Again we went down stairs, and I was carrying the clothes I had worn to get here. Alison led me back to the room we’d had coffee in. There was a door with the international cutout of a stick person in a dress that meant “ladies”, and she led me in. I almost baulked at the threshold but realised I couldn’t show any hesitation now, I was in too deep. Inside was a row of cubicles on the left and some sinks and mirrors on the right, and I realised that I had already been in a ladies’ loo upstairs, where Mrs Miller had had me change. In this one there were also some seats and some tissues and moisturiser dispensers and, along the far wall a bank of tall lockers.

“Tomorrow you can come straight in here and change, and then I’ll meet you outside for a quick coffee, if I don’t see you in here. You’ll do a couple of more days shadowing me, and then we might get different shifts or whatever, but you’ll be thoroughly confident by then.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, more to fill the space than because I wanted to speak.
“So well done. First day over!” Alison beamed and I couldn’t help but smile back, despite the churning worries in my head.

“Before you go, Christine,” I heard Mrs Miller’s voice as I had entered the corridor to reception.
I turned, “Yes?” I forced a smile, but was perturbed that I hadn’t even hesitated when turning in answer to my new name.
“I couldn’t help but notice when I zipped you up earlier that you weren’t wearing a lot underneath. Look, I’ve printed off a copy of the dress code. It’s much simpler, of course, because of the uniform, but please make sure you have the right colour tights and the right shoes, and…” and she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “bra and makeup too please.”
She gave me her beaming motherly smile as I felt my jaw slowly drop. “Just have a read of it. It’s quite simple, the rules are the same for everyone: Mrs Jennings is a stickler for fairness. See you in the morning.”

I walked away stunned. I hadn’t got a bra. How could they dare to tell me what underwear to wear? I felt violated and I felt powerless. I would just have to throw the job in. It was too much, all far too much, however innocent their mistake, however impossible my financial situation. This was intolerable.

As I released the door of my bedsit behind me so it could swing back to shut, it stopped mid-swing with a clunk. I turned to see the enraged face of my landlord.

“I need to…” he shouted, and stopped himself, looking confused. “Who..? Is your boyfriend in?”
“Who?” I said, confused.
“The boy I rent this room to.”
I blinked. “I rent this room from you, Mr Gunn.”
He leaned back and scrutinised me. “Bloody hell, girl, you dressed butch when you moved in.”

I felt heat rush to my face, and yet again heard the pumping in my ears. I had never had this gender confusion before, but these borrowed clothes seemed to have tipped a balance I didn’t know was there to be tipped.
He gave me a hard stare, “I suppose you’d hardly dress pretty to move a lot of boxes,” and he looked down at a piece of paper. Then he looked up.
“I was going to give you notice,” he said simply. “Do you have anywhere to go to?”

I felt myself crumpling. Everything that happened lately seemed to be a disaster. “No,” I said as I tried to stop tears welling into my eyes.
“Oh no, look, don’t cry. I wouldn’t put a girl on the streets – but look, the rent is late again. I can’t have this, really.” The burly gruff man ended his sentence gently.

“I, I’ve just started a new job today,” I could hear a whine in my voice. It wasn’t just that everything was so bleak, it was the twist of the knife that people were nicer to me when they thought I was a girl. “I’ll catch up. It’s just I got laid off last week.”

“Okay,” he said looking at me with an odd mixture of sternness and indulgence, “best if you tell me if you’re in difficulty, okay? I have a few other properties and maybe I could find you some work now and then. Next time there’s a problem, you tell me and we’ll work something out between us,” and, to my surprise, he winked at me. “So, at the end of this week how much can you give me?”

“Um, an… maybe, yeah… is an extra £20 alright. Until I’ve caught up?”
“Okay, see that you do that then, love.”
He closed the door.

I walked to my corroded mirror and after a quick look, I literally kicked myself. I nearly did it again, but it hurt too much. I flopped on the bed. The shirt’s odd cut and the softness of the trousers had looked a bit androgynous to say the least, but I realised that my hair was still up in the bun that Mrs Miller had put it in, and it did look feminine. Alison had unzipped me, and undone the maid’s cap, before I scooted into a cubicle, saying how I was really shy. She’d seemed bemused as she simply stripped off. I had been embarrassed and surprised at her so casual in her underwear in front of me, and had forgotten all about my hair.

In my left hand, rolled up, I still held the printout that Mrs Miller had given me. I lay for at least half an hour staring at the ceiling before rolling onto my side and looking at it.

In cases of dispute the final decision rests with the line manager.

I felt sick.

Somehow the world was conspiring against me. I had innocently done all I could to secure work and to work hard and somehow I had been misconstrued. I don’t know how or where it started. It was probably some sort of ageism. I was young, still growing, or I would be if my diet were better, and had been forced into, first, an ambiguous uniform, then ambiguous smart clothes for the interview, and if the die had not already be set at that point, the assumptions were made anew and a less ambiguous uniform imposed.

Restating events did nothing to clear my mind. I had wrestled with myself on the way home as to whether I would return to work tomorrow. If I went back to sign on I would have to invent a reason for missing my appointment today as I surely couldn’t tell the dole people I had walked away from a job. Would they see my disliking wearing a female uniform as reason enough? Perhaps they would… or perhaps not as I had no experience of officials being reasonable, and that would mean no benefit money for weeks. And benefit money alone wasn’t enough anyway.
But Mr Gunn had made sure that I was not just over a barrel, but that I felt nailed to it. Exhausted, I wept myself to sleep.

Several hours later I woke up. The sleep had helped. Helped me recover my emotions, or helped me to resign to my lot, or helped me to completely crumple under the pressure; I don’t know which. I picked the dress code up from the bed. Mrs Miller had been quite firm: a bra. The code also said light makeup. I felt sick again. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t know how to.
I got up and began to rummage my sister’s boxes again, the school uniform boxes. She had packed things away from that time, and had meant to pass them on to a charity shop, but it had never seemed urgent. So somewhere there would be the bras she wore when she was developing. She was about my height only slightly slimmer, but in the last few years she had filled out in places where I never would. A bra from her school days would be more appropriate to my shape.
As I rummaged I realised I would have to pad it, so all the more reason to find a small one, an older one before she had filled out. At first I felt guilty looking through her underwear, but then I became a little angry with myself as it came to me that I had nothing to feel guilty about; I was a victim here, a victim of someone or something.

Eventually I found a few bras. I was going to try them by stretching them around me over the shirt, but realised that was stupid, just denial. I was going to have to wear it anyway. So I took off the shirt and tried on the first one. It must have taken ten minutes to get on. I twisted and stretched and tried to imagine what my fingers were doing. Eventually I got the right hooks in the right eyes, but my shoulders were aching and I felt somehow outsmarted by a garment. I slumped on the bed feeling ridiculous in the bra. After a minute I walked to the mirror: it looked wrong. I picked another one up and studied it. There were two hooks and three sets of two eyes at the back, and the shoulder straps were both adjustable. I looked again in the mirror and thought that my shoulders were the problem. They must be bigger than my sister’s must have been when she wore this bra. The nausea returned as I thought about what I was doing, but I could see no choice. I slipped the straps off my arms and half turning the bra I loosened each strap in turn. It suddenly dawned on me that it would have been easier to hook the bra up by turning it like this and felt outsmarted all over again by this garment.
When I slipped my arms back in, the chest band was able to go lower and it looked better. I unhooked the back, which was much easier than doing it up had been, but then I tried to hook it again without unlooping my arms. This time I was quicker, having a clear idea in my head of what I was trying to do with my fingers. Hooked in the middle set of eyes, it seemed to hang better on me. I cast around in my head for something to pad them with, but had no idea of what to use.

In my hunt through my mom’s things yesterday, I had come across some makeup. I stood for a few moments, and finally realised I had to try. I took out the box it was in and opened a lipstick. It was a pale pink colour. I looked in the mirror, looked at the lipstick and said “Sorry mom”, and then smeared some on my lips. I had never really thought about my lips. With pink smeared on them they looked strange. I still had my hair in a bun, and now my lips were pink. I didn’t know how to judge if I’d done it well or not.
I looked at the rest of the makeup and saw some mascara. I opened it and was bemused by the aggressive looking black helical applicator brush. I tried to brush some on my lashes and didn’t do very well. I tried another stroke and somehow got it on my cheek as well, and on the third stroke I nearly put my eye out. I dropped the wand and groaned, lunging for the sink and dousing my eye liberally, and wiping with loo roll.
I went back to the mirror and for the first time that day I laughed at the clockwork-orange cum drag queen look I’d managed. And that little cheer gave me the gumption to want to try again. I picked up the wand and carefully wiped it clean with and then put it back into its tube. Suddenly I remembered my sister’s books and wondered if she had any on makeup. I quickly hunted and found two boxes of books and magazines. My spirits dropped as I realised she must have taken most of her books with her to uni, and had left only pulp novels, teen magazines and some women’s mags.

I was about to become despondent and worried about what Mrs Miller would say, when I saw “Summer eyeshadow styles” as a heading on the cover of one of the mags. I thumbed through to the article and cheered up for a second, realising it was perfect, all about how to achieve a “naked” make-up look for the summer … of two years ago, as it turned out. And then I felt a nauseous sinking feeling again as I realised what I had cheered up about.

I felt like a condemned prisoner, cheering up because the death sentence had been postponed, but still a prisoner, and still inevitably sentenced. I had had too much of an emotional rollercoaster. I left the magazine open, but groaned to myself and went back to the bed.

When I woke up next, the alam was ringing and my clock said 6.00 am. My mind groggily tried to make sense of it. I was supposed to be at the Sherlington at 8.30, to get the trollies ready for a 9.00 am start. It would take at least half an hour to walk there. Over two hours to get ready and get there, plenty of time. I rolled over and realised I was still wearing the bra. I sat up and realised I was still wearing the now very crumpled trousers.
“Shit.”

One of the luxuries of living alone had been allowing myself a less refined vocabulary. My feelings about life nowadays seemed more succinctly expressed by expletive monosyllables, so I resorted to them frequently while alone.

I considered going to work looking crumpled, since I was only going to change anyway. Or I could wear my jeans and a teeshirt. But I remembered the dress code and didn’t know if it applied to arriving as well as the work uniform. Alison had looked quite smart in a casual way when she was leaving yesterday.

So I dragged myself out of bed, and looked at my choice of trousers: crumpled, badly stitched, stained or jeans? Once more I hunted through my mom’s boxes, fairly confident my sister had no smart black trousers she’d seen fit to leave behind. I found a pair after hunting through layers of clothes for five minutes, first coming across two black garments which when unfolded turned out to be skirts. The strides were a dark navy, not black, and there was an embroidered pattern in a lighter blue around the hem and down the sides; it was a subtle pattern but it was there.

I slipped into them and was puzzled that they were so long. My mom had been a little shorter than me, and although I’d heard women usually have longer legs, I’d never noticed that much of a difference between our leg lengths. Then it dawned on me that she was often a little taller than me when we went out as she would wear heels. And I remembered the dress code: I was supposed to wear heels too. The queasy feeling I’d been having regularly yesterday returned. There was a box of shoes somewhere. But no, I wouldn’t try them.

I looked at the magazine article, and spent several minutes puzzling over it. I saw that the mascara wand was meant to be used parallel to the curve of the eyelids, which made sense, I realised. Pale colours on the eyelids were recommended, especially for blondes – that’s me. Lip gloss was more subtle than lipstick for a natural look. I didn’t know what a lip gloss was, but conveniently the article finished on the following page with pictures of product recommendations. I mooched through my mom’s makeup box but found nothing that looked like the lip glosses. I did find a liquid lipstick though, that had a sponge applicator and a very neutral sort of pink colour. So having set these aside, I ambled into the bathroom and began my ablutions. I looked for evidence that I needed to shave, but couldn’t see any. I did feel a little stubble, invisible though it was, so I figured that that justified using a razor. Five minutes later my face was as smooth as a girl’s, which was the idea, but was nevertheless yet another straw straining the back of my crushed self esteem.

I returned to the makeup and tried the eyeshadow. It seemed the easiest thing I’d tried so far, just a light dusting of colour applied with a fingertip certainly made a difference. Then with great trepidation, but orienting the wand more correctly, I brushed upwards under my lashes as the mags seemed to suggest and was surprised to get remarkably little on my face, and to watch my lashes change from almost invisible to become dark and long. I carefully smeared the sticky smoky pink lip colour onto my lips and after wiping where I had gone over the edges of my lips in a couple of places, I thought I’d done not too bad a job. I deliberately didn’t stand back and look at the overall effect.

I pulled the hairpins out of my hair, and then removed the scrunchie, feeling a relaxation in a tension I didn’t realise my scalp was feeling. I pulled out a comb and ran it through my hair. Again the hair fell, lank. I determined to go back to the chemists and buy that dinosaur jawbone. I seemed to remember my sister using something similar and not taking long over using it, which would be better than lots of hairpins in places I couldn’t see. Why did women fasten everything behind themselves? I wondered. Not that one could do much else with hair.

I had a quick mooch through my sister’s things looking for a hairbrush, which I suspected would do a better job than a comb. My mom had suggested I use a brush on several occasions if I wasn’t going to cut my hair. In the neglect of the last few months my hair was much longer, and I knew there would be logic in what she had said. To my surprise I found two foam rubber shapes, like small ovals with a flat end, in a plastic bag in a box of my sister’s. They were in with hair clips and Alice bands, garters and short socks. I suddenly realised they could be used for padding a bra, and eventually it dawned on me they were shoulder pads. I slipped them into the bra and stood and looked in the mirror, but my eyes didn’t rest first on the bra.

The nausea swept through me again. I wasn’t a willing participant in this, my own emasculation: it horrified me and embarrassed me, yet I felt I had no choice. It was all the more humiliating that I was doing it myself, but I felt completely compelled by circumstance. I was humiliated before my own inner critical eye, while the world seemed to look on oblivious and unjudgementally.

I had avoided looking at my face earlier, but now, with my hair down and makeup on, with the bra and the embroidered slacks, all I saw was girl. I suddenly felt cold. I looked away from the mirror dejectedly, but looked back to check, as had been my intention, the bra. It looked perfect, a small but feminine bosom of a not very well developed girl. My stomach turned again. I would be eating no breakfast this morning.

I looked back to the box I had found the shoulder pads in. There was a dinosaur-jaw. I looked at it. It had a spring that closed it, and when one pressed on two decoratively moulded ends it opened like scissors. I pulled my hair back again into a pony tail, and I twisted it so I could keep hold of it with one hand, then I let the device pin into my hair near the scalp. For a second it held, then something came loose and it all hung awkwardly off the back of my head. I tried again and this felt better but uneven. On my third attempt I made sure the teeth were tight to my scalp, and I squeezed them shut, assisting the spring in its action, and this seemed to work. I turned sideways and my hair looked perfectly womanly.

I looked down. Every sense of achievement in this process was marked by a cold hollowness of self-destruction.

But hey, chin-up, at least I had a job and that meant that there was a future in which things could change for the better.

Hopefully.