CHAPTER 12
Work had left me frazzled, as that time of year always does. There are various interpretations of legal responsibility by both accountants and clients, and by that I mean more or less blatant breaches of the rules, as I have said. As a firm, we don’t do that, or at least I haven’t seen it. I see so many entries on websites like Companies House where accounts haven’t been filed at all, or regularly late, and I can’t do that anymore than I could shoplift. Annual accounts are, in essence, an account of a year’s business plus a snapshot of where that business is at the start of April. Some clients try their hardest to either squeeze things in or hold them back, for financial advantage, but we refuse to play that game. When those windows and doors shut, they are shut.

It does mean some very, very heavy and long days to prepare the stuff, and then there’s our internal audit, a bit like a pub quiz where teams swap their answer sheets for marking. It’s not a real audit, of course, but it does catch some shit we’d rather not let through, such as the nice honest man who was post-dating his sales to delay tax liability, right up to the point where the tax rate was about to go up, and he then tried to change all those dates to fall before the date of the rise. That was one of three occasions only when I saw my bosses dump a client for ‘professional embarrassment’.

So there I am, in the first half of April, feeling worse than I had that Christmas in front of a petrol station, and Mary has told me that the Morans will be over the following evening.

“Thelma says she’s briefed Larry. Her word, love”

“I doubt he needed much briefing, Mister Neighbourhood Watch that he is”

We were slumped together on the settee, Mary cuddled into me.

“I think he just might, Ellie. I mean… Look. It wasn’t until the airport, yeah, when I really saw you. YOU, not my husband with tits, I mean”

I had a couple of pleasant recent memories surface and wave, with cheeky grins.

“I’m still your husband with tits, though”

“You know what I mean, love. I mean, I did a lot of reading up before you went. Looked online as well, but that was scary”

“Where did you look?”

“Weirdest one… a group on Mumsnet, ‘Trans Widows’ they’re called”

“Fucking hell! Sorry, but that place, dear god it’s vile”

“I managed to spot that, love. Made me think, though”

“In what way, actually?”

“Made me look at myself. Those people, all they do is hate, nothing but that, and I had to ask myself, was that me? Ignoring all that disgusting claim that they’re like real widows, they have nothing but that vitriol. What awful, empty lives. Then I got your Christmas text, and that… Not a bloody widow, was I? Am I?”

She squeezed my thigh.

“I did a lot of thinking, love, and that text, it came just as I was really understanding what arseholes those people are. You know, it’s like the way you talk about your work?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re always---start again. I don’t know if you realise it, but you sometimes have a mini-rant about dishonesty”

“Yeah, well they never see it as that, the ones who try it on”

“And you go on about that a lot, especially at this time of year”

She chuckled, ruefully.

“One way of confirming I have my spouse back, I suppose. Anyway, I have this vision of your clients telling you what you’ll do, and this Mumsnet lot are like that. They are right, everyone else is wrong, and if someone in their forum suggests anything else, they shitpile them like nobody’s business. What’s really funny is the overall narrative. They’re like some of my stroppier kids”

“In what way?”

“Oh, there’s any number of threads which sum up to ‘I’m right, everyone else in here agrees with me, it’s only the Yoof who don’t, why have all of my family and friends disowned me?’. All I need for the full set is ‘They’ll be sorry!’ and a flounce out”

I found myself laughing at her venom.

“So you didn’t spend much time there, then?”

“I saw myself in a mirror, love, and I didn’t like what I saw. Now, I think I’ve said enough, possibly too much. What are we offering the Morans tomorrow? And who’s cooking?”

In the end, it was down to me, and I decided to try two old favourite youth hostel recipes, a vegetarian lasagne followed by bread and butter pudding with custard, really solid food that would hopefully slow down the Morans’ mouths. I was cheating a little, using tinned custard, but I didn’t care.

Mary welcomed them at the front door as I did the kitchen slave thing, welcome to womanhood clichés-R-us. We had some prosecco chilling, and once she’d sat them down, Mary came in to check on plating time.

“Lasagne comes out of the oven in ten minutes. Pud’s ready to go as soon as I nuke the custard”

“Then come in and say hello, and open the bottle”

Deep breath, deep end. No dogs, though.

I was in a shift dress again, as I think they suit me, and the ones I bought had pockets. Mary gathered the glasses as I took the first bottle from the fridge, and I then followed her in.

“Hi, Ellie. I’m letting Larry drink tonight, but not too much. He gets frisky on fizz”

Thank you, Thelma. Her husband simply stared flatly at me, before turning to his wife.

“Looks like you read it right, love. Not dress-up, is it, you two?”

Mary shook her head.

“No. Took me a long time to get it sorted in my head, but no. This is Ellie. This is who she is”

Thank you, my darling. Larry hadn’t finished, though.

“Not feel like, you know? Losing your husband?”

He seemed as surprised as I was by her laughter.

“Larry, that, funnily enough, is what we talked through yesterday!”

She gave the two of them a run-through of our ‘trans widows’ discussion, and Thelma nodded along happily.

“So let me see if I have this right, Mary: you log into a hate site, but instead of doing the normal thing and letting your brain dribble out of your ears, you wake up? Bloody teachers and critical thinking. Shouldn’t be allowed!”

Larry was still in a sober mood, even after I had popped the cork and he’d taken a large mouthful of the fizz.

“I, or rather we, Mary. We were worried. Your bedroom curtains don’t always close fully”

“Thelma said”

“It wasn’t Thelma, it was me. I saw a bit of… I saw a bare-breasted woman walking around in your bedroom, and it wasn’t you, and I knew… Ellie was home. I’ve been trying to find the right way to tell you”

I swallowed my own first glass in one.

“Oh, that is such a cliché, Larry! The trans woman who’s her own ‘other woman’. It’s almost traditional”

“Yes, well, I had some very unneighbourly thoughts about you. Sorry”

I shook my head firmly.

“Not at all, mate. You were looking after Mary; how could I fault that? I mean, not just that, is it? That time you saw those arseholes trying to steal her car? Anyway, this is me, nothing more, and this woman needs to get the main course out of her oven”

I made my escape, letting my pulse rate come down as I wondered how much actual titillation Larry had got from, well, my tits, and if my face had actually been obscured or if his eyes had simply stayed on lower things.

The main course went down well, with a green salad as a side dish, and then I busied myself with the gloopiness that is bread and butter pudding. Once all was devoured, I brought out a couple of bottles of white Rioja and we settled down to a very predictable slide show of my Aussie pictures. I let Mary explain about my new friends, and Thelma nodded.

“Handy people. You were lucky, Ellie. Any problems with men?”

I gave her an edited account of the redneck chat-up attempt, but countered that one with the Jerramungup truckers and their muffin gift.

“Just a local thing, Thelma. They look out for each other. I think if I had done the walk away---”

Shit. That wasn’t part of my script. Thelma pounced, though, before I could redirect things.

“I knew it. You didn’t intend to come back, did you? Just walk off into the shrubs, was it?”

Larry took her hand.

“Probably not the best of topics, love”

“Oh, it might not be the best, but it’s the one we need airing, or at least we need a promise that such bloody stupidity is done and dusted. Do we have that, Ellie?”

I sighed.

“A conversation we’ve beaten to death, Thelma. I do believe that corner’s turned”

“Good. Not got the energy to break in new neighbours. Top-up, please?”