Witness Ch. 02

Margaret started coming home late or sometimes not at all. She was day-drinking and had stopped paying attention to her appearance and the men at the office had passed her around to the extent that she no longer interested them and when her work performance started to deteriorate she was fired from her job.

The cheap apartment became an even shoddier flat in a disreputable neighbourhood and Margaret started to hang around with a seedier crowd. She took low paying positions and went through a succession of bad boyfriends eventually settling on a detestable lowlife named Raymond 'Ray-Ray' Smith.

Paul worked hard at school even though the school was populated by children from a lower the socioeconomic status and the teachers were apathetic. He was outwardly androgynous, wearing long hair and some makeup. Many of the fashions of the day were unisex anyway: flared pants, platform-soled shoes, psychedelic puff-sleeve blouses. It would amuse Paul's friends to know he was wearing satin panties under but by then the eclectic crowd he hung around with suspected that he was gay and knew he was effeminate.

When they first moved into their cramped apartment Margaret was hardly ever home and Paul presented as feminine but when she gave up work and Ray-Ray moved in Paul kept his crossdressing proclivities confined to the bedroom and presented as androgynous to the outside world. Ray-Ray called him a fag and a loser which didn't hurt Paul one bit. What really hurt him was that his mother didn't defend him but by then Ray-Ray had introduced Margaret to the delights of addictive narcotics and specifically meth.

Ray-Ray was selling drugs out of their apartment and tricking Margaret out to those men who had a penchant for older women who would do things that other women wouldn't.

Paul spent most of the time in his room adopting the persona of Penelope, his feminine alter-ego. Unable to attend college Paul had taken menial but reasonably paid positions and continued to study at night school. Paul would have left home but he still loved his mother and cared for her and tried his best to keep her from destroying herself with booze and drugs.

Margaret would get sober, throw Ray-Ray out and clean up the apartment and then a few weeks later Paul would return home to find Ray-Ray had moved back in and his mother high as a kite defending Ray-Ray to her son.

The best and worst possible thing happened to Margaret when she fell pregnant to Ray-Ray. Despite Ray-Ray's insistence that she get rid of it, Margaret saw out the pregnancy and gave birth to her second son who she called Robert. Born underweight and suffering from the effects of his mother's addiction, Robert was still a beautiful baby and it was Paul who took care of him. He loved his baby brother.

One day not long after his eighteenth birthday Paul came home from work to find the house was cleaner than usual, Robert was fed and playing on the carpet and his mother looked better than he had seen her in weeks.

"Honey I know all about your thing. I always knew that you wanted to be girl not a boy but it was your father who tried to beat it out of you remember, not me," Margaret sat her oldest son down beside her on the couch.

That wasn't quite how Paul remembered it but he was not about to argue with his mother who was showing him affection for the first time in months.

"Come on honey; I've bought you some presents," Margaret took his hand and led him into her bedroom.

"Let me show you how to do this properly. I've been remiss as a mother not showing her little girl the secrets of womanhood," she smiled at Paul and stroked his hair.

She helped him undress and wasn't surprised to find that he was wearing feminine undergarments.

"Do you have a name honey?" Margaret asked as she seated Paul at her vanity.

"Penelope; what a beautiful name," she picked up her scissors and straightened Penelope's bangs.

Penelope had some rudimentary makeup skills but Margaret taught her the secrets of feminising her face so that her best features were highlighted: her emerald green eyes, her full lips and arched brows. She showed her how to style her hair, painted her nails and then led her to the bed.

"This is all yours. Let me show you how to wear it properly," Margaret waved her hands at the packages and boxes scattered on the bed.

When Margaret had finished Penelope was dressed in a black taffeta ruffled miniskirt, a mauve satin blouse, sheer flesh-toned pantyhose and six-inch high heels. Her hair was frizzed out and her makeup was heavy and exotic. It was not exactly how Penelope wanted to present herself to the world but she loved how feminine and pretty she looked.

Then Margaret committed the ultimate act of betrayal.

She opened the bedroom door and Ray-Ray entered.

"I'm sorry Penelope. What else can I do?" Margaret took the baggie of powder that Ray-Ray handed to her and left the room.

By the time Ray-Ray left the bedroom four hours later Penelope knew things sexually that a girl her age had no right knowing. Ray-Ray came out of the bedroom sweating, dressed only in his shorts, whilst Penelope lay on the bed sobbing, her clothing stained and dishevelled, her makeup ruined and her body broken.

"Get cleaned up, I got customers lined up for you," Ray-Ray growled.

Ray-Ray turned Penelope out and added her to his small stable of prostitutes. She lived full-time as Penelope and any vestiges of Paul were discarded as she hardened her heart and set her resolve to keep her mother and her brother safe. Robert now had a sister but he couldn't pronounce her name; he mispronounced Penelope as Poppy and it stuck.

Margaret died of a drug overdose when Robert was five and Poppy took Robert and all of their meagre possessions with her and left the apartment late one night while Ray-Ray was so high that he didn't even know they were leaving.

She also took with her the scars that Ray-Ray and his friends had inflicted on her. One night he had held her down and burned the letter R into her shoulder blade with the end of his cigarette. He told her that he had branded her and that she would always be his. He liked to burn her, cut her, blacken her eyes and break her fingers. Poppy told the emergency room doctors that she was accident prone; not that they cared about a teenage transsexual hooker.

Poppy had squirrelled away enough money to get a fresh start. She found a small apartment and set up house. By now she was passable as a woman; Ray-Ray had paid for breast augmentation because he saw it as an investment. Poppy had wanted the surgery of course and she had been especially nice to Ray-Ray when he offered it to her but she wanted breasts proportional to her body but Ray-Ray had insisted that she get big tits 'because guys want girls with big tits'.

Poppy put Robert in daycare and hit the streets fighting off the other hookers and pimps who saw her as competition but she eventually established her own patch. She always dressed conservatively to drop off and pick up Robert from daycare and whenever she was in his company. She led a complicated life hooking to survive, raising Robert the best she could, presenting as a law abiding model citizen whenever she wasn't hooking.

Her first solicitation pinch put the fear of God into her. She used her one phone call at the precinct to call a friendly neighbour and got her to collect Robert from school and care for him until she was released. She told Robert she had been called away urgently for work and went on to explain that he would have to go to boarding school because she couldn't look after him properly and work the busy schedule she needed to provide for them both.

Poppy enrolled Robert in the prodigious Grosvenor School using every penny she had saved to pay the deposit and almost every penny she earned to pay for his ongoing board and tuition. When he was old enough to understand she told him about her being transgender but by then she always been his big sister and he wasn't fazed by it.

What Poppy did keep from her brother was how she lived and made her money. He was convinced that she was a high flying legal eagle who travelled the country extensively and for that reason she had to keep him in boarding school except for the holidays.

*****

"And that's everything," Poppy drained the last of her scotch and put the glass on the coffee table.

Elliot remained silent and she wondered if she had put him to sleep with her story.

She looked up at him and saw the tears falling from his cheeks.

To be continued