“But, your father and I know what’s best for you, dear!” she said.
Kenneth looked at her.
“Does Dad know you and Yvonne Marchart are having an affair?”
Linda went deathly pale.
“If that got out at the Tennis club, it might be worse than having a transgender child. I suggest you get your own house in order before you start organising mine. If there’s nothing else; I’m going to my room. Good night.”
“No, Kenneth, wait; we need to talk!”
Kenneth said nothing, but carried on up the stairs.
Linda stood at the bottom of the stairs and shrieked his name.
“Kenneth!”
He stopped and turned to look at her. She was shocked at the contempt and disgust in his expression.
“Oh, what will we talk about? Getting some psychiatrists who can talk me out of these silly notions perhaps? I don’t think so. How about the fact you demand of me while you carry on a lesbian relationship behind Dad’s back, thinking nobody knows, and claiming it’s only because he’s been shagging his secretary for months?”
She stared at him.
“No? I didn’t think so. Unless you’re prepared to talk sensibly about what steps I can take to become female, then I think this conversation is over. Every time I have mentioned it, you belittle my feelings and tell me I’m mistaken. Well, I know what I want, and as I’m an adult soon, it seems that I shall prevail, whether you accept it or not. As for whether I’m attracted to boys or girls, I think I’m screwed up enough to bother about such trivialities. I have to get my body in line with my brain before I worry whether I’m a dyke like my mother or like boys.”
Linda still couldn’t think of anything to say. The bottom was in the process of dropping out of her world. She was more concerned over what they would say at the tennis club and of her husband’s reaction, than she was of her hurting son.
Kenneth went up to his room, shutting and locking the door.
With enormous relief, he placed the torc around his neck once more, and became the person she knew she should always have been.
Feeling amazingly calm, she sat and quietly read. Her mother knocked on the door for a few minutes, bleating about having to talk. Keira didn’t answer her. She went from pleading to threatening to crying and shouting. Eventually she went away.
She’d discovered her parents’ indiscretions through her time on the computer and through simple observation. What her parents thought was secure wasn’t, not from someone who was an amateur hacker of some skill. Emails were not the best place to manage an affair, or affairs in her parents’ cases. Okay, they weren’t exactly specific, but even a child of six could read between the lines and figure out what was going on. It was so obvious when one examined the fact that Linda and Yvonne were both the wives of busy men. And yet they seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time together. When Linda had claimed to have been at the tennis club, Kenneth had seen her going into Yvonne’s home and the greeting they had was not just a friendly peck.
Graham never went anywhere without Stephanie, his secretary. She was, admittedly, gorgeous and intelligent. One email said everything, except the fact they’d be fucking, as she had booked them a double room at the hotel in Frankfurt.
In a way, she regretted coming out with it all, but now she knew. Linda’s reaction simply confirmed her suspicions as fact, so she felt a surge of power and she now had a degree of control over them both at a sensitive time in her life.
Still, she did not feel particularly close to her parents, either of them, as neither of them seemed to actually give a damn about their one and only child. If they did, they had a very strange way of showing it.
At around ten, she set her alarm and slid into bed, naked, and went to sleep immediately, at peace and with a smile on her face.
Seven
The alarm buzzed at her bossily for a little while. It was pitch black and the clock’s illuminated digits were the only light.
03:00 it said.
“Shit!” said Keira, but then remembered who she was, and grinned.
She got up, relished for a moment, the feeling of the cool air on her naked body. She felt the excitement and wonderful feeling of completeness bubble up, threatening to break out into joyous laughter. Instead, she controlled it, slipping into a black tee shirt and black jeans. She desperately wanted to get some proper girl’s underwear, and a bra.
That thought stopped her.
A bra.
Such a simple piece of clothing, but the fact that she required one was a huge thing in her life.
The only shoes she had were Kenneth’s school shoes, which were definitely boy’s shoes, and a pair of trainers. The latter would have to do.
She opened the bedroom window and looked down the garden. Carefully, she climbed out of the window and sat precariously on the sill for a moment.
“Okay, this is it!” she said, and mentally prepared to fall into the flowerbed below.
She didn’t fall, but she didn’t exactly soar, either. She floated gently, staying at the same height and not moving much at all.
She looked down and saw the ground about twelve feet below. She was flying, just not like Superman. Actually, it was more like just not falling. It took almost an hour of fiddling about for her to master moving around. It required great concentration to work on altitude, velocity and direction all at the same time. She had to push off something in order to attain any velocity. Altering direction was difficult, and would take practice. Also, stopping was interesting. Just as she worked out how to get some considerable speed up, she realised she had no idea how to stop. One just couldn’t stop dead, and she almost hit several trees in the process of controlling her stopping procedure.
It dawned on her that the device simply counter-acted gravity rather than provided an ability to fly. Suddenly she was weightless in a heavy world, so mass and inertia still had bearing, while things like air friction complicated the factors. It was all down to her, as she had to think herself heavier and lighter to time the jumps. So, by setting off, she could become so light as to soar, but then gradually increase gravity to drop to a given point to take the next jump.
It was nearly four-thirty when she managed to fly in a series of very long jumps to Maidenhead, a bigger town a little way to the West on the Thames.
She worked out that she could mentally increase gravity so as to fall slowly to get a chance to use her legs to initiate another jump, altering course at the point of jump.
It took a great deal of practice, and she got it wrong frequently, ending up with her feet in people’s fishponds, and at one jump, almost crashing through a greenhouse.
She found it fun, if a little knackering. Once at the town, she set about trying to find criminals to apprehend in the act of their crimes.
Superman and the other fictional superheroes never seemed to have a problem finding criminals to deal with. She immediately thought of the animated movie, The Incredibles. Mr Incredible listened to police scanners to find out what was happening. She mentally started a shopping list.
Then, to confound the situation, it began to rain. She then discovered the hard way what police officers found out through experience, that criminals don’t like the rain either. Depressed and somewhat deflated, Keira made her way home, without one crime-fighting escapade to her credit and getting completely drenched in the process. It was only as she was getting close to Cookham did she mentally attempt to stop the rain from hitting her.
To her amazement, she realised that it worked. She was surrounded but a sort of opaque shield that prevented any moisture getting through.