AUTHORS NOTE

This has had the longest gestation of any of the stories I’ve posted here on BC. It started in early 2020 as an attempt at the ‘magical transformations’ genre (which I hadn’t tried previously) but as we went into covid lockdown it became more complex, and took off in directions I hadn’t anticipated. It’s sat half written for a long time, as I waited to find out where it was taking me. During that period it has felt at times like the world is unravelling and yet also, locked down with my loving family around me, without the distractions of the outside world, at a personal level I’ve felt blessed to be able to experience periods of profound peace and joy. And the story has ended up becoming something of an attempt to try to understand all of that. As a consequence its more ambitious than anything I’ve written before, and more personal too. If all that sounds far too heavy, please be reassured that there’s still some humour to be found, and at its core, it’s a tale of redemption, so I do hope you’ll stick with it to the end! There are eight chapters, and I’ll aim to post every two or three days or so. Finally, if the ‘Aeaea’ reference doesn’t mean anything to you, do please look it up - it will help everything make more sense! Thanks for reading!

AEAEA

CHAPTER ONE

‘Canteloupe’ Captain’s Log August 17th 2022
25°N, 71°2’W

We sighted a 40 foot sloop drifting off the starboard bow at 9.23 am. There was no sail, and no sign of life on board. I took a RIB and 3 crew to go to investigate. The boat looked brand new. No visible name, or flag. Sails unused, still sealed in plastic bags below deck. No sign that any crew had ever been on board – no food, no clothes, no sleeping bags. On the mapping table I found a black, A4 sized leatherbound notebook filled with handwriting. It appears to be some form of diary – I’m going to transcribe as best I can and record its contents here. There is no title, or heading. It starts as follows:-

I am a man. David Sydos. 25 years old. That I insist. I am putting that down on paper right here, right at the beginning. Nothing that can happen to me can take that away. I AM DAVID SYDOS!
I’m writing this down to try to make sense of what’s happened to me. It’s maybe 12 hours or so since I came to, and everything has changed.
Maybe I’m still unconscious, and this is a weird nightmare.
Maybe I died in the accident and this is hell…

So. Here goes. I need to start at the beginning if this is to make any sense.

I was born in South London on December 19th, 1995. I never knew my father, and my mother died when I was only 3, leaving me to be raised in a children’s home. I went off the rails as soon as I was old enough to ride them. Starting with petty shoplifting, joining a gang, delivering drugs, and then finally, on my 12th birthday, I was arrested for stealing a car. That must have triggered the forces that be into action, because I was uplifted from London and sent to a new children’s home on the south coast near Plymouth. For a while things went from bad to worse. Without the support of the other gang members I was just a scrawny, still pre-pubescent, angry kid. I was beaten up twice in my new school and took to carrying a knife. I’m sure I’d have ended up using it if things hadn’t changed.

I’d been at the school a few weeks when, one games lesson, we went to a nearby sailing club where we were shown how to rig a small dinghy and take it out onto the water. Something clicked for me. Out on a boat by myself, thinking of nothing but the direction of the wind, the trim of the sails and the course I was steering, for the first time I was free of the chatter in my head. And I was good at it, too. I started winning the races we would have. There was another boy there, Pete, who was pretty good too, and he and I would finish miles in front of anyone else. Although he was in my year, he was a good foot taller than me, athletic and popular. He took me under his wing, we became friends and the beatings stopped. We started racing together at the club at weekends in a bigger 2 person dinghy. The combination of my skills in reading the wind and setting a course, together with his athleticism in keeping the boat trimmed and fast through the water meant that we were soon beating everyone in the club too. We graduated to regional races, then nationals, and by the time I turned sixteen we were a shoo-in for the GB team at the next Olympics.

But spending an hour or two at a time on the water wasn’t enough for me. I left school after sitting my GCSEs and hitchhiked down to the south of France, where I blagged my way onto a yacht as crew for the summer season. Pete joined me the following year and we worked our way up until two years ago I was made skipper, and Pete first mate, of a beautiful 20 metre ketch, belonging to a record industry executive from Los Angeles. We were based in the Caribbean, the owner joining us for maybe a month or so a couple of times each year, and the rest of the time taking guests out for multi day trips. We sailed hard all day and partied hard every night. I’d eventually caught up with Pete in height, wasn’t too far behind him in looks, and we enjoyed more than our fair share of girlfriends. We made a heap of money, especially in tips. Life was good, and as long as I was busy the voices in my head kept quiet too.

This summer we’d planned to take the boat back to the UK for some regular maintenance, before hurricane season kicked in. It had been 10 years since I’d been there. Pete was planning on flying back and meeting me there. I’d decided to take the boat single-handed when a couple of guys from one of the other boats we sometimes sailed with asked if they could hitch a lift in return for working the galley. Ash and Drew were both good cooks, which I wasn’t, so I was happy to take them along. And then the evening before Pete was due to fly we’d all gone to a huge party, and Pete hooked up with a girl overnight and missed his flight so in the end we all ended up sailing together. We’d got as far as Bermuda without any incident. We stopped off there for a couple of days and restocked the boat with a view to our next stop being the Azores. We left Bermuda in fine weather and with a good forecast. There was a steady south westerly blowing, and we made good progress over the first day. Around lunchtime on the second we ran into a thick sea fog. It hadn’t shown up on any forecasts and, weirdly, the wind didn’t drop. I wasn’t unduly worried since we were a good distance away from any of the main routes that bigger shipping would take, but I ordered the sails to be trimmed to reduce speed so if we did see something we’d have more time to maneuver out of the way. It was then that we hit something. Hard. I was flung across the cockpit and must have banged my head. That’s the last thing I remember.

Day 1

I came to suddenly, like a drowning man surfacing and gasping for air. I knew something was wrong straight away. I tried to stand up from the bed where I’d been lying, but my legs buckled and I collapsed onto my hands and knees on the floor. My vision was blurred – the carpet on which I’d landed a discombobulating swirl of pattern framed either side by two strangely pale and slim hands. I blinked hard. Long hair was in my eyes and I tried to brush it away, but it fell down again, either side of my face, almost to the ground. Sunlight streamed into the room from a large window opposite me, reflecting off a mirror to my right. I crawled towards it. A figure to my left dressed all in white stood and came towards me. I reached out to the mirror and a young woman, around my age, naked, with pale skin and long dark hair, reached back. I knelt up, transfixed as the woman’s hair fell across her breasts, brushing lightly against my skin. I raised a hand, bewildered, to my chest and then, in a rising panic now, back down to grasp in futility at the void in my groin. I retched violently, but my stomach was empty. I curled into a foetal position and pushed a thumbnail hard into the flesh of my palm but looking up again, the woman in the mirror was still staring back. The figure in white knelt next to me. I felt a robe placed over me, a hand gently on my back. A woman’s voice: “It’s ok. You’re ok. You’re safe here.”

I stayed curled as tightly as I could into a ball, pressing my nail into my palm, breathing heavily. “What’s happening? I’m a man. I don’t understand. I don’t understand…”
“It’s ok. You’re safe.” Despite everything, the hand was a soothing presence on my back, and my breathing slowed. I looked up at her, my vision clearing. Long, straight, white blonde hair framed a face that could have been anything between 35 and 60, but with the most extraordinary pale blue eyes. I wanted to look away, but she held my gaze whilst placing her hand softly on my shoulder. “You’re safe here.”
I took a deep breath. “Am I dead? You look like an angel…Who are you?”
She paused for a moment, and then smiled. “You can call me Chris. And this is my island. Aeaea.”
“Shit!” I suddenly remembered. “Pete! And Ash and Drew!”
“They’re ok. They’re downstairs. They’ve been waiting for you to come round.”
“I want to see them.”
“Of course.” She stood, and holding my hand, helped me to my feet. “We can go down. You should get dressed first, though. Why don’t you freshen up whilst I find something for you to wear.”
“But what’s happened to me?” I felt a rising panic again in my guts.
“Shh.” She took my hand and instantly I felt calmer. “It’s ok. You’ll feel better after you’ve bathed. We can talk then.”

I stood leaning on the handbasin staring intently at my reflection in the mirror above it whilst the bath filled. The eyes I recognised – the only part of me that I did. My hair remained thick and chocolate brown, but where previously it had been something of a tousled mop it now fell in silky waves down past my shoulder blades. My skin, previously roughened and weatherbeaten by ten years at sea, was now milky white and soft. My body, previously angular and taut from hauling sails all day was soft and rounded. Like an amputee who still felt the itch of a missing limb, I felt the absence between my legs the most acutely.

I had a million questions to ask Chris, but emerging from my bath I could manage only one. “Did you do this?”
She smiled gently and shook her head. She took the towel from around my waist and wrapped it again above my breasts and then showed me how to bend forward and wrap another like a turban around my wet hair. “Come.” She took my hand and led me, bewildered, through into another room, maybe 4 or 5 metres square, lined on 3 sides with wardrobes. The fourth wall had a window, stone mullioned and with leaded lights like the one in the room I’d woken in, in front of which sat a dressing table and chair. Chris picked a dress off a hanger and held it up against me. The dusky pink material flowed softly over my body and for a moment I stood admiring the resulting image in a mirror, before shaking myself back to reality.
“Fuck! I keep thinking I’m going to wake up, but I don’t. I can’t believe this is happening! I’m not going to wear a fucking dress!”
Chris recoiled. “I’m sorry. It’s too much. You choose – there are plenty other things.”
I was embarrassed now that I’d sworn. “I’m sorry. Maybe there’s some trousers in here? Whose clothes are these anyway?...”
I worked my way around the wardrobes. There were more clothes than I could possibly imagine one person owning. Long evening dresses, sundresses, skirts, blouses, lingerie in every conceivable style and colour and enough shoes it seemed to be able to wear a different pair every day of the year.

I took a deep breath. Every minute I kept expecting that I’d awake; that reality would be restored. But as long as I didn’t, and it wasn’t, I went through the motions of doing what this strange serene woman was suggesting. I set about finding something to wear. Even choosing a pair of trousers from the range on offer was difficult. Eventually I found the plainest pair I could; black with a high waistband, but even these were widely flared and obviously intended for a woman. A simple cream coloured turtleneck sweater would do for a top.
“You’ll need something to wear underneath.”
I sieved through drawers of undergarments in an attempt to find something as close as possible to a pair of boxer shorts, but eventually had to settle on a relatively simple pair of black panties, which I slipped on without removing the towel.
“I suppose a bra’s out of the question?” Chris’s eyes glinted with humour, and in spite of, or perhaps because of, the surreality of the situation I found myself smiling. I pulled on the trousers and the top. The latter fitted a little tighter than I’d have liked, showing off curves I’d have preferred not to see. But it would do for now. I wanted to see Pete. Maybe that would allow some semblance of my real life to return to me. I wondered in a vague and detached way what he’d make of my transformation. I found a pair of flat shoes, and pulled my hair into a pony tail, making a mental note that if this situation really did continue I should find some scissors and cut it as soon as I could. I was hurrying now, but she stopped me before I could leave the room.
“Listen. I know everything feels really strange right now, but I want you to know that I’m here for you. It might not always feel like that, but I am.” She gave me a quick hug – even though I’d been rushing, I wanted it to last longer. There was something about her touch that calmed me down.

We went downstairs, through the house and into a large old fashioned kitchen. A huge pine table, scrubbed smooth by years of cleaning, stood in the centre of the room. An equally patinated dresser adjacent, opposite a wall with a Belfast sink under a window smaller than those in the rooms upstairs, but similar in design. A tall woman, dressed in dark trousers and a white blouse stood with her back to us as we entered, looking out. Even from the back, she looked awkward and ungainly. Across from her, two petite young women, both blonde and dressed in matching vest tops and cut off denim shorts, were occupied at a range cooker. A sudden realisation dawned on me. I looked back at Chris but she had gone.
“Pete?”
The larger woman turned towards us. “Dave? Oh, fuck, not you as well?”