—
“Hello down there!”
I think it was the first time a police officer had ever spoken to me. She was on duty, standing by the side of the road, keeping an eye on things. There was a half-hearted student protest going on.
I had joined this particular protest. Why? I couldn’t tell you. I did things like that sometimes. I had no idea how to make the world better. I felt uneasy doing nothing at all, but I was also pretty sure that walking around chanting slogans for an hour or two on a Saturday afternoon made precisely fuck-all difference. The Cop who spoke to me was one of a few bored-looking officers stationed along the route to make sure nothing got out of hand, which it never did because student activism was well and truly moribund by the nineties. I’ve forgotten what the protest was even about. It could have been Huntingdon Life Sciences, or it could have been tuition fees. Such were the issues that got the kids out in those days. But if it had been tuition fees, the crowd would’ve been even smaller. So it was probably the animals. We were British when it came down to it.
The Cop was positioned on one side of St. Andrews Street, just past the Boots, where the protesters had decided—for reasons not discernible to me so far back in the flock—to sit down en masse in the middle of the road. I had sat there watching her feet at first, encased in very clean, very smart, shiny black leather. Then I’d followed the uniform, straight up through the black pressed trousers and reflective yellow jacket, to the bowler hat with its band of black and white dicing. It was a chilly day, late in the October of my second year. The Cop looked pleasantly warm. Her eyes, dead level under the hat, were soft like brown merino wool. I stared, and only when she stared back did I realize what I had done. I turned away. I would have moved, if I hadn’t been sitting down.
But it was too late.
“So…what made you come out today?”
A question. Shit. Now she’d asked me a question. You can’t ignore it when a police officer asks you a question. And what a question. She was asking, in effect, what the hell I was doing there. What was the point of it. She had every reason to be there, of course. I had nothing.
I probably mumbled something about dogs. Or cats. I remember that whatever I said was completely stupid, and I remember thinking that this was hardly important police business. But to be fair, we’d been there together for twenty minutes by that point and there was nothing else to do. So she made a conversation happen. And to my immense relief, this conversation was not a disaster. The Cop made sense.
Dr. Humberton had taught me the reason we prefer fiction to reality is that fictional characters make sense. They have focus, things they want, and they don’t waste your time. The Cop was like that. She had something about her. A manner. I would almost say a swagger, except she had it even when she wasn’t moving. I’d only seen this before in men. By this time, I felt deeply unsure about men. I liked how men dressed, and I had tried dressing that way myself, but I couldn’t make it work because my body wouldn’t fit in the straight clothes. Generally, I tried to avoid men. I knew that I certainly didn’t want to have sex with them. Women had never occurred to me, not that way. But The Cop made everything really clear. It is such a relief when people do this. I don’t know why we can’t do it all the time. Within five minutes she had cut a straight path through my stupid responses to her small talk, told me I was pretty, and asked me on a date. By which I mean that she said the words “You are pretty” and “Would you like to go out on a date with me?”
She didn’t speak loudly. She didn’t need to. I can hear her voice even now, a crisp gold chime against the grey chatter all around. A signal, at last, through the static.
—
The Cop was very sensible-looking, always. She had brown, pencil-straight hair, and she wore it in a smart, short bob tucked behind her ears with bobby pins. Even when she wasn’t in uniform it felt like she was. Her name was Julie, and she went by Jules, but honestly I only ever thought of her as The Cop.
Her body was straight like her hair. I wondered if men passing her on the street would look at her the way they looked at me, if they would talk to her breasts instead of her. In summer, when I wore a dress outside, men yelled things at me. I would stare dead ahead, like I was in a corridor with no exits, and as I walked away I’d imagine a giant hawk swooping down behind me and pecking their eyes out. That bird had my back, and it meant I could keep walking. But there was no joy in it, not like there had been with Deb. The Cop’s body seemed to have its own armour, a kind of defensive magic that I envied. I only had my mind, and I wasn’t too sure about that anymore.
I went on that date. And afterwards, I went to her flat. For the first time since Deb, I felt safe in another person’s company.
In the morning she drove me back to Bridge Street in her Mini, and pulled up by the rising bollards that kept traffic away from the Great Gate during the daytime. Just as I was about to get out of the car she turned towards the passenger seat and said, “What about a quick brekkie at
