Free Too Cold For Snow by Jon Gower Page B

Parker.
    The forwards started betting on him getting one wrong. His fellow backs backed him to the hilt, until there was a pot of over three hundred pounds resting on his naming the perfume Mart the butcher’s wife was using. It wasn’t one he recognized at first. It was expensively vulgar, more skunk than musk.
    ‘It’s that new line from Chanel – Gymnopédies, I think,’ laying on a laughable Breton onion seller accent as he said it.
    And before he could be probed about the actual name Mart blurted out the word ‘Gymnopédies’ and by then all were roaring with delight, especially as Watkins, the ageing centre, said that the backs had won fair and square but the winnings were all going behind the bar to be drunk with abandon.
    ‘To salve your weary souls, gentlemen,’ he said, lifting a pint pot to a tumultuous cheer.
    Keiron sat down with his rugby friends and tried to concentrate on what they were saying in their cups amid the din of disco music. But his mind was far away. He was thinking about his forthcoming sex-change operation. In an opulent Harley Street consulting rooms an Australian doctor made absolutely sure he was decided on this course before starting his hormone treatment to enlarge his breasts. The doctor had even taken him out for dinner afterwards. All part of the service.
    Keiron wanted to tell them, he really did, but he knew that things would never be the same. They’d probably never want to play the Perfume Challenge with him ever again. And never allow him to disgrace a rugby field. It was one thing to accept his odd ways, it was quite another to play with a girlie.
    That year the Six Nations competition started on October 8 th with Wales pitched against their deadly rivals, England. It was an old saw that Wales and England still went to war for eighty minutes. Keiron Lye scored a try which earned a place in the pantheon, shrugging off three tackles, outpacing a full back who was renowned for breakneck speed and doing a ceremonial forward roll before grounding the ball. On the Sunday he went quietly into the clinic for a bilateral orchiectomy where he had both testicles removed.
    He’d told the coach he wasn’t coming for training on Monday, citing personal reasons. His consultant had told him to rest for six weeks but Keiron, headstrong with pain, ran out for a full session on the Tuesday, even though he might have burst all his stitches. He deftly avoided tackles, gritted his teeth and made damn sure the team doctor didn’t get within a diagnostic mile of him.
    In the changing room he kept his shorts on and said he was going to shower at home, and no one thought twice about it. Other than the coach, who had noticed how he winced more than once when running, and who had also noted that his running style was less graceful. After three more training sessions he felt obliged to ask Lye what was going on. Keiron was disarmingly frank.
    ‘I’m in the process of changing gender. I’ve been on hormones for eight months now and during the Christmas break I’m due to have a penectomy…’
    ‘Is that…?’
    ‘It is.’
    ‘Jesus H.’
    ‘And that’ll be followed by a vaginoplasty…’
    The coach counted to six, a calming device.
    ‘What is that exactly?’
    The coach blanched when it was explained to him, and this was a man who’d been with the Territorial Army to Helmand province in Afghanistan, worked in a field hospital where unspeakable injuries came in on convoys and Apache medivacs.
    ‘But the good news is I’ll still be able to play.’
    The coach bit his lip. He wasn’t so sure. He did, however, know he was talking to the greatest player in the history of the game, Keiron Lye, who was already set to eclipse all the significant point scorers; Keiron, who never missed a kick, whatever the angle, who almost always scored once he had the ball in hand. There was an unstoppable force about his running, as if a deity had put on togs. As if a man in a chariot with blades on its