by Krissy Kneen
Now I know his name. Aiden stands. Aiden’s mum stands. They walk towards the dark blue door that the receptionist holds open. The mother steps back and lets Aiden go through first.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ he whispers.
I don’t call my mother that. I call her Olivia because that is her name and I don’t pretend to have any other relationship to her other than we know each other well enough to be on a first-name basis.
When Aiden and Mum are gone it is just us twilighters staring at the old lady in a wash of piped-in muzak. No one looks directly at her but we are all staring anyway. She shifts in her chair. Her legs are gnarled sticks, walking sticks. I smirk. She is wearing heavy boots that would sink her in about two seconds if you were to drop her in a river. Concrete boots. An apron dress over jeans. She looks kind of cool. It’s actually the sort of dress that L might wear ironically. A dress for a boy or a girl or a twilighter.
She is going to become one of us. It didn’t cross my mind before, but why else would she be here at the clinic? Do they even allow old people to transition? Why would you bother?
I watch as she pushes her frail body up to standing. It takes her two goes. She almost stands, loses balance, sits down with a little sigh, then stands up again. She shuffles towards me. No, past me. She stops at the jellyfish tank and rests a finger on the glass, bending awkwardly and peering down into the bright blue fluorescent light. She sways. I am not even sure how she is standing up. Her skin is so thin it seems to glow like the soft surface of the jellyfish. She finds balance and then leans forward to look at the thing more closely.
‘Perfect,’ she says. Is she speaking to me? ‘You know we owe this little fellow so much.’
She sways and I stand in case she is going to fall. My arms outstretched to catch her.
‘Six billion years old,’ she says and I wonder if that is her actual age. She looks about that mark.
‘Here, have this seat.’ I point to the one I have just vacated. She starts to shake her head, then sighs and moves slowly to take it.
I sit in the chair beside her. I can’t help staring at her shoes.
‘I like your dress,’ I say and she smiles. It is a great smile. I like her. I have decided we will be friends, an old chick and a young twilighter. Like Batman and Alfred. She will be my crime-fighting sidekick. Our sidekick, because the dynamic duo is really L and me.
‘I like your body.’
Straight out she says it. Like that. I try not to grin but I can’t really help myself.
She nods at my crotch. ‘What are your genitals doing under there?’
I am agape. That is the one thing you don’t ask. Twilighters get to keep their privates private. There is even a T-shirt that some of those militant types wear around. My Privates Are Private!
She is waiting for me to answer, like really waiting, her eyes wide and alert, her hand raised a bit towards her ear to direct the sound of my voice into it.
I shrug. Say nothing.
‘Have you gone all the way to centre yet?’
My cheeks are burning. I frown and glare down into my lap where my privates should be very private indeed, hidden as they are in my baggy jeans.
‘Almost,’ I say, because she is still waiting and I don’t know what to do about it.
She lifts the edge of her apron and for a moment I’m afraid she is about to show me hers, but she just holds the thing out like a parachute.
‘I don’t know if I’ll make it right to the middle. They won’t give me the treatment yet.’ She rolls her eyes and scowls towards the receptionist. ‘Assessments,’ she says. ‘Assessments and more assessments. I’ll die while they are still assessing me.’
It doesn’t sound like she is joking.
‘Doctor Harbison.’
It isn’t the receptionist this time—the doctor comes out in her white coat and lanyard. The whole red-carpet treatment, stepping out into the waiting room and moving towards the old lady.
‘My name’s Liv,’ she says to me.
‘That’s my mother’s name. Well, Olivia. My aunty calls her Liv.’
‘God. Don’t hold it against me.’
She struggles to stand and I help her.
‘I’m M,’ I say, but it sounds like Em, like Emily. Like my old self that is almost undone. We mostly go by letters. It is because of that classic book by Anne Garetta that has become a bible for so many twilighters. We sometimes use stars after the letter. I could be M**** but I am not sure how you would indicate that in general conversation.
‘I’d like to chat some time if that’s okay,’ she says. ‘I want to know what it’s really going to be like. Not the pamphlets or the video they show you.’
‘Sure.’ I know what she means about the video.
‘Do you have a card?’
I laugh.
‘Oh. Well, here’s mine.’ She reaches into the pocket of her apron and pulls out a small blue square.
‘The arborium. We hang out at the arborium.’
‘We?’
‘L and me. My best friend.’
She nods. The doctor holds out her arm and Liv reaches up with fingers that are no more than twigs.
‘Near the scented garden.’
‘I know it. I go to the ocean dome pretty often.’
‘Just next to there.’
‘Doctor Harbison. So nice to see you. How are you today?’
She turns to me and rolls her eyes and I try not to smile.
‘I was better about a hundred and twenty years ago,’ she says to the doctor.
When she is led slowly away to the doctors’ offices there is a lingering smell of jasmine. It reminds me of the way L smells when we lean back against a wall and our lips touch. L’s lips are big and blowsy and the dark skin of chin and cheek give way to a pale line where the lips start and they feel like eating something overblown and ready to seed. Mine are just thin inward-turned lines of pink. I don’t know why L bothers with my lips at all, but there you go. Each to their own tastes I guess. I wouldn’t kiss my lips, but obviously I can’t anyway.
The door shuts behind Liv and I didn’t really pay enough attention to her face. I remember she had lots of lines at the edge of her mouth and they all bunched pleasantly together when she smiled. Apart from that I couldn’t really describe her enough for an identicrim simulation. Just old, I would say. Thin, with extraordinarily bright green eyes and skin that is pale and delicate as a jellyfish. Not much of a description really. The jasmine smell lingers on the chair where she was sitting. It’s nice. I wish L was here; I miss L when we are not together. Soon. One more course and we will be the same kind of beast, twilighters together, united, forever.
L’s body is pressed up against the reinforced glass. I admire the silhouette. Striking angles, arm stretched up, fingers splayed, legs solidly apart. I love L so much that it hurts in the place where my tits used to be. If it wasn’t for the glass, L’s body would be pounded by hailstones the size of tennis balls. People die in the storms all the time. We have all been raised to be frightened of the weather, but L just presses back against it, daring the hail to smash through. I know L is worried about an uncle who still lives on country but you wouldn’t know it to watch this display of daring. I touch the glass tentatively with one hand and feel it rattle.
L steps back down slowly and curls into a sitting position that might as well be a hermit crab curled into its shell. It’s like watching someone in a film that’s running backwards, folding a body up into itself, one arm hiding under another, the shoulders caving in over the slight chest. L never looks directly at you, just speaks over your shoulder. It isn’t rude, it is just a way that is uniquely L. The voice that trickles out of those incredibly succulent lips is deep and thick as honey but I only catch a breath of it. It is as if I am not hearing the words but a thin whispered echo of the words that are all still steeping away inside L.
‘No boundaries in an ocean,’ whispers L. ‘Country reclaims itself.’
Outside it really do
es look like we are on a platform built hovering above an ocean. Submerged gutters and roads shape the water into a mess of turbulent waves. I am suddenly my ten-year-old self. My mum and I were right here, or near here, around the corner, at the ocean dome I think, when the storm hit us. They still had council bins there before the sanitation system was completed. I remember looking down through this same reinforced glass at the little ocean that had suddenly washed in from the river and the rain and the gutters, and there were all these boats bobbing around on it. Garbage boats, I christened them. Each one a nautical adventure, a struggle against a perfect storm, and then when we went into the ocean dome I saw boats everywhere, bobbing around among the memory of fish. There was some long, tangled meditation about memory, what is real, what is not. I was like that as a child, and my mother always calling my name and saying, ‘Honestly, Emily, where are you? You are always wandering off into your own head.’
I drew a picture of a garbage boat in my sketchbook when I went home, a wheelie-bin submarine navigating its way through a school of sharks. I still have it somewhere.
‘One more trip to the clinic?’ L’s honeyed whisper.
People think that L is shy. Strangers, who haven’t seen that steely core. All they see is furtive glances. All they hear is the thinness of an almost imperceptible voice.
‘Let it be over,’ I say, then, like a general rallying their troops to war. ‘Let the wait be over!’
‘You feeling okay about it?’
Ah. That clear-sightedness, that laser eye that can see into the heart of my soul.
I shrug. ‘Some speed wobbles,’ I say, ‘but I haven’t stacked it yet.’
L nods.
‘I met this really old lady at the clinic. She is going to do the therapy at, like, a hundred.’
‘A hundred?’
‘Maybe. Over ninety anyway. Maybe over a hundred.’
It sounds crazy, but L nods anyway.
‘So she said something about jellyfish and how she wants to come and meet us out here and talk to us and she was a doctor. I think she was important. The gender doctor came all the way out to get her like she was the queen.’
When I stop long enough to notice L there are tears tracking down those tawny cheeks. It is startling. I quickly press myself in under one of L’s arms and nuzzle my head under a shower of dark hair. L smells different to me, strong and musky like a panther’s den. I simultaneously feel frightened and protected inside the press of flesh.
‘What did I say? What’s wrong?’
‘Imagine,’ L says, ‘living almost till the end of your days as the wrong person. Imagine being so close to the release from that. And then you die.’
It is true. That’s the saddest thing. If that’s how you feel.
Of course it isn’t the same for me. Twilighting is a choice. Maybe I’ll skip back and forth one day. It’s getting easier, quicker. The transition isn’t even uncomfortable anymore. I might be a man one day, and then a woman the week after. I feel like I’m on some kind of wonderful ride, but I know that L felt nothing but shame in the old gendered body. L has found an equilibrium in the twilight and will not be leaning a centimetre to the left or right of it.
‘I don’t think she’ll come see us,’ I say, avoiding the subject of choice, my own wishy-washy willingness to flit from one thing to another. I pull a little away from my perch to look at L’s serious face and I frown just a little bit. ‘I mean she probably won’t come all the way here. I just thought she was cool.’
It is the wrong thing to say. Yet again. I am being flippant in a poignant moment, throwing away something of worth in my clumsy rush to impress L. I’m certain I have shown myself up as incompetent, again. And yet here is the sweet comfort of an arm snaking around my shoulders and a squeeze of those fine, long fingertips. This is how Grace finds us, locked in a sweet embrace.
‘L,’ she says, her shoelaces hanging loose, her hair soaking wet, a hole in the side of her top large enough to outline a dragon tail scored in ink onto her stomach.
‘Us mob are goin up to Maccas after the storm. No one will be there then, eh. All be home fixing their roofs and shit. Aunty Rita’s gonna meet us out there.’
‘Which Maccas?’ asks L.
‘Near the overpass out on Gregory Terrace.’
L shrugs, which probably means yes.
‘Eh, M&M. You should come too.’
I am always wary of Grace and I think she might be wary of me too. She is family for L and family will always be more important than a relative stranger. No matter how often L kisses me on the lips or strokes my arm or pulls down my jeans in the drowned house to help me understand what complicated adjustment is taking place in my anatomy.
‘You guys go,’ I say. ‘I gotta go home and get changed, see Olivia for a bit, anyway.’
‘Gotta keep Olivia happy.’
I can’t tell if Grace is being sarcastic or sympathetic. I just can’t read her at all.
L stands and hugs me and squeezes my shoulder. ‘You coming over? Have some dinner?’ That glorious husky rasp of a voice. I wish I could draw a picture of the way L sounds. Oh I have tried and failed so many times. Some things you just have to experience for yourself.
‘Mine,’ says L, and for an instant my heart leaps, thinking I am the subject of the comment. But I think L is referring to the drowned apartment block on Oxlade Drive. ‘Sixish?’
I nod.
I can hear Grace lean in and ask L, ‘Your girlfriend okay?’
Two things. Grace thinks I am L’s girlfriend. Grace thinks I am a girl. The first of these revelations is just awesome enough to obliterate the second, but only just. I am sure that tomorrow I will feel like a twilight failure. I will never be able to erase completely the memory of my clitoris, no matter how big it swells. I could have the whole six inches and L’s brother would still open doors for me like he did the other day at the cinema. But for now I have the word ‘Mine’ slipping quiet as a special secret into my heart and the idea that I am somehow linked to L, the property of L, the girlfriend of L. I grin. It is tempting to risk the last of the storm to run home joyously in the rain, but there is no use getting killed, now, is there?
Oxlade Drive is a fast-flowing bend in the river. There certainly isn’t any driving being done there. But the proud heads and shoulders of a few high-rise apartment blocks still muscle up out of the rushing water to prove that there was once a street below the surface of the river. L lives in the tallest of these, the oldest. Glenfalloch peers blank-faced out towards the city, the glass-enclosed stairwell is dark in the evening, but in the day you can see the stairs spidering up and up towards the abandoned penthouse where L would live if it weren’t for all the stairs.
The architects said this building would stand the test of time. We know this because of the original 1950s advertising brochure that we found carefully wrapped in plastic in a bookshelf on the third floor. It is a striking old building, with its sturdy eastern-bloc concrete-slab architecture, and for once an advertising brochure did not lie. It persists, invincible against any deluge. Clinging to its two floors of submerged carpark, now a haven for a kelp forest, jellyfish and water rats.
I steer the boat up to the mooring that L and I fixed to the window frame of unit 2C. There are three rungs of a rope ladder and then the balcony. I vault over the railing and call out, but it is clear that L has not yet arrived home. There are records strewn around the floor, a stack of books teetering on the coffee table, packets of meds on the kitchen bench and a patch of new mould growing in the corner of the kitchen, a livid green colour. Cockroaches too. I crush one under my shoe. There is plenty of juice in the battery, it has been a really sunny day, so I turn the zapper on and the wildlife disperse.
I hop up on the bench and pick up the pump pack of bleach. L has left the radio on and now we will have to charge it before we listen to anything, which is a pain. I could just run the boat home and pick up more batteries from Olivia’s but L hates it when we take stuff from he
r. Olivia wants me to have all the things I might want, batteries, clothes, books, but I suppose L is right. She pays for my meds and it is a big enough stretch, to see her little girl transforming into no one’s little girl. We fought before I left tonight too. She hates that I stay over with L.
Are you sleeping with that…person?
The little pause, my mother, who tries to be so hip, struggling to find the language to describe what I am to L. Grace’s call was better. Just outright say it: girlfriend. That’s how my mother sees me. The girlfriend of a freak.
No Olivia I am not sleeping with that person.
Well I don’t understand it, Em. If you are not sleeping with—it—then why are you following it around like a lovesick pup?
Just let me go.
Go where? To some illegal, probably highly dangerous, squat?
Go—to live my life the way I want to live it.
That gets her. That’s what she used to say to Grandma. I save that line for the big fights and it works like an electric shock every time. My mother backs off. Frowns, but settles down.
I spray bleach on the wall and sponge it down. The plasterboard crumbles and disintegrates in my hand. Olivia does have a point, although I would never tell her so. These buildings have been abandoned for a good reason. I never sleep easy here, knowing the foundations could topple us into the river tearing through the carpark below.
I hear the raucous shouting of L’s mob paddling in an overcrowded rowboat, banging unceremoniously against the side of the building.
‘Woah sis!’ The voice of L’s cousin Darcy loud and jubilant over the sound of L’s brother’s settle and steady up.
‘Piss off!’ Grace’s voice complaining about one or other of the boys. They are a rowdy family, but not once have I heard them question L’s decision to transition and more than once I’ve seen them shove someone a bit too roughly for looking sideways or making a comment about L’s ungendered body.
