28th May 2012

  Over the years of grey market puberty blockers, and then the years of taking carefully obtained HRT while being him, certain things had got increasingly difficult to hide. Thankfully cis people would expin anything away without thinking she was trans. She’d ughed so much when someone complimented his pecs and asked him where he worked out. But she did start to worry that she’d misjudged her exit from his existence. When she finally left the country she worried that using his passport would raise fgs. In the end it had been thankfully uneventful. And then he was gone. He entered Slovenia and would never be seen again. Off travelling, per his st postcard to his now former ftmate. And after a few months recuperating abroad from her surgery she stepped onto the pne feeling truly like herself for the first time in her life. Finally occupying the existence she’d spent years making. In her new idealised life she wouldn’t need to spend her time hacking for others for money. She’d slip into a nice quiet job and just disappear into the world.

  Ironically, for all her pnning, Charlotte had failed in one important regard. Despite a bunch of contingency pns, she hadn’t prepared anything for the circumstance she found herself in on arriving back into the country on her fresh and shiny passport. She’d scouted and rented a ft 6 months before, stocked it with furniture and clothes, paid the bills and never been in since. But on arriving back, she found that there’d been a fire. Not a staged, destroying the evidence that she didn’t really exist before right now, fire. Nothing so convenient. This was a real ‘Oh shit, my ft has gone’ fire, meaning that she pulled up from the airport in a taxi with only a bag of summer clothes to her name and found the burned out shell of a building waiting for her, and a note tacked to what had been the front door informing her that for any access she’d have to ring a 4th rate security company.

  Not that there was much to access. Through the smoke bckened gss of the front doors she could see the remnants of every floor above ground amalgamated in a heap in the corner, along with the roof and a distinct absence of any attempt to repair the building. The taxi driver’s incessant requests for payment finally drilled into her and she parted with some cash. Thankfully there was enough in her new account to st for a while, and she hoped that the contacts she’d arranged would lead to employment pretty sharpish. But where to live, that was most pressing.

  She sat in one of the cafés that appeared to have not noticed any decade after the 1970s, bare skin sticking to the tacky vinyl whenever she dared to lean on it or move. Her holiday summer wear allowing her limbs rather more contact with pstic than she desired.

  A desultory cup of milky tea sat in front of her, along with the local property rag. ‘Location, Location, Location’ was the slogan, but ‘Affordable, clean, avaible this second’ were her main criteria. And that combination seemed to be somewhere slightly out of reach. She grumbled and stared out of the window at passing traffic. Out of the grease coated kitchen door her entirely unexotic ‘Three Cheese Panini’ appeared. The cklustre attempt to bring the café into if not the 21st century, maybe at least the 1990s, appeared to have failed. A limp lettuce leaf and some soggy crisps adorned the edge of her pte, and Charlie sagged slightly at the thought of eating it.

  After letting the situation roll around her head for a bit, she resolved to pick her mood up, and grabbed the paper. She scanned through the list of properties a second time and, having again reached the end without having seen anything affordable, slumped slightly. As she picked up the panini and put down the paper, she was startled to find a woman staring intently at her from the other side of the table.

  Charlie nearly threw the sandwich at her in shock.

  A few seconds passed with Jess looking levelly at her. “Shit, innit,” Jess’d finally stated.

  Her nguage was completely at odds with the clean-living 1950’s A-line dress she was sporting. Indeed, until she spoke, she looked the very embodiment of 1950’s virtue. Charlie stared for a few moments before she finally stuttered out “Pardon?”

  Jess ughed. “Well educated, then. I guessed that right. You used to live in that pce on the corner, didn’t you?” Charlie continued to stare at her. “I remember you moving in. Don’t remember seeing you after that, but you must’ve been home, ‘cos your lights and that were on… sometimes. Heard your telly too.” Charlie noted the disturbing tone of her voice suggesting that perhaps she knew more than she was letting on. “Anyhow, seeing as you’ve come back from wherev’you’vebeen, I figured you’d be looking for a pce to live, same as me, since I used to live on the floor below and the building’s crispier than when I left. I’m guessing you just came back same’s me today.”

  Charlie just sat staring at the interloper who’d appeared before her. Hazel eyes gazed steadily back at her, framed by shoulder length blonde hair. It broke Charlie’s head a little that she looked like she’d just walked off set from filming some period drama. Who the fuck was this woman?

  Jess looked expectantly at Charlie then, without waiting for an answer, piped up again, “Seeing as I saw you pull up in the taxi’n’I was sitting here doing same as you are now,” Jess leapt up and grabbed a paper from the table next to Charlie’s. In it were circled a number of houses and fts, both rger and nicer than any Charlie had considered.

  Charlie had started to open her mouth, but Jess’s speech rampaged over her, “See, I figured that you need somewhere’n’I need somewhere...’n if you’d had somewhere to go right now you’d’ve gone there straight away in the taxi.” Charlie, having quickly gathered that she’d just get lost in Jess’s excited rambling waited for the next volley of speech. “It’s that Arabic thing...y’kno’Kismet...destiny. You’ve been off travelling or whatever for months’n y’come back today...when I got back today...and we’re both needing a pce to live.”

  Something in Jess’s demeanour shifted and told Charlie that this was her moment. Suddenly she was met with the stark realisation that her shiny new existence cked one important thing. Friends.

  Yes, she sported an array of online friendships, developed and carefully nurtured over the past two years. But no one that she felt she could just drop in on. No one she could ring and say, “Hi, I’m a bit screwed. My ft has burned down.” Or maybe she could, but whether it was a good idea was unclear. It was also slightly complicated by the fact that her shiny new life’s phone was presumably a melted pile of pstic-and-metal somewhere in the heap that had once been her ft. She had a backup of the phone, of course, but not one that she had to hand. Nor, given that it was bank holiday, was there likely to be anywhere nearby she could grab a new phone. She cursed herself then, and occasionally afterwards, for not having prepared for this sort of eventuality.

  Charlie waited another beat, and then quietly and simply said “Okay.”

  It had come as somewhat of a surprise to Charlie that she’d dived straight in with “Okay.” In her head it had been “No.” Possibly it might have stretched to, “Look, I don’t even know you, perhaps we should take a moment to find out something about each other.” She’d vaguely thought that she would find an open internet café and use some of her more illicit skills to do some more in-depth research about the woman sitting before her.

  But her mouth seemed to have decided on a course of action, and Charlie found herself following it.

  “Jess,” the woman said, and stuck her hand out.

  “Uhm, Charlotte… err, Charlie,” Charlie replied, shaking her hand and wondering what random thing her brain would agree to next. She watched the strange woman lean across to her previous table and grab an unappetising full English breakfast. Jess flipped through her copy of the paper, and, folding it to show off a pce that she’d circled, handed it across to Charlie.

  “Tha’s the one,” was all she said. Charlie looked at the surprisingly rge Victorian terraced house with the dubiously low price.

  The description hit all the relevant spots ‘Fully furnished, GCH, 2 bed, 1.5 bath, newly renovated’ and most importantly ‘Vacant - immediately avaible’. It was even – and she wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not – managed by the owner rather than an agent. Meaning they could ring them right now, bank holiday be damned. “What’s wrong with it?” Charlie queried, having failed to read between the lines sufficiently to work out why the price was so much lower than she expected.

  “Ex-drug house,” Jess responded, before wolfing down a couple of mouthfuls of breakfast. “Raided a couple a months back. Some prick got shot in the front garden waving a rifle ‘round.” She returned to her breakfast with disconcerting vigour.

  Charlie stared at her, “Uh hu. How’d you know?” she’d asked when the staring failed to prompt a reply.

  “Made the local news. Funny you didn’t see it. Months ago. Been wondering if it’d come up. Knew it’d be cheap. Thinkin’ of moving there anyhow, if the price was okay.”

  “So,” Charlie worried, “Not in the greatest area then?”

  Jess picked up a sausage, the incongruity of it with her chosen manner of dress again striking Charlie.

  “Nah. ‘snotsobad. There’re worse, y’know. Y’ wanna ring?”

  Charlie looked at the advert again. The house looked so much more appealing than anything in her price range alone, but she had no idea what they’d be able to afford together. She gazed steadily at her new companion, who was polishing off the sausage. Jess daintily picked up a napkin and wiped off her fingers.

  “I don’t have a phone anymore,” Charlie stated. “It was in the ft.”

  Jess lent across to her previous table again, this time grabbing a bag from underneath, and pulled an apparently ancient and battered mobile from it. She flipped it open and tapped the keys, As it rang she flicked a gnce over to Charlie “Now alright? If they can?”

  Charlie nodded and again was possessed by a vague notion that this might be a bad idea, but something about Jess just seemed weirdly reassuring. Shortly afterwards, as they set off to view the pce, Jess having purchased their lunch to ‘celebrate’, she quashed those st worries and decided that it was perhaps time to rex and see what happened.