Part Two: The Girl
Catch up on the story by reading Part One: Doorways
The girl unclips her suspenders one teasing strap at a time, then slipping off her shoes, peels down her stockings and hangs them carefully over the chair. Across the road, the accidents have started to happen. Preoccupied with the girl in the window, one of the ditch diggers unwittingly hurls a spade full of dirt over an elderly lady with a shopping stroller. Outraged beyond words, she shakes her fist at the workman and moves along in high dudgeon. Benny brings his sledgehammer down on an old man's foot, who instantly leaps into a frenzied one-legged dance, hopping frantically about until he falls into the ditch. Benny immediately tries to help the aged gentleman up, and is rewarded with a sharp clout on the head from the old man's walking stick.
The girl in the window straightens up and reaches around to unzip the back of her dress. She slips the straps off her shoulders, smiling a wide, naughty smile, and steps out of the little red dress in a single lithe movement. She hangs the dress up on the clothing rail, and stands revealed in a shiny white bra and half-slip. The slip is gauzy satin, so tiny that it barely covers the edges of her underpants. She walks about the dressing room on bare feet, swaying her hips and showing off her beautifully slender legs.
Across the road, the council gang has lapsed into utter chaos; the old man has climbed out and is chasing Benny around the ditch with his walking stick. Several more pedestrians join in the fracas; a bruiser with his cap pulled low over his face, an immaculately attired civil servant with an umbrella, a bald-headed priest attempting to restore order. An officious-looking police officer rushes into sight and begins taking down names.
Still completely unaware of the major conflict going on outside, the girl leans over the table and begins making up in the mirror. Neon-red lipstick, followed by a little powder. Picking up a brush, she flounces across the room, inspecting the items on the clothing rail, then turns to brush her hair in the mirror. Her bra and slip are glaringly bright against her deeply tanned flesh, her waist so thin that a man could almost fit his palm around it. She circles back to the table, puts down the brush, then returns to the middle of the room. The commotion in the street outside reaches a crescendo.
By now, a dozen passerbys have joined in the general anarchy, waging war on the bumbling council workers. Benny is under siege from the old geezer with the walking stick on one side and the police constable on the other. The bobby starts clocking Benny on the crown with his day stick, alternating blows with the old man. Almost unnoticed by the rest of the crowd, a press team arrives with note pads and cameras ready to document the riot.
The girl inspects the lace trimmings on her satin slip, fiddling out a microscopic piece of lint, then places her hands on her hips, admiring her figure in the mirror. She smiles that brilliant, naughty-little-girl smile one more time, and takes off the slip, letting it slide to the carpet in a soft white pool. She stands exposed in the window, modelling her underwear for the entire street. Her panties shimmer like platinum in the afternoon light as she delicately unhooks her frilly white suspender belt and places it over the chair with her stockings.
The melee across the road comes to an abrupt halt. Benny and his foes pause in mid-blow, stunned into complete immobility by the vision framed in the window. The PC puts his truncheon away and cocks his cap back on his forehead. The civil servant produces a pair of opera glasses, the old geezer with the walking stick takes out his glasses and steps forward for a better view. The press photographer begins reeling off snapshots.
The object of their undivided attention parades over to the clothing rail, sorting through the skirts, blouses and dresses hanging up there. Nothing seems quite right today; she pulls out a frock and looks it over carefully before replacing it with a dissatisfied pout. Deciding to start at the top, she takes a large box down from the shelf above the clothes rail. She puts on a wide, canary-yellow hat and shimmies around the room, watching herself in the mirror. She weaves back and forth in her lingerie several times, still smiling her naughty little smile. Then, making a final half turn before the mirror, she looks straight out the window for the first time. Her eyes widen as she sees the tableaux outside: twenty slack jawed, motionless men - including her parish priest - looking in, their faces bulging with fascination.
Suddenly realising that half the town is seeing her in nothing but her bra and panties, she gasps, covers her clevage with her hands, and runs giggling over to hide beside the window. Peeking outside to see who actually saw her undressed, she modestly holds the curtain across her body.
With the girl out of sight, the battle resumes. Jaws are busted, noses pulled, lips fattened. The bald headed priest tumbles into the ditch, still holding his bible aloft. In the background, all but lost in the general confusion, Benny is led away in an armlock by the PC . . .
The clothes KC had taken from the linen cupboard were not exactly the same as the girl on Benny Hill had been wearing, but an exact imitation was unnecessary; KC's imagination required only a close approximation. There were a pair of frilly white underpants which fortuitously happen to fit him exactly, and a small, creamy coloured crop top which - for KC - would double for a bra (KC didn't know what a brassiere was for, but it was unquestionably a necessary part of the costume). There had been no white satin half slip in the sewing bag, but he'd managed to find a bright pink cotton skirt with an elasticized waist. It was light and breezy, almost translucent, and KC judged it would feel cool and smooth against his flesh.
No stockings in his size, but there was a pair of longish girls' sox, which, to KC's inexperienced mind, was pretty much one and the same. The last piece of apparel had been the treat of the morning. Holding it up, KC wasn't quite certain what it was. A woman's blouse or top or something, but it was bright and red and stretchy; it would look just like the mini the Benny Hill girl had been wearing. There was even a zip at the back. KC smiled, his eyes wide with innocent, childish pleasure, and began to take off his PJs.
Something happened while KC changed.
He didn't just put on girl's clothing, he seemed to put on a girl's body. No, not quite. His body felt different, there was no question of that, but he seemed to have pulled on a great deal more than a girl's shape. He . . . felt like a girl. Or at least, what he imagined a girl would feel like, if she was sweet, and saucy, and pretty - and very, very naughty. He could not, at his age, have put it into words, but it was as if he had somehow slipped into a new identity.
He had become the girl. The one from last night.
The one who'd taken off her clothes.
No, that wasn't right either. He wasn't that girl. KC could see her very clearly in his mind. He had taken a snapshot of her with his eyes and developed the picture in his imagination. It was like a high resolution moving photograph; he could visualize the finest details, the texture of her skin, the lacquer on her fingernails, the deep redness of her lips, the sweep of her hair over her forehead. But the photo wasn't just in his imagination. It was as if that picture had somehow been superimposed onto his body.
KC hadn't become a girl.
She had become The Girl.
She played out the scene several times, recreating the scene from memory: the dressing room with its racks of feminine accoutrements, the makeup table with its cosmetics and brushes, the tall, wide window looking out onto the street, the vaguely lecherous council workers leaning on their picks and shovels - she moved through a complex, constructed mind-space, shedding her clothing and parading before a non-existent audience.
The ecstasy swept over her, simmering in her body like a ball of liquid heat, leaving her trembling with excitement and a new emotion she couldn't name. Something had blossomed within her, something huge and pure and utterly beyond description. It was a breathless, gasping delight without comparison, something which she would seek for the remainder of her life. And although this sensual, unspeakable fire would remain forever beyond her reach, there were a few rare moments when she would come extremely close . . .
She assumed her feminine role most mornings, creating little 'scripts' from imagination or else basing her performances on TV programmes. It was the beginning of the seventies, an era of extreme political incorrectness and risque humour, when sexual innuendo insinuated itself into the least sexual of domestic comedies. Television provided KC with an apparently inexhaustible source of inspiration for her fantasy-play.
At first it was enough just to become The Girl and act out her scenarios subjectively, but after a while she became curious to see what she actually looked like while she performed. Being looked at was an important part of being The Girl. Whenever the girls on Doctor in the House or in the Carry On movies undressed, were always visible in some way, even if they didn't realize they were being observed.
Sometimes they were seen by other people in the show (like the council workers in the Benny Hill sketch); if not, then the camera was watching - which meant, of course, that the audience was seeing them. Being The Girl meant being seen by someone. KC couldn't let anyone see her dressed as The Girl, but at least she could watch herself.
KC had taken to hiding her props in an old suitcase under her bed. She rose at five one morning and dressed as The Girl, then examined herself closely in the dressing table mirror. She'd never performed in her bedroom before - there wasn't nearly enough space - but this morning she made an exception.
She stripped gradually down to her undies, smiling widely as each successive layer came off. First her slippers, then her blouse, followed by skirt and singlet - the latter standing in for a full slip. Removing the slip was always the best part, the last thing to come off before her panties were displayed to the world. She felt thoroughly undressed, even though she was still wearing her bra and pants. Inexplicably, undressed did not equal naked; as long as she was wearing lingerie, she was still The Girl. Naked, she would have been nothing more than a nude little boy.
She didn't look much like the girls on television (they were all grown up, for one thing) but she was pleased by what she saw. Her striptease revealed a pretty little girl with short, curly brown hair and a roundish face, her body slightly pudgy with baby fat. If her hair had been slightly longer, she might have passed for any five year old girl, no different from the ones she used to play with back in Ashville. Of course, the girls at playgroup didn't wear bras.
KC had become aware of the differences in shape between big girls and little girls by comparing the kids at kindy to the women she saw on TV. One evening, she'd asked her mum what 'those white strap-things' ladies wear on their chests were.
'Its called a bra, dear', mum replied offhand, as if a brassiere was no big deal, and not in any way connected with lewdness or sex.
'What are they for?' KC asked. Dad pointedly studied the television, trying to hide a smirk.
'Girls use them to hold their breasts in place', mum said, and shot a warning glance at her husband.
'Oh', KC mused, not really understanding, then wondered aloud: 'would my chest look like that if I wore one of those bra-things?'
His parents had glanced at each other and burst out laughing. Once she'd caught her breath, mum had tried to explain why boys never need to wear brassieres, but the answer had been considerably more confusing than the question. Most of all, KC couldn't understand why girls seemed so different to women. Well, it didn't really matter. KC wasn't trying to look like a little girl, anyway. She wanted to look like The Girl (over a decade later, KC would note that many 'real' girls wanted precisely the same thing), tall and leggy and almost-adult.
Strangely, KC rarely saw The Girl outside of television or ladies' magazines. She often saw women who looked like The Girl when she went shopping with mum, but Looking Like didn't mean Same As. It was as if The Girl didn't really exist at all, except as a flickering image on an electronic screen.
She'd once asked her mother about this discrepancy between 'reality' and its televised counterpart: Mum, why do the girls on TV look so different to the ladies down the street? Once mum understood what KC had meant by this amazingly sophisticated question, she had tried to explain, in the simplest possible language, that all those ladies who went shopping and took their kids to school and cooked and cleaned and worked in the shopping centres were real women who lived real lives.
The girls on television were . . . well, they were actors and models who lived out pretend lives. They looked very pretty, most probably because of all the make-up and expensive clothing and everything, but television was mostly make-believe, and so the people on TV were all make-believe, too.
KC had come to a vague realization that there were two kinds of women in the world: first, there were 'real' girls - the sort who lived across the road or sold bread in the corner shop at the end of the street - and then there were the make-believe ones who appeared on daytime serials or cop shows or westerns. They were more like princesses in a fairy tale: always laughing, always falling in love and always living Happily Ever After.
KC listened and realized that her mother was describing the Girl, or else something very much like her. The Girl was young and beautiful and perfect; everybody loved her, everyone desired her, or else desired to be her. And best of all, The Girl could be naughty and get away with it. The Girl could get away with just about anything.
A little over a month later, KC grappled with the problem of being male. Boys looked different to girls, especially in one extremely crucial spot. It was easy to hide this difference when she was wearing a dress or a skirt, but once she'd completed her obligatory striptease, she could see her willy, quite plainly, pressing against the thin fabric of her underpants. No mistake about it; no matter how much she looked like The Girl in every other way, the sight of her erect penis reflected in the mirror always disrupted her performance ever so slightly.
Girls, even older ones, seemed to be perfectly smooth down there. KC was too young to have any real concept of sexual difference - she'd never seen a woman naked - but dad had once told her that girls were born without a willy. KC hadn't really believed him (how could anybody not have a willy? They'd have nothing to wee with!!), but it left her with a mystery nonetheless.
Looking at herself in the mirror, KC pulled tight on the elastic of her panties, trying to hide the small bulge standing out at the junction of her thighs. One time she'd tried tucking it up between her legs, then pulling on a pair of knickers to hold it in place. It had worked for about a minute or so. Her pubic triangle had looked flat and completely faultless. Then she'd gotten an erection, almost as soon as she'd put on the rest of her costume. It grew even larger when she began her disrobing ritual.
KC began to understand that dad must have been right. She had no idea what 'real' girls had down there, but it sure wasn't anything like a willy. She placed a hand over herself, obliterating the cotton outline of her penis. If only she could make it go away permanently. Dressing as The Girl made her feel wonderful; she would gladly have sacrificed her willy if it meant she could feel this good all the time.
Such a small, unimportant thing, really, but it made all the difference. It made her a boy, and she could honestly say that she hated being a boy. If she could just get rid of it, she'd never have to live as a male again. People would think she was a girl, a real one. She would be one step closer to The Girl. KC wished she'd been born female.
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