‘How old was this gentle soul?’
‘Gail? Ten. I was four. She was very big, and I was very small. She knew the offal pit was my nightmare place. When Dad did a home kill he used to drop the heads and guts and skin down there. She said I would rot away.’
He looked sickened. ‘And how did you respond to this threat?’
‘With terror. From then on, I had to hide my real self. I think it was my first bereavement. It didn’t stop me sneaking into my sisters’ rooms to play dress-ups but it had become a frightened, dirty thing. I thought I was the only boy in the world to feel like this. I had no idea there were others. There was no internet.’
I got up out of my chair and wandered to the window. The glass was old; it distorted the sky. There was a tiny courtyard out there where a fountain played. The walls were unusually high. To keep out prying eyes, presumably; or perhaps to keep in the shame.
‘I’m not a man who likes to wear women’s things,’ I said. ‘I am a woman. I’m a woman who puts on a man’s clothes, and speaks in a deep voice, and slaps other men on the back, and pees at a urinal through tackle that shouldn’t even be there. All of which, I guess, makes me a freak.’
Behind me, I heard Brotherton put down his pen.
‘Where do you see all of this taking you?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘We both know that there’s a million websites on this subject. There are books. I’m sure you’ve researched. I’m sure you have goals.’
‘I do.’ I turned around to face him. ‘But I’m afraid of being thrown down the offal pit.’
He smiled, and waited for more.
‘I’ve used the boys’ cloakroom—literally and figuratively—for the past half-century,’ I said. ‘Now I look at the life I have ahead of me and I see that it’s finite. My father died last year. My own generation are starting to go down with heart attacks and cancer. I’m running out of time.’
‘What would you like to do about it?’
I knew the answer. I’d known it for fifty years.
‘I’d like to walk through that other door,’ I said.
Nineteen
Eilish
It was such a beautiful summer. Beauty can be cruel, can’t it? Through August, right into September, the countryside around East Yalton was chocolate-box. Day after day I woke, alone, to indigo skies and fields already baking in the heat. The cool waters of the Thames reflected barges with gardens and bright paintwork, and riverside pubs were full of families making the most of the heatwave. Luke and I should have been doing the same.
It’s the future you mourn most; the road you always thought lay ahead. People say, You never know what’s around the corner, and they all nod sagely, but they don’t really believe it. I was just as smug. I thought I knew exactly what lay around the corner for me: a long and contented retirement with Luke by my side. I had such plans! Now I’d rounded the corner, and my road had dropped off a cliff.
Life goes on. It has to. We had a new headmaster at Cottingwith High: Walter Wallis. Why would parents with the surname Wallis call their son Walter? He was innovative and energetic and dynamic. At least, that was how he described himself in his CV, and the interview committee were obviously taken in, because we were now saddled with this megalomaniac. I’d have sworn the man had ADD. And one of the innovative, dynamic things he did was to insist that all teaching staff come in at the end of the holidays for a day’s professional development. I couldn’t think of a good enough excuse to get out of it. So, at eight-thirty on a September morning that was already promising to be a scorcher, I was sitting in the staff car park, summoning the will to get out of my car. Jim Chadwick, who headed the science department, swung in and parked beside me. I was delighted to see him.
‘Hello, my friend!’ he cried, hopping out of his little green MG. His roof was down. ‘Isn’t this a waste of a glorious day? Shall we play hooky?’
‘That’s very tempting.’
He waited as I fished around for my bag. ‘We could hire a skiff, and I’ll row you down the river. Have lunch at The Lock.’ He was warming to his theme. ‘Or, if you prefer, we could sit in a classroom all day, get dehydrated, and listen to Wally Wallis’s sidekick telling us about learning outcomes.’
Some people question the course their lives have taken. They torture themselves with speculation about what would have happened if they had turned left that day instead of right. What if they’d taken that job they were offered, back in 1995? What if they’d caught that train, been in time for that interview? I know women who’ve ruined their marriages by imagining the idyllic lives they’d be leading if only they’d married that other man. The other one always seems so much more alluring—so much less likely to have a potbelly, or moan about the cost of petrol, or bite their nails—than their ageing, boring husbands.
I never used to play this game. I couldn’t see the point. When I was a young marketing guru, I went with friends to see Giselle at the ballet. My ticket was for row K, seat 20. A man called Luke Livingstone happened to be sitting in row K, seat 21. He was embarrassed because the little machine that dispenses opera glasses stole his money. I lent him my set. He bought me a drink during the intermission. If that machine hadn’t been faulty, we might never have spoken; but it was, and we did, and that was the end of it. I had this old-fashioned idea that marriage was permanent.
If I had been the type to play the what if game, though, it would probably have involved Jim Chadwick. There was an unmistakable spark between us, from the very first time he’d walked into the staffroom at Cottingwith High. He was wearing a blue-and-white-checked shirt, I remember, and it intensified the marvellous colour of his eyes. He had energy. I remember thinking he was . . . well, sexy. We gravitated together immediately. I had no intention of acting on this magnetic attraction, but all the same it made me feel alive. It made me feel young.
Years had passed since then, and the spark had turned into an easygoing—if vaguely flirtatious—friendship. Jim had arrived when Simon was in the sixth form, and he’d had a bit to do with both him and Kate. He also played the odd game of squash with Luke, as they were both in a league that used our school courts. He was a natural teacher, popular and able to control classes that defeated everybody else. He championed children with special needs, because he had a brother with Asperger’s. He celebrated with me when Nico was born; I commiserated with him when his marriage came to an end. It doesn’t surprise me that people are tempted to have affairs with their work colleagues—of course they are! They’re the ones who share in our daily lives. They see us in our element, doing what we do best. Our spouses see us with bed hair, in our dressing-gowns, emptying the cat’s litter tray. Domesticity isn’t erotic.
‘How’s your summer going?’ Jim asked now.
‘Too fast.’
‘You and Luke been away? I haven’t seen him on the squash courts for a while.’
‘Nope.’
I’d begun walking, and he fell in beside me. ‘How is the young chap? Still working eighty hours a week?’
Fortunately I didn’t have to answer, because we’d reached the classroom where the training was to be held. A gangly man was writing an agenda on the whiteboard. It began with 8.45: Welcome and introductions. The room was full of teachers holding coffee mugs. We greeted one another gloomily; all except Mick Glover, who taught maths and was always unreasonably bouncy. He travelled to school on a powered skateboard.
‘Morning, Eilish,’ he called. ‘Jim. There are a couple of seats over here.’
Jim and I were just sitting down when the headmaster came bustling in.
‘Donald is our facilitator today,’ Wally said, grinning fondly at the gangly chap as though he were some kind of pet. ‘Let’s get started, Don.’
It was a bit like being in an evangelical church. Donald strode up and down, waving his hands around as he talked about ‘facing in one direction’ and ‘tapping energies’. There were around twenty of us in there, and the fan wasn’
t up to the job. It was a relief when Donald broke us into pairs, giving out chunky pens and paper, and exhorting us to ‘workshop this one’ before ‘coming back to kick our ideas around.’ He gave each pair a made-up scenario. Ours was about a teacher who lost his cool and grabbed a third former by the ear.
Jim and I managed to commandeer a shady spot on the edge of the quad. I sat at an octagonal picnic bench. He leaned down to use the drinking fountain.
‘Workshopping,’ I grumbled. ‘Who uses that word as a verb?’
‘Donald does.’ Jim splashed water on his face, then ducked to put his whole head under the stream. It darkened his fair hair. He sat down, dripping, on the other side of the table. ‘Has your new grandchild arrived yet?’
‘Not due for a couple of months.’ I’d picked up one of the big pens and was doodling as we talked. ‘Kate’s back from Israel. Broken up with the boyfriend.’
‘Great news! And how’s Luke?’
‘Shush. We’re meant to be thinking about this wretched child’s ear, or we won’t get a gold star.’
It took us about two minutes to address the scenario. We scribbled all over the paper in different colours to make it look as though we’d really tapped our energies. Then we got talking about Jim’s younger son, who was teaching in Ghana. It was pleasant to sit chatting in the dappled shade. It stopped me from thinking about Luke, and the road that had dropped off a cliff.
Jim had to nip into town during the lunch break. I fled to my room—a small space in a prefabricated block; not salubrious—and made a start on organising my resources for the coming term.
The afternoon’s session with Donald was more of the same. It finished at four, and was followed by a mass exodus to the car park. By now, I felt weary and low.
‘Well,’ said Jim, as we reached my car. ‘When I arrived this morning I had no idea what we were expecting to achieve today. And I still have no idea.’
‘Team building?’
‘It was certainly that. I’ve never seen such concord. We’re all absolutely as one in thinking that was a lot of old cobblers.’
I smiled half-heartedly.
‘You in a hurry?’ asked Jim. ‘Got time for a drink? It’ll be heaven on earth right now, at one of those riverside tables at The Lock. There’s a white wine spritzer waiting for you in a tall, chilled glass . . . Can’t you see the beads of condensation?’
‘That sounds wonderful. But not today.’
‘Sure you’re all right?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
He smiled easily, raised his hand, and walked across to his car. I heard the electronic beep as it unlocked. Before getting in, he paused, looking back at me.
‘I’m here,’ he said, ‘when you’re not all right.’
Twenty
Luke
After weeks of heatwave, there was a hosepipe ban. The parks were full of sunbathers. Mirages shimmered above the roads, and the pavements were melting like toffee.
Each morning I put on my Luke mask and took the tube to Bannermans. To the young solicitors there, I was one of the old guard—staid and probably starchy. Each day I battled the urge to phone Eilish just for the selfish comfort of talking to her. And every evening, with the street door locked behind me, I freed Lucia from her hiding place. She was growing in confidence, step by step.
I’d found comfortable shoes and underwear on a specialist website. I’d also given in to temptation and bought a very good wig—just for now, just to know how it felt. It was a rich mid-brown with bronze strands. For the first time in my life I had the sensation of hair curling over my shoulders. I revelled in it. I used to pray for long hair when I was a child. I’d pull a jersey back over my head and leave it half off so that it hung down my back. Prancing about and pouting into the mirror, I’d pretend it was flowing locks. I felt like that child again as I ran a brush through my long hair, and stepped into my feminine shoes. My hair. My shoes.
I’d done nothing permanent yet. No hormones, no hair removal. After all my years of waiting, Brotherton had told me I must wait a little longer before doing anything irreversible. He wanted to see me again. He also insisted on referring me to the Baytrees in-house counsellor, Usha Sharma.
‘I’m getting on,’ I protested. ‘Lots of your clients are young. They haven’t spent half a century thinking about this. They haven’t had children yet, so losing their fertility is a big thing. They’ve got years to dither. I haven’t.’
He was unmoved. ‘Be that as it may, you won’t begin HRT for at least three months. Possibly more. These are my professional rules—international rules—and, believe me, it’s a lot quicker than you’d be moving on the Charing Cross route.’
I knew what he was referring to. Charing Cross was the NHS gender identity clinic. It had had mixed reviews.
‘You don’t need to go full-time before you begin HRT,’ he added, ‘but you do have to understand how it feels to present yourself as female in public.’
‘I’ve already done that!’
‘Been shopping? On public transport? Bought a drink in a pub? There’s living as a woman in your head, and there’s doing the real thing. Any transgender woman will tell you there’s a mighty difference. You may find it isn’t what you want, after all. You may want to give your marriage another chance.’
That shut me up, because I thought about Eilish all the time. Often I dreamed I was making love to her—as a man, as a woman, did it matter? The passion and closeness of those dreams would stay with me long after I woke. They were a filter that coloured the day, and they tormented me. If I became Lucia, one thing was certain: I’d never so much as kiss Eilish again.
So I stepped into limbo. I saw an endocrinologist and had blood taken; I met Usha Sharma, who was about my age and on the patronising side. She wanted me to explore my goals, she said, and to do that I’d need to peel away the layers with which I’d covered my true self. I didn’t like the sound of this at all, but week after week I jumped through her hoops. She was right about the layers. When you’ve got a secret as dangerous as mine, you bury it deep. You lie to everyone, including yourself. I was a pass-the-parcel. Each time I thought I’d torn off the last scrap of wrapping paper, I discovered there was more.
We made a list of the positive and negative aspects of transition—no surprises there; I’d been weighing them up for years. We talked about how I felt as a father, a son, a brother, as a human being: a fraud in every role. Of course, Usha broached the subject of my sexuality. What about desires? Fantasies? This was uncomfortable, but not as titillating as you might expect. Like plenty of trans women, I’d only ever felt attracted to women.
‘I can’t see that ever changing,’ I said.
‘It might change,’ Usha warned. ‘If you begin HRT, you may well find you lose libido.’
‘I know that. Could be a relief.’
‘Your preferences may alter. How would you react if you began to feel an attraction to men?’
‘I’d be astonished,’ I said. ‘Look, Usha, I married Eilish when I was a young man. Since then I’ve rarely even flirted with anyone else, male or female. Sex for me is about expressing my love for her. That’s the vital thing, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’
‘It’s priceless! Thirty years . . . more than half a lifetime. All that shared history, all that understanding, all that life. That’s treasure we’ve built up, Eilish and I. It’s rare to get that with another human being. It can never, ever be replaced.’
I felt my hands shaking, and clasped them together. Eilish was my soul mate. Losing our sexual relationship was far less dreadful than the enormity of losing her as a companion through life.
‘They think I’m selfish,’ I said.
‘Who does?’
‘Eilish, Simon . . . everyone will think it. I wish there were some other way out of this. I wish I could stay with her, be a normal man.’
‘Could you do that?’
I shook my head. Lucia couldn’t be amputated. I’d tried that. She
wasn’t just a part of me; she was me. Outside in the street a car horn sounded.
‘What does the future look like?’ asked Usha. ‘I mean, if you transition?’
‘Lonely. Terrifying. Wonderful.’
There was another furious blast of honking, followed by shouts. I looked out of the window. A delivery van had stopped in the road while its driver unloaded crates. He was holding up the traffic, which was what all the drama was about. The driver was a cool customer. He just carried on doing his job, whistling. How nice, I thought. How liberating, not to care what people think.
‘Turning back would be the most selfish thing I could do,’ I said.
‘Because . . . ?’
‘Because pretending to be Luke is over for me. In a week, or a month, this whole thing would begin again. I know the cycle.’
‘You’re afraid you’d end up back here?’
‘No. I can’t put Eilish through a break-up again, that really would be unforgivable. This time it would have to end in my suicide.’
Usha didn’t comment. I think she understood that I was stating a simple truth.
‘That appointment with the noose was in my diary,’ I said. ‘I was ready, to the last detail. When you’ve planned your own end, when you’ve been so close to it . . . you find you can face other unthinkable things. There was one other choice. Just one. So I made that choice, and here I am.’
Usha murmured something. I heard her chair creak, and knew my hour was up. The delivery man raised his middle finger at one of the yelling drivers before swinging into his van. I watched him hurtle away.
‘I can’t go back,’ I said. ‘Can I?’
I didn’t return to the office after my meeting with Usha. Back at the flat I locked the front door, removed the Luke costume, and—with that guilty, luxurious feeling of relief—let Lucia out of hiding.
The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone Page 14
