I spent longer with Maggie yesterday evening than I have for a long time. Once I started talking, I found it hard to stop. She’s a very good listener.
In the end it was very late when I got home and consequently I slept late this morning.
After lunch I decided on a whim to go and visit my mother in the Larches. I thought it would provide some useful distraction from my worries about the police investigation.
She was asleep in an upright chair in the dayroom, her head resting at an awkward angle. A number of ladies were watching a football match on the large television, the sound turned up to prohibit conversation. I pulled up a footstool and sat next to my mother, hoping she wouldn’t wake up before I’d managed to stay the half hour I’d decided was a reasonable amount of time. I watched the football, for want of something better to do, but it was unbelievably tedious.
When I next looked up at her she was awake and staring at me, even though she hadn’t moved her head at all.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
She didn’t speak but continued to stare, unblinking. Some food was crusted in the corners of her open mouth.
I had a sudden recollection of a moment from my childhood—although my father was already dead, so I must have been a teenager—when she had forced me to eat a saucepan full of cabbage that I had allowed to boil dry. For some reason she believed she’d left me in charge of the dinner while she had gone next door to speak to her friend, and when she came back the kitchen was full of a foul-smelling yellow smoke, and the pan was crackling on the stove top. I was in the study reading a book, oblivious to it.
My dinner was put in front of me at the dining table shortly afterward, a pan full of cabbage half-stuck to the burned bottom, and a fork with which to prise it loose. When I refused she left me sitting there for an hour, staring miserably at it. After that hour, she scraped a lump of the cabbage from the pan with her clawlike fingernails and pushed it into my mouth, while I struggled and cried and fought for breath.
“You hate me,” I whispered to the ghost of my mother in her wingback chair. “Don’t you?”
Her eyes glinted back at me.
I left shortly afterward, stopping in at the matron’s office on the way out to make sure she was fully aware of my presence and therefore not likely to phone me again for a few weeks.
It has crossed my mind more than once that my poor dear mother is in need of a merciful release. I can imagine—imprisoned in a body that’s now beyond her control—that she would quite possibly rather be dead, especially if, as they seem to suggest, her mind is still sharp. I have no doubt at all from the vile look in her eyes today that she’s entirely lucid. And, while it is within my powers to assist her with ending her miserable existence—should that be the path she chooses, of course—I find that I’m relishing the thought that I can hold even this back from her. Now the balance of power has shifted to me, and I choose to leave her as she is—humiliated, suffering, trapped.
It gives me immense personal satisfaction.
Back to work tomorrow. I wonder how Vaughn’s doing. I think I shall need a pint and some inane conversation by lunchtime.
BRIARSTONE CHRONICLE OCTOBER
Another Lonely Death—A Community in Shock
Once again this week Briarstone police officers made a grim discovery when they were called to a house in Blackthorn Row, Swepham, following reports of a foul smell in the area. The body of a man, believed to be Edward Langton, 28, was discovered in the bedroom of the property. Mr. Langton had not been seen for many months and a source said that the body was found in a badly decomposed state.
At the time of writing, no relatives of the deceased had come forward. The sad death of Mr. Langton is just the latest in a shocking number of decomposed bodies found in Briarstone homes in the last few months.
It is not known if the death of Mr. Langton has been linked by the police to Dana Viliscevina and Eileen Forbes, who were both found in their homes last week. Investigations are continuing.
“Love Your Neighbor Campaign”—latest events in your area, pages 34–35.
Eloise
I knew I was in the wrong body when I was much younger, probably before I knew anything else that was a solid fact. I played with girls all the time, my two sisters and all their friends, and until the age of about eight or nine I didn’t even really think of myself as different from them, as separate in any way. If it hadn’t been for my dad, we might have gone on as we were and my life would have been very different. But my dad was a man’s man, a former miner, who wanted me to play rugby and if I couldn’t manage that then he would settle for football; he wanted me to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as I grew up. He wanted someone he could take to the pub on a Sunday morning while my mom cooked us both a roast lunch and my sisters chirped and cooed over their babies.
I loved my father and hated him equally; he was never violent toward me when I was growing up, but his displeasure was bad enough. So I learned how to play the game. I learned how to change my voice to suit his conversation and how to sit on my hands and hold my head down.
When I passed my exams I was offered a place at art school in London. My father wanted me to study engineering if I was going to “waste time” instead of going out to get a proper job. We had arguments about it and I thought that I wasn’t going to be allowed to go. My mother convinced him in the end, and he gave in because he loved her and she was the rock upon which his life was built.
At last I set off for the big city. It was like being free when you’d been in prison for most of your life. I studied fashion and design, and every time I drew the female shape and dressed it in gorgeous fabrics and accessories I knew that that was what I was inside, not the lanky lad who everyone thought was obviously gay. By then I had friends, too, whom I loved and trusted. And an older man who taught me how it felt to be loved properly for who I was. I had no money but I started thinking seriously about gender reassignment. I even went so far as to see my GP to ask about the possibility of this being funded by the NHS.
Mam knew all about this, but we’d both agreed that the time wasn’t right to talk to my dad. It was something that was going to take a long time for him; acceptance was not going to come overnight. She wanted to tell him that I was gay, but that wasn’t the right thing. I wasn’t gay; I was a woman who liked men the same way as my sisters did. My genitals were wrong; my hormones were wrong. For me it was as simple as having an illness, a physical handicap that meant my parts were malformed and malfunctioning. No different really from having diabetes or hyperthyroidism or any other illness related to the wrong sort of enzyme or hormone.
She didn’t tell him, in the end. She left it up to me to tell him at the right time.
Of course, that right time never presented itself until it was all too late. I started going to the gender identity clinic, and after that I started to live as a woman on a permanent basis. This was relatively easy in London, especially in the arty fashion circles I inhabited. Everything felt right for the first time—apart from my relationship with Derek, which faltered. While I wasn’t a gay man, he was, and, as much as he loved me, he wasn’t looking for a female life partner, after all.
I moved out of his London apartment and back in with some friends from college.
On my twenty-first birthday, still drunk from a whole weekend of partying, I found myself on a train home. Our house was near the station and I’d slept on the train, and what on earth I thought I was doing I honestly had no idea. It was midmorning and on a normal day my dad would have been at work. Except he’d been off for a month with depression, something my mam hadn’t told me. And I turned my key in the lock and walked into the living room, expecting Mam to make me a cup of tea and present me with a cake she would have made even though she wasn’t expecting me to visit, but she wasn’t there. Just him. And he was watching the twenty-four-hour news channel, looking up from it to see me in his living room, his third daughter if he’d only realized, but I was still Edward then
—and I was wearing a short skirt and platform heels to go with it. He looked me up and down, his mouth open. And the shock of seeing him drowned me like a cold bath and all I could think to say was, “Hello, Dad.”
He let out a howl of rage and distress, got up from the sofa, and launched himself at me. I exited the house as quickly as I’d arrived, tottering up the street back toward the station thinking that he was following me and any minute now he’d strike my head with a massive blow. And when I got to the end of the street I looked back and he was nowhere to be seen.
When I got back to London I phoned Mam. She was home from work by then and had found him. He was all right she assured me. But of course he wasn’t. She tried to shield me from all that, but he hanged himself a week later. It wasn’t just down to me, of course, or at least that’s what my mam insisted. Maybe she was being kind.
She asked me to wear “something decent” for the funeral. That hurt me a lot. I felt it acutely, the loss of my dad whom I loved very much. The falseness of my mam’s approval of who I was was just another sting. My sisters turned against me then, even though they’d known about me changing and both of them had visited me in London and seen the real me. I wore a tailored pantsuit to the funeral and had my hair done for it. It wasn’t my usual look. It was a compromise, but they still didn’t recognize it as such.
They never spoke to me again, and I barely spoke to my mam afterward, either. With my share of the inheritance I got the deposit for a house not far from the one we all grew up in. I wanted to feel close to what was left of my dad, who would have been a different man if he’d grown up a generation later, and close to my mam who was ailing now without anyone left to look after. I wanted to help her but we couldn’t be close again, not after all that.
I thought I was starting to recover from it. I thought I was getting my head back above water, but I received a letter from the NHS that said they would no longer consider funding my surgery because they were aware that I had the private finance to do it. I didn’t, of course; I’d spent it on buying the little house. I tried to put the house on the market but by then the bottom had crashed out of it and there were no buyers around. I asked my eldest sister for help but she hung up the phone on me, and when I went over there she didn’t answer the door, despite the car being in the driveway and the fact that I could hear her kids playing in the backyard.
I didn’t realize how easy the solution was, not really. Not until someone showed me. All you have to do is go home and close the door. For some people it’s harder. They have to plan; they have to do it gradually. I’d done the hard work all by myself; it was only the little nudge, the little whisper that made me realize the easiest thing to do was to cease to be.
So I went home, and I closed the door and waited for the black cloud to carry the sun away.
Annabel
“Drink this,” he said.
I opened my mouth and tried to reach for the cup—glass—to hold it but he held on to it and it bumped against my lower lip and teeth.
“I’ve got it,” he said. “Drink.”
It was cold and it made me cough. When I’d stopped coughing I opened my eyes and looked and he held up the glass again and this time I drank, two or three gulps, cold water going down my throat. It tasted wrong, made me feel sick.
“Do you recognize me, Annabel?” he asked.
I stared at the face for a moment. There was a name that went with it but I couldn’t remember. It was as though the name had been wiped away.
“It’s Sam. Sam Everett. Do you remember we met a few times?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It will be all right,” he said. His voice sounded wrong to me: annoying, discordant, a buzzing—like a fly, or a wasp, somewhere in the room. “You’ll be fine. I promise. I’m going to look after you.”
“Go away,” I said.
“I’m not going,” he said. He sounded sad. “I’m not going anywhere.” He held the glass up to my lips again but I turned my head. It wasn’t the thing to do anymore. I wasn’t supposed to do this. “Don’t go to sleep, Annabel,” he said. “Stay with me. Stay awake.”
My eyes were closing. I was tired, and I had to wait until six o’clock.
Colin
I called Vaughn at eleven o’clock today to ask if he felt like going for a pint. It feels like a long time since I last saw him. In fact, the last time was when he was scooting out of the pub in search of an engagement ring for Audrey, a whole week ago.
“Colin,” he said cheerfully, when I called. “What’s this number, then? Your happy little face didn’t come up in the caller display.”
I had to think about that for a second, and then I realized my mistake. “Oh, I’m calling you from the work cell. Does it matter? It’s still me.”
“Shall I save it in my contacts this time?” he asked. “I don’t always answer if I don’t recognize the number. I told you that before, remember.”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “It’ll probably be a different one next week. They’re supposed to be upgrading them all.”
That seemed to pacify him anyway. I forgot I’d called him from the wrong phone once before and he’d gotten all bent out of shape.
If I’d hoped that a pint and sandwich with Vaughn would lighten my mood, I would have been sadly disappointed. There’s nothing cheering about the place itself, with its brown carpet and wobbly bar stools, nothing to lift the spirits either in Vaughn’s countenance or behavior. He seems almost as miserable as I am.
“How’s Audrey?” I ask, when I’ve ordered my sandwich and sat down opposite him.
“She said no,” he says dismally.
“No? Really? Why?”
“Said she’s not ready to settle down.”
“I thought you said she’d been giving off hints.”
“Well, that’s what I thought. But turns out I was way off the mark.”
I take a long gulp of the pint of bitter. It tastes faintly, ever so slightly, off. “What do you mean? What does she want?”
Vaughn sighs heavily. “You tell me, Colin. I’ve given up trying to make sense of what women want or expect from us.”
“So,” I say, trying to choose my words carefully and still probably failing. “She’s dumped you?”
He looks aghast. “No, nothing like that!”
“Well, what, then?”
“She just doesn’t want to be engaged; that’s all.”
I make a noise that tries to express sympathy for Vaughn, disgust at Audrey, and relief that they are still in some kind of relationship. It comes out as a “Hmmm. Pfft.”
“This pint’s off,” I say after a while, and go to tell them to change the barrel.
Vaughn’s problems are tiny, pale, and uninteresting in comparison to mine, like the runt of a particularly average litter. I’ve lost one of my subjects—the woman with the satchel. That hasn’t happened to me for a long time, since I became choosier about which subjects to engage with.
I called her at six last night, as arranged, and the phone went unanswered. I wondered if she had already expired and begun to transform—but that would have been very quick, even without water. When I drove past the house on my way home, there was an ambulance and a police car parked outside.
However much I try to kid myself that I don’t mind, I am still pissed off at my own negligence. I’ve failed her, but, more importantly, I’ve failed myself. And losing one when the police are already showing an interest in my activities is a big risk.
I lost others, particularly in the beginning. Ones that were unsure, or maybe were less isolated than they first appeared. I thought that sooner or later someone—a family member, perhaps—would put in a complaint about me, or alert the authorities, but nobody ever contacted me with regard to this. As I refined my technique I took steps to guard against discovery. Taking their cell phones away and leaving them with a replacement for me to keep in touch with them was one particularly genius idea. On more than one occasion I have sent reas
suring replies to texts from people who seem a little concerned, and once or twice I have given up on people and not returned to them at all in case they are found.
Each loss is a shame. Some of them were really interesting, too: ones whose transformation I had been looking forward to very much.
All day today I have been trying to reassure myself that they have no way of connecting me with her. And if they do, what of it? I spoke to her. She invited me into her house. She asked me for help, and I provided it. I have done nothing wrong.
Sitting beside the morose Vaughn, I can’t help feeling a shiver of arousal at the thought of Audrey’s rejection of him. And it is a rejection, no matter what spin he thinks to put on it. She is not ready to commit to him, which means she might consider playing with someone else. She might consider me.
“Do you want me to have a word with her?” I ask.
Vaughn looks up from his food. I can always tell when he is miserable because he chooses a sausage-and-egg baguette instead of a ham salad. This makes for a noxious concoction of brown sauce, ketchup, and egg yolk that invariably dribbles down his chin (where it will be wiped) or down his sad brown tie (where it will remain).
“Really?” he says, or that’s what it sounds like through a mouthful of partially masticated meat and dough.
I give him a disgusted look that I hope he takes on board. “If it might help,” I say. “You never know.”
His eyebrows furrow. It looks like confusion to me, but I can never quite work this out. Suspicion. Maybe it’s suspicion.
“Or—not. It was just a thought.”
He swallows the last of the mouthful and takes a sip of his pint. Then he clears his throat. “It’s a very kind offer, Colin. Thank you. But . . .”