Frank had just got the call he had been dreading. He put down the ‘phone and stared straight at the open file on his desk, without seeing a thing. He felt trapped in his musty, cream-coloured office, with high ceiling and damaged cornice, that had once been a gracious room of a Georgian townhouse. There were files on the floor, and anywhere else there was space; there was shabbiness everywhere, and Frank’s head was somewhere else. The internal auditors would be starting in his section on Monday morning.
Frank had joined the Civil Service straight from school. He had married Moira when they were both in their mid twenties, and they had two daughters. The two girls were married and gone, and about a year ago Moira developed cancer. She had had a terrible time, and their health insurance was hopelessly inadequate to provide the private treatment she needed. Frank was at his wits end to give her not only the best treatment available, but when the worst became inevitable he was determined that at any cost she should have private nursing-care to the end. All of this was way beyond his insurance cover and his salary, so Frank had exploited a flaw in the system that he had become aware of some time after he was posted to Finance to meet the cost of private nursing.
The internal auditors, for obvious reasons, didn’t signal ahead their intention to work in a particular section, however, Frank, through a contact, without giving rise to suspicion, was able to know where they were going next. He had been quite confident all along that his embezzlement would not be discovered, but now that the time approached for the audit he began to have niggling doubts.
He could forget the matter for periods of the day during work, but at lunchtime and after he left the office he became preoccupied with the audit and how thorough it would be. After work he used to go for a pint and a chaser to a pub near where he got off the bus. On the nights since he got word of the audit he would stand at the bar going over and over the likely questions the auditors would ask, and rehearsed the answers in his head. So much so that the barman and other regulars became aware that he was preoccupied and put it down to his recent bereavement.
At night Frank would fall asleep for a couple of hours, waken and then lie awake till morning, obsessed with the embezzlement and the audit, convinced, in the middle of the night, that he would be found out. He went over in his mind the consequences of this: the sack, the loss of pension and above all, the shame. How would he ever face his two girls again, their husbands and his grandson. He would explain that he didn’t do it for drink, horses or exotic holidays, but for Moira, and he convinced himself that they would understand or even admire him for it. He wished he could turn back the clock and tried to work out where he could get the money to refund it. He knew that even if he could come up with the money, he wouldn’t be able to return it unknown to the auditors, but if he could volunteer it immediately he might forestall his sacking and simply be demoted. This way he would at least avoid the shame, as nobody outside would need to know.
When morning came his spirits would lift. He would convince himself that the loophole in the system, which he had been aware of over the years and had finally exploited, would not betray him, but he feared that the computerised system might throw up something that he couldn’t take account of. On balance, however, on the bus to work he was confident, but during the rest of the day he oscillated between confidence and composing what he would say to the girls and to a judge in court.
By the Friday Frank had reduced the whole thing to the need to tell one lie to avoid being found out, and this would not be difficult for him, since he had told many the lie over the years to hide another secret. Frank was a closet transvestite.
When he was a boy he was always interested in his sister’s clothes - the items he liked and didn’t like. He noticed things that went well together or didn’t match. He even noticed his mother’s clothes. Once when everybody was out he put on a blouse and skirt of his sister and admired himself in the mirror. In adolescence he went through dreadful contortions that he might be homosexual, but he emerged into adulthood a full-blooded heterosexual male.
After he became secure in his heterosexuality he was more at ease with himself and his aberration and remembers well the day in his late teens that he read an article in a magazine that put a name on his interest in women’s clothes. In fact when he read this article it was the first time he admitted to himself that he was interested in wearing them. The article said that the whole business was harmless and resulted from some minor glitch in early development, and the only difficulty was the response of people who didn’t understand. It made the point that after the transvestite dressed he felt a peace that relieved an incipient tension that had built up inside him. The danger was, however, that cross-dressing might become an obsession, and like any obsession it could become unhealthy.
Frank was relieved that he wasn’t some kind of freak, and when he was alone in the house he would dress in some of his sister’s clothes. In fact he engineered opportunities to be alone, and he did develop an obsession; an obsession that nobody on earth would ever find out.
In his early twenties he had a series of girl friends, and occasionally wondered, when he was out with one of them: ‘What would she think if she knew?’ He also wondered from time to time what the lads he played football with, would think. If either of them had to know he would prefer that it was the girls, for he was sure that they would be more understanding than the lads, who would ridicule him beyond endurance. In banter they ridiculed anything that was a chink in the armour of the all-conquering macho heterosexual male.
Then he met Moira and he was bowled over. He knew early on that this was the woman for him, and he was blissfully happy when he discovered that he was the one for her. His interest in dressing diminished and for periods disappeared altogether. He did, however, wonder from time to time how she would take it if she knew, but he was determined that she would never know. For a while he even felt it might have been a phase he had gone through that had disappeared, now that he had met the love of his life. But it wasn’t.
Frank and Moira married and in due course the girls arrived, grew up and flew the nest. Moira was a full-time wife and mother, and Frank moved slowly up the ladder in the Civil Service. He kept his secret under wraps, filling his need to dress only under the safest conditions, that is until Moira died. Since he was now in the house alone he indulged himself more freely and more often. He would spend an evening trying on Moira’s dresses, most of which, if he were to look well in them, he would have to have altered. He even began to plan how he might get this done. He began to dress fully, wearing jewellery and make-up. Then one night after dark when he had spent a long session dressing, wearing a wig that Moira had had when she was having chemotherapy, he went out to the car and drove into town. At traffic lights he kept his hands at the bottom of the steering wheel, because of all his visible parts he felt his hands were most likely to give him away. When he got into the city centre he parked the car and sat for a while, then did a circuit and drove home again. He felt a certain freedom and was satisfied that nobody had looked strangely at him.
He did this a number of nights before he had the courage to park the car, get out, walk 30 or 40 yards to a shop, buy a bar of chocolate and back to the car. When he did it nobody blinked, and he was elated. During the working day he took to going to work, dressed in Moira’s underwear, and over it his conventional grey suit, collar and tie and black shoes. He started doing this occasionally, but soon he did it every day.
The Monday morning arrived that his departmental internal audit was due. Frank had more or less convinced himself that his embezzlement would not be detected. He got on with his work, awaiting the arrival of the auditors, but he could not apply himself to anything. He made numerous cups of coffee and by lunchtime the auditors had not come. After lunch he worked himself into a panic. He almost felt he would prefer if they walked in the door and told him they knew exactly what he had done; it would be over and he would handle whatever he had to. Not knowing, was infinitely worse than being found out.
That night Frank slept badly. He was torn between how well he felt recently about dressing and how badly he felt about the prospect of his embezzlement being exposed. If only he had the audit successfully out of the way he could relax and have the prospect of something of a satisfying life. He was lonely and missed Moira, but he felt, not without some guilt, the benefit of being free of her distressing final illness. He also felt some ambivalence about wearing her clothes, but this was diminishing with time.
On Tuesday morning when he arrived into the office he was already as tense as a bowstring. He tried to get on with some work, but couldn’t concentrate. He bit the head off a junior who came into his room with a query. By lunchtime, when there was no sign of the auditors, Frank was pacing around the room like a caged lion. His stomach alternated between being in a knot and feeling sick. His hands were shaking and he had a splitting headache. Instead of his usual sandwich and apple for lunch he went down to the pub and had three quick brandies. When he got back to work he felt dire. He reported sick and left the office, risking not being there to deceive the auditors if they came during the afternoon.
On the way home he called to his local. Standing at the bar, waiting to be served, he had a session of trying to burp, then he put his two hands to his chest and bent over double in pain. He collapsed, and as he lay on the floor someone opened his tie and his belt. Still conscious he fumbled to keep his belt closed. When the ambulance came he was unconscious. By the time they got to the hospital he was dead.
Later in the day one of his daughters identified Frank’s body and brought home in a plastic bag his spectacles, his watch, his wallet and his clothes.