face visibly disarmed her. Gene seemed to take notice of Fritz’s sudden stillness and followed her gaze to the beaming girl in the chair.
They then shot each other a look that said “This was the right decision.”
“It had always been,” thought Peggy.
The door suddenly slammed open, Gene dropping her scissors with a choked-off gasp. Another tomboy stood in the doorway, out of breath and sweating, carrying a large bag.
“Billie!” Gene shouted, clutching her chest, “Did you fuckin’ run the whole way here, mate?” Billie only wheezed a short laugh and nodded, nudging the door shut behind her and dropping a large satchel on the floor.
“Y’look right good, Egg!” Billie exclaimed, flashing a smile at her before crouching down to rifle through her bag. “New trim fits you jolly well!”
Peggy beamed at her in the mirror as Gene put the finishing touches on her hair, quick elegant strokes and drops of hair oil fixing it into place.
Far too short for a flapper haircut, it was unmistakably a man’s haircut.
“A right handsome lass you are, now!” Gene clapped her on the back as Peggy ran her fingers gently over her hair, now neatly styled with a deep side part and slicked back into a perfect wave shape.
“Let’s get you spiffy, then, shall we?”
The mischief thick in Billie’s voice drew Peggy’s attention from the mirror. Twisting around to look at the older girl, Peggy saw Billie brandishing a bundle of clothes — men’s clothes, she soon realized.
“Me old kicks,” Billie said proudly. Peggy couldn’t get her hands on them fast enough.
The moment she stepped through the front door of her home with her hair cut short, wearing long trousers and a men’s jacket layered over a button up, her mother gave her the same look she wore when Peggy dropped those stolen coins on the table. On the other hand, her father exploded at her, then refused to speak or look at her ever again.
“Oh, Christ, mate!” Peter’s head whipped up just in time to catch a young man double over and splatter the contents of his stomach all over the cobblestone beneath him. Wincing, Peter turned to look at which path the poor sod was headed down, being that the sickly one was in a queue parallel to his. The Recruitment Centre had organized separate queues for the different services that hopeless youths had been directed towards, conscientious objectors and the medically unfit having already been winnowed out. Far ahead of the bloke, who groaned as a friend heaved him up and away from the puddle of vomit, a sign read “Coal Mining.”
That’ll do it, Peter thought to himself. When he’d arrived at the local Labour Exchange, he’d been so preoccupied with the fear of being recognized as a woman that he was wholly unprepared when asked which branch of the Armed Forces he’d like to serve in or if he’d rather work civil services.
He’d fallen dead silent. The man working there had sighed heavily and clicked his pen against the desk, clearly growing impatient from having gone through this countless times.
“Look, mate,” he’d droned, “judging by your written tests, you’re no bumbling twit. Could see ye’ a tradesman. Somethin’ a bit more skilled, yeah? Can’t waste someone bright in the trenches ‘n’ all.” He’d clicked his pen a few more times, rifling through papers with his other hand. “You know a good deal about machines, lad? Good workin’ with yer hands? Fixin’ shite in a jiffy?”
Peter had thought back to every job he’d worked in the past decade. Close enough.
“Yeah.”
Her father’s silent treatment was only brought to an end when she brought home her first paycheck she’d earned as a telephone cable erector. A man’s job.
Apparently, it was enough to tip the scales in her father’s mind in her favor. Arthur began to grumble short thanks at her when favors were silently done, even giving her firm handshakes with a deep sigh whenever he was given part of her paycheck.
Peggy found herself begrudgingly thankful for the small notes of appreciation, the satisfaction of turning his insult into an achievement wearing off quickly. If anything, she was grateful someone appreciated her hard work, because her job surely didn’t.
The work was grueling and thankless, consisting of scaling utility poles, thick, heavy loops of wire in hand, and stringing them from one pole to the next. All day spent climbing up and down wooden poles, some of which she swore were over 15 meters tall, for one shilling an hour. It was almost peaceful being up that high. The bird’s eye view and calming sense of solitude outweighed the danger in her mind. She didn’t even consider it at the time, but neither her nor her coworkers were provided any safety equipment by their employer.
The one thing their employer did give them to use on the job was a single, rickety, wooden ladder. Each day, it seemed to be assigned to someone through group consensus, something that should’ve been normal if it weren’t for the fact that there was no rhyme or reason to the pattern Peggy picked up on. Day after day, she grew frustrated that the ladder was never given to her, even when it had gone to one of her coworkers multiple days in a row.
One morning, when she was putting her time card into the clock, she saw a fellow wireman disappear into the nearby janitor’s room. Unusual. Generally, Peggy tried to keep to herself at work so no one would pay close enough attention to realize she was a boyish girl rather than a girlish boy. However, the ache in her shoulders and thighs urged her to slink into the room behind him.
The door shut gently behind her, and she saw her coworkers, all boys close to her own age, crouched down on the ground, huddled around a game of marbles.
Alfred, one of the older boys, took notice of her first. “Fancy joinin’ us, mate?”
The image of the marbles scattered across the floor at her home came flying back to her, their familiar weight in her pocket when she’d overheard her father’s words.
A man’s job.
Peggy nodded.
“Silent type, eh?” Another coworker, Ed, prodded.
“Oh, can it, Ed, you’re just worried he’ll beat ye’.”
“Am not! You,” Ed turned to Peggy. “Come join, then. See if the new lad’s got any skills.” His eager grin was reflected in Peggy’s own.
Minutes later, Peggy strode out from the closet triumphantly, wooden ladder underarm.
Most of the boys walked dejectedly to wherever they were headed, Peggy’s swift win hanging over their heads as a threat that they may never get that ladder again. Alfred, however, ran up beside Peggy, throwing an arm around her shoulders.
“Good fuckin’ show, mate! Cor, the look on Ed’s face, I can’t wait to see that again!” Alfred beamed at him and patted him on the back before letting his arm hang by his side again, much to Peggy’s relief.
“Well done, lad, what’s your name, then?”
Her heart dropped. Noticing she’d frozen in her tracks, Peggy stumbled forwards a bit before continuing to walk, hoping it seemed natural. If Alfred noticed, he didn’t say it.
“E-Egg.”
Peggy’s head started to spin. Egg? The tomboys’ nickname for her? What was she thinking? Surely Alfred would notice now, if her voice didn’t give it away. This is where it happens, this is where it all falls apart, and it’s all her fault.
“Ed? Same as the other bloke, that won’t do. Err, we’ll call you… Victor. Seein’ how you won and all.” Alfred shot Peggy a smirk, a mischievous look in his eyes as if he shared in Peggy’s victory.
Air slowly reentered Peggy’s lungs, now Victor’s. “Yeah,” her voice trembled, “Victor’s ok.”
“Good lad!” he chirped, before strolling off in high spirits.
Lad. Mate. Victor. He.
A surge of emotion boiled up in Peggy’s — Victor’s — chest, an explosion of warmth that sent thrills through her limbs, an overflowing of energy that made a smile blossom, unrestrained, across her face. She felt light on her feet, confident in her stride, giddy like a child being given a new toy.
Reaffirming her grip on the ladder, Peggy rolled her shoulders and trotted off towards wherever her work had sent her, too happy to even damn the company and their telephone wires to hell like she usually did before each shift. Nary a hateful whisper of her employer’s name came from her that whole day. All she could think of was Victor. Victor, Victor, Victor.
A new identity. A man. A worker. He was quiet, but sure of himself. He did his job well and he was an ace at marbles. His name was Victor and she gets to be him for nearly ten hours a day, five days a week.
It wasn’t until she reached home and had shut herself in her room — as usual — that the realization slammed into her. She knew this feeling, remembered it well. It was the same frantic enamor that washed over her the very first time she let herself truly see the tomboys. It was the same exhilarating delight that had Gene chiding her about staying still when she was first getting her hair cut short like theirs.
It was the same sensation that engulfed her when she learned how to bandage her chest from an old magazine she’d nicked off her mum’s bedside table. “For a more sleek, boyish silhouette,” it had said. Peggy found herself disappointed when she saw the rectangular look slowly going out of fashion in recent years, but not being able to place why she felt that way. She hardly cared about trends anyway. She simply couldn’t understand how it wasn’t agreed upon by every woman in the world that it was the best you’d ever look, the best you’d ever feel. It stayed as a part of her morning routine ever since.
She never did let go of that feeling. It was excitement, it was joy, it was a wild envy that thrashed within her. She was jealous of the man her coworkers saw her as.
She didn’t want Victor to be a costume that she put on for work. She wanted to be Victor. She wanted to be a man.
Victor looked at his reflection in the small mirror hanging above Peggy’s bed, and he sobbed.
The next day was a Saturday, which usually meant he could go hang out with the tomboys, something his mother commonly referred to with disdain as “faffing about.” Usually, he’d be excited. Now, Victor sat at the edge of his bed, nudging a loose floorboard with one foot idly as heat prickled on the back of his neck and the outsides of his forearms.
“Do you ever… feel more like a boy than a girl?”
Gene raised an eyebrow at his question. “No,” she spoke tentatively, in a manner that made it seem she was answering with a question. She then turned to call over her shoulder, “Do you, Billie? Feel like a bloke or summat?”
“Nay,” Billie responded as she riffled through a newspaper with one leg casually crossed over the other, one ankle resting on the other knee. That little part of Victor flared up again, envious of how easily they seemed to pull off cool, cocky, confident. Masculine.
“I quite like girls. Bein’ one, I mean,” Billie shot Gene a look when she clarified, some secret hint that Victor couldn’t parse.
Frustrated, he reluctantly turned to Fritz, who sighed and shook her head like she had always known this day would come. She gave Gene and Billie a short glance and saw that they weren’t paying Victor any mind, too engrossed in whatever was happening between them to care. Fritz locked eyes with Victor, then gestured towards the door with her head, pulling a cig from her coat pocket before turning to leave. Victor followed.
Fritz slipped a cig into Victor’s already open palm as soon as they stepped outside. It was something routine, something natural, that Victor found calmed him. Fritz offered a light, and they both took a long drag. Victor followed Fritz’s example and leaned against the tomboys’ flat’s brick exterior as they smoked, enjoying the cool weather as they watched passersby in comfortable silence.
“It’s happened before,” Fritz suddenly lamented. Victor said nothing, kept looking ahead. “A lass- er- bloke like you. Used to be like us. ‘Til she wasn’t,” she continued. “I liked her. But she didn’t like her. Y’know?” Victor nodded, a bit dizzy.
“She wanted to be he. I’d never heard of such a thing before. This one day, she confessed it all to me, screamed it at me, really. I had had no idea. We fought, then she stormed off, and I never saw her again.”
Victor started picking up traces of Fritz’s German accent in her speech, a telltale sign he’d noticed that she felt strongly about whatever she was saying.
“Him, I mean.”
She flicked some ash off the end of her cig. “Could be happy. Made friends. A family, even. Could be dead. Buried in an unmarked grave. We’ve no idea.”
Victor knew Fritz tended to mask sensitive subjects with a flippant attitude. There was something in her voice, though, that slipped through a crack in the façade as she kept talking, kept reliving her memories of this person: a hint of forlorn longing.
“Last we saw, he was happy. Seemed it at least. Can only hope- well, if he is dead, that he died happy with himself,” she spoke pityingly. Fritz looked over at Victor, whose gaze was still fixated on the distance. “What I’m trying to say, Egg, is—”
“Victor.”
“What?” Fritz blurted, taken aback. Victor almost cracked a smile at seeing her composure falter for a moment.
“My mates at work. Call me Victor.” His speech was choppy and strained, offset by nerves.
Then, something happened that Victor never could have predicted. Fritz smiled.
“Is that right?” A certain warmth seeped into her tone. “Victor… Alright then. I was going to warn you, Victor, but it seems you’ve already made up your mind. I like that about you,” she noted wistfully.
The fuzzy feeling from Fritz’s moment of kindness fizzled out and died as the last white bits of paper from her cigarette disappeared, leaving her with only the filter. She stubbed it out on the brick they were leaning against. Fritz then cleared her throat as she stood upright and made to head back inside.
“You should know that this won’t fix it. How they treat you.” She motioned discreetly to the passerby they’d been idly watching. “They’ll treat you like a woman again once they find out. So don’t ever let anyone get too close.” Fritz flicked her cigarette butt into the street, which was already littered with god knows what else. “I know you, though. You’ll be fine,” she reasoned.
As Fritz opened the door to her shared flat, she turned to speak to Victor one more time.
“As long as you’re comfortable living a lie.”
The door slammed shut, and Victor made no move to follow her. A gust of wind picked up briefly, and he instinctively covered his cigarette with his hand to keep it lit. Something told him it was the last gift he’d ever get from the tomboys.
He started to walk. With no set destination, he wandered through the streets of Manchester. He passed by countless homeless people sprawled across the pavement. Bicycles whizzed past him. The engines of double decker busses screeched and groaned as they carted people to the next stop. He gritted his teeth at the incessant honking of cars idling in traffic, sure that their drivers were too rich to be complaining about being stuck in the fancy automobile they spent so much on.
Victor wandered aimlessly for what felt like minutes, but was likely closer to an hour or two. No clue where his feet were taking him, he ended up stopping abruptly on vague impulse. His gaze lifted from the pavement, and landed on a rickety makeshift swing. His swing.
It still hung from the same streetlamp that he’d tied it to over two years ago, though its ropes were now dirty and worn from use, its wooden seat now lightened and sanded down by the elements. A small smile graced his lips at the sight. It was ugly, it was shoddy, and it was old. But it was his, and it was loved.
Victor lightly pushed the swing with his hand just to see it sway back and forth. It slowly sank in that he felt more alone than he’d ever been in his life.
Too deviant for the outcasts. Not a rebel, nor an innovator, but a freak.
He pushed the swing again, something in his body refusing to take a seat. He was eleven when he’d made it, scraping together parts to make what he wanted, unwaveringly determined to achieve a childish goal. He missed that age so terribly. He never wanted to be it again.
Tears welled in his eyes as he was overwhelmed by a sudden urge to leave. He wanted to just go, go away from everyone, from everything, from his parents and his old schoolmates and the tomboys and his coworkers and the whole shitty town of Manchester. He wanted to go somewhere completely new and leave all memories of Margaret, of Peggy, of Egg, behind. They could rot here in the grimy city streets, wet and soggy from the everlasting fog and rain.
But he couldn’t just leave. It wasn’t that simple, he knew that, he wasn’t stupid. He needed a job and a house at the very least, both of which were here.
So, he did the next best thing. He tried to disappear. He’d already cut off his old school friends, knowing they’d be horrified by what had happened to him, what he’d done to himself. He stopped visiting the tomboys as much. That hurt. It hurt that he’d began to feel just as alone with them as he did with anyone else. It hurt that he saw them recognize what was happening in real time, seeing the worry creep into their eyes — fearing that they’d been right all along, that they should never have cut his hair. He wanted to scream. It wasn’t regret. It was something else, something unidentifiable that ached in his bones.
There was no refuge found in his parents anymore. The home was quiet, save for his parents’ occasional bickering, cookware clattering in the kitchen, his father drunkenly stumbling through the door and into bed — domesticity without warmth.
He owed them for his existence; they’d surely be destitute without him, so they were forced to tolerate their daughter becoming a man. She was a man, but she was not their son. He was a stranger in their home, one that used to be his own. He wanted to apologize for the way he was. He never did. Not aloud, at least. He still found himself thinking, on his worst nights, “I’m sorry I turned out this way, mum. I promise it’s for the better.”
He became invisible at home, in the streets he’d always walked, in the town he’d lived in his whole life. He prayed he wouldn’t be recognized, yet missed the kind smiles he used to be greeted with.
He had to start over.
From afar, he began watching other boys like a hawk, discreetly taking mental notes on how they sat, how they spoke, how they walked, what they said and how they said it — studying them like a Method actor. When he was certain he was in the privacy of his tiny bedroom, he’d prop up a small hand mirror and hold recitals, practicing the facial expressions and movements he’d observed so closely.
As he got older and puberty truly began taking its course, he did anything and everything he could to fight it. At 15, he stole cigarettes from the local shop to pick up smoking, hoping to lower his voice, even if it meant destroying it. On top of the occasional games of football he’d play with friends, he picked up weightlifting after seeing the physique of a strongman on a poster advertising a circus that would visit Manchester soon. Of course, given that he couldn’t afford real weights, he found makeshift ones, using things like cinder blocks and small pallets with random materials stacked atop them. He looked for anything to offset the elegant, feminine features he saw fully formed within his mother. Luckily, by the time he was 16, he realized that — in terms of looks — he was taking more after his father.
By the grace of whatever god was looking out for him, he was blessed with a sharp jawline and bushy, sharply angled eyebrows. Combined with the muscle he’d gained at his job, these traits had a few people sneering at him or giving pitying looks, but only if they managed to see that his body was that of a girl’s. They were disgusted by his refusal or incapability to conform, a thin-browed, round-faced beauty all the rage. Though he knew he would’ve felt ashamed of being “the ugly girl” a few years ago, there was a part of him that grew exponentially with time that took pride in it, that reveled in people not seeing him as a real woman, even if it meant seeing him as less of a person.
Instead of the ugly girl, he was the “pretty boy.” The fear of being seen as the boyish girl lessened as his coworkers — and the odd schoolboy passing him by — teased him for being a pretty boy. He had to tamp down the smile that would pull at the corner of his mouth whenever they tried to bully him for it, putting on his best offended face instead. Being recognized as a man was the one light that guided him forward after losing everyone he once knew.
He even managed to make a few friends outside of work, some rabble-rousing boys that he met while lifting weights. Though, he always kept them at arms length. Fritz’s reminder of never letting anyone get “too close” still echoed in his mind, despite how hard he tried to forget that talk.
Where the shaky bones of his social life began to thrive, his home life suffered. His father got drunker. His mother got quieter. The hours spent at work got longer to avoid it all. He only found out his father had lost his job when his mother was complaining about how he still didn’t help around the house even though he “has all the free time in the world now, don’t you?” His dad applied for unemployment, much more content to day drink than apply for another job.
They still called him Peggy at home. Victor held his tongue. He could have held it over their heads that he’d become the main breadwinner, but a residual echoing in his mind of his father’s yell prevented any pushback. He continued to fade into the background.
Victor likened himself to a ghost that haunted his own home. Someone unrecognizable to his own family, only remembered in the sound of footsteps and the memories of a small girl’s laughter.
Luckily, “Peggy” didn’t spread beyond the walls of that house. As the years went on, and Victor hopped from job to job, he ran through several other names given to him by friends and coworkers alike. They usually derived from his appearance as a feminine boy — Beau, Jay, Fox, and Francis, to name a few. None of them ever stuck, but he didn’t mind. They never felt right anyways.
“OI! SKINNY TWIT, YOU’RE AT THE FRONT OF THE LINE!”
Peter’s head whipped up, “Er, yessir, sorrysir.”
Peter. That one’s nice. It came from a mistake, something the man taking names at the door misheard when he’d stuttered. He’d almost said Peggy. Old habits die hard.
“Right, son! I take it you see yourself a sapper? Y’look keen to get yer ‘ands on a good rifle, yeah?” He flashed a toothy smirk that made Peter feel like he was about to be sick.
Perhaps he had flown too close to the sun with this. If he were Icarus, man was the sun, and war was the ocean. Once flying with false wings towards an unachievable yet irresistable goal, Peter suddenly found himself plummeting, his flimsy disguise shattering upon impact with the vast water below.
They would know. They would all know. It would only be a matter of time.
How many times would he be able to change without someone catching a glimpse of his bound chest? How many times could he convincingly pretend to shave? How long could he live under the crushing fear of being found out?
Is this truly the next step to take? War? Why not… sidestep enlistment. Take refuge in the body he was given.
Maybe he should be Peggy again. What was he thinking with this? What a stupid, silly fantasy; he’d never be a man. He could cut his hair and put on men’s clothes and work a man’s job, he could change how he walks and talks and looks, he could put on the costume and play the role perfectly, but he would never be a man.
As long as you’re comfortable living a lie.
He should just admit it, admit the truth. He was a girl. He urged himself, just say it, just say it, you liar, you will never be like the other boys! You’re a girl, just say it!
Do you want to live as a woman or die a man?
“Well?”
“Yes, sir.”