Number Seventy-Three
Gerald Grimman didn’t consider himself to be different from anybody else. He’d realised in his early teens that he wasn’t the type of boy to whom girls were generally attracted. He wasn’t tall, athletic, particularly clever, witty or good looking. In fact he was quite short and, in his teens, was enveloped by a generous layer of puppy fat.
Throughout his school years Gerald had been fairly anonymous, leaving aged sixteen to manoeuvre from one college course to the next until all options for further study were exhausted. It was then, in his early twenties, that Gerald was unable to further avoid gainful employment and found work of a mundane nature doing something nonspecific in an office. He proved himself adept at both filing and boiling a kettle and over a period of years worked his way up from Trainee, to Assistant, to Senior, despite his having no real clue as to the worth of the tasks he completed each day. That, Gerald assumed, would be that. He would work until he retired and then live out his days in a Care Home until his death. Then, as Gerald entered his forties, his grandparents died suddenly.
This in itself was not unduly upsetting. Gerald’s grandparents were both approaching their 90th year and had enjoyed full lives with barely a day of illness between them. For years they’d maintained the use of a car, adamant in the face of suggestions that they were too old to be safe behind the wheel, citing their need for independence.
They regularly drove the length and breadth of the country on spur of the moment excursions and weekends away, preferring even to drive to a local supermarket for a pint of milk rather than walk to the nearest corner shop.
It was, then, considered ironic yet somehow fitting that Gerald’s grandmother be killed by her husband driving over her as he reversed the car from the garage. Feeling a thud but not hearing her scream, he exited the car to find his wife’s dead body trapped beneath the vehicle. He promptly collapsed from a heart attack and the couple were found by a neighbour, side by side, the car engine purring gently next to them, as if the vehicle was somehow watching over them.
This unfortunate episode proved timely for Gerald and the benefits were twofold. Being their only grandchild Gerald could do no wrong in the eyes of his grandparents and, what with relations being strained between them and Gerald’s parents owing to a comment made two decades earlier about Gerald’s father not being first choice for their daughter, Gerald suddenly found he had inherited two adjoining houses in Morecambe.
This immediately solved Gerald’s accommodation problem and he was finally able to move out of his parent’s house – his meagre salary proving prohibitive to buying a pad of his own – and into number seventy-three Westminster Road (much to the relief of his long suffering father and to the disappointment of his mother who loved having her only son under the same roof).
The second benefit took a little longer to realise and was brought about by Gerald’s eagerness to avoid getting any job which might possibly be classed as a career rather than simply a means to an end. With money he’d saved by living at home for so long, Gerald was able to procure the services of a solitary tradesman to help convert the two houses (number seventy-three in which Gerald planned to live and number seventy-five next door) into a number of flats and, over further months, gradually let them. To say this conversion was to a minimal standard was something of an understatement but it provided a steady, if unremarkable, source of income. It also allowed Gerald all the free time he needed to indulge his other passions, one of which was snooping into the lives of others, the other being transvestisism.
Gerald’s story, so far as he knew from speaking to other transvestites, was unremarkable and this is why he didn’t consider himself to be any different from anyone else, aside from the fact that he liked to dress as a woman.
