Herbert The Turbot (Part One)

© 2013 David Jasmin-Green

“I'm off to mum's now, Herbie,” Ruby said to her husband of ten years, who had his nose buried in the sports pages as usual. “I should be back about quarter past nine, if I miss the bus I'll give you a call.”

“Yeah, OK,” Herbert mumbled through a mouthful of sausage roll.

“There are some fresh cream cakes in the fridge if you get a bit peckish later on.”

“All right love, OK.”

“And don't forget to let the dog in in a few minutes time, it's spitting.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“There's an attractive young prostitute I've hired for your enjoyment waiting upstairs. Her name is Candice and she's up for anything, the dirty cow - you can do her up the wrong 'un if you want, I don't mind a bit as long as you bleach your cock when you've finished and don't wipe it on the sodding curtains.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“That's your standard reply to most anything, isn't it, Herbert? If I said I was planning on sawing your legs off just below the knee excruciatingly slowly you'd say 'Yeah, OK.' If I said I was sick of living and I was thinking of jumping off the top of a multi-storey car park dressed as Archbishop Desmond Tutu you'd say 'Yeah, OK.' If I said I was leaving you for a Ninja warrior with an improbably large dong you'd say 'Yeah, OK.' If I said I was off to jump in the shower with the West Bromwich Albion team after the match and let 'em all go through me - including the ref and the ball-boy, whoever the opposing team are and the bulk of the crowd - you'd say 'Duur, OK'.”

“Yeah, OK. You take care, love.”

“I give up, you ignorant fucker,” Ruby grunted, slamming the door behind her as she left the house.

Herbert was only pretending to be his usual unresponsive self, though. As soon as he heard Ruby close the front gate he leaped up and furtively watched her through the nets as she stormed off down the street, doing his best to hide his enormous bulk behind the curtain. “Splendid,” he said, dropping his newspaper on the armchair and rushing upstairs.

From the junk filled attic he retrieved two large suitcases hidden under a dusty tarpaulin and a pile of memory filled cardboard boxes. He carried them downstairs into the master bedroom, opened them up on the bed, closed the curtains and switched on the light. “It's time for my transformation,” he said, shaking with a mixture of anticipation and a creeping dread of his wife coming home early. “It's time for me to become, just like that murderous nut-job in Red fucking Dragon.” Herbert was under no illusion that he was turning into some sort of supernatural monster, though; the transformation he had in mind was much more common and more human if not exactly mundane.....

He picked out a lustrous blue and black silk and taffeta dress and laid it carefully on the bed, a pair of silk fishnet stockings and a matching bra and pants of a rich purple that he had bought from a male to female transformation supplier in the back-streets of Birmingham. From a jumble of carrier bags in the other case he selected a pair of red high heels and a long blonde wig that he had purchased from the same shop. He stripped off, popped on his bra and pants and inserted his improbably large breast forms, then he sat by the dressing table and opened his make-up case.

Herbert had amassed his extensive collection of female accoutrements over a long period of time. He wasn't well off by any means, and every time he made a purchase he felt sick with fear in case Ruby found out about his transgression. A lot of transvestites, he had learned from the TV and magazines, told their partners about their desires, and many women grudgingly accepted it, but Ruby wouldn't accept it, he knew that much. If she found out she would either kill him stone dead or leave him, and both of those eventualities were too unbearable to even think about. Herbert didn't love his wife, he hadn't for a long time, but he depended on her and he couldn't bear the thought of living alone. He couldn't give up his secret passion, though, no way – it was all he lived for.

As he applied his make-up he was still in Thomas Harris mode – Harris's Hannibal Lecter series were among his favourite novels, and he had watched the films dozens of times. “You wanna fuck me?” he mumbled in his best Jamie Gumb voice as he applied his lipstick. “I'd fuck me.....” It took him nearly half an hour to tart himself up to his satisfaction, and not long at all to dress and put on his wig. He wished he had the courage to leave the house, but he couldn't afford for the neighbours to see him. He chatted with a few like-minded men on the internet, and that's what he intended to do for the three hours or so until Ruby returned home.

An incident that had happened that afternoon at work kept coming back to him. Herbert worked for a large engineering company in Aston making dies for the forging industry on a CNC machine. He didn't talk much with most of the men he worked with, and a few went out of their way to avoid him. Alfie, his only real friend there, told him about the rumours that the workforce spread about him. It was nothing to do with his secret passion – that at least was safe. No, the whisper on the grapevine was that he was on the sex offenders' register, which was completely untrue.

The trouble was that someone with the same name – Herbert Fish – had been arrested in a neighbouring town a few years back for a series of sickening offences involving young boys. You couldn't get away from such a distinctive name even if you were as pure as the driven snow, Herbert mused, but he wished that his colleagues would get their facts right and appreciate his innocence. Herbert the Turbot, he had overheard one of the apprentices calling him in the canteen. 'Herbert the Turbot dresses up as the Archbishop of Canterbury and sneaks choirboys 'ome under his cassock', the youth's exact words were, and they had cut him to the bone.

“Malicious little bastard,” he mumbled as he adjusted his wig. “But you, Bootiful Gal – well the name says it all, darling.” He blew himself a kiss in the mirror and descended the stairs very carefully indeed, a vision of Ruby coming through the front door and finding him lying in the lower hall with a shattered pelvis invading his mind as it did every time he used the stairs while he was wearing heels. In the back room he closed the curtains in case old Mr. Micklewright next door was pottering around in the garden, then he turned on his computer.

*************************

Herbert's favourite social networking site was called Femtastic. It had nearly four thousand members worldwide, and it catered purely for transvestites and transsexuals and their admirers. Though a few idiots occasionally joined just to take the piss the administrators quickly weeded them out, so the bona_fide users experienced little hassle. Herbert logged in with his user-name - Bootiful Gal - and his password, which was Kissytitties, and he spent a good ten minutes trawling through the two hundred plus users online. “Hank,” he whispered as he clicked on his greatest admirer. “You'll do nicely, my hunky American friend.” Only it wasn't Hank that appeared on the web-cam. In fact it wasn't a human being.....

“What is this?” Herbert mumbled at the appalling creature glaring at him from the screen. “I'll email the administrators immediately, we've been hacked!” Only that couldn't be true, because the monstrosity was sitting in Hank's chair, and the surroundings looked perfectly familiar, right down to the Brown bear's head and a selection of deer horns mounted on the wall. He was looking at a man-sized, basically human something, but its oversized head, wrinkled grey-green skin and huge, almost perfectly round fishy eyes told him it wasn't human, and though its lipless mouth didn't move it started talking to him.

“Don't be alarmed, Bootiful Gal, we mean you no harm. And rest assured, Hank is just swell.”

“Who are you? What do you want? And where's Hank? Herbert yelled, his multiple chins trembling in indignation.”

“Hank is fine, he's at work and we have taken the liberty of using his computer. I am Oscelon, my crew members and I are from a planet a great distance from yours. We have been conducting a survey of human relationships for a little while. Somehow we stumbled across this site, and to be frank we're a trifle confused. We need your help, Bootiful Gal, we can't figure out who is male and who is female or what exactly is going on here. Are you female?”

“That's an impertinent question, of course I'm female!”

“Well you don't look at all like the other human females we've come across on our Earthly travels. And you have a funny name, just like most of the users on this site - Bootiful Gal isn't your real name, is it?”

“Of course not, penis breath - it's a user-name to protect my privacy, otherwise I'd have all sorts of weirdos banging on my door. And it's not my fault that I don't fit your ideal of feminine beauty, is it? I'm an individual, I'm, well, I'm me. What do you expect me to look like?”

“There's no need to be abusive. Would you mind taking off your clothes so that we can take a look at your breasts and genitalia?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I bloody well would mind! I don't drop my kit for just anybody, you know, especially a greasy, bug-eyed alien. Not that you're a real alien, of course, there's no such thing. Do you think I'm stupid? This is some sort of joke - you're a computer generated image, and at this very moment some twat is laughing his bollocks off at me. I'm terminating this conversation straight away and reporting you to the site administrators.”

“Don't go, Bootiful Gal – we need to talk! If you refuse to talk we're going to have to pay you a visit to satisfy our curiosity.”

“Piss off, freak-face - you don't know where I live, thank fuck. And curiosity killed the cat, you obnoxious little prick.....” At that Herbert clicked on the home button and the conversation was terminated. He sent an email to the administrators telling them exactly what had happened, and then he decided to see if there was anyone else online that took his fancy.