Max is looking unlike himself too. I’ve always thought of him as such a confident, successful young man: a leader, a reliable person, a mature person, particularly lately, with how he has dealt with all of this, how little he has complained.
But in the bed, he seems to be a child again, his hair ruffled on the pillow, asleep more deeply than simple sleep, pale and vulnerable. His lips are parted, his skin is hairless. He seems to have sunk not simply into the bed, but back through the last five years. He looks eleven to me.
I stroke his hair, feeling a peculiar mix of ownership and intrusiveness, holding my child without his knowing.
I should have been here for the operation, but I couldn’t be, for Max’s sake, because someone would have known me. We were worried, as it was, that someone would recognise Karen. We thought me going would have been too much of a risk. There is always someone who will have a quick visual memory of my face on their paper, or on the evening news broadcast from Oxford. It flits across their face like a shadow, followed by a light, and then they move towards me, shake my hand, look with keen interest at the faces of the people around me. At my family.
Perhaps I should never have run. Perhaps I should have let politics go when I knew I had a family that needed protecting from the limelight, like Karen let go of vying for the top spot when she knew the boys needed her at home. She always found work easier than me, and perhaps we should just have taken each other’s roles. But she was their mother, and somehow, as modern and educated as we were, it seemed to make more sense for Karen to take the more active parenting role. Even when we knew that sometimes she could not handle it. She could have had my job. She could have already been an elected MP. That’s the thing about Karen: logic, academics and objectivity always came easily to her. She never had to try to be the best barrister we had; she just was. But achieving a balance between objectivity and the subjectivity at home was always hard for her. She felt every blow Max felt, but keener than he did, because she saw the bigger picture, knew what it would mean to him growing up, knew how people would treat him. Max’s happiness has always been more important to her than, really, anything.
But this meant that she could not make medical decisions for him when he was born, found it hard to take care of him without worrying she was hurting him and making the wrong choices for him. After those first few years of turmoil, Karen found a coping strategy. When things go wrong, she sits back, being too objective, too cold. It’s not her fault. She didn’t have a real mother figure growing up. She didn’t expect to have an intersex son. Everybody copes in the way they were taught to cope.
Not very many people see it, but cool Karen Walker has a huge, warm, endlessly giving heart, and it beats almost entirely for our children.
She was wary of the campaign, and she was right to be. The work for the campaign is taking me further away from my family when I thought it would bring us closer, and I feel myself using it as a barrier, using it to distance myself when I don’t want to comment on what Max is going through, what he should do.
I am a politician, at the end of the day. I don’t like to announce an opinion until I have properly formed one. The only thing I can honestly say to Max is that I don’t know what he should do – about the hysterectomy, about the gender reassignment procedure, about anything – so I haven’t said anything to him.
It has been Karen driving us towards the operations, because she knows time is running out, and I’ve been thankful to her for taking the reins on this occasion, for being the strong one. As I watch Max sleep, I realise I need to be there more, for my children, for my family. You cannot take your family for granted.
I had thought we would all come together on the campaign. I thought the kids would be proud, I thought Karen would be excited. Perhaps I didn’t think it through enough. Perhaps I didn’t think a lot of things through, as Karen said the other night in bed.
‘Did you ever think about what would happen if Max had children?’ she murmured, her back to me.
‘I wanted him to have the option.’
‘Seriously, Steve?’
‘He could have used a surrogate. He could have grown up wanting to be a girl,’ I offered diplomatically. Then, when she was silent, I said, ‘Karen, I didn’t know this would happen.’
‘We should have made these decisions for him.’
‘I don’t think we should have.’
‘Don’t you? This is our fault.’
‘It’s—’
‘It’s our fault.’
‘These things happen. Teenage pregnancies happen.’
‘This isn’t just a teenage pregnancy.’
‘How is it different, Karen?’
‘Because . . .’
‘Because?’
‘Because he’s a boy!’
‘What do you want me to say, Karen?’ I grunted. ‘Of course I didn’t imagine it like this. Of course I didn’t!’
‘Keep your voice down!’
‘Of course I didn’t want this for him, but now it’s happened, we have to let him make his own choices.’
‘He doesn’t know what he wants. You don’t know what you want.’
‘And what do you want?’
‘I want him to have a good, normal life. I want him to not be treated differently.’
‘Doesn’t that sound so cynical? So awful? Do we care that much about what other people think?’
‘That’s a strange question for you to ask.’
I ignored the remark. ‘Making decisions based on what other people think just seems plainly wrong to me.’
‘Plainly wrong? You get to wander around on your high horse being the hero politician and you don’t see how our lives are! You don’t live the day-to-day life of a parent. You’re never here, and when you are here, you’re with Lawrence or Debbie. You don’t live like a regular person. You’re surrounded by sycophants and people who worship you.’
‘I thought you would be proud of me. You knew this is what I wanted. We talked about this years ago, in our twenties.’
‘Well, I was stupid in my twenties, Steve!’ Her voice was low and hoarse. ‘I was ignorant and young and I said things and wanted things without knowing what they would really be like. I had no idea what it would be like to raise a child with an illness, who needed privacy, who needed us both to be there.’
‘It was just an accident, Karen,’ I said quietly. ‘If we did anything wrong, it was not getting the doctors to figure out how Max’s fertility worked. If he had known, then he would have been careful.’
‘Just an accident . . .’ Karen muttered.
We were quiet for a moment, both lost in our thoughts.
I sighed regretfully, and spoke softly, trying to get her to understand how I was feeling and what I had been thinking. ‘I just want the world to accept Max the way he is, for him not to have to compromise one way or another. It’s not his fault he’s born this way. It’s not life-threatening, it’s not something that’s wrong.’ I turned to her. ‘Karen?’
She stood up.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Spare bedroom,’ she muttered.
‘I just want him to—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she snapped, her voice breaking and filled with tears. She left the room with her BlackBerry in hand.
I sigh, in the hospital room.
Max takes a long time to come around, which affords me a lot of time to think. I have not seen Karen here yet. One of the nurses suggested she might be in the canteen. I have a feeling she is avoiding me, and I choose not to disturb her.
Suddenly Max takes a deep breath in, which turns into a yawn, and his eyes open. He blinks, with a particularly unreadable expression in his eyes. I’m sitting back in the chair, slightly behind the head of the bed. He doesn’t notice me. His lips part, and he lowers his hand to his stomach, touches it and frowns, seeming dazed. He lifts the sheet.
‘Max?’ I say.
Karen comes in. She looks beautiful, but older than I
remember her. I suppose I look older than I remember me. Her hair shines in the light, the blondes mingling with caramels and chestnut. I wish we wouldn’t fight. I wish I could talk to her. She moves over to Max with trepidation. Then she smiles at him.
‘Did you stop the termination?’ Max says.
‘What?’ I murmur, turning to him.
Karen pauses momentarily, faltering, her hand hovering in the air, halfway towards touching Max. Her hand stops hovering, and she retracts it. She shakes her head.
Max looks confused. ‘But you . . .’ His eyes flit from side to side and frown at Karen. ‘You . . .’ He stutters a little, then seems to realise something and he stares at Karen as if in horror. His mouth slowly opens at the same time as his face changes, the eyebrows frowning deeply in anger, the mouth buckling in sorrow, the eyes boiling from blank to furious.
‘No!’ he says, louder than before. ‘No! But you knew! You knew!’
‘Max!’ Karen says, her hands once again dancing in front of her.
‘NO!’ Max moans now, trying to sit up in the bed, but still groggy, gasping and holding his stomach. ‘NO!’
‘Max, I told them we weren’t going to have the rest of the operations,’ Karen says nervously, quickly, in a shrill voice. ‘I cancelled the appointment for the gender reassignment talk, the hysterectomy, everything. You can choose about all that in your own time. I just, we had to—’
‘I can’t believe you! I can’t believe you!’ Max protests.
‘What’s going on?’ I say, standing.
Karen shakes her head. ‘It’s for the best, honey.’ She stumbles over her words, becoming redder. ‘Now everything can go back to normal, and we can forget all about—’
‘I’m not normal! I’ll never be fucking normal! Can’t you get that into your thick head? Give me up now if you want something normal, because I’ll never be right for you!’ Max leans forward, snarling now, like a dog. ‘You knew what I was asking! You fucking knew!’
As Max is saying these words, I rush over to the door and shut it quickly.
‘Shh!’ I say, but Max and Karen don’t hear me. ‘Max, what’s going on? Everyone can hear you outside. Stop yelling.’
They ignore me, and Karen tries to put both her hands on Max’s yellow mop of hair.
‘Don’t touch me!’ he screams.
‘Please, Max,’ she says desperately.
I turn to her and notice how much she is shaking and how her hand flutters to her mouth and throat and back to try to touch Max, then away from him again.
‘What are you doing, Karen?’ I ask quietly.
‘I want her out,’ growls Max, not taking his eyes off Karen. ‘Get out!’
She shakes her head sadly. ‘I did it for your own good.’
‘I just wanted some fucking time, some breathing space!’ Max shouts. ‘How could you do that? That was my choice to make!’
‘It’s better this way, sweetie,’ Karen says softly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t call me sweetie!’ he says, as she walks towards him. ‘Get away from me.’
‘Max—’ she says, touching his hair.
He pushes her hands away and leans forward and screams so loudly that the water in the glass beside him ripples.
‘GET AWAY FROM ME!’
Max
Dad drives me home from the hospital on Friday night. When we open the kitchen door, Mum is there, in her coat. Her hair is wet. It’s raining outside.
I tense up immediately, wanting to throw something at her. But tensing hurts my stomach, and I wince painfully.
‘Go up to your room, Max,’ says Dad.
I look at him, register what he’s just said, and run upstairs. I change my clothes from the hospital, and I sit on the bed.
It’s quiet. Daniel is staying with Hunter’s parents. I hope they don’t come round to drop him off. I feel shaky and weak thinking about it.
I hang my head over my knees.
After a few minutes, I hear Mum and Dad’s voices murmuring downstairs. I open my bedroom door, creep down the stairs and up to the kitchen door, and sit just beneath the keyhole. Everything is too quiet, and I look through the hole, just to check that they are there.
They are stood at either end of the table, not saying anything, not looking at each other.
After a while, Dad says, ‘What the hell were you thinking?’
Mum looks out the window at the black night. She doesn’t look at Dad.
‘Karen,’ Dad starts again. ‘All he wanted was some more time to decide. He just needed time.’
‘We might have assigned him the wrong gender,’ Mum says finally.
Dad shakes his head. ‘No. We didn’t assign him a gender; he decided who he wanted to be. He always has, up until this point.’
‘If he’d said it to you, what would you have done?’ Mum says quietly.
‘I don’t know! Given him some—’
‘More time! More time, like he wanted? For what? For him to show? For it to be an even more invasive operation? For him to panic and end up keeping it and ruining his fucking life?’
‘He wouldn’t have kept it! He just wanted to talk about it more, think it through.’
They wait, watching each other warily.
‘He never talks to you about it,’ Mum murmurs darkly. ‘It’s always me who has to make the hard decisions.’
Dad lowers his head, like he’s stopping himself from saying something.
‘All I know is that we’ve always told him he could be who he wanted,’ he says finally. ‘And every time that we’ve tried to impose something upon him because those bloody doctors have told us it’s realistic and it’s for the best, I have deeply regretted it.’
‘Steve, I did what I thought was right,’ Mum says.
‘You weren’t there, Karen!’ Dad suddenly shouts. ‘You weren’t bloody there in the beginning. You didn’t have any right to make these decisions without me!’
I frown, surprised and annoyed. What’s he talking about? Him? How is this about his right to make decisions for me?
‘It’s been sixteen years,’ I hear Mum say, in this bitter, strained voice. ‘When are you going to forgive me?’
There’s a silence and then she starts to talk again. ‘One year, one year of his life when I couldn’t take care of him, when I was overwhelmed and couldn’t cope thinking about how fucking difficult his life was going to be. I’d just been pregnant for nine months and then to be asked to deal with the intersex issue . . . To think the hard slog is over and then suddenly—’
‘It wasn’t just one bloody year, Karen. Every time there was a problem, you refused to deal with it and Max saw that, even when he was little. And he learnt never to complain, never to ask for help. That time you up and left, when he was five and we found out you were pregnant with Daniel, and I had no idea where you were for two months.’
Mum kind of gasps. Her face looks horrible, through the keyhole. I look away, thinking about what Dad’s just said. I remember that time. I remember being frightened until Daniel was born, because I thought she would leave again. But then he came and it felt like we had been a rickety table of three legs and he was the fourth, and then I knew Mum couldn’t leave, because the baby would keep her with us. I felt safer.
‘Two months, Karen!’ Dad shouts. ‘I thought you were never coming back. I was worried you were dead! I had police out looking for you!’
‘I was exhausted—’
‘Well, so was I! I had a full-time job, I had a five-year-old that wanted to know where his mum was . . .’ Dad’s voice breaks, and tears immediately come to my eyes. My dad’s voice never breaks. He’s as sure and steady as anything. ‘Since then, you’ve been much better, Karen. You’ve found a way to cope, but it’s to be so objective as to cast aside Max’s feelings, his choice today, to make a choice you thought logically was for the best. Every time you have to deal with something, Karen, you move away, you create distance. It’s almost instinctual. And Max has barely had a bad
mood since you left for those two months, because he didn’t want to rock the boat and make you leave again. Do you know what that’s like to see in the eyes of a five-year-old?’
‘I—’
‘No, you bloody don’t, because you weren’t there. Since then he’s just gone along with everyone else, done whatever he felt he had to to please you, to make you not leave again, and you don’t know how hard that is for me to watch. You’ve made our son a pushover. He doesn’t stand up for himself.’
‘He’s not a pushover, he’s amicable!’
Dad sighs and I glare at him through the keyhole. I’m not a pushover. But then I think, and I turn around with my back to the door, and I wonder, Am I?
Dad speaks again, and sounds at the end of his tether. ‘I’m so tired of it, Karen. Maybe I shouldn’t have run for MP. Maybe I need to find a better balance. Maybe I stepped away from our home and our family, and that’s my fault, but I was so . . . I just wanted to have it all. To be able to show the boys that you don’t have to sacrifice to have a family.’
‘Well, maybe you do,’ Mum snaps sharply.
Silence.
They seem to both be exhausted from yelling. I look through the keyhole.
Mum suddenly smacks the table with her hand. ‘We’ve always had this family story, Steve: “Karen’s the bad guy, Karen’s the fuck up”. Well I’ve been trying to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, I’ve dedicated my bloody life to trying to make up for being so useless when we were young and when we had Max, and I’m done. I’m done.’
She walks around the kitchen, picking up random things, looking like she’s about to do something with them, then banging them down again on the counter like a mental person.
‘I stand by my decision. It was a difficult one, but I think I did what was right. Don’t tell me, Steve, don’t tell me it would have been a good thing to let Max decide that he couldn’t go through with it, to let him ruin his life.’
‘I understand it was a hard decision, Karen.’ Dad’s voice is muffled. He’s rubbing his face with one hand. ‘I’m glad he felt he could talk to you. I’m sad he didn’t feel he could turn to me.’ Dad sniffs, and I realise he’s wiping away tears. He says more quietly, ‘I thought if we just showed Max that we accepted him, that we . . . But I can’t believe you did that to him, Karen. And I cannot believe . . .’ he breathes in and out rapidly, ‘. . . that you didn’t tell me immediately about what he said, or tell me even when I’d got to the hospital. Because you knew what I’d say. You knew, didn’t you?’
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